- cross-posted to:
- linuxmemes@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- linuxmemes@lemmy.world
cross-posted from: https://piefed.zip/c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world/p/1899107/of-course
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i don’t even know how anybody would trust their documents to such a project
Eh let them be the alpha testers… Maybe in 5 years and a bajillion tokens it will be a real office suite
and then you’ll trust your information and your projects to the companies that are known for stealing everything they can get their hands on?
What do you mean? If it’s open source, it’ll be clear what it’s doing with your information
if you can read through and follow all the ai bullshit
well, just get the ai to read it!
I want human creations forever and always!
LibreOffice has the ability to use regex in search&replace, MS Office does not. So why should i use a copy of the inferior product?
Because corporate policies mandate it?
99% of people using office products daily will die not knowing how to formulate a regular expression.
99% of people using office products daily will die
True.
Regex save lives
True, although the corollary:
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think ‘I know, I’ll use regular expressions.’ Now they have two problems.
I’m also upset that a mainstream tool doesn’t support a niche feature.
(Mostly because I have to use certain tools at work because corporate bullshit and get annoyed when I’m reminded that the way I’m used to doing things doesn’t work here)
But if I was developing a tool for a certain audience, I would also prioritise the needs and habits of that aufience. And if that means leaving out regex because laypeople will only shoot themselves in the foot… I’ll bitch and moan and cry but ultimately comply.
There’s a difference between focussing on laypeople and working against power users. It shouldn’t be an either/or thing
Because Calc has the UI and functionality of Excel 97…and an awful name to boot lol
Hate to say it but anyone adept in Excel (or even Sheets, probably) would agree. It gets the job done but there’s major features missing for a lot of what I’d use it for.
there’s major features missing
Sounds like someone should contribute, lol. I kid, sort of.
I don’t think my my php knowledge from the 2000s is relevant unfortunately lol
I’m happy enough with Calc at home. Just can’t imagine trying to do half of what I do at work with it.
Excel also has lots of instabilities and bugs that pop up for even standard users. Plus it’s slow as hell
Standard users are people who are not adept at Excel. Calc is fine for basic stuff but I was responding to the question why’d you ever use Excel.
Calc doesn’t handle named tables so you can’t reference one and you also can’t apply a function to a whole column, nor can you reference row by its column
These are all incredible features to have for advanced users
I always think of doing codng by hands but then I am so slow compared to others that it becomes not worth it. What to do about this?
Yes i code very slowly if I do it by myself.
I always think of doing codng by hands but then I am so slow compared to others
easy newbie mistake to make. you should try using your fingers instead.
follow me for more helpful developer tips and tricks!
Elite ball knowledge
As to not be fired. I’ve been forced to use AI at work, I’m “slower” than the rest of my coworkers even with AI, but I also don’t spend half my week fixing bugs for code that I didn’t read from the week before.
I’ll usually pick a project and tell the robot to figure it out, give it all the context it needs so it’s not asking every 5 minutes for access to my whole disk, and let it run. While it’s doing that I’ll hand code and actually do the work. I’m convinced it’s the fact that I still code that I’m able to read and understand what slop need to be ripped out of the robots output.
I might do 2-3 tickets a day while others are doing 5-6, but I also didn’t introduce a bug that cost our clients $1,000/day for 2 weeks straight and then didn’t know how to fix it so it continued costing them that for 3 extra days while struggling to read code that I didn’t write.
tldr: code by hand while the robots running it’s task. Don’t lose the skill just because you’re not as fast.
Plenty of IDEs have non-LLM predictive text. Common code patterns pop up as a suggestion, and continue to refine as you type.
It’s not the same level of “write a comment and we will spit out something that might work” but it’s more than a few steps above notepad.
This does help and has been around for awhile but I’m still slow af even after working as a dev for 3 years.
I really enjoying coding by hand and figuring out the challenges and architecture of each function. Not to mention the immense feeling of gratification when you spend six hours to find that missing semicolon, comma, or curly brace then it all works. Refactoring massive obscure code into something readable with immediately clear logic, or changing data structures and getting something insane like 100x performance on your biggest bottleneck; all of it feels so good.
However, it seems like this is going to relegated to a hobby in the near future. LLMs are largely better and faster than me plus most, if not all, of my colleagues. I dont like it, but spending the past year working primarily with agentic LLMs i can’t really deny it. It wasn’t this good until relatively recently.
Honestly, having a good LSP that provides context for its suggestions was a huge help for learning how to program in a couple languages. Made sure I actually understood what each part of my code was doing and how pieces fit together. If I’d had claude or copilot, I genuinely don’t think I’d have learned.
I think with frontier models you have to resist the temptation of letting them do too much. If you can, they can be great tools.
It’s the difference between knowing how to market and knowing how to actually build shit.
Turns out, in our modern society, the former is a far more valuable skill than the latter.
Just bullshit your way until you get enough money and resources to actually hire people who know what they’re doing and can build the thing.
It sucks
One guy I used to work with (long before LLMs) built a website for his company and listed a bunch of software there for sale. Except he hadn’t built any software product yet. Once someone contacted him about buying one of the products, then he would build it.
Turns out, in our modern society, the former is a far more valuable skill than the latter.
that was knows and loudly displayel by all the apple fanbois and Jobs
until you get enough money and resources to actually hire people who know what they’re doing and can build the thing.
Has this ever happened? I though the way to go was enshittification of an already inferior product
Blitzscaling. The enshittification comes once the userbase is stable and the company can’t keep bullshitting investors about possible future gains so they have to start cutting.
I’m 100% all in on Libre Office. I’ll use Libre Office until it dies or I die
The clone is perfect though, vibe coded or not: as it doesn’t work it’s obviously a 1:1 copy that’s just accurately mimicking the original…
Man that sentence was hard for me to parse – browsing threadiverse too early in the tye morning
We love you, Libre Office devs!
Nothing vibe coded is worth a shit.
LibreOffice is an awesome piece of kit! On setup, they let you select the “tabbed” UI if you prefer something closer to MS office.
Collabora Office is another one that seems neat, have not used it before though. OnlyOffice has weird Russian ties and GPL incompatible licensing shenanigans, I would avoid them for the most part. WPS Office has the best compatibility with MS Office files on Linux I think, but it’s closed-source so not great either. There’s always running a VM / dual booting if you must use MS Office.
Honestly, MS office files have worked fine on LibreOffice, the only big issue I’ve found is that translucent images are a little broken when going from Impress to PowerPoint (all images share the same opacity for some reason?)
Collabora Office has an overly permissive policy towards AI, and a lot of their commits are vibe-coded.
In my experience, MS Office files tend to have fewer compatibility problems on LibreOffice than on MS Office after the next update.
What?
It’s never that MS Office files don’t work on LibreOffice (formatting is a little different but almost never broken), it’s always files exported from LibreOffice that MS Office misreads (because Microsoft
can’t be bothered to follow standardsare anti-competitive)Can’t be bothered makes them sound lazy. It’s a deliberate method of squashing all competitors. If you can’t send a document to someone else who usrs MS Office and have it appear the same, then you’re going to need to use MS Office. Libre has been calling them out on this for years.
Oops yeah that is a good point! Amended the comment.
The three you mentioned in the second paragraph are slop fests now.
I haven’t used any of them in ages, I know Collabora is focused on their online suite. Looking at OnlyOffice’s website, they are positioning themselves as an “AI-first” office suite (the LLM tools have been changed to be optional and installed separately since a recent update, but still a bad look)
And WPS Office was always owned by a Chinese company and continues to be closed-source, so no changes there. Again, the same sort of “AI-first” stuff on their homepage, yikes
On setup, they let you select the “tabbed” UI
On setup it asks you to select one of four UIs, some of them are missing features. Once I spent almost an hour trying to solve a problem, but it turned out it was unsolvable in my UI. I changed the UI and found a solution in a moment.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the fact that OpenOffice exists, but their UI needs a lot of work
LibreOffice, not OpenOffice. I believe LibreOffice was forked from OpenOffice, and the latter hasn’t had any updates in ages.
I imagine that the UI you selected was the one of the “compact” or “single toolbar” options? It is a little confusing that some of the one functions disappear with those, it would be helpful if it was listed which ones were missing
I had thought that OpenOffice was the one that “looked modern and familiar” while libreoffice is the good one but lools older.
You’re confusing OpenOffice (dead project pretty much, hasn’t seen updates in ages) with OnlyOffice (the Russian one with the licensing shenanigans and “AI first” stuff, UI is M365-like and very similar to the LibreOffice “Tabbed” UI)
The only reason we want a clone of ma office is because it’s the standard, not because it’s good…
Sadly if you need to make ppts regularly, OpenOffice and Libra Office don’t come close to Powerpoint in terms of features…
And sadly I’m far too incompetent a coder (and already torn 4 ways between family, job, MtG:judging, and rest and hobbies as I’m hugely introverted) to be able to help change that.
Feature Wish List
- copying objects copies their animations and interactions, including “on click” or links if copying multiple at once.
- replacing an object doesn’t destroy it’s animations, links, etc.
- ability to replace multimedia objects (images, sounds, etc.) from clipboard, not only storage.
- ability to edit animations in bulk in more than just activation, type, and order. i.e. timing, sound effects
- animation rules such as reset on completion or not to actually do what they say.
- transparency to not block interaction with objects.
And this one is probably a faulty user error:
- change the default colours from that blue to something I’d occasionally use.
That said, the word processor, spreadsheet, and graphic design application are all a head better than the proprietary versions I’ve tried.
Calc is also not an Excel replacement for a lot of use cases. It’s good for basic number crunching but it lacks a lot of functions, conditional formatting, and if you set up data validation on any cells…good luck finding them again. There is no menu for it. You need a PLUGIN to scan the sheets for cells with data validation and manually remove them
I thought it was a photoshop clone, not a MS Office clone?
They (multiple parties) are cloning any possible software and games they can.
cloningsloppingedit: fixed
“slopping”
In English, you need another ‘p’ or the ‘o’ is pronounced long.
Not to be confused with clopping, a pre-AI slop term mlp community uses …
Does the new one look better or something? Or is it just the fact that it’s AI-written that’s getting people excited?
Nobody wants to use Microsoft specifically. But that’s what they’re used to. And that’s what the industry standard is. LibreOffice does not prioritize compatibility with Microsoft Office formats. LibreOffice has tabbed mode which feels a bit more like “home”, but for some reason is missing options on this Ui view.
That’s why people are interested. If it looks exactly like Microsoft Office and is 100% compatible with Microsoft Office formats without having to use a Microsoft product, that is a win. Will it be possible to maintain since it was so heavily vibe coded? That remains to be seen. But let’s not pretend that open source projects are just as good or better in every way. LibreOffice is a lot closer than most, but Gimp is no Photoshop, for example, and after 30 years of waiting, I think it’s safe to say that it’s not gonna be. As much as I respect both LibreOffice and Gimp.
Apparently it looks identical to MS Office, so it isn’t “better” than MS Office or LibreOffice in a functional sense (arguably less so since it’s probably very buggy code)
I wouldn’t say it’s people (normal people would be using MS Office or LibreOffice most likely) excited that it’s LLM generated, though some AI Bros probably are, I imagine some outlets are promoting this to sell whatever the new model is these days. And when there is a lot of news around a topic, it’s covered by more and more people (something about all press is good press here)
The latter
The exciting part is using AI to decompile closed-source software, which could potentially enable you to change it and run your own custom version of it.
Imagine, say, doing that with Windows and turning off all the hardcoded telemetry.
are any of these actual decompilations tho? my understanding is that to be a good decomp, it has to compile to the same binary as the original, that’s how you know your decomp is perfect. that’s what the infamous game decomps made before ai (mario 64, devilution, lego island…) did
the ai-generated “decomps” aren’t even in the same language! both the ms office and photoshop ones are in rust!
We will also see the same sort of AI bugs in closed source stuff that we’ve seen in open source once AI is able to read compiled code
New security exploits, new security exploits everywhere!
you could do that before. there was nothing stopping you, including the law.
the fact that the vibe coded versions barely work at all is a testament to the fact that LLMs do not mean this is any easier now. the hard part isn’t decompiling the software.
There are already version of debloated windows installs, like Windows X-Lite, btw.
The future is in containerization anyway. If we all run Qubes OS, we can run each vibecoded project in separate containers. So when they crash and burn, we just restore from snapshots. The future where noone does long division is inefficient!
So you can run the same functionality on 100x the computing power? Seems as reasonable as rebuild a motorway bridge out of burning toothpicks each time a car wants to pass. 👍
Depends on your threat model. For someone who works in cybersecurity, the hard seperationo files per-project, easily split networking to different VPNs between VMs, and being able to keep sensitive data on a basically air-gapped VM that you can only copy to clipboard from is amazing. And with templates getting a stack of VMs for a new project running is pretty quick.
QubeOS is one of the coolest OSes around, if you work for multilple customers and/or take your data security seriously.
It’s true that I have not considered it from the AI-slopworks PoV, but in general doing development in a container is probably a must nowadays anyway, so why not have a system build around it. It’s not like virtualization is any difficult.
I would say that building a container for developments becomes worth it once your project reaches a certain scale and has lots of environment variables/input or when you want to produce reproducible builds. For smaller projects or projects that have a relatively low threat level it may not be feasible to create a virtual environment.
