Enjoy, its such a good turn of phrase!

LaTeX, really? Its like evil markdown.

I've been wondering when/if this thought process will gain more traction

lmao real

That rule where something is expected to last in the future as long as it already has in the past probably applies here

It's also like... libreoffice has done fine so far being developed without AI. You can just keep doing that.

Disagree that it's an empty phrase though-- it's a prediction, like any other prediction.

They need to implement the rest of the Wine stub functions. That would make it 100% compatible with windows applications...

I mean windows is already vibe coded

You only need to slay the giants...

Reverse engineering isn't illegal. It's how projects like Wine are possible.

If you want to typeset math, yes really. And IMO formatting control in LaTeX is unmatched and then some in word processors.

Plus TikZ is incredible.

LibreOffice - the only office suite that handles tables correct, even when multiple users change the document 🥳

I think its over for us, and most other knowledge based jobs eventually. I have no idea where this is going.

Well, depends.

Software is subject to copyright. Yes you can implement the same APIs, but when you get into the visual presentation, things can get copyright related even if the code isn't being ripped off.

If you decompile rather than clone, well then the code is copyrighted even if transformed into plausible source code.

Of course then there are patents...

You are right no one cares how it is implemented, and on select contexts, right that LLMs can produce sufficient implementation.

However it isn't generally the case that they can produce quality software. The bad news for a lot of developers is that by volume most software isn't exactly great quality either, particularly in house enterprise software is already crap, so there is large area where differently crapi isn't so bad.

I will say that people who want their software well supported are likely to be ill served by "vibed" solutions. It is really tricky to debug complex software that was vibed, whether human or GenAI. If it worked perfectly the first time around and/or the software in question is fairly disposable, well those may be fine.

That's just licenses to prevent use in training data, but other LLM related use is unspecified.

People both here and on Reddit keep complaining about the ‘bad UI’ of GIMP compared to Photoshop. Which UI is laid out the same way as in Photoshop.

Well Fuck. I should have done more research on this...

LLMs are perfectly capable of writing correct code

My understanding is that this is only partly true.

The problem as I understand it is that an LLM can create a code base for a prompt like "create an android app where I can record my medications", and it might be "correct" and surprisingly usable. However, as your app evolves and "develops" it will be a mess, and the cognitive load quickly becomes unbearable. Everything feature breaks a heap of stuff and every fix breaks more things.

Why can't passion projects be a thing anymore ? Because they can be decompiled ?

OpenOffice hasn't released a major version since 2013.

My team uses LibreOffice exclusively, and extensively. It's fine.

Microsoft already changed what they are selling. Now they are renting document storage that happens to have document modification software integrated.

They long decided that owning access to the data was more leverage than the software used to edit it. Ditto for Adobe. Pretty much immediately software as a service encouraged "don't worry about ever saving/managing your data" and it wasn't about user convenience...

I agree with the image thing, I'm taking courses that require a lot of screenshots to be put into documents and it's a bit annoying to do. Although, I get the feeling that it's difficult because the goal is to give you more control and consistent results, rather than to "be easy". I've had a ton of difficulty dealing with Microsoft office and images as well, but that is usually after the image is in there and I want to fine tune it. Also, I can grab an odt file from 15 years ago and it's laid out exactly the same as when I first made it, I can't open up a docx from two years ago without word messing up some part of the formatting.

Calling decompilation the “end of closed-source” is way too hyperbolic.

Ah my bad, I meant ONLYOFFICE*

So many offices 😅

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

Neat, I haven't heard of this one before. I'll likely use it in the future

I firmly believe a fair chunk of the ones who are supporting it on here are either bots or have fully drank the vibe-aid, whereas the people who don't support it are ( in some communities ) being pushed away because the sloperators/bots are genuinely trying to psy-op us all into giving up our mental faculties to the clankers.

This is my paranoid conspiracy of the moment.

Oh sure.

OnlyOffice compatability with MS is much, much better than LO.

However, I think LO is focused on compatibility with the spec rather than MS - so its an ideological thing. Not much comfort if you want comments in documents I guess.

To be fair, neither does the real MS office

Excel is the 7th ring of hell

If you think using it is bad, try deploying/maintaining it

Sir, there’s a reason nobody likes to see the sausage being made.

Attention goes to that AI can fuck their creators though, not to the clone Programms.

Yeah I mean at the end of the day it's a work tool.

I had a situation a few weeks ago where a Microsoft user sent us a PowerPoint of screenshots full of comments from the client about what to change. People on MacOS couldn't see the comments in their software and I couldn't see it on Ubuntu Studio using LibreOffice either. ONLYOFFICE had them but they were still hard to find in the UI.

The desktop scaling one just does my head in too. Feel like on Linux I should have more options and utility and I probably could figure something out if I tinker with it. But who has the time ey

I do care, i want to get work done, not waste my time with slop applications. All this talk about the adobe suit being cloned and in practice it is less usable than gimp and other open source projects out there, so why waste my time, with another slop marketing stunt?

Techbros always pretend the public doesn't value efficiency and integration, and are willing to pay for it. If it wasn't this way open source apps would have crushed it's competition decades ago simply for being free.

And don't get me started in how without proper support these slop apps will be dead faster than the grokopedia.

It depends on how it’s built. Anyone vibecoding without a plan will run into this very quickly. However, if a project is planned out in advance, broken down into multiple milestones, with measurable goals and thorough testing at each milestone before moving forward, the LLM can create surprisingly well-structured and solid code which fits the overall structure.

Basically, the more thought, planning, and structure is worked out before anybody runs even a single prompt, the better your results will be. And continual testing with the goal of finding every single weak point will give even better results. But planning it out ahead of time and doing all that testing takes a lot of time and human effort, and nobody vibecoding slop apps is doing that.

Switched to Typst and love it. I’d say I use LibreOffice much less because of Typst.

May be I'm in a bubble but I've never heard anyone talk about this? Who's supposedly giving it all the attention? Did I just miss it?

Wow, it managed to perfectly replicate Microsoft office?

What level is Teams?

I disagree, their efforts don't go unnoticed. Their recent no-AI claims prompted me to donate.

At least "back in my day" there was no alternative if you wanted to write a paper (or a thesis).

The way I unterstand it, at least in European practice, the code itself is copyrighted, as in, the actual text, not the concept behing it. Decompiled source is not the same as original source, it goes through rounds of compiler optimisations and the process of reversing that includes a lot of guesswork. So, in practice, decompiling and working on the decompiled source was at least tolerated, probably because it would have been a grey area at worst.

Same. My 60+ mother got a new computer recently, saw the prices of MS Office and told me "install that free thing". So far no complaints, first remark was "well, looks like it has all the same buttons, works for me"

That's why I code in Fortran

Nah, that would be productive and not flashy enough for a publicity stunt.

I remember a large company picking MS over Google Docs, because at least at the time, MS proudly advertised that you could show up with a wagon full of HDDs at their data centre and get your stored stuff. Although, a lot of enshittification happened since then.

That's right. I think vibecoding generally refers to people who don't understand code and don't have the ability to plan around potential problems.

compatibility with a standard does not mean much if nobody implements the standard

Satan just asked god to add new layers of hell.