There's that, but it seems like microsoft has always been a bunch of civil wars between departments, each trying to push theirThing® and their way of doing things.

That's led to nonsense like there being about a dozen different ways to configure the OS (control panel, settings app, local and domain group policies, registry, powershell, msconfig, device manager, disk manager, every single network connection, schedule manager, the services manager, task manager for some reason since 11, and I'm sure I'm forgetting some), most of them specific for certain parts of the OS, or incomplete.

Or the way they publish APIs and UI frameworks and whatnot (also cyclically losing favour and support and being replaced by some shiny new thing that at this point almost no one will use), yet almost every single one of their flagship programs (office, visual studio...) uses its own custom undocumented UI and API hacks, extremely hard to replicate with the available documentation, and forcing the users to learn new UI paradigms with each app or major update...

Hell, a couple weeks ago I was trying to diagnose a remote desktop disconnection issue, and it involved looking at two different logs and trying to relate their events by their timestamps to find the termination code because for some reason remote desktop and winlogon use completely different session IDs, and the remote desktop people never thought to include the winlogon session ID in their logs...

TL;DR, It seems to be mostly different departments trying to push their own things and pushing sticks into each other's wheels, while also, as you said, trying to appease the whims of the current main boss.

Utter chaos.

Which makes it a breach of contract, but not illegal.

Nah, I don't think so. We're getting into philosophical / religious territory here, but from a technical standpoint I believe there is no difference between a brain and an accurate simulation of a brain, and an accurate simulation of a brain is "just" an engineering challenge at this point. We might now have the computing power or architecture yet, but there is no conceptual issue prohibiting us from building it.

But an LLM is not a simulation of a brain. It is an autocomplete on steroids. Very different architecture. It is not a brain, but it can sometimes produce the same outputs a brain would. But it is nowhere close to a human brain.

A coworker did something similar recently. Besides pasting internal stuff into a foreign model like a moron, it had some nice ideas, but lacked a lot of information it simply could not have known. Things like, we already did this, but in an unrelated repository, and we didn't mention it in this part of the docs. Or, since the person did not know / input the overall purpose and constrains correctly, the LLM proposal was cool, but missed the point completely. Or, the LLM forgot to mention that its plan would require buying hardware we simply don't have yet, and which would be really expensive and hard to obtain right now, because, idk, hallucinations or it just assumed it was all already there.

Yeah, not impressed. Neither by that idiotic coworker nor by the proposal.

Don't get me wrong, the models are really impressive, and something I would have called impossible two years ago. From an information theory point of view, it is super cool how they manage to compress so much knowledge and connections in so little size (relatively speaking).

Itelligence is very ill defined, as someone else pointed out. It still has a very weird model of the world (if at all).

My point is however, it sometimes seems to be too good at guessing facts that should not be guessable from the inputs and publically available information alone.

Only because Microsoft offers bundle deals between Azure and O365 for business customers. The point still stands.

I've never understood the appeal with Azure. I was forced to use it for 4 years and hated every second of it. It's really awful.

Well i was careful and used a private LLM, and didn't include any customer specific info just in case.

That "moron" was not directed at you, but only at my coworker. I just wanted to point out that it seems to be a bit hit-or-miss sometimes :)

Apparently you write good meeting notes.

No, there always will be no ai movement

It's more accurate to say somebody spent a > couple thousand dollars and a few weeks project-managing an AI.

It's not nothing, but it's also not coding.

Azure is like the SharePoint of cloud services. The controls are horrible. They keep making breaking changes to how they do crap; the whole thing is unintuitive enough that you really need someone trained to use it.

I stood it up beside AWS and used them both for what they were cheaper for; I eventually gave in and migrated the last few images I had over there to AWS.

Azure works, but it's not good. IMO, the only reason it exists is that they have good Datacenter licensing fees and people using Entre to get away from having to host their own DCs.

Their user management and device management are basically unmatched by any other provider.

Active Directory is used in close to every company just because of how the sheer amount of features that are useful to businesses.

It is easier to shift your business away from Adobe than it is to shift away from AD.

I have news for you about breaches of contract. They can be sued over.

Also DMCA 1201 is a thing which often makes reverse engineering a felony.

Transcoding would not be a violation, but in order to rip it in the first place, you had to bypass technological restrictions built into the disc and the drive. Under section 1201 of the DMCA, the creation or sharing of software that can do thatis a felony punishable by half a million dollars and six months in prison for a first offense.

This is a pretty stupid project because only office already exists as a very competent msoffice clone.

There's a hobby project I've been working on for over a year, but now I'm not sure I'm even going to bother to release it because everyone will just assume I vibe coded it in a weekend.

Resharing your transcode would be a violation, even assuming the original was somehow an unencumbered HEVC. Ripping a VHS and encoding would still be a violation even without any DMCA complications

Yeah it is great for POC. Basically something that you show as a demo and then throw it away.

I saw one mod for a Minecraft where author was honest and wrote upfront something like "please don't report any bugs, this mod was vibe coded and I don't have the skills to fix it"

I mean even if it did train on the proprietary code it can't memorize it. It has to "learn what code like this looks like". It has to figure out what the function is. That can I think only be called verbal intelligence. The ability to understand what is meant behind words. Not very good yet but having to pretend it's not there is just denialism. Denialism exactly like climate change denial. And of course some AI fans do have AI psychosis, different side of the same coin.

The whole dancing around LLMs clearly being able to reason (which can be shown in scientific experiments) and therefor clearly having some sort intelligence is so stupid. Because meanwhile 90% of lemmy users are too brainwashed to accept basic reality any more.

Because you know, this isn't just funny. There are real danger as the technology progresses. But it's politically incorrect and gets you massive downvotes in the wrong community if you talk about those dangers. You can't talk about facts any more.

It's not just about the historical facts about e.g. the coup in Ukraine that you can't talk objectively about any more. Facts in general become anathema. Only the feeling of correctness and manufacturing social consent matters. Collectively we are becoming more and more stupid animals. We are trained to become less sentient or sapient. Less able to perceive and react to reality and more and more act on trained and instinctual impulses. But I see little difference between the MAGA fascists and like 90% of lemmy users now. And if you don't want to offend (or get fired) you have to mask and that seemed funny in your post.

Anyway, sorry just rambling lol

I remember when companies hosted their own email. Giving up control of that was the beginning of the end.

To be fair, Libre Office has been around more than 15 years and the AI clone of MS Office is in the experimental alpha stage. I mean, hate AI but at least think rationally.

Please do release it! The loudest voices on social media shouldn't make your decisions for you.

Can't decompile an app that does all the real work in the cloud.

@LastYearsIrritant @chunes then use cloud as a black box, replicating it behaviour

Wait. There are other Typst folks? I don't see the comments!

They already allow AI as shared in my edit. Do you mean no AI features in their products maybe? I bet it will come too, some kind of chat interface to modify the document. IMO the reasonable choice is to make AI features opt-in only.

That line of thinking is directly leading to "you cannot say anything any more" and "facts before feelings", and before you know it, you confuse some loud people disliking your edgy opinions with you and your "facts" being oppressed. It's human interaction, get over it, stop being butthurt and either engage in constructive discussion, willing to occasionally accept being wrong, or block and move on. Most of us live in a world where we have more freedom of speech than most of recorded history. Stop perpetuating that bullshit play by people who hate people haveing civil discussions, because they profit from screaming matches and endless polarization. Someone disagreeing with you, even someone calling you an idiot, is just exercising their free speech, same as you do.

With that out of the way, several things can be true at once: intelligence and reasoning can be ill-defined terms, an LLM can be able to match inputs to outputs with impressive accuracy, it can have an internal model of the world that is very weird and surprisingly lacking, and it can be a dangerous technology for humanity. Does that make it intelligent? Probably, for some definition of intelligence. But I am still much more worried about people with/behind AI than about AI itself. I'm not afraid of a gun, I am afraid of an egoisitic moron with a gun.

I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, as should be obvious by me being a random dude on the internet.

• you can kind of sue about breaches of contract, but that's civil law, not criminal law, so not illegal
• unless I profit from that or use it to defame , they might have a hard time demonstrating their damages from that breach
• I didn't sign any contract with over their firmware anyway, and it will be hard to prove for them that I did, so kiss my ass
• I'm not in the US, neither is so the DMCA can kiss my ass as well
• there are people who do this kind of work above-board, mostly in academic contexts, with their name attached to it, and as far as I can see they still walk around freely

Good point.

you might want to double check your country's laws. back when the DMCA was first passed the US was also in talks with a bunch of other nations and sneakily made it a condition of doing any trade with the US that they had to adopt basically a copy paste of the DMCA. if you're in Canada for example it's called the Copyright Modernization Act. If you're in the EU it's called CISD 2001.

Is it though?

I try it but it doesn’t feel good. It feels like a clone of Office 2004.

—

I just installed it, open an xlsx file, it opens to the document explorer panel not my document.

Okay, weird, where’s my file? Open it again.

It’s your first time here, customize the app! Here are 5 different UI paradigms to choose from. Okay, I guess compact?

Don’t forget the theme! Sure, okay, use automatic theme and default 2004 style icons.

LibreOffice needs to restart to apply settings. I watched it dynamically update in the background, but okay.

Restarts Tip of the day: you can change your appearance settings! Run this action now? No. Why? Close.

Okay, I spent all that time customizing my tab bar, and yet, Calc doesn’t use a tab bar, so there’s no change at all after all that? No idea if that’s a macOS thing or not because it puts the toolbar values in the menu bar.

Okay, well let’s make a pivot table. Seems decent, it’s a clean Excel clone here, decent functionality. Needs a count distinct and some custom aggregations.

What’s this “Data” field though? Drag it to first slot: LibreOffice hard crashes. At least it saved my document.

Reopen file, let’s zoom out. Click and drag zoom slider, it creates a glitched rectangle around the active cell that tears vs rest of screen that doesn’t always update. It looks like the full page only zooms on certain values while deagging, but on release that sticks.

Let’s make a chart. Select 3 items plus total in my pivot. Click chart button. 3 bars in the chart, where my total bar? Data field is blocked out on pivot take charts. Change chart type, wait 3 seconds for a re render. Try to move the chart but have to click off first.

Okay, let’s delete the chart now. Press delete button: “This function cannot be completed on the selected objects”. Huh? Oh I have to click off, then select the chart again, then delete it.

—

That was my 10 minute experiment. It feels just as bad in a web browser. The Skia renderer is so much better than the old system, but like, I found all this crap in 10 minutes.

I really want this to be good, but it needs a critical editor to go through it with a fine toothed comb. Honestly, they should crib Google Sheets, since it’s got a better interface than Excel now.

and before you know it, you confuse some loud people disliking your edgy opinions with you and your “facts” being oppressed

I agree with your other points but you're definitely wrong on this. Facts are definitely oppressed today. Objective, verifiable historical facts are "not allowed" to be mentioned, and it has cost people their job.

And I do believe that is something that we've been trained to do now. Mention you just used AI with the wrong people and you're out. A moral absolutism based on disinformation and refutable arguments. The "MAGAtization" of the left if you will. Or in case of AI it creates a deep moralistic divide with tech nerds.

It could either be accidental (engagement is good for profit) or part of a strategy (divide and conquer). But as a society we've lost the ability to even talk about certain very important things without walking on eggshells.

And yeah most of this is speculation.

Nope but AI can perfectly re-create the API by observing the payloads being sent and received, and make an app with the same functionality.

Mention you just used AI with the wrong people and you’re out

So, there are people who think you are a bad person for supporting large companies with fascist owners that sell you a product that makes you unlearn critical thinking, steals your data and also destroys the environment in new and funny ways?

Yeah, that sounds like a reasonable opinion to me, to be honest. Of course, you are free to disagree, but I would like to use what is left of my free speech to call AI supporters morons. I am also deeply against people who make cluster munitions to be dropped on middle-eastern hospitals, or who work in surveillance capitalism.

That's just me having an opinion, and I will not give up my core values because of some hypothetical unity. That is how we end up with the US Democrats being the "left" party. People like Clinton or Pelosi have tend to use arguments to silence critics, and it didn't work out well for the US left. The enemy of my enemy is my ally, not my friend.

supporting

No

EDIT: Just to clarify, this is a strawman. Anyone who ever uses AI is maligned and attacked and dehumanized for "supporting" evil AI companies. What I do support is Chinese open source / weight models that run on clean nuclear power. Because that is where most businesses get their tokens from today already, and it's only going to rise.

There is a willingness to betray your fellow man and every truth and every principle of a pluralistic society just to support "your tribe" here. The fuckai tribe. They preach hate against normal people. And ultimately they are no different from MAGA or climate deniers or antivaxx because they don't just peddle in lies they insist on them and nothing you can tell them will change their minds. Close minded people preaching hate and stupidity based on some arbitrary dogma. More and more divisions and hate mongering are being invented every year. That is how the rich and powerful control society now.

OK 👍

If it's open source, won't the commits be enough to prove you didn't do it over a weekend?

Ima be honest, I use it like all the time and I've never had a problem with it. Especially to the degree that you're saying you had in just 10 min.

If youre fluent with Office tools then you should be able to use it.

The only single thing I noticed explicitly that bugged me was it not opening template files as a new file so if I saved it would save over the template.

You can argue that the math editor kind of sucks, which fair, if I was doing a discrete mathematics paper I'd be doing it in LaTeX which has like decades of modules and academia behind it