- cross-posted to:
- programmer_humor@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- programmer_humor@programming.dev
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To be fair, neither does the real MS office
Wow, it managed to perfectly replicate Microsoft office?
Attention goes to that AI can fuck their creators though, not to the clone Programms.
LibreOffice - the only office suite that handles tables correct, even when multiple users change the document 🥳
that doesn’t work
You see, they took the efforts to replicate Microsoft excel experience.
Excel is the 7th ring of hell
What level is Teams?
If you think using it is bad, try deploying/maintaining it
For anyone not already aware, there was a push in the early 2000s to require government documents to be in a standard format rather than giving a specific vendor (Microsoft) unfair advantage (official government endorsement). LibreOffice (OpenOffice at the time) used the standardized ODF format, which should’ve pushed many European governments to switch to an open source office suite. Instead, Microsoft bribed a bunch of people to push through their “OOXML” format as a standard, even though it was just a snapshot of Office’s behavior, bugs and all.
I’m going out on a limb here, but I don’t think the kind of person who contributes to FOSS projects get into it for the fame and attention.
Well Fuck. I should have done more research on this…
Decompilation projects are getting attention right now because AI models being able to do it is a new thing. Essentially the end of closed source is a huge deal and people haven’t realized the implications…
Calling decompilation the “end of closed-source” is way too hyperbolic.
Sir, there’s a reason nobody likes to see the sausage being made.
This. I am so demoralised as a SWE who was trying to get out of working for a morally objectionable company by working on passion projects and selling them as apps. Guess I need to find something else… again.
Why can’t passion projects be a thing anymore ? Because they can be decompiled ?
I think its over for us, and most other knowledge based jobs eventually. I have no idea where this is going.
Depends. Hand-written apps will still be more valuable than slopped ones as they’re far more trustworthy and less generic (like, literally), not to mention people being environmentally conscious about their choices. A good, trustworthy app that respects the user (and therefore omits e.g. privacy invasion) is still worth a few bucks to many.
I don’t mean this to be snippy but people don’t give a shit how or who wrote the code.
Most people will never know either way. If you download an app from an app store you don’t know what the code looks like.
Also software devs like to think they are clever and valuable because big tech has been pumping them up for a couple decades but the business doesn’t actually give a shit how a feature gets implemented only that it was and the customers value it.
LLMs are perfectly capable of writing correct code. The main issue with them is the pace of change which has been greatly accelerated and how it can eclipse the rate a dev can understand the change.
I know people like to claim that every thing they make is slop but that ignores that basically the entire industry is using it to varying amounts and are unlikely to stop going forward.
It’s a confirmation bias thing.
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 stsrted in how without proper support these slop apps will be dead faster than the grokopedia.
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.
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.
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.
Guess I need to find something else… again.
Keep in mind that all of these projects cost a fuckton of money. This cannot go on forever.
You only need to slay the giants…
If someone does that to an app you’re actively selling you’re well within your rights to C&D them.
Reverse engineering isn’t illegal. It’s how projects like Wine are possible.
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…
And Libreoffice is great. I got through grad school using it. I had to look up a lot of the button locations and formulas but not having Onedrive hork up everything made it all worth it.
Same. LibreOffice and Latex
LaTeX, really? Its like evil markdown.
Switched to Typst and love it. I’d say I use LibreOffice much less because of Typst.
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.
lmao real
Overall Libre Office works fantastic. My only gripes is inserting an image into a document is way worse than word still, but overall it’s only a mild inconvenience.
Word only gets worse each update, and libre just gets better each update
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.
Which is entirely tragic, because LibreOffice is good, I respect hand coding more than the products of a prompt slot machine.
‘prompt slot machine’ <- I’m borrowing that
Enjoy, its such a good turn of phrase!
It’s only tragic for a month, after which the other project gets abandoned because its unmaintainable or the vibecoder got bored and moved on to another viral idea
I’m not going to switch to something unless I know its going to be around when I need it
abandoned because its unmaintainable
Exactly this. It’s hard enough maintaining my own code. It can take a good 15 mins or so to familiarise myself with something I haven’t worked on in a short while. Seeing code that isn’t mine is very challenging. Not the code itself, but the methods and structures used by the other person. All that has to be done before hunting bugs and adjusting features. Then of course there’s the things you don’t know about that can be easily missed.
An AI would need to thoroughly know the code and detailed context on the decisions behind it all, every session, in order to be able to maintain it with vibe, because the vibe coder won’t know any of this.
That rule where something is expected to last in the future as long as it already has in the past probably applies here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
Neat, I haven’t heard of this one before. I’ll likely use it in the future
To me, its tragic for exactly that reason; the vibiot, is lavished and rewarded with attention, when they don’t even understand the outputs from their prompt slot machine. So when they get bored or confused by their projects and chase the next craze…The person that should’ve gotten the accolades for understanding and maintaining their work, is forgotten still. I don’t like this timeline, its a stupid time to be alive.
LibreOffice just outright stating their policy of ‘no AI’ as a feature made me respect them so much more.
It’s good enough that my 75yo mother picked it up without trouble when I switched her to Mint after W10 went EoL.
Had the same reaction with the Photoshop ai clone when se already have projects like gimp
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.
LibreOffice is great, but it has some glaring issues that keep it out of the mainstream. In my experience it can’t handle multiple monitors with different scaling, comments on 365 don’t import, formulas in sheets break, etc.
Some of these issues come from Microsoft, but other FOSS office suites like ONLYOFFICE have overcome them so it’s doable.
I get the sense their tech stack is very rigid so that may be why iteration is slowed.
OpenOffice hasn’t released a major version since 2013.
My team uses LibreOffice exclusively, and extensively. It’s fine.
Ah my bad, I meant ONLYOFFICE*
So many offices 😅
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.
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
This. As much as I want LibreOffice to succeed (AND I WANT LIBREOFFICE TO SUCCEED SO SIT DOWN YOU IN THE BACK), having converted actual work projects over to LibO and maintain them has been hell, to say the least.
2026 and tables and text boxes still explode the document into confetti if you look at it funny. Hours of frustratingly reconstructing documents, or reloading progress saves because moving a text box one pixel over makes things explode.
LibO needs QA and maintenance fixes, badly. If you don’t want LibO to use AI models to bug hunt, then enlist and help fix it. Development in turning LibO from a messy desk project to something actually useable efficiently has taken literal decades already.
Jesus fuck did the LLM slop bots come out?
Why the fuck is everyone in favor of slop apps now?
The comments here are insane
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.
This is actually one of the best things of this year. First they shit on adobe and now Microsoft, the two most hated and worst hurdles in the way of people switching to Linux. I’m actually predicting that there will be regulations now by the government over this stuff (it won’t work or do anything of course because it’s not even touching their code base) since our government loves money and corporations more than humans.
I see it as a proof of concept. Whether these products deliver or not doesnt matter. What matters is components within proprietary tools can now be replicated in a fast and effective way.
Not everything from AI is slop. AI in the hands of good developers can be powerful and help make open source projects more productive. It needs careful governance and quality control, but this kind of stuff helps level the playing field as resource limited projects can do more with what they’ve got.
Without commenting on Microsoft and Adobe specifically, because I couldn’t care less about their fates, I find the prospect of no longer being able to make a living from making and selling software deeply depressing.
I could put my heart and soul into an app, stick it on a marketplace, and someone gets their LLM to RE the binary back into source code to repackage and distribute it. LLMs were built on theft but now they enable even more of it. As a SWE I’m quite demoralised.
I really did want to get out of selling my hours to an evil corporation by instead selling my own works of passion as apps, but this has really thrown a spanner in the works. I don’t want to have to use an always-online SaaS/licencing model instead, because I believe consumers should own things. This does feel like the final straw pushing me out of software entirely.
