- cross-posted to:
- programmer_humor@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- programmer_humor@programming.dev
You must log in or # to comment.
“… an AI slop version of Microsoft Office that doesn’t fucking work” also known as Microsoft Office 365
Which is entirely tragic, because LibreOffice is good, I respect hand coding more than the products of a prompt slot machine.
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.
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
LibreOffice just outright stating their policy of ‘no AI’ as a feature made me respect them so much more.
They allow the use of AI for contributions but with multiple restrictions: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/AI_policy
Based, x2
I wonder how long this will hold. Remind me 3 years?
I think “no AI” policies are a good thing and the intention is (likely) not literally forbidding AI; they couldn’t in any meaningful way. But the code should have a human attribution and ownership. If the code reeks of LLM, it’s shitty code quality. If people open MRs saying it was written by an agent, they distance themselves from their contribution but expect others to review and integrate it; which is also shitty behavior.
If on the other hand it’s well crafted code that was being thought through and refined, no one should or could care if an LLM was involved.
Yes, eventually no one will care, that’s my point. Using AI will become as normalized as using the internet for help, so the no AI policy will not hold. I agree that people should still own their changes and be held responsible for the quality.
Edit: I checked the actual source, they actually already allow the use of AI for contributions but with multiple restrictions: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/AI_policy
No, there always will be no ai movement
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.
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.
The person behind all these *craft projects has (or claims to have) made millions from his AI image / video creation services and scam-enabling deepfake voice cloner. The projects are linked to and funded by his commercial endeavors. He’s also extremely exuberant about real developers and creators losing their jobs, and suffers from massive AI psychosis. Unfortunately I don’t think he or this project is going anywhere.
I don’t think any of it will ever actually work, but he’s very good at making outlandish comments and drumming up hype, so we’re going to keep hearing about it anyway.
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.
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
Yeah, I love little rules of thumb like that
That’s why I code in Fortran
Damn; looks like grandma is going to outlive us all
The wikipedia article on the effect covers this with an awfully blunt aside lol
The Lindy effect applies to non-perishable items, like books, those that do not have an “unavoidable expiration date”.[2] For example, human beings are perishable
It’s good enough that my 75yo mother picked it up without trouble when I switched her to Mint after W10 went EoL.
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”
I wish the people at my company were like your mother. Instead, they freak out about the smallest of changes in the UI of the same application. God forbid they have to move to another application entirely. Had a user freak out their application wasn’t licensed and they couldn’t use all functions anymore. Turns out they just managed to somehow hide the toolbar with all the options… These are people anywhere from 20 to 60 years old, btw.
Yeah, it is not an age thing. I’m very happy that my mother has always been pretty good at programming solving. Although she never did any real tech related job, I believe this is a question of attitude more than anything else.
When she proudly tells me she used my dad’s phone to google for a fix for her phone acting up, my inner first year support monkey is proud :)
‘prompt slot machine’ <- I’m borrowing that
Or just slop-machine in short
Enjoy, its such a good turn of phrase!
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.
If it’s open source, won’t the commits be enough to prove you didn’t do it over a weekend?
Please do release it! The loudest voices on social media shouldn’t make your decisions for you.
Good point.
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?
Satan just asked god to add new layers of hell.
they made Teams 2, Satan might not get the note because he uses teams.
But they got stuck in infinity meetings
He also asked to remove all the fun emojis because fun is banned in hell.
Hells sewage tunnels.
If you think using it is bad, try deploying/maintaining it
It feels disengenuous to say people vibe code things.
I know it’s correct English, I just think it’s kind of a bullshit statement.
When dumbasses talk to AI’s and the AI’s do things for them, it’s wild to think the credit goes to the dumbasses.
This is like your boss saying he did all your dev work and calling it “boss coding”.
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.
a couple of months ago i asked about this one of local Forbes editors and they explained this phenomenon as “because it is expected to code by hand but managing to vibe anything is amazing”. i decided not to continue this conversation because that’s fucking stupid
“because it is expected to code by hand but managing to vibe anything is amazing”.
I don’t think it’s wise to stake the future of computing on “It’s not that the bear dances well, it’s that the bear dances at all.”
maybe that’s why some rando forbes editor is not a CEO of some nondescript startup.
they’re desperate for ai to be profitable.
you’re right
It’s not really stupid. Things that are unusual are more noticeable, and garner more comment. We’ve grown used to devs tirelessly doing what they do, to the point most people don’t think about where their software comes from, but a machine sort of doing it (poorly, so very poorly) is novel, so people talk about it.
Currently, software mostly working as it should is the norm, so people don’t talk about it much. When the wave of slopcoded disasters starts to grow, people will talk about it, because software is suddenly not working as it should.
and yet no one is celebrating a piece of software well done
Id be done for a “it just works” day to celebrate all of invisable labour that makes the world work
That’s supposed to be Labour Day/ May Day
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.
There is another twist to this in that the OOXML format didn’t actually define the bugs in the format and MS Office itself didn’t actually follow the officially defined specification they pushed through. This inevitably led to every product that tried to make use of the official spec (e.g. Open Office) failing to be compatible with MS Office. It took the open source devs many years to properly duplicate the buggy mess that is the real MS Office formats.
The only reason Microsoft exists today is because of Exchange and an old market share on consumer/prosumer OS.
They’re a glorified email hosting company and an embarrassment to software development. Idc what AI does to their shitty software. Fucking hate Outlook.
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 remember when companies hosted their own email. Giving up control of that was the beginning of the end.
That’s not really accurate, Azure is massive.
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.
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.
But irrelevant for most users. Azure can stay all it wants but we must be freed from the shackles of Microsoft Office
Maybe for most personal users, but in B2B (where the money is) …
Only because Microsoft offers bundle deals between Azure and O365 for business customers. The point still stands.
Linux
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.
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.
Switched to Typst and love it. I’d say I use LibreOffice much less because of Typst.
Thx ill ckeck it out (and tx to the other typst folks, just too tired to keep replying )
Wait. There are other Typst folks? I don’t see the comments!
It’s mark-phd-down, that’s why it’s not easy to start with.
Best name ever. My issue is that its not very read friendly. (Had quite a headache doing papers in it.)
At least “back in my day” there was no alternative if you wanted to write a paper (or a thesis).
Even in undergrad, I swear using good LyX templates nets you half a grade just for beautiful presentation. And if you throw Zotero in there for the automated citation management, it’s glorious for research papers.
In my day we used bibtex, uphill, in the snow!
No. If you format aomething in latex it will look like you want. Word and even libre writer will just mess up formatting at the slightest inconvenience
.md files are agnostic and can be read by pretty much anything. I care for the content to be preserved, the “look” can be handled later. Considering sloppification,Data preservation and accessibility should be held to a premium at this point.
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.
I disagree, their efforts don’t go unnoticed. Their recent no-AI claims prompted me to donate.
Long live Libre devs!! Been with yall for over a decade
I don’t like LibreOffice but any actual Open Source dev deserves infinite more respect than those prompstitutes.
Tinfoil hat time:
A year ago, I did some reverse engineering. I figured a pattern matching engine has to be good matching patterns, so I threw the messed-up output of Ghidra into Claude to clean it up and to give me an overview of what the fuck happens in a certain part.
I was absolutely surprised. Sure, it got some things wrong, but it knew way more than it should have been able to guess from that short bit of fucked up, optimised not-quite-C. Including guessing context that it should not be able to guess. This was a firmware with not-yet-released functions that, to my knowledge, shouldn’t exist outside of this bit of binary firmware. At least not for us non-NDA mortals.
At the time, Mistral had a new-ish model as well, so I figured I’d give it a try. It worked as expected, cleaned up things, gave variables reasonable names, made educated guesses and so on, but didn’t act as if it had background info. And I was using Sonnet 4.x, so the small Claude which shouldn’t be that much larger.
Since then, I have the conspiracy theory that the Claude people threw a bunch of proprietary sources in the training, too. I have no idea how, maybe aggressively training on user inputs? Anyway, this does not help to allalleviate my suspicions.
I specifically asked our CEO about this just to cover my ass. It seems insane to trust these guys at all. Here in the USA, small businesses have de facto no legal protection from large businesses.
Absolutely. Especially if you have company info / IP that someone else would pay a lot for. This is a question for lawyers and managers to negotiate with the lawyers at OpenAI, Anthropic etc, not for us little people to decide. I’m not throwing company data in an online service that is not cleared for us to use, and I don’t even work with spicy stuff. Back in my IT days we would have called that a data breach, which would have lead to something from an unpleasant hour in the boss’ office to a promotion to customer.
Makes me wonder how much of the frontier models hacking is just “our devs uploaded the codebase to Claude and suddenly it knows where all the backdoors are”?
I guess most, honestly
They’re using gig workers by the hundreds of thousands, if not millions to do “data annotation”. You can actually make quite a bit if you’ve got higher credentials like Phd, masters, or a very good resume.
My theory is they’ve been using professionals to inadvertently leak proprietary methodologies. They could be doing so by creating problems for them to solve that lead people to inadvertently expose solutions based on their actual jobs.
It’s lowkey corporate espionage.
I’m sure it’s all but officially confirmed, that all the people upload to it goes to training data unsanitised. And Microslop for sure uploaded entirety of their codebase to all the bots. This is at least part of the reason why claude is so surprisingly OK at reverse-engineering all the big stuff.
I threw about 10 short phrased meeting notes (4-5 words each) into an LLM to get some document formatting started with titles and sections etc. It built a full scope document and inferred a ton of information about the project and product. It was surprising how much it could infer, and suggested very sensible testing criteria and alternate solutions should the main product path not pan out.
I can see why people start believing it “thinks”, because it was remarkable what it “understood” about a vague new product. Had I sent the info out to stake holders, they would have assumed this person was a key team member that was involved from day 1.
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.
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.
I figured you meant the coworker, but its something I think any AI user should be aware of, especially just using a public web browser version where they definetly will store you data and could leak private info.
I don’t use it often enough to have stats, but I did notice large differences between public AI models.
I had an odd Secure Linux permission issue after an update so I figure WTH let’s try AI debugging.
I pasted same info into Chatgpt and Googles AI. One suggested a bunch of debug steps which made sense, but it talked ahead of itself. It would say check this, then do this, then this (assuming you had answered a Y/N scenario for step 1 already. So it was a complicated interaction, because it gets your response, formulates new plans, but assumes you also completed step 2 and 3 from before. It led itself around in circles with pages and pages of suggestions. Even though none of the steps were poor choices, they made logical sense, it just couldn’t sort it out.
The other one took my paste, asked one question, and gave me the solution. The update had stripped the SELinux rule off the file and become an undefined default.
“Intelligence”, as a word has always been ill defined. What’s it mean? It’s mostly been used to create prejudices via standardized tests, the bell curve, and IQ tests.
I don’t believe it’s “intelligent” as we don’t really know how to define that. But I do think it’s really really really good at writing reasonable seeming statements in various languages using probability.
Coding and programming, are just languages. So it will likely be able to get pretty damn good at it, just as it has with the English language.
I think with LLMs accurate regurgitation of facts, is the colary to good code.
But I don’t believe that means it “thinks” (which requires introspection, and an internal experience). It does multi-agent computing, and this might even simulate some aspects of thinking… But it’s not thinking. It’s computing.
It won’t be able to do any more than that, until it consistently gets data from having a body (and something like glial thought-interactions/organs/flaws/survival).
By the way, this also means if you could download a mind to a computer - it would slowly lose it’s humanity as it lived longer and longer interfacing with computer systems rather than human systems/organs/experiencs.
Eventually that “uploaded human” would become a Clankr, and stop understanding human life, the will to survive/think. Eventually it would just compute (not think/care or have flaws).
Many sci-fi stories are based on the man-to-technology-to-cold-rational-evil pipeline… Less have gone in the other direction, even though it often produces very popular characters: Spock, Data, the Terminator, Pinnoccio.
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.
Oh it learned enough from code that it has developed some basic, and hear me out of this, artificial verbal intelligence. I know I know, not just pattern matching, but actual artificial intelligence at a low level.
Please don’t downvote me (sorry don’t remember if this is fuckai or not) but I’m just saying it’s one possible explanation to this phenomenon you describe.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
i would err towards it ingesting proprietary code before this, it’s not wrong but AI spits out copyrighted and should-be private stuff all the time.
There are studies and tools like LiCoEval and others that investigate LLM memorization. It does happen but it’s not all the time, and it’s very infrequent for real world (complex) examples. Mostly this concerns textbook examples or standard boilerplate code - from what I read. And I obviously don’t know the specific example mentioned. This is also a problem that can be fixed.
But I’m really just half mocking the very careful language used by the comment I replied to.
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…
Can’t decompile an app that does all the real work in the cloud.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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…
I think its over for us, and most other knowledge based jobs eventually. I have no idea where this is going.
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…
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.
In terms of whether the ‘clean room’ approach is as critical in Europe or not, I can’t be sure. It might be more permissable for someone to use a decompile as a reference and also directly work on a replacement. However I’m pretty sure starting with a decompile of proprietary software as a direct codebase would run afoul of issues.
Otherwise, imagine you have an HEVC encoded rip of a 4K blu ray. You transcode it to AV1. The bytes are totally different, and even the resultant frames are likely not even pixel for pixel identical. I don’t think copyright law would deem that not a violation, regardless of jurisdiction.
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.
That is explicitly prohibited by virtually all proprietary software license agreements.
Which makes it a breach of contract, but not illegal.
Calling decompilation the “end of closed-source” is way too hyperbolic.
Sir, there’s a reason nobody likes to see the sausage being made.
They claim it’s “clean room”, so no decompilation involved. I’m just waiting for the lawsuits to arrive, so we may learn how much of that is true. The big ones probably are already checking the code.
Companies were just dropping the entirety of their proprietary code base into chatbots to save money after firing their best developers. I bet that’s where they’re getting most of it.
I think that could only be really claimed if you know what training data the LLM was trained on. That will only matter if it ends up in court though and no one seems willing to fight that fight at the moment.
LibreOffice - the only office suite that handles tables correct, even when multiple users change the document 🥳
