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The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice

simonwillison.net

221–230 of 277 posts

Re: The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They removed the global shortcut to show a portable chat overlay. That one entrypoint must've been the source of at least 80% of my chats, yet apparently it was considered too vestigial to keep.

Can it be reassigned under Settings / Keyboard shortcuts?

Yes, although it's buried among a huge number of other shortcuts now, and not particularly easy to search for.

Re: The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice

#222

I wonder if this says anything about the capabilities of AI. If it's better to bundle an entire headless office suite than ask your AI to build support for relatively well documented formats (or even to extract the file support parts it needs from Libra Office), that seems to suggest AI isn't as good as human devs just yet.

Or, it's dumb as hell to have an AI re-write Word every time it wants to output or present a document. But let's focus on how this validates the belief that "AI bad."

perhaps onion2k meant that openAI could’ve reimplemented it once in-house on their side for the codex app?

Re: The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's not possible with humans in a relatively SHORT amount of time (let's say 1 year).

I’m not sure about you but I would not want to adopt and ship an overnight “word” written in rust

Me neither, but this is exactly my point: nowadays, no one will trust an "overnight word written in rust", unless someone prove that an "overnight word written in rust" is good enough.

And big AI LABs, with basically infinite tokens, are the only one in the position to do it.

Re: The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice

#224
post #212
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows has never felt more archaic than now. I can't imagine trying to do work on a Windows machine in the age of LLMs. If there is anything that LLMs are rock solid at these days, it's unix terminal usage.

They're also great at powershell, you just need to tell it to do so. sh is neat but it's 55 years old, there are newer and better shell environment concepts out there and the robots can handle them well too, try it some time!

PowerShell unfortunately just isn't that first-class, even on Windows. You'll inevitably discover, if you do this, that certain things simply can't be automated via PowerShell, that some PowerShell modules wrap or lag behind older Windows CLI tools, that various things you want to do still require manual registry hacks, etc.

Try starting from a blank slate Windows machine and making a commitment to only changing settings via PowerShell, and ideally only declaring them using DSC. You'll soon discover settings where the best you can do is snapshot the registry, change a setting in the GUI, snapshot the registry again, then take a diff so you can write the registry change into your PowerShell automation. If you're on a corporate machine, you'll also likely find many corners of PowerShell that you need closed off to you, anyway.

At the end of the day, Windows is not friendly to automation because it's not CLI-first (not culturally and not technically).

Re: The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice

#225

The new app is an unbelievable mess. Settings are senselessly organized, too. The whole thing has this aesthetic slickness and then underneath it's like the people who make it have never even used it. It's not surprising that it's pulled in absolutely massive dependencies, although I'm not sure it's the wrong call on some operating systems. LibreOffice is pretty tried and true.

Probably vibe coded right?

Re: The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like, don't expect anything if not forced. Most people only generally pay for things if there is no other option. It's about what's moral (even then debatable as everyone has different morals) versus what's realistic to expect.

The Guardian's funding model [0] proves this wrong. People will absolutely pay for things voluntarily if you ask them, without forcing them to. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2018/nov/12/katharine... In a nutshell - voluntary funding by readership. No paywall. You can read as many stories as you like for free, and donate if you want. It works.

That article has no detail. How much did they make? They said they hope to break even in 2019 so they weren't profitable, what are the latest stats? Compare this to NYTimes which has been crushing it after implementing their paywalled subscription.

Re: The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that it would be the right thing to do. Which is why you have to make the best attempt to make it the legal thing, because people looking to make money will not care about what's right. So, it makes sense to point out the disconnect when people use and promote pro-corporate licenses and then get upset when corporates follow them to the letter and provide them nothing but demands in return. If you want a mutua…

> because people looking to make money will not care about what's right This is two-sided: making a kind of license mandatory also shrinks adoption if it is more restrictive. So, even if I acknowledge there is truth in your side of the story, there is also another at the other side, as usual. How many people use GPL-licensed software as opposed to MIT licensed?

That is not the problem of GPL. I'd rather have high quality software with patches shared back and always being able to see the code than some popular software that eventually is used in some corporate environment without the ability see what they changed.

Regardless, who cares about "adoption?" That's not the original point of open source which was that if you're working on something and you wanted to share it, you could, without any expectation of usage, merely that it might help just one extra person out there. It's simply human ego to care about adoption and GitHub usage and stars especially have accelerated this.

Re: The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure about you but I would not want to adopt and ship an overnight “word” written in rust

Me neither, but this is exactly my point: nowadays, no one will trust an "overnight word written in rust", unless someone prove that an "overnight word written in rust" is good enough. And big AI LABs, with basically infinite tokens, are the only one in the position to do it.

Even then, I would not trust an AI lab as Microsoft does have a long history of support for word whereas I’m not sure the level of continued support from AI labs. *support including bug fixes, vulnerabilities, continued user testing, interop with other services, standards, etc

Right now even OpenAI has its own copy of Overleaf (for latex). I’m not in the same circles as it’s intended users, though I haven’t heard any major use of it since the splash.

Re: The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice

#230
post #29

Someone may need to explain to me what is wrong with this sorry. Is it because it bloats the app with functionality that some users will never use? I feel like that is fairly usual for productivity/business apps generally.

I don't see anything wrong with it, I just think it's interesting.

You aren't worried about the provenance of the installed apps?
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