The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice • Hacker News Board

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

#261

Post by germandiago » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 12:27 AM UTC

satvikpendem wrote: post #227

germandiago wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> and you wanted to share it, you could, without any expectation of usage, merely that it might help just one extra person out there

Related: how do you think you can attract more people, by setting a restrictive copyleft that some people will use in their spare time or by attracting even corporations with money that will end up committing to a repo that is used in half of the world?

Note that I am talking about adoption bc thanks to adoption things just do not get rotten. If you make a piece of software and set a license that noone wants to touch, you will see it stall and die in front of your face.

Do not take me wrong, I mean, I think it is fair to contribute back, collaborating, sponsoring and so on. But it is a fact of life that if you make certain choices you make adoption more difficult with all the consequences it entails.

I do know what the original spirit of such licenses is. I was talking about real side-effects these choices have.

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

#262

Post by pseudosavant » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 12:36 AM UTC

pseudosavant wrote: post #113

bs7280 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's ironic about this is, afaik there's no programmatic way to get a screenshot of a PowerPoint on windows other than opening up PowerPoint and screenshotting it. I only discovered this when I first tried out Anthropics official PowerPoint skill when it came out this winter. If anything happens from this, I hope it forces Microsoft to address some of its long standing hostile to power users issues so they can stay…

This can absolutely be done programmatically. I just added the ability to do that using PowerPoint for Windows yesterday in my uv/python tool `markdown-pptx`. Codex added the functionality in less than 5 minutes. https://github.com/pseudosavant/markdown-pptx/

For those that are interested, this inspired me to create a tool just for exporting images and PDFs of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. Check out the repo below, or if you have uv installed just run `uvx office-export skill install` or `uvx office-export --help` to check it out.

It uses Office for Windows, so it is Windows only. I don't currently have access to a Mac machine, so I can't build in Mac support yet.

https://github.com/pseudosavant/office-export

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

#263

Post by marcus_holmes » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 12:49 AM UTC

BizarroLand wrote: post #244

fangspire wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It was illegal to harbour escaped slaves. Or hide Jews from the Gestapo. Yes, of course. Morality is relative. In a slave-owning society, harbouring escaped slaves is immoral.

It is somewhat interesting that the version of morality an individual possesses always feels to that individual as an absolute. "Of course it's wrong to beat your wife!" says the person who beats their children in a society that has only recently ceased infantilizing their women (USA circa 1900 +/- 30 years). "Of course it's wrong to own slaves!" says the person whose society only recently began protesting against an…

The one I find fascinating is eating animals.

We currently eat animals as a normal part of our diet (for most of us, including me, anyway). To do this we treat the animals horribly. Incredibly badly. And we know it.

It's very easy to see how society's morals will probably change on this, in fact are changing on this, and how in 50 years' time our current stance on eating animals could be seen as monstrously immoral and indefensible.

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

#264

Post by marcus_holmes » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 12:54 AM UTC

vasco wrote: post #195

marcus_holmes wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely not. It was illegal to harbour escaped slaves. Or hide Jews from the Gestapo. Laws have nothing to do with morality. Or justice.

Well this goes into the debate of "is morality absolute or relative" which gets religious fast and there's more books on the subject than we have time to read.

I actually think that's a separate debate.

The question of "are laws there to enforce morality, or enforce public order?" is the key one. And, I think, very easily settled by looking at the laws we choose to implement. Almost none of them enforce moral behaviour (e.g. you must give 10% of your income to charity), they're all about enforcing how we interact and how we're ruled.

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

#265

Post by pocksuppet » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 4:21 AM UTC

marcus_holmes wrote: post #160

fangspire wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But laws are just encodes morality.

Absolutely not. It was illegal to harbour escaped slaves. Or hide Jews from the Gestapo. Laws have nothing to do with morality. Or justice.

That was the morality at the time.

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

#266

Post by pocksuppet » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 4:21 AM UTC

KronisLV wrote: post #180

bayindirh wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I can't understand what you mean by that. Do you mean that it's good that companies can profit over people's mostly voluntary efforts for free, or Free Software is meant to be used for free and never supported in any way, or what? I'm at a loss here.

You are allowed (and encouraged) to do good things without being obligated to. I think it would be immensely cool if OpenAI donated some of that crapload of AI money to the people behind LibreOffice to help with development - and then having like a blog post about it or something would already improve the project's visibility a bit more (hey, every bit helps). What's peanuts to them could help with the sustainability…

You are not allowed to do good things. The penalty is more subtle: instead of cops showing up to arrest you, you will be outcompeted in the market. It's really hard to see when this is happening and course-correct, so all rational actors are doing their utmost to prevent it at all times.

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

#267

Post by fangspire » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 4:58 AM UTC

marcus_holmes wrote: post #263

BizarroLand wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is somewhat interesting that the version of morality an individual possesses always feels to that individual as an absolute. "Of course it's wrong to beat your wife!" says the person who beats their children in a society that has only recently ceased infantilizing their women (USA circa 1900 +/- 30 years). "Of course it's wrong to own slaves!" says the person whose society only recently began protesting against an…

The one I find fascinating is eating animals. We currently eat animals as a normal part of our diet (for most of us, including me, anyway). To do this we treat the animals horribly. Incredibly badly. And we know it. It's very easy to see how society's morals will probably change on this, in fact are changing on this, and how in 50 years' time our current stance on eating animals could be seen as monstrously immoral a…

Animals eat each other. Often in ways more "horrible" than what we do to them (in quotes because nothing in nature is horrible. Horror is a human notion).

Animals are not moral agents, and eating them is not different from eating plants. Both are part of the biosphere that we manage to our benefit.

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

#268

Post by artpar » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 5:10 AM UTC

pseudosavant wrote: post #259

artpar wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have made puppt cli for this, it includes high dpi rendering per-slide/all-slides and in place editing https://github.com/artpar/puppt it allows your llms to see the ppt files structurally apart from just rendering it

Cool project! I'm playing around with some similar stuff, but via uv/Python. Impressive you aren't leveraging any other existing libraries for OpenXML parsing, editing, or rendering. Any especially tricky gotchas you've run into for this tool?

Yeah thanks to LLM hill climbing and PPTs being easily available and they being nothing more than just xmls this did not involve any gotchas, just a about a weeks worth of goal chasing with manual verification. I did have to stop LLM into hardcoding a lot of times trying to escape the actual goal.

But based on this I thought I could make something similar for cad files, and they turned out to be an entirely different monster. the cad spec is like 1000x bigger than ppts, cad files themselves were hard to gather for test targets. 70-80% of their spec is public and remaining is driven by private vendors. the format itself is in binary. The LLM has been chasing that goal since about 2 months now and its nowhere close.

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

#269

Post by marcus_holmes » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 5:15 AM UTC

fangspire wrote: post #267

marcus_holmes wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one I find fascinating is eating animals. We currently eat animals as a normal part of our diet (for most of us, including me, anyway). To do this we treat the animals horribly. Incredibly badly. And we know it. It's very easy to see how society's morals will probably change on this, in fact are changing on this, and how in 50 years' time our current stance on eating animals could be seen as monstrously immoral a…

Animals eat each other. Often in ways more "horrible" than what we do to them (in quotes because nothing in nature is horrible. Horror is a human notion). Animals are not moral agents, and eating them is not different from eating plants. Both are part of the biosphere that we manage to our benefit.

Animals don't have a choice about eating each other. We do.

And there are plenty of people who would vehemently argue that eating their pet puppy is very, very, very, different from eating a plant.

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

#270

Post by defrost » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 5:21 AM UTC

marcus_holmes wrote: post #269

fangspire wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Animals eat each other. Often in ways more "horrible" than what we do to them (in quotes because nothing in nature is horrible. Horror is a human notion). Animals are not moral agents, and eating them is not different from eating plants. Both are part of the biosphere that we manage to our benefit.

Animals don't have a choice about eating each other. We do. And there are plenty of people who would vehemently argue that eating their pet puppy is very, very, very, different from eating a plant.

And to complete a particularly cultural PoV, there are many people eating "pet" chickens, "pet" guinea pigs, goats, et al about the world.

Good arguments, particularly in Australia, for eating wild pigs, clean skin bulls, camels, donkeys (mainly for pet meat IMHO), etc. Kangaroos, unculled, explode in number past the sustainability of their landscape and litter the ground with bones - humans estimate a cull target and shoot to reduce populations, only eating a few themselves (leaving many on the ground for "nature").