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LibreOffice breaks download records after declaring it has no AI features

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Re: LibreOffice breaks download records after declaring it has no AI features

#141

Post by mmooss »

rietta wrote: post #29

This is awesome! I have used LibreOffice (and Open Office) extensively for decades now. It is my real office suite I use for real work and real business accounting tasks. Yes, I am very well aware that Calc is different than Excel but it can get nearly all the same tasks done as long as you are not tied deep into a corporate environment passing Excel-specific files around. I have also made great business uses of it i…

> normalizing document formats for analysis

What do you mean here? Normalizing it into ODF format? Does that limit which tools/libraries you can use to analyze it?

Re: LibreOffice breaks download records after declaring it has no AI features

#143

Post by altmanaltman »

jrflo wrote: post #46
smokel wrote: post #6

The number of weekly downloads has simply been increasing over time, due to growing popularity. Calling each new high "record-breaking" is a bit meaningless. Unix timestamp counter breaks record after writing this comment.

It's the tried and true headline method of "event 2 happened after event 1", implying a causal effect between the two, despite no evidence of such effect existing. Technically the headline is correct, in the same way that "Canada Tariffs $20b in US Goods After Amazon Plane Crash" is also correct.

David Hume reads the news

Re: LibreOffice breaks download records after declaring it has no AI features

#144

Post by ButlerianJihad »

Aurornis wrote: post #67

I found this graph of LibreOffice downloads https://stats.documentfoundation.org/downloads Switching to the monthly view, the downloads are actually mostly flat going back to 2019 I can believe that the downloads record has been broken in the same way that the stock market hits record highs all the time because the long term trend is upward. I don’t see anything to suggest that LibreOffice is seeing a sudden surge in…

What methods do these "downloads" include?

Standard Linux software is often obtained through package management. Is LibreOffice self-updating? Is an update counted as a "download"? What about the torrents, Snap, Microsoft Store...?

https://www.libreoffice.org/download-other/

Re: LibreOffice breaks download records after declaring it has no AI features

#145

Post by ksymph »

robrain wrote: post #124
tempfile wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this comment. You don't seem to be disagreeing with OP?

There is a specific record being claimed. They're not just saying the absolute downloads are going up, as the OP suggests.

Their point was more that, if every 'weekly download count after a new release' (or whatever record) is consistently being broken on each new release due to generally increasing popularity, then it doesn't make sense to imply causality between the messaging around this particular release and its already-expected record-breaking status.

Re: LibreOffice breaks download records after declaring it has no AI features

#146

Post by kitd »

smokel wrote: post #6

The number of weekly downloads has simply been increasing over time, due to growing popularity. Calling each new high "record-breaking" is a bit meaningless. Unix timestamp counter breaks record after writing this comment.

Absolute number of downloads inevitably goes up. Weekly downloads number doesn't.

Re: LibreOffice breaks download records after declaring it has no AI features

#147

Post by jimmaswell »

poilcn wrote: post #138

Not a fan of pushing LLMs into everything, but this is one of those things where it would be great to have a powerful(or specialized) local llm to help you Write a formula, make a macros, filter stuff, formatting. I'd rather not to Google it. Especially considering SEO made it impossible to find information how to do stuff in editor X of version Y, at best you'd get thrown with crap for other version and have to figu…

You can still ask a general model to do that and it will probably have a nearly full success rate at this point. Either a good open weights or something like Astra.

Re: LibreOffice breaks download records after declaring it has no AI features

#148

Post by tux3 »

robrain wrote: post #124
tempfile wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this comment. You don't seem to be disagreeing with OP?

There is a specific record being claimed. They're not just saying the absolute downloads are going up, as the OP suggests.

They're saying the weekly numbers grow a little bit every week, so every week is technically record breaking.

The absolute number of lifetime downloads can of course only go up (but that's even more vacuous).

Re: LibreOffice breaks download records after declaring it has no AI features

#149

Post by rietta »

mmooss wrote: post #141
rietta wrote: post #29

This is awesome! I have used LibreOffice (and Open Office) extensively for decades now. It is my real office suite I use for real work and real business accounting tasks. Yes, I am very well aware that Calc is different than Excel but it can get nearly all the same tasks done as long as you are not tied deep into a corporate environment passing Excel-specific files around. I have also made great business uses of it i…

> normalizing document formats for analysis What do you mean here? Normalizing it into ODF format? Does that limit which tools/libraries you can use to analyze it?

Normalize into flat xml that I could then parse in Nokogiri.

Edit for clarity: I am a Rubyist at heart so I reach for Ruby for almost all of my automation, ML, and even now AI stuff. Fro a very long time, I have been able to use CLI LibreOffice to do amazing things. It can read everything, even obscure formats by today's standards, going back into the 1990s. And then once in OpenOffice XML you have one target to parse in your scripting language of choice to do document analysis, data loss prevention detection, and more. All with a clean open source license with no server usage restrictions, unlike MS Office.

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