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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

#201

Post by onraglanroad »

rc5150 wrote: post #99
figassis wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is actually no correct. A record by definition is an unsurpassed accomplishment or statistic. It needs to be an accomplishment before it can be called a record. The passage of time does not qualify as a record. Also, a statistical certainty cannot be called a record.

The year 2025 progressed to 2026. Never in the history of the Gregorian calendar have we EVER made it to 2026. That is an accomplishment. That is a record.

It's not an accomplishment. It's obviously been recorded and is therefore a record.

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

#202

Post by [deleted] »

ButlerianJihad wrote: post #144
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/

[deleted]

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

#203

Post by mossTechnician »

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.

There has to be a much stronger correlation between good press for a software release and the subsequent downloads of it, even if a certain number of downloads were inevitable.

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

#204

Post by [deleted] »

MoonWalk wrote: post #61
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.

But still nice to hear. Really timely, too, since my 83-year-old mom called me the other day to help her E-mail a document she prepared in LibreOffice. I installed it on her (seldom-used) computer years ago. So I talked her through E-mailing it with Thunderbird. And I say "talked," because the jagoffs at Microsoft REMOVED Remote Assistance from every version of Windows used by people who are likely to need it. And MS…

[deleted]

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

#205

Post by wat10000 »

kailpa1 wrote: post #72
wat10000 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That list seems pretty easy to meet today. I’m not sure why they’re waiting for an approach to emerge instead of building it now, unless there’s something else they haven’t listed.

What features do you think meet the list right now?

I'm not sure where the supposed difficulty lies.

"User-controlled execution." Seems easy enough to add settings so this is configurable.

"No content may leave the computer without authorisation." OK, so don't do that.

"No telemetry of any kind." There are plentiful API providers with zero data retention. If this means no data of any kind, even just records of having accessed the API, then local inference is a thing.

"No dependence on a single provider." Trivial. The OpenAI API is a de facto standard implemented by tons of providers. If you really want to go broad, it's easy to implement clients for other APIs too.

"No compromises on format." I don't even understand how this would be a problem in the first place. Text goes in, text comes out. The client can put it into whatever format it wants.

"Entirely optional." Trivial to add an off switch. Or an on switch, so it's off by default. If it must be completely removable and not just turned off, it can be implemented as an extension.

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

#206

Post by Narishma »

Aurornis wrote: post #70
hn_submit wrote: post #22

Companies are totally blind to the fact that A.I. is a complete turn-off to many customers. Not having / using A.I. may even become a unique selling point in the future.

> Companies are totally blind to the fact that A.I. is a complete turn-off to many customers. In a normal office environment I would guess most people actually want more AI features. Most people aren’t passionate about hand writing their best TPS reports with carefully crafted prose. They want to get their work done as easily as possible at their job so they can go home on time.

Why bother with people then, if the AI is going to do their work.

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

#207

Post by wat10000 »

dingaling wrote: post #168
wat10000 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many, though? It looks to me like the anti-AI crowd is not all that big, but it’s a bubble so they think everyone thinks that way. Especially if we’re talking about people who are so rabidly against it that they’ll get upset about optional AI features that are completely ignorable.

Even if the features are ignorable, they have consumed development time and attention to get there.

That's true of any feature you don't use. And while it's nothing new for people to get upset about work being put into features they don't care about, I've never seen anything like this level of vitriol. In particular I never saw anyone say they won't use a piece of software at all if it contains a particular optional feature, until LLMs came along.

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

#208

Post by mmooss »

rietta wrote: post #149
mmooss wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pars…

Thanks, that makes a lot of sense. I wonder if that's how Codex uses LibreOffice.

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

#209

Post by smokel »

tzs wrote: post #186
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.

> Calling each new high "record-breaking" is a bit meaningless It is the first to break a million in a week. Even if it has been steadily going up most people would consider passing that number interesting.

That would make sense, but according to the stats posted in a sibling comment they crossed the million weekly downloads in week 31 already.

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

#210

Post by JohnTHaller »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #123

this is temporary marketing towards a direction that they may change their mind on in the future, which would likely anger people who downloaded it because of this preference not a call I'd make early on, a preference to disable AI features like Firefox added is maybe a more reasonable call all we know today is that AI is being used in annoying ways, this won't be forever

It has no AI built in, which is a feature to a growing set of users. No AI buttons all over the place and sending your personal data off to who knows where. And if you want AI, you can add your choice of AI via plugins if you want AI in your word processor.
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