(TDF Blog) – Italo Vignoli:
LibreOffice 24.2 Community, the new major release of the free, volunteer-supported office suite, is now available for Windows, macOS and Linux. …
Archive for the ‘Software’ Category
LibreOffice 24.2
2024-02-01
LibreOffice Getting Started Guide 7.6
2024-01-26(TDF Blog) – Olivier Hallot:
Rob Thornton, e.a., volunteers from the LibreOffice Documentation community, are happy to announce the latest version of the Getting Started Guide updated to the features available in LibreOffice 7.6.
It introduces Writer (word processing), Calc (spreadsheets), Impress (presentations), Draw (vector drawings), Math (equation editor), and Base (database). …
Bug Thread
2024-01-17(xkcd) – Randall Munroe:
At some point, you just have to give up on fixing the bug and embrace the fact that you have dozens of new friends. …
Linux Mint 21.3 “Virginia” released!
2024-01-13(LinuxMint Blog) – Clément Lefèbvre:
Linux Mint 21.3 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2027. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use. …
AI Transparency
2024-01-09(Atlantic Tech) – Matteo Wong:
The resources needed to build generative AI have allowed the tech industry to warp what the public expects from the technology. …
But that would also be a very narrow way to build and use generative AI. … People might also be willing to sacrifice performance for a more fair and transparent chatbot — benefiting from open AI will require not just redefining open-source, but reimagining what AI itself can and should look like. …
Social Media Enshittification
2023-12-27(Pluralistic) – Cory Doctorow:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them. …
The Human Supremacist Position
2023-12-21(FTB stderr) – Marcus Ranum:
A fairly common statement regarding AI goes something like: “AI cannot be creative; all they do is re-mix existing stuff probabalistically.”
I characterize that as “The Human Supremacist” position, because it’s implying that there is some sort of “true creativity” which only humans are capable of. There are a lot of problems with that position, which I will attempt to explore, herein. After that, I will describe some of my thoughts on how I experience the creative act, and compare it with how AIs implement creativity. …
Fantasy Morality
2023-12-05(Existential Comics) – It is funny to think about the morality in the fantasy genre, because often it just seems more like a war between species which are both trying to exterminate each other, rather than a moral issue. They have to find ways to explain why humans are justified to kill orcs or goblins or whatever on sight. …
In the latest editions, this sort of thing has been seen to be problematic, and stripped out. Now the orcs simply have an evil culture, most likely because they weren’t exposed to John Rawls at University. …
Running Signal
2023-11-18
How Elon Musk Rendered Twitter Useless
2023-10-28(Guardian Tech) – Pranav Dixit:
We’ve watched in horrified fascination as the town square that was once the world’s collective pulse has gone up in flames.
“The word I am looking for is ‘trashy’,” said a former Twitter reliability engineer who requested to remain anonymous for fear of Musk’s famed litigiousness. “Musk’s Twitter is trashy. My feed is filled with trash. The ads between those tweets are also trash.” …
The Hilarious Twitter Nightmare Continues
2023-10-28(The Intercept) – Jon Schwarz:
I did not understand Musk’s determination to torment himself by forcing his entire existence into an extremely painful Procrustean bed. The results have been bleak and awful for Twitter and the world, but not just bleak and awful: They have also been hilarious. Anyone who likes to laugh about human vanity and hubris has to appreciate his commitment to the bit. …
Veilid: A Secure Peer-to-Peer Network
2023-10-21(The Register) – Iain Thomson:
Infosec super-band the Cult of the Dead Cow has released Veilid (pronounced vay-lid), an open source project applications can use to connect up clients and transfer information in a peer-to-peer decentralized manner.
The idea being here that apps – mobile, desktop, web, and headless – can find and talk to each other across the internet privately and securely without having to go through centralized and often corporate-owned systems. Veilid provides code for app developers to drop into their software so that their clients can join and communicate in a peer-to-peer community. …
The Internet Could Be So Good. Really.
2023-10-18Today’s social platforms are designed for spectacle and entertainment—but it’s not too late to build a platform that improves society. …
Wikipedia: Mastodon
AI Image Generation
2023-10-11(SMBC) – Zach Weinersmith:
“Good day sir. In an effort to make AI image generation more safe, I need to uncover which images humans consider sexual and which they do not.” …
How a Social Network Fails
2023-10-08(Atlantic Tech) – Taylor Lorenz:
Elon Musk and Linda Yaccarino are making the same mistake that has tanked other social networks.
“You can’t successfully force users to use a platform that’s hostile to them—not in the long run,” James Marshall, a longtime software engineer in Berkeley, California, who has built open-source social-media software, told me. “You may get a short-term gain or think you get a short-term gain, but it’s not going to last. Users will continue to resist, they’ll move to other platforms, and your user base will go away.” …
AI Vincent van Gogh in Paris Exhibition
2023-10-03(Guardian Art) – Kim Willsher:
The Musée d’Orsay adds AI and VR to the display of the artist’s last works, never previously seen together. …
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