There’s also been a certain “Soviet democracy”, the democracy perception of which in the polls would be sky high especially under dear Stalin and Voroshilov leading it with iron hand, and less when dissent stopped getting you executed.

The worst is that they are expecting complex formats to “just open” and using those complex formats. It’s the EU, such a thing as a modern office format should be standardized the hell through, there should be a format specifically designed for all such places, MSO just shouldn’t be a factor. Yet when MS kickbacks are involved, it’s fine to use something unfit for the task and call a couple of blank pages (at page breaks, I assume) a fatal flaw. Anyway, text formats are complex, but not that complex, MSO’s OOXML is just intentionally left open and with variety of interpretations and with implementation’s data structures not important for anything written into the standard and in general it’s a scam device and MS should have been fined like 50 billion for publishing it and daring to propose it to official entities and as a standard.

What I don’t understand is why can’t we use something like XHTML with <tex> and <ps> and <csv> tags and a WYSIWIG editor.

I mean, OK, I’ve spent a few months playing with prototyping a document format with edits history and comments and it’s not as easy as it seems, but applying what worked for me to a content format like described above with links to blobs by hashes, blobs stored in the same zipfile, one could get something usable for many office tasks.

Not even talking about org-mode, you know, existing, with just a bit of extension that could fill the role of many office applications.

I mean, no need to even talk about “fit for the task” and efficiency. 90s’ WordPerfect was good enough for the same uses. The complexity of formats is a deliberate way to limit competition by MS and a deliberate excuse to keep getting kickbacks for the organizations in question.

There’s just one thing that can be done - to make it mandatory to use software developed by government contract for this specific purpose for all governmental stuff, and make it FOSS, and with a FOSS format, and with specifications simple enough for a student to write an editor.

Anyway. This is all dreams.

One thing I hate, but came to understand about governments and big companies, - is that they only leave stuff if it starts falling apart under them due to lack of support and growing incompatibilities.

Because otherwise the “technical problems” in the title can possibly be one Excel spreadsheet that turned out to not be bug-to-bug compatible when opened in LO.

And now I’ve read the article, and with the exception of Collabora instead of LO, this is even dumber, they’ve cancelled the pilot due to “formatting issues”. Even after looking a bit at big companies I think they are f-ng parasites and should have somehow gotten used to those “blank pages”, thank you very much.

That’s an excuse. I say continue the pilot, and fire the focus group of 38 lazy ministerial jerks.

But OK, I’m not a Danish citizen, so please be my guest, you hypothetical Danish citizen reading this, to borrow my opinion.

Got excited and wrong.

OK, sorry, got emotional and wrong.

Well, OK, but you haven’t answered whether you believe into the “spontaneous evolution of intelligence in a text approximator” thing.

I understand if that’s because of some stubbornness and desire for correctness of the conversation, but people believing in that are a problem not less than antivaxxers.

Not today, no, no difference at all today.

No, making the customer think they’ve got the magic bullet doing all they need is a valid one too. The only problem is that it’s repeating a job already done in areas where you need to do jobs not previously done, ideally. It’s very useful for all wrong applications of tech where it was honestly not needed (things easily repeatable done by people who are honestly not that much smarter than haircutters). It’s useless for the skeleton applications.

It’s a very smart Ponzi scheme, one where much of the funds collected gets spent on maintaining real usefulness, at least visible one. Unlike most Ponzi schemes, it’s able to achieve unimaginable scale due to that.

Like, say, plague has low survivability rates, and doesn’t spread too easily, meaning that it’s not very dangerous in the modern world. While a disease with very high survivability rates and easy spread has far bigger reach. Or a very slow incubation period with carriers being infectious long before detection.

OK, I suppose everyone likes Plague Inc.

IRL it’s no good as something everyone uses, because current token costs are subsidized and because what’s solvable with it for most people is what’s been done many times before.

When things balance out, I’d expect token costs to be like 4 times what they are now. And people using these things to be mostly engineers.

You can’t persuade those people, before these bots they were picking a random Facebook post over a person they know, because they didn’t want to be taking advice from that person, but random posts (except God forbid Wikipedia, because they say it can be unreliable ; that can’t happen to a random Facebook post you agree with, that’s the real shit), and now these bots conveniently give them answers they are looking for, confirmed by high authority of some faceless company (anything is better than the authority of a person you meet who’s more knowledgeable), for every kind of situation.

And yes, they are trying to hide it thinking that’s smart and they are avoiding conflicts with inadequate people who can’t be reasoned with on all the important topics, that a text generator will seamlessly evolve into a race of robots helping them, that communist theocracy is the best system of government, that there’s a world government controlling us via vaccines and all such very nuanced and perceptive takes.

Hence the “language policing” complaint, that person is trying to weasel themselves out of answering that yes, they think their computer is sentient, without arguments.

software. And I want to poison any telemetry streams they might be using to spy. I recently watched a gamers nexus video on hacking TV’s. Can you look on my network and find the TV. and then do a research project to look into what it would take to de-shittify this TV?

So, “local” would require a pretty powerful machine here and “cloud” might eventually stop being an option because they don’t want you to do such things using their cloud models.

Other than that, you are starting to attain that tone of a person who thinks they are starting to understand something in depth, like a Linux convert that has learned that one can write shell scripts. Don’t. You’ve used a glorified combination of Google and StackOverflow copypaste and it worked.

They are saying that if you are using a cloud model, you are advertising it by default.

Apocalypse shelters are more of a dream of a new world where there’ll be fewer people and more air and green, but you need to be prepared. People like “clean sheet” dreams, like “I’ll erase this and start anew, that’ll be magnificent”, except it won’t, you had 3 levels of a house, you’ve erased them, now you only have some wet ground and nowhere to sleep. OK, one level with a bad roof. Not better. EDIT: Much better, except it would be even better not erasing anything.

I mean, post-apocalypse is a pretty common escapist setting, makes perfect sense people with money and no imagination wanted to turn it into their “not for everyone” elitarian fantasy and fashion instead of something common, that has also happened with ideas of trans-humanism and new secret societies and what really not. Some folks with nothing interesting in their personality try to feel special by impeding others in engaging in games pretty common in our humanity and our time in particular.

I frankly feel as if that whole thing with enshittifying the Web and computing were also an irrational thing, people with power just having that desire to spoil a good thing for others so that it became rare and elitarian.

Getting back to apocalypse shelters, variations of that were a pretty common hobby for like everyone even in poorer countries. Be that a bit of amateur radio, hiking, making a shack in the woods, picking up mushrooms, science-fiction and fantasy reading groups, a whole lot of hobbies.

We’re just living in a time when unfortunately people with money and no personal qualities of note are trying to make everything “magical” and “interesting” a sign of status and take it from the rest.

So, about practical possibility of an apocalypse and “clean sheet” dreams, those people will be the first to die. No, nobody will kill them, they’ll just find out that in a post-apocalyptic word you die from catching a cold, breaking a leg, getting an infection, letting your food spoil, miscalculating time and direction and all those mistakes are more likely when you are used to fixing mistakes with money, and you won’t have that, you’ll just have a stockpile of tools and materials, which can be used for exchange, but in a functional world money buys logistics, and in a post-apocalyptic world it doesn’t, so a mistake will remain a mistake. No matter what you have, that won’t synthesize a doctor when there’s no doctor. EDIT: And, of course, someone may, in fact, kill you.

So - for smarter people it’s a hobby, for the dumber kind it’s a compensation strategy that (if we are being compassionate) won’t be tested. In general such preppers, especially playful billionaires, often manage to die from stupidity without any apocalypse, I forgot what that submarine was called with an X-Box controller instead of a helm.

So - this might read as a very angry text, I’m sort of the stupider kind myself, regularly risking getting an infection or breaking something, but I still live in a big city with doctors and transport and groceries.

Banks Preparing for Aftermath of Unprecedented Catastrophe Caused by AI: “You can’t stop it.”

That’s because they don’t act, they generate. Generate this, generate that. With some probability and degree of fitting the criteria set, much better than spewing random sequences.

One can manage people the same way as LLMs, one can’t manage LLMs the same way as people.

And if you build proper processes in managing people, using people might be more profitable honestly in everything I can imagine, even support bots, that employs people.

That control is usually about political correctness as defined by the organization making the encyclopedia in question. People often say Britannica is good, no fucking way, those people have just forgotten how miserable it is compared to Wikipedia.