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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: April 28th, 2026

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  • Cause the way UIs look when you want to do a job are discarded as “by programmers for programmers and not normal people”, and UIs making an illusion of things working by themselves by intuition of the user and hiding specific actions are considered “user-friendly”.

    UIs intended for people to do their jobs look, as an extreme, like ed . Less extreme - WordPerfect. XEphem, XGrace, Lisp environments. Those are what you come up with when you want a kiosk, but with a clear idea of a workplace supported by it, or an expert workplace where you do a job.

    While things like MSO, Telegram, today’s web browsers, and so on - they are intended for people who don’t want specifics. They want the illusion of fuzziness of what they are doing.



  • 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.







  • 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.