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xvilka 15 hours ago [-]
Would be nice if they donate to LibreOffice then, to improve the support of various MS Office features in files, as well as comparison/diffing features. Win-win to everyone.
alpineman 7 hours ago [-]
It's like that scene in the Simpsons when Bill Gates comes to buy out Homer:
"You don't think I got rich writing a bunch of checks, do you?!"
j16sdiz 12 hours ago [-]
As much as I would hope they would... I don't think that's in character for sam altman.
mastermage 8 hours ago [-]
Sam "Its only Open until it does not benefit me anymore" Altman
dev1ycan 4 hours ago [-]
They will never do this
pocksuppet 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dumberquestions 13 hours ago [-]
Good thing that "would be nice" doesn't entail that they have to.
bayindirh 10 hours ago [-]
Sorry, I can't understand what you mean by that.
Do you mean that it's good that companies can profit over people's mostly voluntary efforts for free, or Free Software is meant to be used for free and never supported in any way, or what?
I'm at a loss here.
cryptonym 10 hours ago [-]
They just imply them not having to doesn't dismiss the original comment, thread being more about morals than laws.
That being said, hoping for any financial support from AI companies would be really naive. Using others work without retribution is at the core of their model.
bayindirh 10 hours ago [-]
> That being said, hoping for any financial support from AI companies would be really naive. Using others work without retribution is at the core of their model.
I have no such expectations. They believe that they own the world and owe nothing, as you said.
KronisLV 10 hours ago [-]
You are allowed (and encouraged) to do good things without being obligated to.
I think it would be immensely cool if OpenAI donated some of that crapload of AI money to the people behind LibreOffice to help with development - and then having like a blog post about it or something would already improve the project's visibility a bit more (hey, every bit helps). What's peanuts to them could help with the sustainability of the project a whole bunch!
bayindirh 10 hours ago [-]
> You are allowed (and encouraged) to do good things without being obligated to.
We're absolutely on the same page with you, and I try to do my best with what I can in that regard.
On the other hand, I see a perspective which thinks that companies are entitled to use everything for free and don't need to support the Free Software ecosystem because it's an externality that they don't have to care for, which bothers me a lot.
What I was trying to understand that whether this comment was supporting that perspective, or is there something I'm missing entirely.
vasco 9 hours ago [-]
You misread that comment so much that I'm not sure going too deep here matters much.
bayindirh 9 hours ago [-]
I might have. I'm a human with a different native language. Sorry if that offended you. Was just trying my best.
vasco 9 hours ago [-]
Nobody is offended. I'm also not a native speaker.
redsocksfan45 7 hours ago [-]
[dead]
YetAnotherNick 10 hours ago [-]
What does donation does for open source? Surely it wont come close to pay talented developers who create it. For cloud cost, there are few companies already giving generous free tier for open source.
The only thing that donation could pay for is marketing e.g. events and meetups.
mksaunders2 10 hours ago [-]
That's not true at all. Donations are the biggest source of income for The Document Foundation, the non-profit behind LibreOffice, and have been used to pay developers who've joined the team in recent years:
* Michael Weghorn (accessibility)
* Jonathan Clark (language and scripting support)
* Neil Roberts (scripting improvements)
* Dan Williams (macOS support and general UI improvements)
YetAnotherNick 9 hours ago [-]
How much do they pay them?
Maken 8 hours ago [-]
They don't disclose individual salaries but you can check their annual reports [1]. About 1M € among all the developers.
It obviously depends on the project and the scale and duration of a donation, but plenty of open source projects have benefited from donations. Donations can and do pay for developers, as well, part time or full time. With LibreOffice, you can answer your questions directly by browsing https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/ and as a non-profit you can easily find more detailed reports: https://www.documentfoundation.org/financials-and-reports/
small_scombrus 8 hours ago [-]
> The only thing that donation could pay for is marketing e.g. events and meetups.
You do realise there's an insanely large gap in-between "everyone is a volunteer" and "everyone is full-time staff", right?
mplewis 13 hours ago [-]
you people are always mixing up the legal thing to do with the right thing to do
duskdozer 11 hours ago [-]
I agree that it would be the right thing to do. Which is why you have to make the best attempt to make it the legal thing, because people looking to make money will not care about what's right. So, it makes sense to point out the disconnect when people use and promote pro-corporate licenses and then get upset when corporates follow them to the letter and provide them nothing but demands in return.
If you want a mutually beneficial community, you should contribute and distribute using a license that requires it.
germandiago 9 hours ago [-]
> because people looking to make money will not care about what's right
This is two-sided: making a kind of license mandatory also shrinks adoption if it is more restrictive. So, even if I acknowledge there is truth in your side of the story, there is also another at the other side, as usual.
How many people use GPL-licensed software as opposed to MIT licensed?
satvikpendem 4 hours ago [-]
That is not the problem of GPL. I'd rather have high quality software with patches shared back and always being able to see the code than some popular software that eventually is used in some corporate environment without the ability see what they changed.
Regardless, who cares about "adoption?" That's not the original point of open source which was that if you're working on something and you wanted to share it, you could, without any expectation of usage, merely that it might help just one extra person out there. It's simply human ego to care about adoption and GitHub usage and stars especially have accelerated this.
chias 10 hours ago [-]
> I agree that it would be the right thing to do. Which is why you have to make the best attempt to make it the legal thing
Do you believe that in an ideal world, any instance of not "doing the right thing" should be illegal?
foxglacier 10 hours ago [-]
"you people" means people that always mix up the legal thing with the right thing? It's tautological to say they're always doing that because that's how you defined them! Are you trying to say that you've encountered other people doing that before too and you've built up an annoyance with them?
fangspire 13 hours ago [-]
But laws are just encodes morality.
marcus_holmes 12 hours ago [-]
Absolutely not.
It was illegal to harbour escaped slaves. Or hide Jews from the Gestapo.
Laws have nothing to do with morality. Or justice.
fangspire 4 hours ago [-]
>It was illegal to harbour escaped slaves. Or hide Jews from the Gestapo.
Yes, of course. Morality is relative. In a slave-owning society, harbouring escaped slaves is immoral.
BizarroLand 39 minutes ago [-]
It is somewhat interesting that the version of morality an individual possesses always feels to that individual as an absolute.
"Of course it's wrong to beat your wife!" says the person who beats their children in a society that has only recently ceased infantilizing their women (USA circa 1900 +/- 30 years).
"Of course it's wrong to own slaves!" says the person whose society only recently began protesting against and/or illegalizing slavery (USA circa 1866 +/- 10 years)
They say this not knowing that had the event of their births been moved a few decades in the wrong direction their morality would have shifted with it.
Those same people might have said "Of course its wrong to beat your wife with a rod thicker than your thumb!" or "Of course its ok to own slaves as long as you treat them well!" at the same point in their lives had they been born maybe 30-50 years earlier.
buran77 9 hours ago [-]
It's not really that "absolute". Laws are not all made the same. Some start as a reflection of what society considers "right" at the time. Then the laws fall behind as society's morality reaches a tipping point. So the society pulls that part of the legal system behind it. Other laws are progressive, and they pull society's morality behind them. Some are driven by/for the majority, and some by/for the elites.
But they all reflect the morality of society to a degree, whether the democratic majority, or the powerful minority.
vasco 9 hours ago [-]
Well this goes into the debate of "is morality absolute or relative" which gets religious fast and there's more books on the subject than we have time to read.
lukan 11 hours ago [-]
Yes they do, but not with a philosophical concept of morality, but merely those of the ruling class/majority.
ultrarunner 12 hours ago [-]
Funny how morality so often benefits incumbents and the powerful.
Dylan16807 13 hours ago [-]
Many of them are, but they're focused on big picture issues and preventing harm. Most of morality has no legal force.
gib444 11 hours ago [-]
That's genuinely hilarious.
satvikpendem 13 hours ago [-]
Who decides what the right thing to do is? Everyone has different opinions.
kennywinker 11 hours ago [-]
Mostly individuals decide what they will do, and then communities decide if they respect that or not. Doesn't exactly apply to companies tho, since they're functionally sociopaths.
rdbl27 13 hours ago [-]
Surely "the right thing to do" includes some element of the authors' explicitly stated preferences about how they wish to be treated.
In this case, they chose -- explicitly -- to NOT require any payment or contribution from anyone.
Your feelings about what constitutes "the right thing to do" are apparently different from those of the authors. You believe you know better than they themselves do how they should be treated.
marcus_holmes 12 hours ago [-]
They clearly would like donations, but choose not to require any payments.
Your line of reasoning seems to be along the lines of "anything not forbidden is compulsory" which is not a good place. Having the choice to donate but not being required to is good.
And yes, I think that if OpenAI is choosing to include an entire copy of LibreOffice in their product, it is definitely the right thing to do to sling them a donation. Note that the moral thing to do is not always the required thing to do, or even the legal thing to do.
satvikpendem 12 hours ago [-]
More like, don't expect anything if not forced. Most people only generally pay for things if there is no other option. It's about what's moral (even then debatable as everyone has different morals) versus what's realistic to expect.
marcus_holmes 12 hours ago [-]
The Guardian's funding model [0] proves this wrong.
People will absolutely pay for things voluntarily if you ask them, without forcing them to.
In a nutshell - voluntary funding by readership. No paywall. You can read as many stories as you like for free, and donate if you want. It works.
Bluestein 11 hours ago [-]
I've always wondered how they are actually making ends meet, if at all, that is, what their budget looks like.-
satvikpendem 4 hours ago [-]
That article has no detail. How much did they make? They said they hope to break even in 2019 so they weren't profitable, what are the latest stats? Compare this to NYTimes which has been crushing it after implementing their paywalled subscription.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Dylan16807 13 hours ago [-]
> Surely "the right thing to do" includes some element of the authors' explicitly stated preferences about how they wish to be treated.
It does! And they wish to get donations. There's a button right at the top on the site making that clear.
> In this case, they chose -- explicitly -- to NOT require any payment or contribution from anyone.
Yes, so what? It is true that they wished to not require payment. That is one of their wishes, but they have more than one wish. And if they required payment, that wouldn't be a donation anyway.
esperent 20 hours ago [-]
I actually bundle LibreOffice with my app too and the reason is reading files, especially old xls files. Since I'm bundling it I'm now using it for everything docs related but the specific reason is those old files. I couldn't find anything else that I could just drop it and feel confident it'll just read anything I give it.
19 hours ago [-]
skinfaxi 16 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
stackghost 13 hours ago [-]
>How much money have you contributed back to this seemingly indispensable project?
Perhaps it's time for you to become familiar with the terms of the Mozilla Public License, under which Libre Office is released. There is no requirement for monetary compensation.
dnautics 13 hours ago [-]
No requirement doesn't mean "don't be a mensch"
Dylan16807 12 hours ago [-]
Yeah but like, we don't know if OP is making any money off this, let alone significant money. Let's not instantly hold them to the same "please contribute or you're dragging things down" standard as a zillion dollar corporation.
esperent 10 hours ago [-]
> we don't know if OP is making any money off this
I'm not, and don't have any intentions to monetize it.
rdbl27 13 hours ago [-]
You believe you know better than the authors themselves about how they ought to be treated?
They chose -- explicitly, voluntarily, knowingly -- to give the thing away for free. That's their right for their own creation. Your preferences don't supersede theirs.
sampullman 13 hours ago [-]
You've emphasized this point more than once, but I don't think it's a good counterargument to the GP. It is equally valid to say that they have explicitly (voluntarily, knowlingly) chosen to accept donations for their work.
By profiting off their work and not supporting them you are making your own choice. It says nothing about the authors' preference.
deadbabe 6 hours ago [-]
There is also no expectation to bash people who do not want to donate anything.
stackghost 12 hours ago [-]
I don't know what a mensch is but if they wanted to be compensated for their software they should not have released it as Free Software.
Mashimo 9 hours ago [-]
Mensch is German for Human.
Bridged7756 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
lgl 20 hours ago [-]
Does that really mean that it's bundling those apps from the start or did it just download and install them at some point to do some local work on some prompt or job you ask it to?
I don't see it making much sense to bundle it. I'm sure a LOT of LLM prompts are related with docs, excels, powerpoints etc, etc but don't really see it worth it for it to be bundled on the codex app from the get go, because otherwise, why not also install dozens of other apps?
simonw 20 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure. Someone who hasn't installed the ChatGPT (or Codex) apps yet could confirm this by installing the apps, seeing if that ~/.cache directory exists, then try running a prompt that needs Python or Node.js or LibreOffice and see if it downloads them when needed.
zatkin 20 hours ago [-]
I've never installed the ChatGPT app on my Mac until today. I ran the app, signed in, and I see the same.
% ls ~/.cache/codex-runtimes/codex-primary-runtime/dependencies/native/libreoffice-headless
libreoffice manifest.json
embedding-shape 20 hours ago [-]
On a Windows installation I see this:
PS C:\Users\user> ls C:\Users\user\.cache\codex-runtimes\codex-primary-runtime\dependencies\native\
Mode LastWriteTime Length Name
---- ------------- ------ ----
d----- 8/27/2026 10:09 AM git
d----- 6/16/2026 9:18 PM jxrlib
d----- 8/26/2026 7:37 PM libheif
d----- 6/17/2026 5:32 AM poppler
d----- 8/27/2026 10:09 AM powershell
So doesn't seem bundled with all installs at least.
dofm 18 hours ago [-]
Is this perhaps because the aim is to read Office documents and there are (maybe, I don't know for sure) default components within Windows that can do that?
thrdbndndn 8 hours ago [-]
I don't think there are.
Even when you have the MS Office suite installed, it doesn't really provide a good interface for LLMs or automation, so AI tools don't really use it.
BizarroLand 38 minutes ago [-]
And libreoffice has some really useful and easy to use tools for document manipulation and creation hiding in the background.
melagonster 15 hours ago [-]
Codex always try Libreoffice first on my computer.
zamadatix 20 hours ago [-]
Notably: this did not exist after I installed the app, it existed after I ran the app and there was the long startup screen. Presumably, and I'm not sure I'm interested enough to redo it all and find out, that long startup screen involves the default skills plugins setting up their environment and one of those pulls it as a general app requirement.
I also saw this present after first run on macOS but not Windows.
atp_studio_coll 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ValentineC 19 hours ago [-]
I have had the Codex/ChatGPT app installed for a few months, and can confirm that there's a 422.9 MB file named LibreOfficeDev.app in the above path.
More notably, I don't use Computer Use or any of the fancy features, just Codex for agentic coding.
RomanHauksson 20 hours ago [-]
> why not also install dozens of other apps?
because other apps are less likely to be useful, and there's diminishing returns
isityettime 19 hours ago [-]
The new app is an unbelievable mess. Settings are senselessly organized, too. The whole thing has this aesthetic slickness and then underneath it's like the people who make it have never even used it.
It's not surprising that it's pulled in absolutely massive dependencies, although I'm not sure it's the wrong call on some operating systems. LibreOffice is pretty tried and true.
prmph 2 hours ago [-]
Where are the AI-will-render-software-engineers-obsolete and/or vibe-coding apologists? They can make all kinds of nice-sounding arguments, but if AI is contributing to a degradation in product quality, their arguments cannot stand up to the reality we see with our own eyes. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and all that.
It is the same with Claude Code. Pretty much each change Anthropic makes to it now lowers its quality. Just yesterday they auto-updated it, and now backspace in the CLI does not work reliably. It also insert the enter key command when there is a line break in text that you are pasting, causing fragments of the prompt to be sent prematurely. What the heck! And pretty much all the regressions I have experienced this year have also not been fixed.
yeutterg 19 hours ago [-]
Personally, I like the 3-pane organization (sidebar, chat, browser). I turned ChatGPT into my bookkeeper and social post writing/kanban space, and it works well for these script+browser workflows on desktop.
However, all of this is confusing:
- the ChatGPT/Codex split on desktop
- Chat/Work split on mobile
- how you remotely access each chat from your phone (some of my most valuable chats are buried in Remote)
- which chats propagate from device to device, and which remain on that device
pests 10 hours ago [-]
> - the ChatGPT/Codex split on desktop
Do tell, cause I run the "ChatGPT" program on Windows to use both the normal Chat and Codex (side menu items). I think its a more recent change.
yeutterg 3 hours ago [-]
This is from a recent update, and I'm on macOS. I had to re-download it, not just update from within the app.
This new version has tabs for ChatGPT and Codex. The ChatGPT tab seems way less powerful; Codex is basically a coding agent with a UI and browser built in.
Pretty sure this is the old Codex app with the ChatGPT tab bolted on. It's great in some ways, but needs work in others.
nobody_r_knows 17 hours ago [-]
[dead]
RestartKernel 16 hours ago [-]
They removed the global shortcut to show a portable chat overlay. That one entrypoint must've been the source of at least 80% of my chats, yet apparently it was considered too vestigial to keep.
mkesper 9 hours ago [-]
Can it be reassigned under Settings / Keyboard shortcuts?
isityettime 5 hours ago [-]
Yes, although it's buried among a huge number of other shortcuts now, and not particularly easy to search for.
RestartKernel 15 minutes ago [-]
Did they restore the functionality itself? Last time I checked the overlay was just straight up not a feature anymore.
written-beyond 18 hours ago [-]
HOW DOES IT WORK FOR YOU PEOPLE?!
Istg on windows, I can't get codex app, new chatgpt or chatgpt classic to work without hanging on even a moderately sized chat. I tried all of the different tricks people recommended but that shit just crawls. It was stable at some point, classic that is, but then it started being a laggy mess.
I've uninstalled new chatgpt/codex app. I can't access phone chats on it, I can't use the desktop allocated chat messages on it. I have to use up codex limits. I am so surprised that OpenAI ships that hot garbage on windows.
luma 6 hours ago [-]
One thing I've found - these things are pretty good at troubleshooting desktop problems. If the codex app is running slow, I'll note that it shouldn't be, and also you might get more traction than you'd expect asking the codex app why it's slow.
johaugum 17 hours ago [-]
Mac Neo can be had for $600 now, and it runs Codex incredibly well!
But even on the Windows machine, if you Tailscale into a free tier VM for the workloads, you'd probably have a much better time.
Just leave Codex itself on your machine, if you set up computer use it will happily set up all of this for you while you have lunch.
Do you have any tips for running Codex on the Macbook Neo? Have you changed any setting? On mine, it stutters on every single chat, and I don't even have any plugins installed.
johaugum 1 hours ago [-]
Are you on the recent update that handles long chat sessions much better? That made a big difference. Biasing towards lightweight and fast tool alternatives (uv over pip, bun over npm, ripgrep over grep, etc).
If that still doesn't resolve it, a free tier VM might be the move. I suspect OpenAI will be bundling some kind of VM with their new Astra release, which Sama said yesterday will be released soon (this week maybe?). If this new model supports much longer running tasks, you'll want a dedicated box that can run 24/7 even when your Neo is closed and asleep anyway.
cheeze 10 hours ago [-]
Windows has never felt more archaic than now. I can't imagine trying to do work on a Windows machine in the age of LLMs.
If there is anything that LLMs are rock solid at these days, it's unix terminal usage.
luma 6 hours ago [-]
They're also great at powershell, you just need to tell it to do so. sh is neat but it's 55 years old, there are newer and better shell environment concepts out there and the robots can handle them well too, try it some time!
isityettime 5 hours ago [-]
PowerShell unfortunately just isn't that first-class, even on Windows. You'll inevitably discover, if you do this, that certain things simply can't be automated via PowerShell, that some PowerShell modules wrap or lag behind older Windows CLI tools, that various things you want to do still require manual registry hacks, etc.
Try starting from a blank slate Windows machine and making a commitment to only changing settings via PowerShell, and ideally only declaring them using DSC. You'll soon discover settings where the best you can do is snapshot the registry, change a setting in the GUI, snapshot the registry again, then take a diff so you can write the registry change into your PowerShell automation. If you're on a corporate machine, you'll also likely find many corners of PowerShell that you need closed off to you, anyway.
At the end of the day, Windows is not friendly to automation because it's not CLI-first (not culturally and not technically).
manofmanysmiles 2 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure why reading and writing the registry is considered a bad interface for programmatic system administration.
I realize text files can be processed by utilities for working with text files. And text files can be read by humans without any tools, and in that sense are rather universal.
I wonder what I'm missing.
I'd go so far as to think an OS that had a database at its core, or perhaps a persistent lisp would be even more programmable and legible.
Maybe better tools for dealing with structured data would help this?
bonesss 8 hours ago [-]
How do you work on Windows in the age of LLMs?
That’s easy: you activate WSL and then ask the LLM how to get networking and stuff working since they changed it with WSL2. You need a config file flag to setup network mirroring now.
enraged_camel 14 hours ago [-]
The thing that blows my mind about it is that they straight up copied Claude Code and tried to frame it as some sort of incredible accomplishment. There are no new ideas, no insightful UI/UX paradigms, no killer features. They say money can't buy taste. The ChatGPT/Codex app is proof that it cannot buy creativity either.
pdantix 8 hours ago [-]
which is really funny/sad when you see openai staff doing victory laps whenever claude code copies one or two small codex features like /goal.
steve1977 12 hours ago [-]
Codex, clone Claude Code, make no mistakes they also didn't make.
Schlagbohrer 4 hours ago [-]
Probably vibe coded right?
jbird99 18 hours ago [-]
Almost like it's... vibe coded.
16 hours ago [-]
senectus1 16 hours ago [-]
yeah, that seems obvious by now.
KronisLV 9 hours ago [-]
> The new app is an unbelievable mess.
How so? On Windows, I like it (version 26.825.51511).
Works fast (like modern Claude Code desktop, their old versions were bad), has pretty okay UI (could have an option for wider main text display, like ZCode added), allows you to change the fonts and shells and some of the layout stuff.
I mean currently I have Paseo hooked up to OpenCode that runs the actual models and often that works a bit better for me, but as a standalone desktop offering, the ChatGPT app has been okay in my experience. I can kinda see why ZCode copied them a bunch (though ZCode also lets you run 3rd party models, which is actually preferable to me).
I do like the idea that Claude Code desktop had in the earlier versions, 3 tabs - chat, work, code, except they kinda went in the direction of merging chat and work which was very ehhhh. The ChatGPT app doesn't even have a proper split between chat and work/code.
Razengan 17 hours ago [-]
And when you go to their forums it says "This forum is not for discussing the ChatGPT App..."
..like excuse me? Where the fuck else would we post feedback about it?
Maken 8 hours ago [-]
Just tell ChatGPT what changes you want in the next version.
pseudosavant 21 hours ago [-]
Is that what it is using to render and manipulate MS Office documents? That'd explain the poor rendering of some of my files. Bundling all of LibreOffice seems like a pretty huge dependency.
bs7280 19 hours ago [-]
What's ironic about this is, afaik there's no programmatic way to get a screenshot of a PowerPoint on windows other than opening up PowerPoint and screenshotting it. I only discovered this when I first tried out Anthropics official PowerPoint skill when it came out this winter.
If anything happens from this, I hope it forces Microsoft to address some of its long standing hostile to power users issues so they can stay relevant in the world of AI tooling.
pseudosavant 17 hours ago [-]
This can absolutely be done programmatically. I just added the ability to do that using PowerPoint for Windows yesterday in my uv/python tool `markdown-pptx`. Codex added the functionality in less than 5 minutes.
it allows your llms to see the ppt files structurally apart from just rendering it
telotortium 20 hours ago [-]
I have a skill that instructs ChatGPT/Codex to verify the rendering using the Mac versions of Microsoft Office. Even without registering, you still can open files read-only, which is enough. Apparently Office refuses to open some Open Office XML documents that LibreOffice is fine with, so that's another reason to use this. After a few times, Codex ended up storing some memories to stop producing broken files in the first place.
For a docker image of mine I was bundling the full version of LibreOffice as well but I managed to get some space savings by bundling just the no-gui version.
zamadatix 20 hours ago [-]
Seems to match the screenshot in the blogpost but libreoffice-headless still shows as 429.7 MB.
nomel 21 hours ago [-]
> Bundling all of LibreOffice seems like a pretty huge dependency
What's the alternative library you see?
4 hours ago [-]
MikeTheGreat 20 hours ago [-]
pandoc
simongg 20 hours ago [-]
Apache POI
nomel 18 hours ago [-]
I don't think that's anywhere near equivalent. That's for reading and writing Microsoft Office docs. It has no office functionality. LibreOffice has a full API, for example to run calculations on spreadsheets [1].
The goal of bringing in dependencies is so you don't have to duplicate the functionality, in this case, crafted over decades of effort.
Why not computer use or using the tools the user prefers instead? The primary office suites have APIs/CLIs now
johnsmith1840 16 hours ago [-]
If you've ever actually gone down this route you will try exactly this realize how much of a cluster f these products are and just use libre.
I did the exact same thing in my AI system. Spent an ENOURMOUS amount of time trying everything I could and in the end libre was the only thing even somewhat functional.
Easily 2 months of my life lost to these god forsaken systems. APIs and CLIs sound reasonable until you actually attempt anything in this space.
Computer use is exactly the same thing. Go try this: go to a google doc and dev tools check out the dom and now do the same for a word doc. Eye gouging pain of trying to get anything to work.
tyre 20 hours ago [-]
Computer use is slow and can take control of the application focus. I’ll be doing things while Claude runs in the background. Suddenly it decides to open the app and try to do something + screenshot it.
ChickeNES 19 hours ago [-]
I don't know how many times I've had to yell at codex or claude to use/implement headless versions of whatever it's doing at the time, interrupts me trying to multitask and play Battlefield or Factorio while they work :P
1718627440 5 minutes ago [-]
Can't you run this under a different user or in the same, but with another instance of the desktop server?
verdverm 18 hours ago [-]
don't try Dyson sphere project (/s, its acrually really great), but maybe try x4 foundations, I'm contemplating how I might have my agent help manage my empire
verdverm 20 hours ago [-]
That's where the CLIs come in for me, I'm not going to waste tokens on screenshots and input device manipulation
Yes. If you have word you can instruct to use word via com or AppleScript.
OutOfHere 20 hours ago [-]
Just the headless version looks to be bundled. The title as posted might be incorrect.
petilon 19 hours ago [-]
There is a serious threat to Microsoft here, if everyone starts using AI for generating and updating Office docs. At some point Office will become just a viewer.
trueno 19 hours ago [-]
im stoked for that outcome, standard document tooling should not live behind subscription models anymore. i dont care that microsoft spent zillions bankrolling education systems and companies to fall into this cultural lock in over the decades
whether they like it or not spreadsheets word docs etc are just ubiquitous parts of existing in society at this point you're gonna need to reach for these tools eventually just to apply for jobs or do homework
watwut 19 hours ago [-]
You assume tokens will be free after these get their monopoly positions? Actual libre office is actual open source running on weak hardware. Truly free.
And I suspect we will look back at MS with nostalgia once Altman and Musk get their ai imperiums.
fg137 18 hours ago [-]
I have not created or read any Word document for a very long time. I only create PowerPoint presentations a few times a year for work, which could be easily replaced with PowerPoint online or Google Slides or even just some markdown files.
But I have a license for the entire office 365 including Copilot premium.
Guess why?
articulatepang 17 hours ago [-]
For Excel?
kennywinker 11 hours ago [-]
I think they meant to view documents.
Schlagbohrer 4 hours ago [-]
Likewise with PDF editing via AI. Way nicer than having to pay Adobe or some other shady software vendor for PDF editing ability.
pmontra 5 hours ago [-]
If you don't have to edit files or you are not supposed to, they should send you a PDF, unless it's an Excel. Excel is a much better viewer for itself because of many reasons (explore the formula, sort, filter) including that usually its sheets are not built to fit a particular page format.
dist-epoch 19 hours ago [-]
Don't worry, they are ahead of this.
Satya said some time ago that they expect soon to have more agents using Microsoft software than humans, and are working on transitioning their focus from serving humans to serving agents.
So they will switch to per-agent pricing instead of per-user. Fine, but that doesn't change the fact that Microsoft Office will become a just bunch of viewers as far as human usage is concerned. As far as generating Office documents, you can do that without using any Microsoft code.
yakz 18 hours ago [-]
This is one that's already true and "everyone" hasn't figured it out yet. But you don't really even need Office as a viewer, PDF is fine (for printable/portable fixed-layout) or just HTML. "Office" is a product that doesn't need to exist anymore, at least for the core apps. For day-to-day office work, you probably shouldn't be using those legacy apps, you should be reviewing portable document formats and asking an agent to make the revisions that you want.
dist-epoch 18 hours ago [-]
> For Microsoft, this shift means products like M365 will act as the foundational layer where AI agents operate. Users will still need places to store documents, manage projects, search files, and track workflows
They bet on the online office suite (M365).
cromka 19 hours ago [-]
... and without the license, crucially!
airstrafer 10 hours ago [-]
This sentiment is also why Microsoft crushed earnings this quarter. Their AI play is to create corpo-slop AI middleware, which sits between AI models and enterprise applications. Sure, others can go and build harnesses which can generate MS office documents, but MS is already doing it, and conveniently such harnesses will come with everyone's existing Microsoft 365 subscription.
The analogy is IBM. Just like IBM helped every old-money corporation on the planet figure out the whole "computers" thing 50 years ago, MS will help everyone solve the "AI" thing. The software will suck and will not really innovate, but it will make a ton of money
bonesss 8 hours ago [-]
> The software will suck and will not really innovate, but it will make a ton of money
Microsoft’s goal isn’t to provide high quality software that outperforms other software, their goal is to provide an obvious and reasonably proximate answer to clueless execs trying to check things off of a procurement list so that existing contracts can snowball and competition is excluded.
We, collectively as a global species, really lost out when MS wasn’t divvied up in their anti-trust trial. Office as its own corporate entity would be in a radically different place right now, as would their enterprise customers.
kelvinjps10 19 hours ago [-]
But why would openai and antrhopic pay them if they already libreoffice for free and why would users pay if they already have an Ai subscription
jags-v 16 hours ago [-]
Haven't used MicrosoftOffice in the past 7 years.
vb-8448 20 hours ago [-]
Curiously, I didn't find any reference in the Open source licences section of the codex app.
Is this a MPL 2.0 violation?
zamadatix 20 hours ago [-]
Despite the title, I'm not sure it's actually bundled. Some of the skills plugins will download it on the first run. So it depends where they are grabbing it from rather than the presence of the binary on the system, but I haven't checked that deep into where they actually grab it.
TZubiri 20 hours ago [-]
The license itself may be present in the cache folder.
Alternatively, ChatGPT might happily disclose authorship and licensing if asked.
I'm not convinced of the argument that the fact that it is not bundled at download or even at install-time, would free them of the GPL responsibilities. And at this point.
I'm also not sure HOW the devs bundled libreoffice, whether they just mentioned in a prompt (use libreoffice), or whether they hardcoded a command (like apt install libreoffice), more likely the former, considering the recursive vibecoding nature of this software.
Whole lotta words to say that I don't know whether this is a GPL violation, but interested in the answer. If it is a violation, the likely fix will probably be yet another prompt that says something like "comply with licensing", which probably already exists, so a more specific "provide attribution (in a way that doesn't bother the user)"
prmoustache 13 hours ago [-]
> Whole lotta words to say that I don't know whether this is a GPL violation,
I don't need a lot of words to say it can't be a GPL violation since Libreoffice is distributed under the MPL v2.0 license.
Copyright violation is the last thing one could accuse ChatGPT of.
vb-8448 20 hours ago [-]
Well, this one is particularly obvious, other one are more fuzzy.
throwaway613746 16 hours ago [-]
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ars 18 hours ago [-]
I think that depends on if they distribute it with the install package, or if they download it once installed.
devy 17 hours ago [-]
Now someone please use ChatGPT/Codex or Claude Code to rewrite the entire LibreOffice source into a single Rust binary already! Just like Jarred Sumner did for Bun [1] or Carmine Paolino did for Fastpotify [2] - granted there are some rough edges for sure, but the slim diet trimmed down and performance gains were wrothy.
> rewrite the entire LibreOffice source into a single Rust binary already!
Why?
paaloeye 20 hours ago [-]
First Claude installed 10GB VM [0] without asking, but OpenAI ships LibreOffice.
What's next? Somebody ship their monorepo verbatim?
Honestly, not sure it's worth having those app on your localhost at all.
I ended up uninstalling all frontier labs bloated apps and start using Google AI Mode + Antigravity CLI / Claude Code sometimes.
Reminds me of pulling in an entire JS framework just for a single button. The bundle size must be something else.
onion2k 5 hours ago [-]
I wonder if this says anything about the capabilities of AI. If it's better to bundle an entire headless office suite than ask your AI to build support for relatively well documented formats (or even to extract the file support parts it needs from Libra Office), that seems to suggest AI isn't as good as human devs just yet.
aeon_ai 5 hours ago [-]
Or, it's dumb as hell to have an AI re-write Word every time it wants to output or present a document.
But let's focus on how this validates the belief that "AI bad."
psjs 5 hours ago [-]
perhaps onion2k meant that openAI could’ve reimplemented it once in-house on their side for the codex app?
artyomsv 5 hours ago [-]
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alex-moon 20 hours ago [-]
Someone may need to explain to me what is wrong with this sorry. Is it because it bloats the app with functionality that some users will never use? I feel like that is fairly usual for productivity/business apps generally.
simonw 20 hours ago [-]
I don't see anything wrong with it, I just think it's interesting.
2sk21 4 hours ago [-]
You aren't worried about the provenance of the installed apps?
simonw 4 hours ago [-]
How do you mean?
I trust OpenAI to have installed apps that at least work well enough for their intended purposes.
2sk21 3 hours ago [-]
You aren't worried that these binaries may have unfixed vulnerabilities?
simonw 2 hours ago [-]
That's the nature of installing software.
I'd like to know OpenAI's approach to updating these things - their auto-updated is pretty aggressive already, but does that cover their vendored cached apps too?
alex-moon 20 hours ago [-]
Oh right, yeah I agree. It's the kind of thing I can imagine the harness downloading in the background anyway (or instructing the user to do) at some point so I can see the sense in just skipping that bit. Kind of comforting they just do it the same way the rest of us do - if it ain't broke and so on.
nialse 20 hours ago [-]
It does, however, introduce a potentially enormous attack surface into ChatGPT, along with creative opportunities for less security conscious individuals and LLMs.
winstonp 20 hours ago [-]
I think it's overbloating my computer
OutOfHere 20 hours ago [-]
Actually, people do use and require the functionality, which is the point. The title as posted might be incorrect.
alex-moon 20 hours ago [-]
Yes, that's what I mean - maybe that didn't come across cos I said "bloats". I work for a business that builds web apps for corporates - LibreOffice is bundled in most of the repos of ours that I've seen, a bit like Imagick is in the broader sector.
monneyboi 19 hours ago [-]
Imagine the enormous complexity of office file formats if your business is literally building coding models/agents and still you choose to bundle LibreOffice.
lennart-rth 19 hours ago [-]
I suspect that it’s used in headless clip mode to reliably convert file formats back and forth.
mirzap 20 hours ago [-]
I wonder why they didn't try to discover if the user already has those binaries and use them before downloading.
duskdozer 11 hours ago [-]
Why would they? Storage [they don't have to pay for] is cheap! And just bundling it saves them time.
LtWorf 19 hours ago [-]
Because they vibe coded it.
Lucasoato 19 hours ago [-]
Also in the newest app I think the transcription feature is unusable. Ok, I can have a shortcut to start and stop recording. Wow, cool! Ok, but where did the transcription go? In my clipboard? To my cursor? Hey? :(
jrflo 20 hours ago [-]
I've noticed that when I have codex read/modify word files the live reasoning snippets often allude to LibreOffice, so that makes sense. I think it was a quick and dirty way for them to interface with docx and xlsx files?
gfalcao 19 hours ago [-]
Are they at least respecting the licenses (.i.e.: providing a verbatim copy of each license?)
zitterbewegung 20 hours ago [-]
It might be for their new Work product which can produce docx, pdf and pox files.
topaztee 19 hours ago [-]
spinning up an entire copy of libreoffice sounds super heavy?, if someone here is actually using chatgpt to edit docx documents then they can feel free to use us.
vespper.com
woadwarrior01 18 hours ago [-]
You want something heavier? They were trashing people's SSDs a few months ago. IDK if it's been resolved, yet.
having had to manually save some xls files by editing their xml, yeah it makes sense
hexley19 10 hours ago [-]
Bundling LibreOffice with a chatbot app feels like peak software bloat. My hard drive just let out an audible sigh.
dvduval 20 hours ago [-]
My agent did it? I didn’t do it.
trentor 20 hours ago [-]
I don't see the problem?
iAMkenough 20 hours ago [-]
Who said it was a problem? This looks like an observation to me, not an accusation.
simonw 21 hours ago [-]
(This is more of a tweet than a blog post, it really wasn't written with Hacker News in mind.)
benatkin 18 hours ago [-]
Indeed, but that likely wouldn't have stopped someone from submitting it with a misleading title. HN is known to get a lot of misleading titles submitted and to have to change them. The <title> tag is better, it doesn't say "a full copy". In the screenshot it shows "headless" in the filename. I would simply add the tiny detail of headless to the <title> and use this title for HN: Codex Bundles Headless LibreOffice
MattDamonSpace 20 hours ago [-]
frankly how dare you
mrob 20 hours ago [-]
How is simonw to blame for somebody else submitting it to HN?
embedding-shape 20 hours ago [-]
True, I feel like the entire HN community is to blame for this, particularly pg and dang.
Last time I used the Windows version it pegged all my cores at 100% usage for some reason. The machine became unusable. Instead I used Codex with JetBrains Rider (doing a C# project) and it worked flawlessly.
FailMore 18 hours ago [-]
(I made a similar comment in a different post by Simon Willison yesterday about GPT Work)
I am unsure the direction that AI assisted document creation work will go in. I am opinionated and building something in the space. In this reply I discuss my view + what I have been building.
My opinion is: We now have AI, this new amazing flexible tool. We can throw it at any problem. But in terms of document creation we have a choice between old fashioned siloed document formats (.pptx, .pdf, .xlsx, .docx, etc.) and a freshly rendered - slightly randomly styled - html site with some basic javascript within it. I think these combinations are odd and do not maximise the powers of AI.
I've been building something called SmallDocs [0][1] which is a new take on work documents. It's all Markdown, but it always renders (100% privately) on the SmallDocs site. This means the SmallDocs renderer can convert recognised Markdown combinations into powerful traditional document formats [2]. For example, we convert a ```cells block into an in-line spreadsheet you can export to Excel.
This gives an agent the ability to express itself with a great deal of depth and flexibility. For example, your agent can produce a single data analysis "SmallDoc" with text, charts, spreadsheets, etc. [3] I find that combining formats quickens the speed I can understand a topic.
SmallDocs also have standardised and pretty boring styling. This means you spend less time understanding the layout of a flashy HTML page and more time on the content.
I also believe a pre-determined rendering engine has a lot of advantages over a freslhy built HTML artifact. It allows you to build in lot's of useful defaults that the agent doesn't have to code from scratch. These can be small things, for example, every time your agent renders a Markdown table in SmallDocs you can instantly copy it as a CSV or a PNG. And these can be bigger things, such as a rich slides DSL with solid styling defaults, which saves your agents a lot of tokens and results in consistently attractive HTML slides [4]. (Slides can also be automatically exported to .pdf and .pptx.)
I've been at it for a few months, and am still working on the project. I am looking for feedback and open source collaborators. Thanks for reading!
There's no security benefit to doing this versus demand-downloading hashed-locked components on need.
TZubiri 19 hours ago [-]
Ok, it's probably not a security decision. It's a common pattern with both storage and memory management to push most reservations to initialization, in order to cluster resource insufficiency errors to a specific install-time when the user or admin can do something about it. An excessive just-in-time approach in both storage and memory would cause OOM and Disk exhaustion to occur at many different times.
dvrp 21 hours ago [-]
And wait till you find out about @oai/walnut
bcanzanella 20 hours ago [-]
do tell!
djriley 20 hours ago [-]
Walnut is the .NET and OpenXML backend. I think the point parent was trying to make it that it shouldn't be surprising Codex bundles runtimes for damn near everything.
m3kw9 20 hours ago [-]
probably uses it extensively to convert between LLM working on a doc and exporting it out to excel, word etc
runtime_lens 6 hours ago [-]
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throwaway613746 16 hours ago [-]
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cpursley 21 hours ago [-]
I still don’t understand why with all their cash these companies dont redo their apps in Rust or native. They are all so heavy and dog slow. There are already some very fast cross platform (wasm too!) libraries that can do what poppler does as well as parse and produce various office file formats. Because 2gb is crazy town, these things could be around 100mb, just throw some tokens at the problem.
johnsmith1840 16 hours ago [-]
You should go actually try to make any basic automation work around these systems.
They purposely obscured, google doc is another example they completly hide the dom!
I spent months fighting word processing systems and ended up shipping libre. There's almost zero alternatives without that becoming your entire company.
sudo_cowsay 21 hours ago [-]
Not that easy. Also, they have "priorities." Although their priorities are different than the users'.
20 hours ago [-]
cpursley 20 hours ago [-]
Just throw some tokens at the problem. I’ve vibed up a Rust Crux hybrid app that runs well on macOS, iPad and wasm and does some pretty complex xml manipulation and other document work. Absolutely smokes electron and you get native UI.
On top of everyone else’s great points, if you make your own “fork” of something, then you have to consistently maintain it. Which can be done with tokens, but an extra cost with something that’s not as user tested.
cpursley 19 hours ago [-]
I’m not talking about forking, but using standard libraries and native frameworks instead pretending electron is a desktop app.
doc_ick 18 hours ago [-]
Ah good point, I thought this was coming across from the "recreate" your own approach. I would fully agree with you on using native frameworks, though the eletron desktop is a great "entry" onto desktops ensuring companies only have to update 1 source, as opposed to natives everywhere.
verdverm 20 hours ago [-]
one does not just "throw tokens" at a problem, Ai is not that capable, and we are talking about MS Office file format, likely a NP hard problem
vb-8448 20 hours ago [-]
But in case they succeed the return on image will be astonishing.
doc_ick 20 hours ago [-]
Can you expand upon this?
vb-8448 17 hours ago [-]
A full implementation/rewrite of something like word, which is pretty complex and the quantity of edge cases is insane, in a relatively short amount of time, months, is very hard.
If they succeed with AI it will be huge: it's basically not possible to do it today with humans, no matter how many people you put on the job.
doc_ick 13 hours ago [-]
I would agree a full rewrite of word which is very complex and take quite a bit of time.
It would be impressive of AI to make a 80% rewrite, though I fully doubt it would cover the 100% rewrite (disregarding long term support as well).
Why do you think it’s impossible for humans to rewrite word, especially even humans made it in the first place?
vb-8448 7 hours ago [-]
I think it's not possible with humans in a relatively SHORT amount of time (let's say 1 year).
doc_ick 5 hours ago [-]
I’m not sure about you but I would not want to adopt and ship an overnight “word” written in rust
vb-8448 5 hours ago [-]
Me neither, but this is exactly my point: nowadays, no one will trust an "overnight word written in rust", unless someone prove that an "overnight word written in rust" is good enough.
And big AI LABs, with basically infinite tokens, are the only one in the position to do it.
doc_ick 4 hours ago [-]
Even then, I would not trust an AI lab as Microsoft does have a long history of support for word whereas I’m not sure the level of continued support from AI labs.
*support including bug fixes, vulnerabilities, continued user testing, interop with other services, standards, etc
Right now even OpenAI has its own copy of Overleaf (for latex). I’m not in the same circles as it’s intended users, though I haven’t heard any major use of it since the splash.
cpursley 1 hours ago [-]
I'm not talking about that, but existing utility tools (in Rust) that can generate MS document format. Perhaps not perfect, but these work today.
sigbottle 20 hours ago [-]
I mean, aside from all the NP Hard sub problems (I might not be reading your satire though), the real hard problem is that a "product" is not just software, but an ecosystem and a promise of maintenance of the abstract user experience & quality of it.
cpursley 19 hours ago [-]
AI is especially good at ports like this where there’s a known and well tested surface area.
johnsmith1840 16 hours ago [-]
*that only microsoft has access to.
These guys puposely obscure controls and understanding of these products 100% to prevent you doing a port.
Just go open a microsoft word doc in the browser and look at the dom.
Despair! Horror!
doc_ick 13 hours ago [-]
Especially when there are three different versions, and each has a different team, and they all can work together at the same time. Crazy amount of tech supporting it that breaks a humans context let alone a models context.
johnsmith1840 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah that's by far the most complex part.
Ever letter is it's own object and they stitch it into the visual view. When you type one letter is turns a single word into multiple objects all versioned objects.
Can't imagine all the crazy race condition protections baked into that.
verdverm 18 hours ago [-]
"ports like this" skips the part about Microsoft/enterprise software having a known and well tested surface area, the few examples we've seen are exceptional cases I suspect
nomel 20 hours ago [-]
What % of time, for a an average session, do you think is app overhead vs waiting for tokens? And there's your answer for why it's not a priority.
andai 20 hours ago [-]
Jon Blow's response to this take was, "yes, which is why you have to work even harder to hide latency", instead of adding more on top.
nikanj 20 hours ago [-]
From OpenAIs perspective, resources on your computer are free and wasting them is inconsequential
tmp10423288442 20 hours ago [-]
Kind of. Eventually it gets too slow even for the OpenAI engineers using it, and then they need to fix it.
kingstnap 19 hours ago [-]
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quotemstr 20 hours ago [-]
What makes you think Rust is automatically better?
(Also, "Rust or native" is a strange dichotomy. What's not native about Rust?)
kennywinker 20 hours ago [-]
I think “or native” is a gesture at swift/objc for mac and C# or whatever people write windows apps in.
cpursley 19 hours ago [-]
Rust or native is objectively more performant and have smaller binaries than these web apps in Halloween costumes…
"You don't think I got rich writing a bunch of checks, do you?!"
Do you mean that it's good that companies can profit over people's mostly voluntary efforts for free, or Free Software is meant to be used for free and never supported in any way, or what?
I'm at a loss here.
That being said, hoping for any financial support from AI companies would be really naive. Using others work without retribution is at the core of their model.
I have no such expectations. They believe that they own the world and owe nothing, as you said.
I think it would be immensely cool if OpenAI donated some of that crapload of AI money to the people behind LibreOffice to help with development - and then having like a blog post about it or something would already improve the project's visibility a bit more (hey, every bit helps). What's peanuts to them could help with the sustainability of the project a whole bunch!
We're absolutely on the same page with you, and I try to do my best with what I can in that regard.
On the other hand, I see a perspective which thinks that companies are entitled to use everything for free and don't need to support the Free Software ecosystem because it's an externality that they don't have to care for, which bothers me a lot.
What I was trying to understand that whether this comment was supporting that perspective, or is there something I'm missing entirely.
The only thing that donation could pay for is marketing e.g. events and meetups.
* Michael Weghorn (accessibility)
* Jonathan Clark (language and scripting support)
* Neil Roberts (scripting improvements)
* Dan Williams (macOS support and general UI improvements)
[1] https://www.documentfoundation.org/financials-and-reports/
You do realise there's an insanely large gap in-between "everyone is a volunteer" and "everyone is full-time staff", right?
If you want a mutually beneficial community, you should contribute and distribute using a license that requires it.
This is two-sided: making a kind of license mandatory also shrinks adoption if it is more restrictive. So, even if I acknowledge there is truth in your side of the story, there is also another at the other side, as usual.
How many people use GPL-licensed software as opposed to MIT licensed?
Regardless, who cares about "adoption?" That's not the original point of open source which was that if you're working on something and you wanted to share it, you could, without any expectation of usage, merely that it might help just one extra person out there. It's simply human ego to care about adoption and GitHub usage and stars especially have accelerated this.
Do you believe that in an ideal world, any instance of not "doing the right thing" should be illegal?
It was illegal to harbour escaped slaves. Or hide Jews from the Gestapo.
Laws have nothing to do with morality. Or justice.
Yes, of course. Morality is relative. In a slave-owning society, harbouring escaped slaves is immoral.
"Of course it's wrong to beat your wife!" says the person who beats their children in a society that has only recently ceased infantilizing their women (USA circa 1900 +/- 30 years).
"Of course it's wrong to own slaves!" says the person whose society only recently began protesting against and/or illegalizing slavery (USA circa 1866 +/- 10 years)
They say this not knowing that had the event of their births been moved a few decades in the wrong direction their morality would have shifted with it.
Those same people might have said "Of course its wrong to beat your wife with a rod thicker than your thumb!" or "Of course its ok to own slaves as long as you treat them well!" at the same point in their lives had they been born maybe 30-50 years earlier.
But they all reflect the morality of society to a degree, whether the democratic majority, or the powerful minority.
In this case, they chose -- explicitly -- to NOT require any payment or contribution from anyone.
Your feelings about what constitutes "the right thing to do" are apparently different from those of the authors. You believe you know better than they themselves do how they should be treated.
Your line of reasoning seems to be along the lines of "anything not forbidden is compulsory" which is not a good place. Having the choice to donate but not being required to is good.
And yes, I think that if OpenAI is choosing to include an entire copy of LibreOffice in their product, it is definitely the right thing to do to sling them a donation. Note that the moral thing to do is not always the required thing to do, or even the legal thing to do.
People will absolutely pay for things voluntarily if you ask them, without forcing them to.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2018/nov/12/katharine...
In a nutshell - voluntary funding by readership. No paywall. You can read as many stories as you like for free, and donate if you want. It works.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
It does! And they wish to get donations. There's a button right at the top on the site making that clear.
> In this case, they chose -- explicitly -- to NOT require any payment or contribution from anyone.
Yes, so what? It is true that they wished to not require payment. That is one of their wishes, but they have more than one wish. And if they required payment, that wouldn't be a donation anyway.
Perhaps it's time for you to become familiar with the terms of the Mozilla Public License, under which Libre Office is released. There is no requirement for monetary compensation.
I'm not, and don't have any intentions to monetize it.
They chose -- explicitly, voluntarily, knowingly -- to give the thing away for free. That's their right for their own creation. Your preferences don't supersede theirs.
By profiting off their work and not supporting them you are making your own choice. It says nothing about the authors' preference.
I don't see it making much sense to bundle it. I'm sure a LOT of LLM prompts are related with docs, excels, powerpoints etc, etc but don't really see it worth it for it to be bundled on the codex app from the get go, because otherwise, why not also install dozens of other apps?
% ls ~/.cache/codex-runtimes/codex-primary-runtime/dependencies/native/libreoffice-headless
libreoffice manifest.json
Even when you have the MS Office suite installed, it doesn't really provide a good interface for LLMs or automation, so AI tools don't really use it.
I also saw this present after first run on macOS but not Windows.
More notably, I don't use Computer Use or any of the fancy features, just Codex for agentic coding.
because other apps are less likely to be useful, and there's diminishing returns
It's not surprising that it's pulled in absolutely massive dependencies, although I'm not sure it's the wrong call on some operating systems. LibreOffice is pretty tried and true.
It is the same with Claude Code. Pretty much each change Anthropic makes to it now lowers its quality. Just yesterday they auto-updated it, and now backspace in the CLI does not work reliably. It also insert the enter key command when there is a line break in text that you are pasting, causing fragments of the prompt to be sent prematurely. What the heck! And pretty much all the regressions I have experienced this year have also not been fixed.
However, all of this is confusing:
- the ChatGPT/Codex split on desktop
- Chat/Work split on mobile
- how you remotely access each chat from your phone (some of my most valuable chats are buried in Remote)
- which chats propagate from device to device, and which remain on that device
Do tell, cause I run the "ChatGPT" program on Windows to use both the normal Chat and Codex (side menu items). I think its a more recent change.
This new version has tabs for ChatGPT and Codex. The ChatGPT tab seems way less powerful; Codex is basically a coding agent with a UI and browser built in.
Pretty sure this is the old Codex app with the ChatGPT tab bolted on. It's great in some ways, but needs work in others.
Istg on windows, I can't get codex app, new chatgpt or chatgpt classic to work without hanging on even a moderately sized chat. I tried all of the different tricks people recommended but that shit just crawls. It was stable at some point, classic that is, but then it started being a laggy mess.
I've uninstalled new chatgpt/codex app. I can't access phone chats on it, I can't use the desktop allocated chat messages on it. I have to use up codex limits. I am so surprised that OpenAI ships that hot garbage on windows.
But even on the Windows machine, if you Tailscale into a free tier VM for the workloads, you'd probably have a much better time.
Just leave Codex itself on your machine, if you set up computer use it will happily set up all of this for you while you have lunch.
Maybe a used one?
https://www.apple.com/macbook-neo/ has it for ~$700
If that still doesn't resolve it, a free tier VM might be the move. I suspect OpenAI will be bundling some kind of VM with their new Astra release, which Sama said yesterday will be released soon (this week maybe?). If this new model supports much longer running tasks, you'll want a dedicated box that can run 24/7 even when your Neo is closed and asleep anyway.
If there is anything that LLMs are rock solid at these days, it's unix terminal usage.
Try starting from a blank slate Windows machine and making a commitment to only changing settings via PowerShell, and ideally only declaring them using DSC. You'll soon discover settings where the best you can do is snapshot the registry, change a setting in the GUI, snapshot the registry again, then take a diff so you can write the registry change into your PowerShell automation. If you're on a corporate machine, you'll also likely find many corners of PowerShell that you need closed off to you, anyway.
At the end of the day, Windows is not friendly to automation because it's not CLI-first (not culturally and not technically).
I realize text files can be processed by utilities for working with text files. And text files can be read by humans without any tools, and in that sense are rather universal.
I wonder what I'm missing.
I'd go so far as to think an OS that had a database at its core, or perhaps a persistent lisp would be even more programmable and legible.
Maybe better tools for dealing with structured data would help this?
That’s easy: you activate WSL and then ask the LLM how to get networking and stuff working since they changed it with WSL2. You need a config file flag to setup network mirroring now.
How so? On Windows, I like it (version 26.825.51511).
Works fast (like modern Claude Code desktop, their old versions were bad), has pretty okay UI (could have an option for wider main text display, like ZCode added), allows you to change the fonts and shells and some of the layout stuff.
I mean currently I have Paseo hooked up to OpenCode that runs the actual models and often that works a bit better for me, but as a standalone desktop offering, the ChatGPT app has been okay in my experience. I can kinda see why ZCode copied them a bunch (though ZCode also lets you run 3rd party models, which is actually preferable to me).
I do like the idea that Claude Code desktop had in the earlier versions, 3 tabs - chat, work, code, except they kinda went in the direction of merging chat and work which was very ehhhh. The ChatGPT app doesn't even have a proper split between chat and work/code.
..like excuse me? Where the fuck else would we post feedback about it?
If anything happens from this, I hope it forces Microsoft to address some of its long standing hostile to power users issues so they can stay relevant in the world of AI tooling.
https://github.com/pseudosavant/markdown-pptx/
https://github.com/artpar/puppt
it allows your llms to see the ppt files structurally apart from just rendering it
I generated the skill originally for ChatGPT 5.5, so some of these may not strictly be necessary anymore with later models. But posting here in case others find it useful: https://gist.github.com/telotortium/844386f762c4b3bab49999ba...
What's the alternative library you see?
The goal of bringing in dependencies is so you don't have to duplicate the functionality, in this case, crafted over decades of effort.
[1] https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/SDKGuide/C...
[1] https://poi.apache.org/components/spreadsheet/formula.html
I did the exact same thing in my AI system. Spent an ENOURMOUS amount of time trying everything I could and in the end libre was the only thing even somewhat functional.
Easily 2 months of my life lost to these god forsaken systems. APIs and CLIs sound reasonable until you actually attempt anything in this space.
Computer use is exactly the same thing. Go try this: go to a google doc and dev tools check out the dom and now do the same for a word doc. Eye gouging pain of trying to get anything to work.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/microsoft365dev/getting-start...
https://github.com/googleworkspace/cli
whether they like it or not spreadsheets word docs etc are just ubiquitous parts of existing in society at this point you're gonna need to reach for these tools eventually just to apply for jobs or do homework
And I suspect we will look back at MS with nostalgia once Altman and Musk get their ai imperiums.
But I have a license for the entire office 365 including Copilot premium.
Guess why?
Satya said some time ago that they expect soon to have more agents using Microsoft software than humans, and are working on transitioning their focus from serving humans to serving agents.
https://www.news18.com/business/satya-nadella-announces-micr...
They bet on the online office suite (M365).
The analogy is IBM. Just like IBM helped every old-money corporation on the planet figure out the whole "computers" thing 50 years ago, MS will help everyone solve the "AI" thing. The software will suck and will not really innovate, but it will make a ton of money
Microsoft’s goal isn’t to provide high quality software that outperforms other software, their goal is to provide an obvious and reasonably proximate answer to clueless execs trying to check things off of a procurement list so that existing contracts can snowball and competition is excluded.
We, collectively as a global species, really lost out when MS wasn’t divvied up in their anti-trust trial. Office as its own corporate entity would be in a radically different place right now, as would their enterprise customers.
Is this a MPL 2.0 violation?
Alternatively, ChatGPT might happily disclose authorship and licensing if asked.
I'm not convinced of the argument that the fact that it is not bundled at download or even at install-time, would free them of the GPL responsibilities. And at this point.
I'm also not sure HOW the devs bundled libreoffice, whether they just mentioned in a prompt (use libreoffice), or whether they hardcoded a command (like apt install libreoffice), more likely the former, considering the recursive vibecoding nature of this software.
Whole lotta words to say that I don't know whether this is a GPL violation, but interested in the answer. If it is a violation, the likely fix will probably be yet another prompt that says something like "comply with licensing", which probably already exists, so a more specific "provide attribution (in a way that doesn't bother the user)"
I don't need a lot of words to say it can't be a GPL violation since Libreoffice is distributed under the MPL v2.0 license.
https://www.libreoffice.org/licenses/
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/license-policy/
[1] https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust [2] https://fastpotify.rocks/
Why?
Honestly, not sure it's worth having those app on your localhost at all. I ended up uninstalling all frontier labs bloated apps and start using Google AI Mode + Antigravity CLI / Claude Code sometimes.
[0] https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/22543
But let's focus on how this validates the belief that "AI bad."
I trust OpenAI to have installed apps that at least work well enough for their intended purposes.
I'd like to know OpenAI's approach to updating these things - their auto-updated is pretty aggressive already, but does that cover their vendored cached apps too?
https://x.com/bdsqlsz/status/2067964486615810369
...
For those that can't see the sarcasm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law
I am unsure the direction that AI assisted document creation work will go in. I am opinionated and building something in the space. In this reply I discuss my view + what I have been building.
My opinion is: We now have AI, this new amazing flexible tool. We can throw it at any problem. But in terms of document creation we have a choice between old fashioned siloed document formats (.pptx, .pdf, .xlsx, .docx, etc.) and a freshly rendered - slightly randomly styled - html site with some basic javascript within it. I think these combinations are odd and do not maximise the powers of AI.
I've been building something called SmallDocs [0][1] which is a new take on work documents. It's all Markdown, but it always renders (100% privately) on the SmallDocs site. This means the SmallDocs renderer can convert recognised Markdown combinations into powerful traditional document formats [2]. For example, we convert a ```cells block into an in-line spreadsheet you can export to Excel.
This gives an agent the ability to express itself with a great deal of depth and flexibility. For example, your agent can produce a single data analysis "SmallDoc" with text, charts, spreadsheets, etc. [3] I find that combining formats quickens the speed I can understand a topic.
SmallDocs also have standardised and pretty boring styling. This means you spend less time understanding the layout of a flashy HTML page and more time on the content.
I also believe a pre-determined rendering engine has a lot of advantages over a freslhy built HTML artifact. It allows you to build in lot's of useful defaults that the agent doesn't have to code from scratch. These can be small things, for example, every time your agent renders a Markdown table in SmallDocs you can instantly copy it as a CSV or a PNG. And these can be bigger things, such as a rich slides DSL with solid styling defaults, which saves your agents a lot of tokens and results in consistently attractive HTML slides [4]. (Slides can also be automatically exported to .pdf and .pptx.)
I've been at it for a few months, and am still working on the project. I am looking for feedback and open source collaborators. Thanks for reading!
[0] https://smalldocs.org
[1] https://github.com/espressoplease/smalldocs
[2] https://smalldocs.org/blogs/what-is-a-smalldoc
[3] https://smalldocs.org/s/46fWiAyF77T9c7tqYwAQqp#k=j78ZEOOrgo8...
[4] https://smalldocs.org/s/QrmeWMsULGS871nXQYOacB#k=ubOHH9QtTWp...
(And something totally different, your agent can also use SmallDocs to walk you through code files: https://smalldocs.org/s/JsI_-tWSH0UpSd_YXxVLPm#k=G5jLCYA4JUX...)
They purposely obscured, google doc is another example they completly hide the dom!
I spent months fighting word processing systems and ended up shipping libre. There's almost zero alternatives without that becoming your entire company.
Ref: https://redbadger.github.io/crux/
If they succeed with AI it will be huge: it's basically not possible to do it today with humans, no matter how many people you put on the job.
It would be impressive of AI to make a 80% rewrite, though I fully doubt it would cover the 100% rewrite (disregarding long term support as well).
Why do you think it’s impossible for humans to rewrite word, especially even humans made it in the first place?
And big AI LABs, with basically infinite tokens, are the only one in the position to do it.
Right now even OpenAI has its own copy of Overleaf (for latex). I’m not in the same circles as it’s intended users, though I haven’t heard any major use of it since the splash.
These guys puposely obscure controls and understanding of these products 100% to prevent you doing a port.
Just go open a microsoft word doc in the browser and look at the dom.
Despair! Horror!
Ever letter is it's own object and they stitch it into the visual view. When you type one letter is turns a single word into multiple objects all versioned objects.
Can't imagine all the crazy race condition protections baked into that.
(Also, "Rust or native" is a strange dichotomy. What's not native about Rust?)