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LibreOffice: Request to the European Commission to adhere to its own guidances
- _fat_santa 8mo ago> This is not a minor procedural oversight. It is a structural bias built into the process which sends out a clear message: full participation in EU policymaking requires a Microsoft licence. Im gonna be honest it sounds more like a procedural oversight.
- wiz21c 8mo agothey are activists, everything make them nervous. however I'm sure there are tons of past reasons to make them nervous...
- AuthorizedCust 8mo agoThat text reads like AI output, where I commonly see two short sentences that describe a dichotomy in the “This is not… This is…” pattern. Therefore, that these sentences don’t describe the situation great could be due to poorly vetted copy-paste of AI text.
- Imustaskforhelp 8mo agoLibreOffice using AI against Microslop/anything related to it doesn't feel very Libreoffice of it to me. I know that this pattern is used by AI but it only said this is, one time not two times and then continued with It is rather than the pattern that you mention. An AI would've probably used "This" second time instead of "It" most likely given that its probably really trained on it. I mean, we do use "this is" in a sentence atleast once like they did. How else do you want them to write this point :/ I don't think that Libreoffice team is using AI to write their messages.
- braiamp 8mo agoWhen the policy is that X happens, procedural oversight can't be claimed when X doesn't happen. If X doesn't happen, then the policy is being rejected or ignored. No matter which, it allows the executing agent bias to be on full display and set the tone. There's a reason why a compliance office becomes the norm.
- einpoklum 8mo ago> it sounds more like a procedural oversight. But the "oversight" is likely due to the fact that those policy-makers only see MS Excel used around them, and only expect people to use MS-Excel - which is why they did not think there might be any problem with requiring its use in a procedure. So, the people doing policymaking, and other related technical work, at the EU do actually need their MS license to work.
- EGreg 8mo agoIm also gonna be honest Ever since LLM generated content proliferated we now have “This isn’t X. It’s Y” shibboleths EVRYWHERE! A person doesn’t normally start a sentence with “This isn’t a silly minor thing that you wouldn’t think it was but I had to say it out of the blue as a set up for the next sentence.” only to be followed by “This is a major deal worthy of you resharing and liking!” They might do the clauses in the other order, though. “This is a huge deal! Not just business as usual.”
- st_goliath 8mo ago> Ever since LLM generated content proliferated we now have... Or maybe, ever since you became aware of it, you started increasingly becoming aware of it? See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
- EGreg 8mo agoNope. It is generated by LLMs, and a few people got influenced by it now. It isn’t like em-dashes
- Aerroon 8mo agoI've definitely been writing like that for a long time.
- johanyc 8mo ago"Nope. It isn’t like em-dashes. It is generated by LLMs, and a few people got influenced by it now." Your comment can be rearranged in that it's not X it's Y format too.
- EGreg 8mo agoYes, but it's not natural to say "It's not <non sequitur thing no one was talking about>. It's <amazing globally impactful thing that should make you pay attention>." That's how LLMs write though.
- raverbashing 8mo agoAlso sounds like an LLM wrote it (the original message)
- chrismorgan 8mo agoCombined with their rapid acquiescence to the request, it sounds to me like a procedural oversight due to a structural bias.
- dtj1123 8mo agoIt sounds like a procedural oversight which demonstrates the structural bias built into the process.
- pfortuny 8mo agoNope: they have signed a contract with Microsoft, it is not oversight, there was a clear decission by the specific committee to buy Microsoft Products and Support, and it is costing us (EU taxpayers) lots of money just to interact with the EU.
- solid_fuel 8mo agoI would argue they are the same thing. What is a procedural oversight if not bias in the system? The existing process missed an obvious issue because of bias.
- Spivak 8mo agoI mean it's a small thing but this seems like the bureaucracy equivalent of seeing your friend get up for a smoke break out of habit and reminding them that they're trying to quit.
- jfengel 8mo agoCool, but why does feedback come in the form of a spreadsheet at all?
- analog31 8mo agoI see this frequently. People want data that are organized in some fashion, so they start with a spreadsheet. The drawback is that spreadsheet cells are a terrible way to convey narrative information. I’ve seen detailed product requirements in spreadsheets with thousands of cells, that failed to capture what the team actually wanted to build, and were never read.
- whirlwin 8mo agoThis is likely a matter of poor competence by the author of the spreadsheet, and an oversight after all. From my experience, unfortunately, people who manage policies are much less competent that those who implement them.
- cyanydeez 8mo agoMost of governance is a fight between policy and implementation. Even the best science based policy decisions fail when faced with the real world. And its not just competency, its also consumption based or its the highway road inducement problem. The reality is if we want science back policy decisions, you need to involve stakeholders through every step.
- KronisLV 8mo agoThis might seem quite pedantic but I like the fact that they’re calling stuff like that out - over here office documents are more or less synonymous with MS Office, despite me having used LibreOffice for years with no significant issues (aside from their bibliography being broken while writing my thesis, super annoying but I found a workaround). I’ve never actually had anyone complain about me sending them ODT or ODS files since even the said MS Office doesn’t have a big issue with those. Oddly enough, if you ever also see a CSV, LibreOffice Calc will give you a nice import dialog whereas by default MS Excel will happily open it wrong and fuck everything up for you. Edit: oh wait there was a case in university where I did a presentation in front of like 60 people and it referenced fonts that weren’t on the other machine and they didn’t get embedded in the presentation file. It fucked up all of the font layouts. Since, I do presentations in PDFs (the archival kind). Except recently I also wrote my own presentation tool that outputs HTML pages and can also serve everything from a folder, or I might just put them on my server. I think I reinvented worse Google Docs.
- ocdtrekkie 8mo ago100%, the file format compatibility drama is long over. I have no issues at home using Excel files with LibreOffice. Microsoft has not meaningfully changed any Office file format in fifteen years, you can go all the way back to Office 2007 (with the compatibility pack) and open modern documents. Office has no issues with ODS formats either. This is a purely performative exercise.
- hobofan 8mo ago> you can go all the way back to Office 2007 (with the compatibility pack) and open modern documents Great, I can open proprietary document formats with proprietary software. I think you are missing the point of this "performative exercise".
- ocdtrekkie 8mo agoYou can also open all of those documents with LibreOffice. My point is the support LibreOffice has for Office documents is fine and not at all a problem, because Office formats have not meaningfully changed over time and they have been supported in LibreOffice for all of that time.
- Pxtl 8mo agoIt's frustrating how we're still fighting over this stuff when 99% of documents and spreadsheets (the data, not the formulas) could be zipped html except if not that spreadsheet editors and document editors don't have a standardized subset of html to support.
- Ekaros 8mo agoThat sounds rather bad idea. HTML is really not designed for proper data storage. It can display something, but I don't think it is right tool for the job. Just because html can present something like tables doesn't mean it is right tool for tabular data.
- RobotToaster 8mo agoODF is just XML.
- shiroiuma 8mo agoThis is like saying that HTML is "just" ASCII/UTF-8 text. Lots of formats are based on XML, but they're not compatible with each other and their schema require complicated parsers.
- anthk 8mo agoHTML sucks for proper formatting. CSS it's a clusterfuck and it can't be any rigorous standard for anything.
- Pxtl 8mo agoI don't mean HTML+CSS, I mean just HTML, as a middle-step between CSV and full spreadsheet file. HTML with only the table tags allowed get you a document that you can 1) View in a browser, 2) Has table headers and the ability to define column widths and combine cells But you can leave presentation up to the viewer. Same principle as Markdown, but markdown tables are bad.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- pluc 8mo agoWhy do you have to allow cookies to see this website?
- aaron695 8mo ago[dead]
- danmaz74 8mo agoThe current article says that the Commission already accepted the request.
- skrebbel 8mo agoThat was impressively fast! Over the weekend, no less.
- moffkalast 8mo agoFinally, our tax euros at work.
- dchest 8mo agoI just downloaded the ODS version and it comes with .pdf extension, had to rename it. It also uses Aptos Narrow font (from MS Office), which gets substituted.
- zoobab 8mo agoIf i have one regret over the OOXML corruption scandal was to not bring the whole thing to court. We had some many evidences of Microsoft captureing the whole process.