As i rmeber it ooxml backers made it intentionally harder to parse the specs than was necessary ,if it was fully open i believe the open source implementation would have been on par. As it is its subtly broken in annoying ways , and with Word being the default - its version wins out and gets to be the only acceptable submission format.
If you notice most doc submissions when its not a pdf being requested will specifify MS's version.And by sheer momentum the alts get less traction.
I feel like I’m watching group psychosis where people are just following each other off a cliff. I think the promise of AI and the potential money involved override all self preservation instincts in some people.
It would be fine if I could just ignore it, but they are infecting the entire industry.
You need to take every comment about AI and mentally put a little bracketed note beside each one noting technical competence.
AI is basically an software development eternal september: it is by definition allowing a bunch of people who are not competent enough to build software without AI to build it. This is, in many ways, a good thing!
The bad thing is that there are a lot of comments and hype that superficially sound like they are coming from your experienced peers being turned to the light, but are actually from people who are not historically your peers, who are now coming into your spaces with enthusiasm for how they got here.
Like on the topic of this article[0], it would be deranged for Apple (or any company with a registered entity that could be sued) to ship an OpenClaw equivalent. It is, and forever will be[1] a massive footgun that you would not want to be legally responsible for people using safely. Apple especially: a company who proudly cares about your privacy and data safety? Anyone with the kind of technical knowledge you'd expect around HN would know that them moving first on this would be bonkers.
But here we are :-)
[0] OP's article is written by someone who wrote code for a few years nearly 20 years ago.
I don’t think it’s a group psychosis. I think it’s just the natural evolution of junior engineers. They’ve always lacked critical thinking and just jumped on whatever’s hyped on Twitter.
It’s a group psychosis fueled by enormous financial pressure: every big tech company has been telling people that they’re getting fired as soon as possible unless they’re one of the few people who can operate these tools. Of course that’s going to have a bunch of people saying “Pick me! Pick me!” — especially since SV has become increasingly untethered from questions like whether something is profitably benefiting customers. With the focus on juicing share prices before moving to the distilled fiat pricing of cryptocurrency, we have at least two generations of tech workers being told that the path to phenomenal wealth comes from talking up your project until you find a rich buyer.
I’d really love to see some data on the age and/or experience distribution of these breathless "AI everywhere" folks. Are they mostly just young and easily influenced? Not analytic enough? Not critical-thinking enough? Not cynical enough?
It is possible that AI is both over-hyped and is (or is becoming) a useful tool. The two can co-exist. Based on my own experience it is useful and it is a huge time saver, especially for experienced engineers who can figure out when to use it and when to avoid it. Trying to ignore AI is as unwise as ignoring any other new tool. I imagine lots of people thought static analysis tools were never going to live up to the hype and didn't need be part of a standard build/debug flow.
Crypto hasn't really passed. It's just not talked about on HN anymore. It is still a massive industry but they have dropped the rhetoric of democratising banking and instead let you use cryptocurrency to do things like betting on US invading Venezuela and so on.
By "passing" the GP presumably meant that the fad phase has passed. The hype cycle has reached the natural plateau of "I guess this has some use cases" (though in this case mostly less-than-scrupulous ones).
No one can really figure out what legitimate uses crypto has that can't be covered by normal payment systems.
Everyone can immediately see how useful AI is, and tons of people are using it. Pretending it will pass would be like saying the Internet was a fad in 1997.
The reason why Apple intelligence is shit is not because Apple's AI is particularly bad (Hello CoPilot) its because AI gives a really bad user experience.
When we go and talk to openAI/claude we know its going to fuck up, and we either make our peace with that, or just not care.
But, when I open my phone to take a picture, I don't want a 1/12 chance of it just refusing to do that and phoning my wife instead.
Forcing AI into thing where we are used to a specific predictable action is bad for UX.
Sure you can argue "oh but the summaries were bad" Yes, of course they are. its a tiny model that runs on your phone with fuck all context.
Its pretty impressive that they were as good as they were. Its even more impressive that they let them out the door knowing that it would fuckup like that.
OpenClaw is not broken, it is just not designed to be secure in the first place.
It's more like a tech demo to show what's possible. But also to show where the limits are. Look at it as modern art, like an episode of Black Mirror. It's a window to the future. But it also highlights all the security issues associated with AI.
And that's why you probably shouldn't use OpenClaw on your data or your PC.
I had a dark thought today, that AI agents are going to make scam factory jobs obsolete. I don’t think this will decrease the number of forced labor kidnappings though, since there are many things AI agents will not be good at.
Yes, I've begun translating "ultra-processed foods" to "junk food". It's roughly the same meaning and roughly the same amount of scientific rigor. UPF sounds scientific and specific but it's neither.
OTOH everybody intuitively understands junk food is bad for you, has a rough idea of what it is and that the definition is circular.
This is giving the "ultra-processed" term too much credit. Organic is at least pretty explicitly specified by the USDA (even if that definition is perhaps not what most people think or expect when they read the term).
Ultra-processed doesn't even have a single, consistent definition.
Agreed. I hope these terms go away. I think what people tend to mean is "calorie dense, low in nutrients, low in fiber", or something along those lines, and the term "processed" makes it far more confusing.
"Processed" ends up meaning anything from "high in sugar" to "long shelf life" or "one of a dozen kinds of artificial sweetener" etc. It does more harm than good.
I can have an extremely high fiber, high protein, nutritionally well rounded meal that's also "ultra processed".
Someone mentioned Nova. Nova is a PERFECT example of how god awful the term is. When asked to classify foods into Nova categories there is almost no agreement amongst nutritionists.
Time after time, Nova is shown to be more confusing than helpful, with worse than random results. Nova itself doesn't even attempt to correlate with "healthy".
> there is almost no agreement amongst nutritionists
Neither is there for speciation. Doesn’t make the term or concept useless. And doesn’t mean we can’t make useful statements about one species versus another, even if it gets blurry at the edges.
What is helpful about Nova? What are the useful statements we can make? I would argue that Nova makes it more difficult to make useful statements. For example, someone who follows Nova would believe that taking a fiber supplement, or a multivitamin, is "ultra processed" and if they equate "ultra processed" with bad... well, they'd skip those. Meanwhile, they could eat raw mean morning to night, or drink their own urine, and they'd be on a totally unprocessed diet.
What framework has Nova helped develop for eating healthier?
> someone who follows Nova would believe that taking a fiber supplement, or a multivitamin, is "ultra processed"
No one believes that. We're all adults and not looking for loopholes or edge cases to exploit. A system can be generally good even if it has inconsistent edge cases, which is basically all systems that have ever existed.
It's could be OK to have informal system with plenty of inconsistent cases for informal conversations, but once we start talking of regulation, it's time to switch to something that does not have quite as few loopholes.
Because for example grape juice has more sugar per cup than coca-cola, and almost no nutrients (if filtered.) And yet it's firmly the best type of food according to NOVA system (minimal processing, no artificial additives). You can be sure that if any sort of government adopts NOVA system, it's that kind of food that would be pushed to consumer, not the actual healthy stuff.
If a framework leads to obviously absurd conclusions, I think that's a very valid criticism of that framework. You have not demonstrated or in any way supported that this framework can be "generally good".
And yes, people absolutely believe things. I have had people criticize food/drinks I've eaten as unhealthy because they are "processed" even though being "processed" means I know exactly what's in them.
why not use a classification of food that actually aligns with what is bad? it seems like we don't actually know. Nova combines a bunch of different attributes some of which we don't actually think are causally linked to bad health.
People do this, and the good ones don't have anything to do with processed food, or if they do, it's entirely superfluous. The Mayo Clinic publishes on this topic and, as I recall, strongly recommends the Mediterranean diet - high in fiber and protein, nutritionally diverse, inclusive of fats and carbohydrates.
I know multiple people that are drinking litres of olive oil daily because of the Mediterranean diet. Because of this critical oversight, I am forced to conclude it's bogus. A real recommendation would address this.
I don't understand anything you're saying. A diet can not compel you to do anything, let alone drink liters of olive oil. I assume this is attempting to parody something about Nova but I frankly can't unpack whatever it's supposed to be.
That's a perfect example of the problem. It's overgeneralized to the point of meaninglessness.
It asserts that UPF is bad because they tend to result in quicker absorption, amongst many other things. So why not say quick absorbing food is bad for you, and why use a definition that also includes food that is processed to absorb slower?
Then repeat across several other characteristics. Few UPF foods will bingo on all characteristics and a lot of non-UPF foods will bingo on many of the same characteristics.
How do you show that a certain food is quickly absorbing or slowly absorbing? Would you require that every food item is evaluated on each individual characteristic?
I was thinking of the example of crisps which are basically potatoes with oil and salt, baked. If you are going to call baking ultra processing then it would include rather a lot of things.
> "Ultra-processed foods" isn't a scientific concept
This is like arguing astronomy isn’t real because colloquial definitions of space are ambiguous.
The study [1] uses a definition that finds a significant effect. We should investigate that further. If it pans out and the term ultra-processed food triggers people, we can rebrand it. (Did the cigarette lobby ever try muddying the water on what cigarettes are?)
Presumably, since the first citation in the paper is said epidemiologist (Monteiro), this is the framework they rely on.
Unless you’re intent on scientific gatekeeping, in which case having actually read the reported study (it’s linked in the article fyi) would have offered much more effective methods of rebuttal than semantic quibbles.
It's not gatekeeping to point out that multiple studies have shown that Nova is a perfect example of "no one agrees on what processed foods are". Even when given Nova criteria, nutritionists repeatedly, across studies, fail to agree on categorization.
Nova also does not even attempt to categorize in terms of health because "processed" has nothing to do with "healthy" despite being used in conversations about public health. Absolutely perfect example of how bad the term "processed" is.
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