LibreOffice:
An open letter to office suite users, just before the Euro-Office announcement
In recent days you will have read various articles announcing the arrival of
Euro-Office, which is being “marketed” as the first open-source office suite developed in
Europe. We feel compelled — reluctantly, since open source should rest on transparency, not
deception — to correct this claim. The first open-source office suite developed in Europe
was OpenOffice.org in 2001, based on StarOffice’s source code, followed by LibreOffice from
2010.
These are two genuine open-source office suites, built from source code that
originated in Europe. They are not a freeware clone of MS Office whose code provenance is
undisclosed, nor a product that has rebranded itself out of pure opportunism to ride
today’s wave of Digital Sovereignty.
If you're intrigued by thinking about story structure, I really enjoyed Uncanny Magazine:
The Protagonist Problem by Ada Palmer and Jo Walton
In talking
about the BoingBoing link to Vadim Drobinin: Am I a Bad Friend?
, an observation of something I've felt, from Elf M.
Sternberg
@elfsternberg.bsky.social
It was at one party that I ran into a couple of friends I hadn't seen in a few
weeks, and after a round of "How ya doin?" we ran out of things to talk about because we
were so on-line we KNEW what was going on in their broader lives.
Elf M.
Sternberg @elfsternberg.bsky.social
We didn't have the gaps that took time to fill, that justified talking to each
other, that justified spending time together.
Maybe the rise of TTRPGs and the like is a way to create a context for being
together and trading synthetic experiences since the real experiences we used to trade are
gone.
Short little video
of an easter egg in the Lego Batman game that's awesome for those of us of a certain age.
Via.
Arkansas state
trooper resigns after wife files 'white supremacist' messages in divorce records
In a court filing, Alana requested sole custody of the children, with Michael
given visitation rights so long as he completes a parenting course "in order to limit the
hatred and prejudice that he has towards people."
The comments from the Arkansas State Police rep are extremely telling. Yikes.
Via.
Good read on why conversations with LLMs aren't protected as attorney-client privilege: Elizabeth X Guo
writing in the Harvard Law Review re United States v. Heppner.
The Heppner court assumed sub silentio that Claude was more like a non-
attorney human than a tool. One might reasonably question that assumption. On the very same
day of Judge Rakoff’s oral decision, the district court for the Eastern District of Michigan
(in a civil case concerning work-product protection for a pro se litigant’s ChatGPT-
generated materials) emphasized
that “ChatGPT (and other generative AI programs) are tools, not persons” and
represent “a litigant’s internal mental impressions reformatted though
software.”
With the news that Meta's AI bot is being used to steal accounts, hat tip to everyone who's used "Facebook Login" to trust Meta with their identity on third party services.