contextfree (u/contextfree)

contextfree commented on LibreOffice says Microsoft Office exploits you, offers free ODF migration guide neowin.net/news/libreoffi... · Posted by u/bundie

kristopolous · 17 days ago

Are people still using single user desktop office suites?

It makes me wonder if there's some kind of light decentralized thing that can be used with a convention oauth style front end

contextfree · 17 days ago

MS Office isn't single user? It supports real-time collaboration, including in the desktop apps. Though that does require you to keep the files in onedrive or sharepoint.

contextfree commented on .NET 10 Preview 6 brings JIT improvements, one-shot tool execution infoworld.com/article/402... · Posted by u/breve

lowleveldesign · a month ago

Interestingly, the Rust windows crate is generated from an MSIL assembly. And same metadata might be used to generate C# bindings thanks to cswin32 [1] project. The meta-assembly generation (Win32 metadata project) is based on clangsharp and it's fairly straightforward to generate interop code for native Windows libraries. Some time ago I described this process on my blog for the detours library [2]

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/CsWin32

[2] https://lowleveldesign.org/2023/11/23/generating-c-bindings-...

contextfree · a month ago

Yes, and this approach is an extension of the one taken with WinRT metadata which is also ".NET assembly" based.

contextfree commented on .NET 10 Preview 6 brings JIT improvements, one-shot tool execution infoworld.com/article/402... · Posted by u/breve

thewebguyd · a month ago

> .NET nowadays has a serious adoption problem

It's seriously going to make people question the future of the platform. Look at Microsoft's actions, not their words.

TS Compiler: Go New TUI Editor: Rust Winget: C++ (this would have been a great candidate for .NET)

At least PowerToys is C#.

.NET is great, but why isn't it good enough for Microsoft? The company that historically has had such a strong culture of dogfooding.

contextfree · a month ago

Windows and Office never adopted .NET for client code in the first place except for the Longhorn period in the mid-00s, which burned them and put them off it. If that didn't stop .NET in the two decades between then and now, I'm not sure why it would today. Actually, Windows is just now starting to adopt C# now that AOT is supported (I think the new native Copilot app is C#).

contextfree commented on Two narratives about AI calnewport.com/no-one-kno... · Posted by u/RickJWagner

20k · a month ago

One of the problems with using AI for prototyping (or just in general), is that the act of creating the prototype is what's valuable, not the prototype itself. You learn lessons in trying to build it that you use to build the real product. Using the AI to skip the learning step and produce the prototype directly would be missing the point of prototyping at all

contextfree · a month ago

That's definitely an issue and I've gotten burnt by similar problems when using AI to help navigate and find things in codebases, where I've used it to read and understand code for me, with seemingly miraculous results at first, but ended up wishing I'd read more code "manually" myself, as my shallow understanding led to wasting more time on net than I saved. I still feel like it should be possible to find some kind of a balance, but it's tricky.

contextfree commented on Brave blocks Microsoft Recall by default brave.com/privacy-updates... · Posted by u/XzetaU8

diggan · a month ago

I think what's only available in Enterprise/Education editions is the users ability to configure that filter themselves, while what Brave is doing should be available everywhere, where the application itself registers as a browser + what specific window is "sensitive" (which Brave registers all windows as, when the toggle is active). That's my understanding at least.

contextfree · a month ago

The linked document is about how IT admins can manage the filter via policy, which is exclusive to Enterprise/Education. Users can set up filters through the settings UI (on all editions).

contextfree commented on Brave blocks Microsoft Recall by default brave.com/privacy-updates... · Posted by u/XzetaU8

partiallypro · a month ago

Recall is off by default, it's no more enabled on a clean install than Hyper-V. I think the idea is actually very good, but obviously the privacy concerns are not great. Microsoft has made a lot of changes from what I've seen to allow you to block it on x, y, z, etc.

contextfree · a month ago

It's off by default but still present on the system. You can remove it entirely via the "Turn Windows features on and off" dialog.

contextfree commented on Brave blocks Microsoft Recall by default brave.com/privacy-updates... · Posted by u/XzetaU8

ur-whale · a month ago

The real question is: can recall be forcibly torn out of your system, not if a specific application tries to "block" it.

contextfree · a month ago

Yes, it can be removed via the "Turn Windows features on or off" dialog.

contextfree commented on Brave blocks Microsoft Recall by default brave.com/privacy-updates... · Posted by u/XzetaU8

Eggpants · a month ago

This “feature” was made for corporate owned window machines, who will force it enabled via policies.

contextfree · a month ago

There is currently no policy setting to do this. The available policy settings are "disable Recall and do not allow users to enable it" (which is the default) and "allow users to enable Recall, but leave it disabled by default".

contextfree commented on Open Source Maintenance Fee github.com/wixtoolset/iss... · Posted by u/AndrewDucker

pino82 · a month ago

For me, Wix was never truly an OSS project (sure, technically/formally, it is). It's for me just an MS developer workplace in disguise. As MS, it looks nicer and you don't have to support so much.

I was wrong and Rob was indeed not an MS employee??

contextfree · a month ago

He started the project while he was still at Microsoft, but since left and continues to work on it independently.

contextfree commented on Two narratives about AI calnewport.com/no-one-kno... · Posted by u/RickJWagner

20k · a month ago

The key is to look at the long term structural changes the industry is going through, and whether or not AI helps, or hinders that goal

In general, the industry has been making huge efforts to push errors from runtime, to compile time. If you imagine points where we can catch errors being laid out from left to right, we have the following:

Caught by: Compiler -> code review -> tests -> runtime checks -> 'caught' in prod

The industry is trying to push errors leftwards. Rust, heavier review, safety in general - its all about cutting down costs by eliminating expensive errors earlier in the production chain. Every industry does this, its much less costly to catch a defective oxygen mask in the factory, than when it sets a plane on fire. Its also better to catch a defective component in the design phase, than when you're doing tests on it

AI is all about trying to push these errors rightwards. The only way that it can save in engineer time is if it goes through inadequate testing, validation, and review. 90% of the complexity of programming is building a mental model of what you're doing, and ensuring that it meets the spec of what you want to do. A lot of that work is currently pure mental work with no physical component - we try and offload it increasingly to compilers in safe languages, and add tests and review to minimise the slippage. But even in a safe language, it still requires a very high amount of mental work to be done to make sure that everything is correct. Tests and review are a stop gap to try and cover the fallibility of the human brain

So if you chop down on that critical mental work by using something probabilistically correct, you're introducing errors that will be more costly down the line. It'll be fine in the short term, but in the long term it'll cost you more money. That's the primary reason why I don't think AI will catch on - its short termist thinking from people who don't understand what makes software complex to build, or how to actually produce software that's cheap in the long term. Its also exactly the same reason that Boeing is getting its ass absolutely handed to it in the aviation world. Use AI if you want to go bankrupt in 5 years but be rich now

contextfree · a month ago

In the broader context, you could look further left:

Conception -> design -> compiler -> code review ...

If AI tools allow for better rapid prototyping, they could help catch "errors" in the conception and design phases. I don't know how useful this actually is, though.