They are going to start selling solar panels at Lidl, a German-owned grocery store chain https://www.independent.co.uk/extras/indybest/house-garden/l...

I saw a video from the UK government with a guy walking down the aisle of a Lidl talking about it! I quickly went to Lidl.es to look as these 800w balcony solar setups are legal here in Spain. Unfortunately they don’t sell the here! Maybe once the UK does it they’ll start.

It's been the case for several years in Lidl Germany and about a year in France

This reads like it was written by AI. I don't understand how it provides any real security if the "guardrails" against prompt injection are just a system prompt telling the dumber model "don't do this"

I had the same thought as well. The firewall is just assuming a dumb model can't be tricked

Adding a mobile version, MS Exchange integration, supporting OAuth2 login, refreshing the UI periodically because otherwise everyone whines about how "dated" it looks.

Why can't governments fund LibreOffice as part of their effort to wean themselves away from Microsoft? This seems like such an obvious thing for governments to fund for their own use and bequeath as a gift to their citizenry.

1. A lot of people aren't even aware of the alternatives;

2. There is a lot of backlash from people afraid to learn new things;

3. Even in IT departments, people who are used to administering MS networks will fight against it;

4. Does LibreOffice have a marketing department?

I wholeheartedly agree that governments should not only use Linux/LibreOffice in their bureaucracies, but that they should also finance and promote it, especially in peripheral economies.

I think OP's point is that certain government agencies have already transitioned or are in the process of transitioning. As such it would make sense for them to fund LibreOffice, given that they now depend on it.

In my country, the government would have to get something in return (support would be the most obvious channel).

LibreOffice has some obvious disadvantages: it does not have an office in my country, it does not offer support, and it does not lobby the government.

Previous efforts to push more OSS into government were obliterated by right-wing governments. You can guess why.

You are in a bubble. Most office workers want Word documents and Excel spreadsheets (or something equivalent) not markdown and numpy.

People been running libreoffice just fine in french administration.

They even prefer it to office because they are used to it now.

That supports my point: Office workers want to use an office suite for office work. They don't want to edit markdown and JSON.

My bad if I read your comment wrong. Thought you were saying that workers prefer Microsoft office.

I don’t think they really want these document formats, usually the requirement is imposed by management.

"Managment" usually are office workers.

Please just use the AGPL or shut up. If you release under a license that encourages freeloaders, you will get freeloaders.

Malicious compliance of having the OS accept an arbitrary date and report that for verification purposes seems good to me.

Or a small step that enables actually problematic real compliance, combined with a bad precedent: a "secure" way to populate that birth date field is a plausible future drive-by contribution.

There is a line of reasoning out there that giving every system a different birthdate, and trying to fill it with as much false information as possible, is one way of balancing the scales. I'm not sure how useful it is, kind of like when a website asked for your age and you just put in whatever.

>Yemen, in the midst of a perennial civil war, still runs commercial flights

Not any more, they don't:

> The General Director of Sanaa International Airport, Khaled al-Shaief, said in a post on his X account that the strike had completely destroyed the last of the civilian planes that Yemenia Airways was operating from the airport.

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-says-it-has...

That's just from Sanaa. There are still flights to/from other cities in Yemen, mainly Socotra and Aden.

But then you have to feel bad that you're not contributing to society. The plumber is doing far more for society than any crypto con-artist is.

I mean, or you could help build houses instead of drain electricity. One is clearly less lazy and helping humanity more.

Not paying taxes is a drain on society

It's for certain a drain on the military industrial complex, but building houses while not supporting the current regime is certainly better than draining a bunch electricity to enrich only yourself and paying money to a bunch of authoritarian wannabe's.

I am impressed with your compression of the entirety of this conversation down to two values of right/wrong. /s

You compressed all taxes down to paying for the war in Iran

What you lose is control. Even in the case of an actually-intelligent agent, if you task a subordinate with producing a document for you, they are going to come up with something that is different from exactly what you had in mind. If they are really good, they might even surprise you and do a better job than than you'd have done yourself, but it still will be their vision, not yours.

Your notion of a "mortal wound" to the software industry seems to assume that today's SaaS portals are the only form that industry can take. Great software is "tool calls for agents". Those human agents who care about getting exactly the result they want will not be keen on giving up Photoshop for Photoshop-but-with-an-AI-in-front-of-it.

Strongly dispute this. Compute very depreciates rapidly. Inference is cheaper than training. DeepSeek was the warning shot across their bow, but the big AI firms can't afford to change course without jeopardizing their "Wile E. Coyote off the cliff" economics.

LLM performance is already plateauing; models will get more efficient. Good-enough models will be deployed on chips, the same way H.264 is a good-enough video codec but used ubiquitously.

More than your points, I'm very curious how these AI companies are going to turn profit without making using AI insanely expensive. Some time ago, each prompt was highly subsidized, I doubt the picture has changed much.

Edit: maybe the model efficiency you mentioned is the key, we'll see.

I suspect they just won't. First-mover disadvantage is real for many markets. Everyone knows Amazon, but how many remember Kozmo.com?

My assumption is that OpenAI, Anthropic, etc will go bankrupt and eventually be subsumed into Microsoft/Google/ByteDance & friends. New entrants will take their pioneering work and sell inference for pennies on the dollars without investing in massive R&D spend.

Supposedly they could make money, if they wouldn't have to burn a lot on the research. There was an interview with Dario where he stated this and hinted to the fact that a monopoly would not have the research problem, and thus could start making money.