Why not let go of SPSS instead? It has run its course and is basically legacy legacy software by now. But it good fun I suppose? Are you using SPSS as an oracle? (Guessing that the author is/will be in the comments.)

An oracle and fuzzing have been excellent when reimplementing software. Given implausible inputs, the black box shows its colours quickly. Rounding errors and different representations of floats are and endless source of debugging, eh, joy.

Because it's not an option for many. And it being pushed by universities as the mandatory and only explained tool, doesn't help.

I think a lot of people would like to move on from SPSS, but try telling that to the people that have been using it for the last 25 years.

You might want to clarify that you are quoting the referenced standard so it doesn’t read like an opinion.

Why not both?

The word "agent" implies that they should _only_ act on your behalf.

Ah I thought the SUPER CAPS was a dead giveaway.

The title is highlighting an unexpected exposure path. (Not my submission.) An unfortunately common combination. Agreed that the issue is in Linux, somehow the go surface area makes the situation much worse though.

Unfortunate news for Caddy which exposes unpatched Linux systems (confirmed) and may be common in container setups. Unclear if the container engine as a middle man actually helps mitigate the issue.

Casually opening a Word document to do some adjustments, a number of popups appeared. Word is disabled until buying a M365 license. It's not that it doesn't get updated, editing is disabled. How on earth do they get away with this?

Don’t let them, just move on. The days are pretty much over in terms of using Microsoft Word at a personal level away from the office why? It doesn’t add anything special, the only program worth using is Excel. And even that is slowly fading away. Adobe and Quark are also declining too.

It actually trigged installation of WordCraft to fix the document and export as pdf. Maybe it won't do everything Word does, but it did this task well. Now I'm willing to use it again, especially considering I don't want to subscribe for basic computer use.

> How on earth do they get away with this?

By having trillions of dollars, that's how. Even if they get hit with a lawsuit, it'll be some million dollar fine, which is chump change for them.

The best way to deal with this is to not use their products in the first place. And now that we've got OnlyOffice and ArtCraft, there's almost no reason to continue using the MS Office suite, unless you're a corporate customer.

How on earth do they...

They are the 900# gorilla, and the screams of the smallfolk have no effect on their bottom line.

They are sadly mistaken. Microsoft is slowly fading away to irrelevance. In fact, the age of Nandella is coming to an end I’ve said it before. “Microsoft does not know how to compete when the playing field is level” and the same applies to their evil twin Intel.

You are thinking long-term. In the late-stage capitalist taxonomy, long term is a subspecies of lip service.

The era of automatic code washing is upon us. The ability to cleanroom reverse engineer and reimplement any software with little effort. Software value in free fall.

> The ability to cleanroom reverse engineer and reimplement any software with little effort.

LLMs hardly to clean room anything when their training corpus is most likely "all the code you can get online regardless of license".

> Software value in free fall.

I'd challenge that. A lot of what's being produced is slop, that's the low value part. Good software still has plenty of value because it requires a lot of effort to create.

Perhaps it’s about taking pride in one’s work. The feeling of mastery. “I understood this. I solved it. Doesn’t that matter?”

Maybe being right, doing the right thing, and solving difficult problems isn’t what makes the world tick. But perhaps it’s what makes you tick.

And realizing that the world doesn’t necessarily value what gives your work meaning is a loss that needs to be grieved.

Thank you for the kind words. Agreed that writing is process oriented and I'll have to work on that. This experiment has been on the top of my mind for a long time and it feels good to finally share it. It's been a long process.

Analysing the shape of the output is an excellent idea, it would be interesting to see which abstractions surfaced, and which did not. There are a lot of programming paradigms in high-level language that I'm curious to see if they are there or not.

And I do gloss over libmuffintop, and I think it might be worthy of its own post. It is the thinnest cross platform abstraction layer I could come up with. It's implemented in LLVM IR directly. The main idea is to remove as many abstractions as possible between the prompt and the machine. I wanted to see if the abstractions are necessary for agents, it seems that they are not.

It’s fantastic! Kind of ironic that we share videos where humans made AI make fun of itself though.

https://youtu.be/XXSYqiS9Lys

Love it. Hate it.

The everything computer makes yet another one gigantic leap for machinekind.

I don’t know how to feel about it anymore.