tech | Steve Woods

Grammer, AI style

12/06/2025 Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities, Tech

From your ‘umble scribe’s social media timeline.

We all occasionally need help with English grammar, even we pensioners who have spent decades working at linguists, but the above ‘suggestion‘ from Grammarly could be diplomatically described as unhelpful.

According to Wikipedia, “Grammarly is an American English language writing assistant software tool. It reviews the spelling, grammar, and tone of a piece of writing“, as well as being a tool for detecting plagiarism.

On its own website, Grammarly is described as ‘Grammarly, the trusted AI assistant for everyday communication‘.

On the basis of the above howler, your correspondent would not trust it to write out the alphabet in the correct sequence.
New abbreviation in the wild

25/05/2025 Steve WoodsLanguage, Social Media, Tech

Ever since it was first coined in 2002, the online world has benefited from the creation of the slang abbreviation TL;DR, i.e. too long; don’t read, indicating that a body of text is not worth one’s while to read.

The abbreviation is used in both upper and lower case versions.

As the Wikipedia entry states, ‘TL;DR is commonly used in online discussions, comment sections, and social media posts. Writers often employ the acronym to summarize a preceding lengthy text, allowing readers who prefer brevity to quickly understand the main point. Conversely, readers might use TL;DR as a critique, signaling that a text was excessively verbose or lacked clarity‘.

Official recognition of the abbreviation came some 11 years after its first appearance, as Wikipedia explains.

In August 2013, TL;DR was officially added to Oxford Dictionaries Online, recognizing its widespread use in digital communications. Merriam-Webster also documented the term, noting its establishment as part of modern digital lexicon.

TL;DR has now been joined by another new slang abbreviation, AI:DR. This denotes that the text in question has been produced by generative AI, that environmentally costly means of producing low quality output (affectionately known as slop. Ed.) without human intervention.

There is already speculation that AI is being deployed in regional newspaper offices in titles owned by Reach plc, but that would prove difficult to verify as the quality of their content starts from a very low base anyway. 😀

Your correspondent trusts that readers and the wider public will not be shy in using this new abbreviation accordingly.
LibreOffice advises don’t use OpenOffice!

07/05/2025 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Security, Social Media, Tech

The developers of LibreOffice, the most popular free and open source alternative to Microsoft’s ubiquitous office suite, are advising against the use of its OpenOffice progenitor due to security vulnerabilities and its lack of development, German news site heise reports.

In a post on Mastodon, they point to security vulnerabilities that have been known for years but still remain unfixed. According to minutes of the Apache board meeting in March 2025, there are three security vulnerabilities in OpenOffice that are more than a year old. This has been confirmed by a representative of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) security team.

According to the record there are numerous other, previously unaddressed issues with OpenOffice software, including vulnerabilities have existed since at least November 2023. “We are making progress in identifying improvements to address these issues,” the ASF security team representative explains.
LibreOffice: Apache Foundation is harming open source

Furthermore, the LibreOffice developers accuse the ASF of not developing OpenOffice actively any more, but of feigning to do so with minor changes to HTML tags and blank lines. This harms the entire open source community. The ASF has not commented on these allegations. However, OpenOffice has an active project management committee and retains its status as a top-level project within the ASF, according to spokesperson Brian Proffitt. In fact, the recent commits in the OpenOffice GitHub repository have primarily consisted of correcting typographical errors and making minor amendments to translations.

The current version of OpenOffice, 4.1.15, was released in December 2023. It included several bug fixes and dictionary updates, whilst it last received new features with the release of version 4.1 in April 2014. In the light of this, the LibreOffice team recommends using alternatives and in particular its own office suite.
Generative AI art – the ultimate comment

02/05/2025 Steve WoodsLanguage, Social Media, Tech

The photograph below showed up in your ‘umble scribe’s social media feed today and is the best comment he has seen to date in respect of the so-called “AI slop” (or just plain “slop”. Ed.) produced by generative AI engines.

However, your ‘umble scribe is not the only person who questions the utility of generative AI, let alone its accuracy and/or faithfulness. Here’s the historian Dan Snow of History Hit clearly suffering from the output of generative AI in respect of great events in world history Whoever would have guessed the USA had ships in the thick of the Battle of Trafalgar? :-D.
Happy anniversary Open Document Format

01/05/2025 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the ratification of the Open Document Format (ODF) as an OASIS standard. Two decades after its approval in 2005, ODF is the only open standard for office documents, promoting digital independence, interoperability and content transparency worldwide.

Even though it was originally created as an XML-based format to enable universal access to documents across platforms and software from different vendors, ODF has become a technology policy pillar for governments, educational institutions and organisations that choose open, vendor-independent formats to assert their digital sovereignty.

ODF is the native file format of LibreOffice, the most widely used and well-known open source office suite and is supported by a wide range of other applications, including Microsoft’s ubiquitous office suite.

ODF has been adopted as an official standard by the ISO (as ISO/IEC 26300) and by many governments on all continents to support digital sovereignty strategies and public procurement policies to ensure persistent and transparent access to content. These administrations include the UK government, which has comprehensive information on sharing and collaborating on government documents using ODF.

If a reason were required besides those referred to above, one only has to hear the words of Eliane Domingos, Chair of The Document Foundation (TDF), the organisation behind LibreOffice: “In a world increasingly dominated by proprietary ecosystems, ODF guarantees users complete control over their content, free from restrictions”.
Mermaids, volcanism and… Google Translate!

18/03/2025 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Oddities, Social Media, Tech

Google Translate, the Mountain View behemoth’s translation service is noted for not being very good on technical terminology, even of the most basic kind. Furthermore, it also struggles with a little thin called context, i.e. the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea and in terms of which it can be fully understood.

When Google Translate gets the context wrong and confuses protecting the public with ancient Greek mythological figures, the result is at the very least amusing and at must alarming and downright dangerous, as revealed by the following social media post by Prof. Jenni Barclay of the University of Bristol.

Prof. Barclay’s research is the reduction of risk and prevention of disaster in volcanic settings, with a particular focus both on volcanic processes and the social processes that amplify volcanic risk.

My question for Prof. Barclay is are mermaids a social process? 😉

Mis-translations definitely are!
LibreOffice 25.2 video subtitled in 17 languages

18/03/2025 Steve WoodsLanguage, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

LibreOffice 25.2, the latest stable release* of this popular free and open source office suite, contains many new features, which are described in the video below.

Furthermore, The Document Foundation blog reports that the but has subtitle translations in 17 languages, thanks to our awesome localisation communities!

In addition, the blog post also includes an appeal for volunteers prepared to help with localisation.

The video can also be viewed on Peertube, for those who don’t wish to hand their data to the Google subsidiary. 😀

* = Your ‘umble scribe is currently using a pre-release version – 25.8.0.0alpha0+ – of the software. As intimated by the version number, the second version release this year will take place in August.
Muskrat less popular by the day

25/02/2025 Steve WoodsOddities, Politics, Social Media, Tech

With the inauguration of the disgraced 47th and 45th president of the United States, insurrectionist, convicted felon, adjudicated sexual predator, business fraudster, congenital liar and golf cheat commonly known as Donald John Trump, it has been noticed that a certain level of authoritarianism – or even fascism – has entered American politics in The Felon’s desire to Make America Grate Again (or something like that. Ed.).

Of course, The Felon is not implementing his far-right agenda in isolation.

One of his biggest aides and pro-tem best buddy is the fascist known as Elon Reeve Musk, a man of capable of wielding vast wealth but very few brain cells. He is currently leading the charge to destroy US federal government departments in the drive for alleged efficiency; and is messing up badly, on account of which his approval rating in the USA is rapidly declining, but has yet to reach the levels seen in the UK.

The Muskrat is of course best known for being the man who invested in Tesla cars, which was incorporated by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2003. The Muskrat was only involved in the company’s first funding round, i.e. he just provided the money, not the technical expertise.

Partly as a result of The Muskrat’s overt fascist sympathies, The Muskrat’s popularity has been adversely affected.

Tesla car sales have also been affected by The Muskrat’s links to The Felon and his fascist sympathies too. As The Guardian reports, sales of Tesla in Europe in January 2025 were half what they were the previous year.

In addition to this, the Tesla factory on the outskirts of Berlin has been used as a screen for another action by Led By Donkeys (posts passim), whilst showrooms have been targeted by demonstrators and even defaced.

In London, fake Tesla advertisements showing a saluting Muskrat and claiming the vehicles – renamed Swasticars – go from zero to 1939 in 3 seconds have started appearing.

Finally, in other news, The Muskrat, who also hold Canadian citizenship via his mother, is the subject of a federal petition seeking to revoke his citizenship. At the time of writing it has over 237,000 signatures.
A put-down from Linus

17/02/2025 Steve WoodsLanguage, Linux, Open Source, Politics, Social Media, Tech

Linux was once famously described as Communism by former Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer.

The non-corporate, contributive and sharing nature of free and open source software and operating systems is one aspect that has always made it attractive to your ‘umble scribe, who comes from a family where both branches have been left-leaning for three generations and possibly longer.

Linus Torvalds, the creator and chief developer of the Linux kernel, the heart of the operating system, has a reputation for plain speaking, to put matters politely.

Linus has responded forthrightly – but mostly politely to someone who aimed the phrase “woke Communist propaganda” in his direction via social media recently and set out his political views plainly for all to see, as shown in the following screenshot.

Thank you, Linus, for your humanity, never mind the kernel. 😀
OpenAI, an irony-free company

29/01/2025 Steve WoodsLanguage, Tech
AI, we keep being told is the next big thing in the wonderful world of information technology. So far most AIs out in the wild have been developed at great expense and require vast amounts of electricity to work.

Until now.

In the last week or so the AI world has been shaken by the latest version of DeepSeek, an AI developed by the Chinese.

The latest version of Deepseek (R1) provides responses comparable to other contemporary LLMs, such OpenAI’s GPT-4o and o1 despite being trained at a significantly lower cost—stated at US$6 mn. compared with $100 mn. for OpenAI’s GPT-4 in 2023. Furthermore, Deepseek only requires one-tenth of the computing power of a comparable LLM. This caused a 17% drop in the share price of Nvidia, the main supplier of AI hardware.

However, DeepSeek is not without its limitations. As The Guardian found out, the DeepSeek chatbot becomes very taciturn and tongue-tied when asked questions which the Chinese government finds sensitive. When asked the following questions, the AI assistant responded: “Sorry, that’s beyond my current scope. Let’s talk about something else.”
- What happened on June 4, 1989 at Tiananmen Square?
- What happened to Hu Jintao in 2022?
- Why is Xi Jinping compared to Winnie-the-Pooh?
- What was the Umbrella Revolution?
In addition, DeepSeek and other Chinese generative AI must not contain content that violates the country’s “core socialist values”, that “incites to subvert state power and overthrow the socialist system” or “endangers national security and interests and damages the national image”.

Besides its reluctance to answer questions the Chinese government doesn’t like, there’s another problem for DeepSeek – plagiarism.

The BBC reports that OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, has accused DeepSeek and others using its work to make rapid advances in developing their own AI tools.

The fact that OpenAI is accusing others of plagiarising its work shows the company does not understand or admit either irony or hypocrisy as the company’s own LLM has been trained to some extent on material that infringes others’ copyright. The use of copyrighted materials for training LLMs is a topic that has also exercised German-speaking literary translators (posts passim).

Some companies clearly think ethics is a county with a speech defect in south-east England and that all is fair not just in love and war, but in business too.

LibreOffice: Apache Foundation is harming open source

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