Now you can just create 1:1 functional equivalents
This got a lot of press in the last few days, but the tools themselves are kind of… terrible? At least in their current state, I see no merit in this app slop.
Yeah; I gave the photoshop clone a try and while it looks fine at first it doesn’t properly work. Also: this kinda isnt anything new? Isn’t this why there is copyright and stuff…? Sure slop-cloning has gotten faster with AI but the problem of an IP “needing” protection to prevent replication isn’t anything new?
If you want a good laugh…
I opened the masking section of LightCraft, and selected the “Subject” mask…
It is just a radial mask in the center of the image with some odd parametric detail selection baked in. Obviously not well thought out 
As others have pointed out, successful software is increasingly about ongoing maintenance and longevity rather than knocking something together than can do the basic job adequately.
So, no, software isn’t “over”.
The response to this is always that you can use a swarm of agents or whatever they are called these days to fix it up overnight. It just somehow never happens.
I have a friend who is in the software business, custom small scale solutions. A year ago he was concerned the he would be put out of business. Then he was gleeful, because custőmers started coming in for fixing up codebases which got too enthusiastic about vibe (people in his company do use LLMs for this and other tasks). Now he is pessimistic again because people approach him with codebases that are practically unsalvageable, at least no custőmer would pay for the person-hours, the best they can do is go back to some last good commit and cherry pick new features in a sane way, but that is again quite costly.
Vibe coding with a vengeance. More to come apparently.
I don’t have much love left for Adobe. But if there was a piece of software that seriously needed a rewrite, it’s Microsoft Word. But not “in rust”, but properly rethought, from the ground up.
Btw, have I mentioned how much I love typst?
Oh yeah the remnants of the a_rline cu_tomer phone number scams that’s certainly been quite a thing.
Oh my, the frustration of using Word for my thesis was crazy I later tried LibreOffice Writer, but that wasn’t any better to be honest (in different aspects). Have you tried Writer, I wonder?
I wish it existed during my university days, when I had to write two theses in LaTeX.
At home, I author all documents in typst. Life is too short for Microsoft Word. At work, I sometimes, rarely, have to use Word. It is truly horrendous.
So no, I haven’t ever used Writer in anger. I have used Calc on occasion, for doing trivial tax documents. But Excel seems better (I do re-watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=JxBg4sMusIg every few years, just because I find it highly amusing).
Have you used either?
Libre Office writer is like word was at its worst. I find word quite usable nowadays. Not for a thesis of course.
But boy does Libre Office Writer suck.
What’s your workflow there?
The only documents that need typesetting at home are letters. I have a simple template for letters, which I fill out, run typst to typeset it to PDF, then print and mail it.
On the rare occasion that I need to write an invoice, I take absurd joy in the fact that typst will not just typeset, but also sum the amounts directly in the document, without me needing to double check results or relying on an external spreadsheet.
Oh, and I wrote my own calendarium in typst, for our monthly family calendar.
Never heard of that and honestly, using markup to form documents sounds cool. I often need random bits of advanced functionality and I’d fear the difficulty of learning how to use it 
But I’ll keep in mind that it exists! (translation: I’m saving a browser bookmark)
Is that referring to Excel vs. Calc? Yeah, both, and Excel just works really well IMO. I can’t think of any major problem I’ve had with it. Calc feels clumsy and outdated in comparison.
Tell you what, I’ve written a thesis in Writer too There were moments when I might have invented new swear words when trying to get something to work. Like, Writer has something likeable to it compared to Word, but…
It’s true 
. There are some unbelievably frustrating bugs with basic functionality and GUI. With Word it’s rather design decisions than bugs that I dislike.
I took a uni course in LaTeX and ohhh boy it was a wild ride. All I took from it was “I’m not touching this ever again”
I’ve been eyeing OnlyOffice as the office suite of choice as I remember it being decent and it’s claiming to be AGPLv3 license. What I don’t like is the home page talking about being driven by AI functionality. Should I be scared?
Word is (was?) horrible at rendering math and the theses being in theoretical physics, they had thousands of equations, so LaTeX was absolutely a must. Plus it offered a greater latitude in customisation.
A bit like using darktable as opposed to… say… Lightroom, there’s a “learning curve” of a couple of weeks and then you don’t notice much anymore.
But typst, from what I have seen, it looks much simpler than LaTeX and (possibly) equally powerful.
Yep, math and physics applications might be like 90% of the whole user base tbh. Nowadays Word does a very good job with equations, so it’s not as necessary I guess
So you don’t keep the markup files for later duplication/editing?
@paperdigits could you fork out our typesetting discussion 
?