There are at least two distinct AGI definitions. Thus, people use AGI to mean two different things today.
I suspect one def. is "plain language" and one is "jargony". Or one is imprecise and one is specific.
Maybe the gap is closing at some rate; that is arguable.
There are probably other definitions elsewhere. Possibly more concise, more codified.
The idea is to post a blog post as revised, clearer, more correct definitions become available over time and get updated to the microsite homepage at https://sites.tnyrl.com/agi-defined/
First of all, I love LibreOffice very much as the last bastion of sanity in classic document suites, and I love what Collabora is trying to do with the online piece. So, first, a million thanks. Truly.
Now, to put on the the "feedback is a gift" and "radical transparency" caps.
From the screenshot comparison in TFA: The new one looks all Microsoft-Ribbony. That's a huge step backward. The big strength of LibreOffice or Collabora Desktop Classic is that it has a sane UI/menubar visual paradigm. (Which MS obliterated eons ago.)
But let's talk about what matters: Collabora (the online document suite) is slow as heck.
It needs to be fast-updating for shared multi-user docs, like Google Docs/Sheets or Word/Excel 365.
That should be the top priority. Full stop.
LibreOffice works fine for desktop. But, for Collabora, the web experience needs to be fast. The lag in Collabora is simply unacceptable.
People expect online, and they expect collaborative, and they expect nearly instantaneous updates (at least not painful to type and wait for screen to update).
Talk about misplaced priorities. In my very humble opinion.
At least to me, it seems most regular users would struggle and have their productivity reduced attempting to learn a new word processing UI. Everyone and their extended family has been trained on Microsoft products, with Microsoft UI design.
I think this matters for the paying customers of things like Collabora and LibreOffice, as they're using it in a work environment. Not at home.
> most regular users would...have their productivity reduced...this matters for the paying customers...using it in a work environment
If the concern is business productivity, then it might be interesting to read that at least some research indicates (perhaps counterintuitively to some) that classic style is better:
"...results indicate that Excel 2003 is significantly superior to Excel 2007 in all the dependent variables...results support the conclusion that the user interface of Excel 2007 did change for the worst in comparison with the user interface of the 2003 version." [0]
A study from 16 years ago is hardly relevant anymore. Back in 2003, people were still familiar with Office 2003's layout; most people have long since forgotten that layout or never learnt it in the first place.
The author doesn't discuss users' existing familiarity with Office 2003 and they only mention the word 'training' once, that "software design to interact with technology should require the least amount of training as possible" whilst never acknowledging that training in, and even qualifications in, the use of the Office suite was very much a thing in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Even then, the most problems were had in Excel. Advanced usage of Excel is done by technical people who would have had some training. Word and PowerPoint weren't shown to have significant difference in usability; arguably, Word is the program most people forced to use the Office suite spend their time in.
Never mind the ways by which the Ribbon and computers have changed since Office 2007. Options moved around, the Ribbon height reduced, screens having gotten wider to compress fewer options into submenus…
The author states at the end of their conclusion:
> In order to determine if the result of the study with respect to the Excel 2007 application persists and are not due to the learning curve the experiment can be repeated with users having at least three years using this version.
Do you know if the author or anybody else followed up?
It would be more interesting to see a comparison between Office 365 now that the interface has effectively become the de facto standard (same as Windows, macOS, mobile, tablet, and the web version) and Google Sheets (which retains the menus, toolbar, etc.).
I'm no lover of the Ribbon myself but I feel like there's better evidence for it not being the ideal interface than this which wouldn't have convinced me even at the time.
This isn't the proof that'll bring down the titan.
>> the study with respect to the Excel 2007 application persists...can be repeated with users having...years using this version.
> Do you know if the author or anybody else followed up
I would love to see more recent and similarly thoughtful work on the exact same subject. If I find more, I'll try to remember to come back here and comment. Definitely, I am interested in the clearest evidence regarding whether either paradigm is "actually" more usable, and not just the result of some confounding variable(s).
With a null hypothesis that the classic toolbar is no better than the ribbon, I just wanted to see some data (instead of assuming that what users have now has to be more efficient for those users just because it's what the market-leading product has been giving users for about two decades).
I agree - we're coming up on 20 years of the ribbon, it is too jarring to go back to the fixed toolbars and the vast majority of computer users have no experience with the "old way."
This is true I suppose. Google Docs is a bit different. I'm not very familiar with their offerings. Here in the US, most stop using it past grade school and graduate to MS products after, at least in my experience.
I don't think it matters since Universities will not be taking Google Doc submissions unless it's core ed classes, any beyond it will be LaTeX anyways.
And I can tell that while at CERN, those using LaTeX on paper submissions were the minority, on ATLAS TDAQ/HLT group it was a mix of Word, and FrameMaker.
Google Docs implements the most popular 10% of features that people use 90% of the time.
It was said in the distant past that the last 10% of the time everyone is using different features — the long tail 90% of features. You had to implement them in your software.
When did we switch so we adapt our workflows instead, and only use the common features now? And software doesn't have to implement the long tail?
> It needs to be fast-updating for shared multi-user docs, like Google Docs/Sheets or Word/Excel 365.
In my experience, Google Docs has this, but realtime collaboration with Word is unusable. Which is interesting, because that means a huge number of existing Office 365 users have yet to experience it.
What's wrong with the ribbon? It's basically a tabbed toolbar. Unlike a menu bar it doesn't cover up content or require extra actions to hide, and it doesn't require precise mouse movement in order to avoid accidentally hiding.
Ribbon vs. classic toolbars is the comparison to be made. (Sorry for saying menubar when I meant toolbar up above; that was probably confusing.)
I'll try to explain the gist of it, since that seems to be the question:
As you say, one facet of ribbons is they are essentially tabs. So, ribbons obscure whatever is on "those other tabs". Often, with additional annoyance of taking more space than needed to show what they do show (which often is not want is needed). And any section within a given tab can have its own peculiar (varied) layouts. (Continuing the "find it in the hierarchy - customized for the purpose to make your life easier the way a designer thought would help!" paradigm.)
Contrast with toolbars. Show the ones you need, customize them if wanted. Icons and locations are quite effective for selecting actions. They can all be seen at once. They do what they say. No constantly interpreting the interface flow to find stuff.
The internal guts of Collabora's data models and such are based on the LibreOffice code, right? My understanding is that it's really hard to get Google Docs-like performance with real-time multi-user editing if the whole app wasn't engineered from the ground up to make it possible, which LibreOffice wasn't.
I would not be surprised to learn that substantial parts of the core of Office were rewritten to make that possible. Unlike Collabora/LibreOffice, Microsoft is one of the most well-resourced organizations in the world and can afford to do that kind of colossally expensive project. Of course, they'd need an extremely compelling reason to do so, but Google Docs was an existential threat to their market share.
Also, other commenters report that the real-time collaborative editing experience in Office is more sluggish than in Google Docs, and this is consistent with my own admittedly very limited anecdotal experience, and if this has persisted for years it may well be for deep architectual reasons.
Office for web and desktop office were literally separate teams, in separate locations, when I worked there. Complete separation unified only by a document output.
I think UI looks is a very Subjective opinion. I am rather young so I have realy only experience the Ribbons and for me everything back to the old is a huge step back is always going to look old and dusty to me. But thats personal opinion.
Now speed in editing thats a clear showstopper. And we all can agree on that.
I'm currently working on a set of documents with 3 or 4 other people in collabora and we have no more problems than with office 365. It works. You can type simultaneously even in the same line (one types while another corrects the spelling of the previous word, etc), no problem at all.
You can switch away from ribbon styles btw, if it's not your jam. IMO it's grown on me. As for my experience, collabora thus-far has been plenty responsive.
My research says that this product/tool does not exist. And I wonder why not. Is it too niche? Or too hard?
Is everyone handing their stuff off for use cases like this, to some other agent/company/tool? Or just doing the n8n configurations themselves? To me that seems like the perfect use case for AI coding - highly defined/constrained.
To be clear, I'm asking because I want it. But now I'm curious if others would want it, too. Do you want it, too?
Is it though? Facebook and nextdoor are free. That's incredibly hard to compete with.
I'd be interested in building something like this, but even at $100/year, you really can't even afford to advertise for it, so I can't see how one builds distribution.
It sucks that for cash strapped community groups / rescue orgs / etc everyone defaults to facebook, but disrupting that requires a way to make money that isn't advertising, and I can't figure it out :shrug:
> user permissions/groups never come into the sandboxing discussions
Sometimes *nix user accounts for AI agent sandboxing does come up in discussions. At [0], HN user netcoyote linked to his sandvault tool [1], which "sandboxes AI agents in a MacOS limited user account".
Actually seems like a great idea IMO, to be lightweight, generic, and robust-enough.
Yeah, Ralph smells like a fresh rebranding of YOLO.
With YOLO on full-auto, you can give a wrapping rule/prompt that says more or less: "Given what I asked you to do as indicated in the TODO.md file, keep going until you are done, expanding and checking off the items, no matter what that means -- fix bugs, check work, expand the TODO. You are to complete the entire project correctly and fully yourself by looping and filling in what is missing or could be improved, until you find it is all completely done. Do not ask me anything, just do it with good judgement and iterating."
Which is simultaneously:
1. an effective way to spend tokens prodigiously
2. an excellent way to to get something working 90% of the way there with minimal effort, if you already set it up for success and the anticipatable outcomes are within acceptable parameters
3. a most excellent way to test how far fully autonomous development can go -- in particular, to test how the "rest of" one's configuration/scaffolding/setup is, for such "auto builds"
Setting aside origin stories, honestly it's very hard to tell if Ralph and full-auto-YOLO before it are tightly coupled to some kind of "guerilla marketing" effort (or whatever that's called these days), or really are organic phenomen. It almost doesn't matter.
The whole idea with auto-YOLO and Ralph seems to be you loop a lot and see what you can get. Very low effort, surprisingly good results. Just minor variations on branding and implementation.
Either way, in my experience, auto-YOLO can actually work pretty well. 2025 proved to be cool in that regard.
I suspect one def. is "plain language" and one is "jargony". Or one is imprecise and one is specific.
Maybe the gap is closing at some rate; that is arguable.
There are probably other definitions elsewhere. Possibly more concise, more codified.
The idea is to post a blog post as revised, clearer, more correct definitions become available over time and get updated to the microsite homepage at https://sites.tnyrl.com/agi-defined/
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