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Comment by cpursley | Hacker News Reader

I still don’t understand why with all their cash these companies dont redo their apps in Rust or native. They are all so heavy and dog slow. There are already some very fast cross platform (wasm too!) libraries that can do what poppler does as well as parse and produce various office file formats. Because 2gb is crazy town, these things could be around 100mb, just throw some tokens at the problem.

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Not that easy. Also, they have "priorities." Although their priorities are different than the users'.

Just throw some tokens at the problem. I’ve vibed up a Rust Crux hybrid app that runs well on macOS, iPad and wasm and does some pretty complex xml manipulation and other document work. Absolutely smokes electron and you get native UI.

Ref: https://redbadger.github.io/crux/

one does not just "throw tokens" at a problem, Ai is not that capable, and we are talking about MS Office file format, likely a NP hard problem

I mean, aside from all the NP Hard sub problems (I might not be reading your satire though), the real hard problem is that a "product" is not just software, but an ecosystem and a promise of maintenance of the abstract user experience & quality of it.

But in case they succeed the return on image will be astonishing.

Can you expand upon this?

A full implementation/rewrite of something like word, which is pretty complex and the quantity of edge cases is insane, in a relatively short amount of time, months, is very hard.

If they succeed with AI it will be huge: it's basically not possible to do it today with humans, no matter how many people you put on the job.

I would agree a full rewrite of word which is very complex and take quite a bit of time.

It would be impressive of AI to make a 80% rewrite, though I fully doubt it would cover the 100% rewrite (disregarding long term support as well).

Why do you think it’s impossible for humans to rewrite word, especially even humans made it in the first place?

I think it's not possible with humans in a relatively SHORT amount of time (let's say 1 year).

I’m not sure about you but I would not want to adopt and ship an overnight “word” written in rust

Me neither, but this is exactly my point: nowadays, no one will trust an "overnight word written in rust", unless someone prove that an "overnight word written in rust" is good enough.

And big AI LABs, with basically infinite tokens, are the only one in the position to do it.

Even then, I would not trust an AI lab as Microsoft does have a long history of support for word whereas I’m not sure the level of continued support from AI labs. *support including bug fixes, vulnerabilities, continued user testing, interop with other services, standards, etc

Right now even OpenAI has its own copy of Overleaf (for latex). I’m not in the same circles as it’s intended users, though I haven’t heard any major use of it since the splash.

I'm not talking about that, but existing utility tools (in Rust) that can generate MS document format. Perhaps not perfect, but these work today.

I wouldn’t imagine recreating Apache poi would be a terrible reach for a human let alone a llm.

Anything beyond basic utilities though I have a slightly harder time seeing.

AI is especially good at ports like this where there’s a known and well tested surface area.

"ports like this" skips the part about Microsoft/enterprise software having a known and well tested surface area, the few examples we've seen are exceptional cases I suspect

*that only microsoft has access to.

These guys puposely obscure controls and understanding of these products 100% to prevent you doing a port.

Just go open a microsoft word doc in the browser and look at the dom.

Despair! Horror!

Especially when there are three different versions, and each has a different team, and they all can work together at the same time. Crazy amount of tech supporting it that breaks a humans context let alone a models context.

Yeah that's by far the most complex part.

Ever letter is it's own object and they stitch it into the visual view. When you type one letter is turns a single word into multiple objects all versioned objects.

Can't imagine all the crazy race condition protections baked into that.

On top of everyone else’s great points, if you make your own “fork” of something, then you have to consistently maintain it. Which can be done with tokens, but an extra cost with something that’s not as user tested.

I’m not talking about forking, but using standard libraries and native frameworks instead pretending electron is a desktop app.

Ah good point, I thought this was coming across from the "recreate" your own approach. I would fully agree with you on using native frameworks, though the eletron desktop is a great "entry" onto desktops ensuring companies only have to update 1 source, as opposed to natives everywhere.

You should go actually try to make any basic automation work around these systems.

They purposely obscured, google doc is another example they completly hide the dom!

I spent months fighting word processing systems and ended up shipping libre. There's almost zero alternatives without that becoming your entire company.

What % of time, for a an average session, do you think is app overhead vs waiting for tokens? And there's your answer for why it's not a priority.

Jon Blow's response to this take was, "yes, which is why you have to work even harder to hide latency", instead of adding more on top.

From OpenAIs perspective, resources on your computer are free and wasting them is inconsequential

Kind of. Eventually it gets too slow even for the OpenAI engineers using it, and then they need to fix it.

What makes you think Rust is automatically better?

(Also, "Rust or native" is a strange dichotomy. What's not native about Rust?)

I think “or native” is a gesture at swift/objc for mac and C# or whatever people write windows apps in.

Rust or native is objectively more performant and have smaller binaries than these web apps in Halloween costumes…

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