LibreOffice replaces Microsoft 365 at Denmark’s Ministry of Digitisation

Showing all posts tagged: current affairs

LibreOffice replaces Microsoft 365 at Denmark’s Ministry of Digitisation

12 June 2025

The ministry will swap the likes of Microsoft Word and Excel for LibreOffice applications instead, says Caroline Stage, Denmark’s Digitisation Minister. It is anticipated all Ministry staff will be using LibreOffice by the end of the year.

The switch to open source software is part of a move by the Danish Government to reduce their dependency on applications made in the United States. Comments by US President Donald Trump, expressing interest in buying Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark, have also concerned and angered the Danish Government.

I’ve been using LibreOffice word processor and spreadsheet apps since migrating to Linux Mint last year. I’m hardly a power user of either, maybe tapping into, what, ten percent of the available functionality of each app, but they do exactly what Word and Excel did before. As I type the draft of this post in Writer, the LibreOffice word processor, I can barely discern any difference.

I dare say my computer is better off for the change though, by way of the absence of all manner of needless extraneous bits and pieces that come with non open source software.

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current affairs, technology, trends

AI 2027: an artificial intelligence future that’s only two years away?

28 May 2025

A speculative essay on the (perhaps) faster than anticipated rise of a superhuman, superintelligent AI, by Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander, Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, and Romeo Dean. It’s a long, possibly unsettling read, but well worth it.

The CEOs of OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic have all predicted that AGI will arrive within the next 5 years. Sam Altman has said OpenAI is setting its sights on “superintelligence in the true sense of the word” and the “glorious future.” What might that look like? We wrote AI 2027 to answer that question. Claims about the future are often frustratingly vague, so we tried to be as concrete and quantitative as possible, even though this means depicting one of many possible futures.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) mimics all the cognitive activities of the human brain, while AI can perform tasks that require human intelligence. I’m thinking HAL, the human-like computer in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey might be an example of AGI, while ChatGPT or Claude are AI bots.

There are some people who think AGI will never arrive, but an almost superintelligent AI could still be as menacing as some fear:

A week before release, OpenBrain gave Agent-3-mini to a set of external evaluators for safety testing. Preliminary results suggest that it’s extremely dangerous. A third-party evaluator finetunes it on publicly available biological weapons data and sets it to provide detailed instructions for human amateurs designing a bioweapon — it looks to be scarily effective at doing so. If the model weights fell into terrorist hands, the government believes there is a significant chance it could succeed at destroying civilization.

Doesn’t sound like much of a “glorious future” to me.

Australian political leaders who refuse TDA interviews lose elections

5 May 2025

Australian youth news outlet The Daily Aus (TDA), asked former Australian Liberal Party, and Opposition leader, Peter Dutton several times for a one-on-one interview, but he refused every time.

The same, apparently, went for former Liberal Party leader, and Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison. Both leaders refused to speak to TDA, both leaders went on to lose elections they subsequently faced, Dutton over the weekend, and Morrison in 2022.

Current Prime Minister Anthony Albanese meanwhile sat down with Billi FitzSimons, TDA’s editor-in-chief, in early February. Angus Taylor, the Opposition’s shadow treasurer, did however speak with FitzSimons in April (Instagram link). He was, I believe, the most senior Liberal Party/Opposition member to be interviewed by TDA.

FitzSimons, and TDA co-founder Zara Seidler, recounted the experience (palaver?) of attempting to invite Dutton to speak with them, in a recent podcast. Spoiler: Dutton seemed pretty obstinate, an attitude in general that probably cost him the 2025 election.

Mark Zuckerberg says social media is no longer social media

30 April 2025

Kyle Chayka, writing for The New Yorker:

Facebook was where you might find out that your friend was dating someone new, or that someone had thrown a party without inviting you. In the course of the past decade, though, social media has come to resemble something more like regular media. It’s where we find promotional videos created by celebrities, pundits shouting responses to the news, aggregated clips from pop culture, a rising tide of AI-generated slop, and other content designed to be broadcast to the largest number of viewers possible.

In other words, social media is no longer social. The Facebook co-founder, and CEO, states what many of us have known for at least a decade. Zuckerberg’s comment was made a few weeks ago, during anti-trust proceedings led by the United States Federal Trade Commission, against Meta.

If there is life on K2-18b the K2-18 red dwarf star will kill it off

25 April 2025

News that traces of chemicals possibly indicating the presence of life on a planet, known as K2-18b, some one-hundred-and-twenty-four light years from Earth, resulted in a flurry of headlines the other week. Scientists find strongest evidence yet of life on an alien planet. Scientists claim they’ve discovered most promising ‘hints’ of potential for life on distant planet. And: Scientists Find Promising Indication of Extraterrestrial Life — 124 Light-Years Away.

Sure, it’s exciting. This is news many of us have been waiting for. Even if it’s not quite the definitive announcement we would have preferred. The problem though is the media outlets writing about the discovery of chemical “fingerprints” in the atmosphere of K2-18b, have not looked at the whole story. In fact, it seems they’ve only looked at the first few words. After all, why allow the full facts of the matter to get in the way of a click-bait worthy headline? The biggest — literally — part of the story is K2-18, the star the would-be life-hosting planet K2-18b is orbiting.

I’ve written about this before, but let’s revisit the subject, since it’s topical.

K2-18 is a red dwarf star. Red dwarfs — as the name suggests — are small. Some might only be a little bigger than Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system. Red dwarfs are dimmer and cooler compared to a star like the Sun. They however have long lifespans, typically measured in trillions of years, rather than billions, as is the case for many other stars in the universe. At first glance, red dwarfs seem like ideal stars to host planets that might give rise to life. Their longevity gives lifeforms an eon to take hold and develop. But red dwarfs are not really life-friendly stars.

One problem lies in their size. Being so small, the habitable, or Goldilocks zone, the area of their solar system best suited for the fostering of life, that is neither too hot, nor too cool, is quite close to the star. Any planets in the habitable zone will be tidally locked. This means one side of the planet permanently faces the star, while the other is perpetually shrouded in darkness. In other words, the star facing side of a planet will be incredibly warm, while the dark side will be quite cold. Neither extreme may be particularly conducive to life, especially complex lifeforms.

But that’s not the worst of it. Red dwarfs also emit powerful flares that can render nearby planets lifeless. Some of these outbursts can be even more intense than those generated by the Sun. While one study of these flares found they might emanate from the polar regions of red dwarfs, rather than their equators, being the plane planets usually orbit a star along, the odds remain stacked against life here. None of this information is new, but has just about been completely overlooked in the recent news stories, about the possibility of life on K2-18b.

Here may be an unfortunate instance of a star that brings life into being, only to take it away later.

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astronomy, current affairs, science

Australians favour early voting, time for politicians to take notice

24 April 2025

Shane Wright, writing for The Sydney Morning Herald:

A record 542,000 people, or 3 per cent of those on the electoral roll, cast a ballot on the first day of pre-poll voting on Tuesday. It was a 72 per cent increase on the 314,000 who cast a vote on the first day of pre-polling at the 2022 election.

According to the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC), there are a little over eighteen-million Australians registered to vote in the upcoming federal election (Saturday 3 May 2025). To expect all of these people to attend a polling booth on a single day, is absurd, especially in more populous regions. Could that many people possibly vote in one day? Despite the best efforts of polling booth staff, I think some people might miss out. This after having possibility waited hours in a queue.

Of course eighteen million people wouldn’t all descend on polling booths on election day. Some people would have sent in postal votes, while a supposedly small number would voted early, as they were unable to do so on election day because of work or travel commitments. But with up to half of Australians expected to cast their votes during the two weeks ahead of election day, it is clear not all of those people will be working or travelling on the day. When it comes to voting early, Australians are voting with their feet, by walking to into pre-polling booths in droves.

Voting is compulsory in Australia, as it should be, and all the more reason people be given — particularly in the absence of an online voting system — a reasonable amount time to vote. Naturally there are risks in voting early. The candidate a person votes early for might make a serious blunder in the lead up to election day. The party someone backs might announce a policy on the eve the election that is not popular. Parties typically do not release the costings of their policies and promises until the last minute. People who have voted early might find the proposed expenditure excessive.

Then again, policies can quickly be altered, or dropped completely, immediately after the election. An elected lawmaker can unforgivably err shortly after assuming office. There may be little a voter could do at that point, except wait for the next election. But nine million, maybe more, Australians cannot be wrong. The option to vote early, unconditionally, is something the people want, risks notwithstanding. It is time all politicians in Australia accepted early voting as an inherent part of the election process. I also wrote about early voting at the last federal election, three years ago.

Say what you will, this is a democracy after all, but I’m sold on it.

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Australia, current affairs, politics

Seeing Trump’s America through the eyes of a historian in 2100

18 April 2025

One way to make sense of the present upheaval in the United States might be to see it through the eyes of a historian writing about US history in the early twenty-second century. This perspective, envisaged by Peter Leyden, which doesn’t address every last (often heavy-handed) policy of the Trump administration, sees a system of government long overdue for reform:

The Pax Americana with America as the global policeman enforcing order in the international system was coming to an end. That system had a great long run of 80 years, starting at the end of World War II, but could not go on much longer.

The United States military budget in 2025 was $850 billion — more than the military spending of the next dozen countries combined — and America was saddled with chronic budget deficits that could not sustain that kind of spending.

The bureaucratic welfare state that had been the backbone of post-war society in America and throughout the West was also fiscally unsustainable and way past its prime in effectiveness. The large aging populations of these developed economies were putting mounting pressures on the budgets of entitlement programs, which were devised for the smaller numbers of elderly long ago.

Leyden’s article is completely speculative, but is a fascinating read nonetheless. The Democrats appear to have been firmly pushed aside at the moment, but in time will return to centre stage:

Trump, his MAGA administration, and the current crop of Republicans now in Congress are not going to come up with the new systems that will reinvent America in a way that allows it to thrive in the 21st century. The odds of that happening are miniscule.

However, they almost certainly are going to create the space for some other political force, some other movement, some other set of leaders to pull that off. I expect that will come out of Blue America, with new movements and a new generation of leaders looking forward with truly transformative ideas.

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America, current affairs, politics

A pre-war deal between Ukraine and Russia? What deal exactly?

20 February 2025

If Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had made a deal with Russia three years ago, the war in Ukraine could have been avoided. According, that is, to United States President Donald Trump:

This could’ve been settled very easily, just a half-baked negotiator could have settled this years ago without the loss of much land, very little land, without the loss of any lives, without the loss of cities that are just laying on their sides.

Was an undertaking not to join NATO meant to stop Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attempt to take back territory he’s long considered part of the old Russian Empire? Or were the Ukrainians expected to offer a whole lot more?

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current affairs, politics, Ukraine

Intercepted, a Ukraine war documentary by Oksana Karpovych

19 February 2025

Ukrainian film director Oksana Karpovych’s documentary, Intercepted, which features phone calls between invading Russian soldiers and their families in Russia, has one of the starkest trailers I’ve seen in a long while.

Phil Hoad, writing for The Guardian, described Intercepted as chilling, and compelling:

Juxtaposing intercepted calls back home from frontline Russian troops with shots of the devastation they have wreaked in Ukraine, this film is a bleak and searing wiretap into Putin’s warping effect on his people and the psychology of power.

Were David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin right about Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network?

12 February 2025

American actor Jesse Eisenberg played Meta/Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, David Fincher’s 2010 dramatisation about the founding of Facebook. The screenplay, written by Aaron Sorkin, was based on Ben Mezrich’s 2009 book, The Accidental Billionaires.

Despite being part fiction, Zuckerberg was not impressed with his portrayal, saying Fincher and Sorkin were only accurate with his wardrobe. Think the hoodie, and those fuck you flip-flops.

For those who have not seen The Social Network, the now Meta CEO comes across as a brash, arrogant individual, who has virtually no regard for authority, and little respect for anyone other than himself. Particularly women, and the people he called friends. But Zuckerberg’s upset was understandable; few people would relish being presented in such a light.

Perhaps Fincher and Sorkin recognised that by way of one of the final lines in the film, delivered by Marylin Delpy (Rashida Jones), a lawyer acting for Zuckerberg, who said: “You’re not an asshole Mark, but you’re trying so hard to be one.” In other words, Fincher and Sorkin were trying to give a young Zuckerberg — as someone who’d become a little too obsessed with his ambitions for the the fledgling social network — the benefit of the doubt.

Some of Zuckerberg’s recent actions however may have removed any doubts. Revising Meta’s fact checking and content moderation policies, and scaling back the company’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) recruiting programs, among them. Some people may be thinking Fincher and Sorkin had nailed Zuckerberg’s character from the get go.

Even Eisenberg, whose portrayal of Zuckerberg was, I thought, pure class, seems to be of the same opinion. Speaking recently, while promoting his new film, A Real Pain, Eisenberg said he didn’t want to be thought of as being associated with the Meta CEO:

These people have billions upon billions of dollars, like more money than any human person has ever amassed and what are they doing with it? Oh, they’re doing it to curry favour with somebody who’s preaching hate. That’s what I think… not as like a person who played in a movie. I think of it as somebody who is married to a woman who teaches disability justice in New York and lives for her students are going to get a little harder this year.

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