Entries for January 2025
Monetize AI, not the editor
A certain characteristic of legacy desktop apps, like Microsoft Office, Autodesk AutoCAD, Adobe Photoshop and so on, are that they have crappy proprietary file formats. In 2025, we barely have reliable, fully-supported open source libraries to read and write .DOCX, .XLSX, .PPTX,1 .DWG, .PSD and so on, even though related products keep making billions in revenue.
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Yes, Microsoft’s newer Office formats .DOCX, .XLSX, .PPTX are built on OOXML (Office Open XML), an ISO standard. But can all of these formats be rendered by open source libraries exactly as they appear in Microsoft Office, in an efficient way? Can I use anything other than Microsoft Office to convert these into PDF, with 100% guarantee that the formatting will be preserved? The answer is no, there will still be inconsistencies here and there. This was intentional. A moment of silence for the poor souls in late 2000s Google who were tasked with rendering Office files in Gmail and Google Docs. ↩
Calling strangers uncle and auntie
Cultures can be categorized across many axes, and one of them is whether you can call an older male stranger uncle or female stranger auntie. For example, calling a shopkeeper uncle might be sympathetic in Singapore, whereas doing the same in Germany (Onkel) might get a negative reaction: “I’m not your uncle”.