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KDE and GNOME Developers Ponder How to Handle AI-Generated Contributions

27 Sep 2026, 01:04 by EditorDavid

Last weekend KDE's annual Akademy conference included a presentation proposing an AI-native KDE," writes The Register. This led KDE developer Nate Graham to open a discussion about proposed restrictions on LLM-assisted contributions which "rapidly became heated. Moderators issued warnings, restricted further comments, and eventually removed the thread." But as Graham writes on his blog, "A bunch of people mostly outside of KDE who disapprove of LLM usage derailed KDE's attempt to add restrictions to LLM usage." Two people unknown to any KDE contributors appeared and began fighting with one another about the broader topic of the morality of AI, not the proposed guidelines... Someone else outside of KDE set up kdeforpeople.com in an attempt to... pressure KDE into banning LLMs. A bunch of people signed onto it, almost none of whom are known KDE contributors. The topic was picked up on social media and the press with... varying levels of accuracy. The draft proposal was removed and the whole topic hidden... Yep, that's where we're at in the state of online discourse around AI... The "lovable, sovereign, AI-native KDE" idea was presented by two people important to KDE in decades past, but who had not made any contributions recently besides this Akademy talk. Their idea does not reflect the overall direction of KDE or Plasma, and I don't think it ever will. If "a lovable, sovereign, AI-native KDE" freaks you out, I believe it is completely reasonable and safe to ignore... I completely understand why a lot of people have problems with LLMs. I have these concerns as well. He concluded by asking people not to derail any future process to set usage guidelines, fighting over "the broader topic of AI in general." "The discussion is gone, but the argument continues," adds The Register: GNOME developer Jordan Petridis has also published The GNOME LLM Policy That I Want, proposing that LLMs be barred from creating or modifying anything submitted to GNOME or hosted on its infrastructure. "You might be asked to prove your code meets this requirement," Petridis writes, arguing for proposals that target the norms around developer behavior. His rationale? "The GNOME Project prioritizes the social and human aspects of collective software creation,"

After 40 Years, Microsoft Excel Will Add Single-Cell Lists and Arrays

26 Sep 2026, 20:34 by EditorDavid

Microsoft's senior product manager for Excel acknowledges that "Throughout Excel's 40-year history, you've only been able to put one value per cell." But that's now changing with arrays in cells (as well as nested arrays) and lists. "You can create a list by selecting Insert > List or pressing Ctrl+J, then typing or pasting items separated by commas or semicolons, depending on your regional settings. Selecting the icon in the cell shows the individual values..." "With lists, you can filter by one or more individual items instead of whole text entries. Referencing a list returns all its values for calculations. For example, =B2 spills those values into separate cells..." "For the first time in Excel, arrays can exist natively in cells as values or as formula results. They can be any size or shape and can even contain other arrays. You can now keep the result of any spilling formula in a single cell by "wrapping" the formula body with braces { }." "Since the introduction of dynamic arrays, array results have spilled across cells — for example ={1;2;3}. Wrapping the original array with braces creates a 1x1 array around it, so instead of spilling to multiple cells, the array stays in a single cell. Braces have long been used to describe arrays in Excel and this extends that behavior by allowing multiple layers of braces. This gives you more flexibility when building spreadsheets. Instead of leaving room for a formula to spill, you can keep the result in one cell." "Arrays can now also 'nest' inside other arrays... Previously, a formula that produced an array of arrays would return a truncated result or #CALC! error. Now, supported formulas return the complete nested result... FLATTEN(array, [pad_value], [levels]) simplifies nested arrays by removing one or more levels of nesting..." Three HAS functions check whether values are in an array: — HAS(array, value) returns TRUE if value appears anywhere in array, and FALSE otherwise. — HASANY(array, values) returns TRUE if any of the values appear anywhere in array, and FALSE otherwise. — HASALL(array, values) returns TRUE if all of the values appear anywhere in array, and FALSE otherwise.