this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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xkcd

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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

Title text: The heartfelt tune it plays is CC licensed, and you can get it from my seed on JoinDiaspora.net whenever that project gets going.


Transcript2003:

[Cueball approaches a bearded fellow.]

Cueball: Did you get my essay?
Bearded Fellow: Yeah, it was good! But it was a .doc; You should really use a more open-
Cueball: Give it a rest already. Maybe we just want to live our lives and use software that works, not get wrapped up in your stupid nerd turf wars.
Bearded Fellow: I just want people to care about the infrastructures we're building and who-
Cueball: No, you just want to feel smugly superior. You have no sense of perspective and are probably autistic.

2010:

Cueball: Oh my God! We handed control of our social world to Facebook and they're DOING EVIL STUFF!
Bearded Fellow: Do you see this?

[Inset, the bearded fellow rubs his index and middle fingers against his thumb.]

Bearded Fellow: It's the world's tiniest open-source violin.


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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Hot take but PDFs became the primary form of document transfer because Microsoft made .doc, docx, docm, rtf, doc 2003-2020...

All those "It won't open" just forced everyone to say "Fuck it send me the PDF"

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Well, that and every time you touch a DOC/DOCX file it reformats itself to your local settings, fucking up the entire layout. PDF is a terrible, inefficient, poorly (or at least variably) implemented format which was proprietary for two decades but is now about the best option we have for a document to look the same at the recipient end as the sender and still include text, vector, bitmapped, semi-interactive, and certifiable/traceable contents.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I really, really hate that so many people still try to share ebooks as PDFs. Why that was ever a thing makes no sense to me. Yes, I absolutely wish to read a 500 page novel on portrait letter size pages with tiny font that completely ignores my screen size.

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