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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • Monument@lemmy.sdf.orgtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.worldWhat is your "hunch"?
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    14 days ago

    If the Trump administration doesn’t kill the ADA law changes regarding digital accessibility set to go into effect soon, Adobe is going to leverage the law to unseat the PDF format on the web in an effort to get people to pay for a subscription-based content management system.

    Adobe doesn’t own the PDF standard. They gave it to the International Standards Organization in 2008. Acrobat’s accessibility checker has never been updated to newer standards, even as the federal government has moved to require compliance with WCAG 2.1 (a web standard). Their checker does partial WCAG 2.0 and PDF/UA, which was released in 2008. The ISO is working on PDF 2.0, which is not backwards compatible with PDF/UA, nor will files compliant with WCAG be able to meet the PDF 2.0 spec.
    Which means that Acrobat (or InDesign) won’t be able to make files that can be legally shared online by many organizations. Adobe will leverage their near monopoly to steer designers into cloud products integrated into their publishing software as a means up fill the niche vacated by PDFs.


  • Not buy their products. Drag them on social media. Give interest to news stories about the product’s users, not the figurehead of one of the vendors, so the news media focuses on them rather than the distraction. Reach out to your politicians and your friends to discuss how product failures are the result of the company embracing AI and don’t forget to highlight the greed that brought us to this fascist economic system. Use, donate to, or even offer your skills to non-LLM FOSS alternatives. Spend your dollars on companies with scruples. Build your own home lab, give up on all technology, get really into self-sufficiency, and go live in the woods to escape the whole system.

    I don’t know… something other than giving in. Literally anything other than that.





  • Can openers is what did it for me.

    In 2015 I needed a new manual can opener. The local big-box stores had two basic styles. A cheap, all metal one that was just stamped from a single sheet, and a more expensive one with better handles.
    The more expensive one had previously rusted and began to look nasty within a few years.
    Amazon had a bunch of different styles at less than the price point of the more expensive one.

    I bought one. It was fine. I didn’t love the operation. It cut the whole top off from the side, rather than from the top in a downwards cut. The sharp edges were on the can rather than on the lid. It would catch the paper labels and sometimes wad them up into the can while you cut. Cans with no air space would leak when opened.

    Anyway. Replaced it in 2019. Amazon still had a broad selection, but all except for obvious crap was as expensive as the local big box store’s expensive option. Wound up going to a smaller local(ish) bulk foods store and bought a cheapo restaurant one for less than Amazon’s/the big box store’s similar offerings. Minimal rusting to date.






  • I like it. I would not go back.

    But I have a nice home office, don’t live alone, and found office culture and colleagues to be disruptive.
    I have ADHD. My job tends to be wide but not necessarily deep. A “quick question” can cause me to lose my train of thought, cause me to get disordered while trying to figure what the hell I was doing, get shut down by the frustration, and lose hours in ‘wait mode’ for the next interruption because it took me so long to enter a flow state that I’m fearful I’ll get interrupted again.

    Being able to shut my office door, silence notifications, and focus with music playing in the background has been incredible for me.



  • I used to have a TCL soundbar.

    In addition to being extremely mediocre, it promised to integrate with my WiFi so that music could be airplayed through it. After adding it to my WiFi, it still broadcast the open ‘setup’ WiFi network.

    If you joined the setup network, you could SSH into the soundbar as root without a password and dump the dhcp.conf file, which would give anyone access to my home WiFi network. Other TCL models also allowed for root via SSH, but used 12345678 as the password. A skilled hacker could just bot these via wardriving and turn them into network listeners.

    It may have still broadcast the setup network because I blocked the device from accessing the internet. I only ever went poking around on it because I noticed that the setup network kept getting set to the same channels as my home network and it was causing interference. I eventually just factory reset the device so it had no information on it at all.
    After the umpteenth time of not being found by my TV, a hard reset killed it. Just got stuck booting and never recovered.

    Anyway - crap brand. Sad day for Sony TV fans.