xkcd @lemmy.world Jakylla @sh.itjust.works 1 yr. ago

xkcd #743: Infrastructures

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.

Transcript

2003:

[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.

61 comments

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"
- Pretty much. PDF was specifically designed to retain the same look across any device. The goal was that if you designed a document to look a certain way, that opening it on another device wouldn’t fuck your entire design. That’s also why editing PDFs is so damned frustrating, because they’re designed to not change. It largely started as a frustration with the “move an image 3 pixels to the left, and now all your text is in the wrong place” issue. But the EEE strategy by Microsoft directly contributed to pdf becoming the de facto way to share documents.
  
  My Dad got frustrated with docs as people saw that as an invitation to edit the document, or cut and paste stuff he would write. So he switched to using PDF whenever other people got involved.
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  What are more efficiente and better implemented formats for documents sharing?
  
  I don't get why it always must look the same. If i look at Markdown or Asciidoc/tor, Restext, you get content and formatting. Pack it in a tar.gz and create a directory structure for pages and media, etc. and it would imho suffice. And i would gladly see document X in my prefered font size and family instead of creators favorite.
  
  I mean, i get it for typesetting etc. But not for common use.
- Yes and No.
  
  They were really designed to show the same output on the screen and printer.
  
  Even if you are using the same word processor software and file format, a document can look vastly different when you send it to someone else who doesn't have the same screen resolution or the same fonts installed.
  
  PDF started as just a print preview for the postscript printer language. They should have just stopped there instead of trying to make it do all sorts of other shit that can open security holes.
  
  The constant parade of file formats drove popularity, but it was really about being the only popular format to look the same.
- Instead of using .odt.
  
  Maybe with more advertising? Most people don't know about the Open Document Format and that it's standardization sent MS to panicky rework their .doc & co. to pseudo-open OOXML (.docx etc.).
  
  When you save an odt from Word and open it in OpenOffice, the formatting is usually all fucked. At least that used to be the case. A pdf comes out right on the other side.
- Except for my local printing shop, which couldn't print my PDF poster for some reason so now they are asking for a PPT. WTF!
  
  There's someone at your local print shop unqualified to be doing their job.
  
  Permanently Deleted
One thing I've learned over the years: the scruffier looking the IT guy, the more they should be listened to.
- They don't bear the moniker "greybeard" without reason
  
  I thought that was because they shout a lot.
- Richard Stallman is rarely wrong
  
  Except when he eats something from his foot.
Permanently Deleted
- Hot take: people being annoying doesn't make them less right about things and if you disregard the warnings you still only have yourself to blame.
  
  Hotter take: Dismissing a warning because it's annoying is a tacit admission that they are right and you just don't give a shit. People are lazy creatures. We have to make fire alarms the most obnoxious and loud sound in the world because otherwise people wouldn't leave the flaming building.
I have a great idea for a program! I should describe it in agonizing detail to an AI owned by some company so it will spit out working source code. Nothing can go wrong with my plan!
- If you make it open source they can't steal your idea
  
  I mean, they can still steal your idea, fork it, repackage it and charge for it while refusing to upstream their development. But now it's a licensing discussion and not a personal attack.
  
  Apple and Google have stolen plenty of ideas. They don't care if it's closed or open.
- This is a flawless plan, especially since they pinky swore that they wouldn't keep around the information you put into the black box AI. So we're all safe!
- If AI will stop people from telling me their "amazing" app ideas when they find out I'm a programmer then I'm all for it.
I feel like that violin is probably written in C. Or maybe Go. Has anyone made this yet? I might have my next weekend project
- It's being re-written in Rust.
- Permanently Deleted
This is a bit Mary Sue for my taste but lots of truth there lol
TIL the xkcd main character(s?) is (are?) called Cueball
- Cueball is the main character; others have their own names; for example Megan (appearing a lot as the main Feminine character)
  
  More recurring characters are listed on this page: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Characters
- It's unofficial, but yeah. People call him that.

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