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xkcd #743: Infrastructures (imgs.xkcd.com)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by Jakylla@sh.itjust.works to c/xkcd@lemmy.world
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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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[-] Datas_Cat_Spot@startrek.website 68 points 2 years ago

One thing I've learned over the years: the scruffier looking the IT guy, the more they should be listened to.

[-] elscallr@lemmy.world 30 points 2 years ago

They don't bear the moniker "greybeard" without reason

[-] Klear@sh.itjust.works 7 points 2 years ago

I thought that was because they shout a lot.

[-] negativenull@lemm.ee 26 points 2 years ago

Richard Stallman is rarely wrong

[-] TheBat@lemmy.world 22 points 2 years ago

Except when he eats something from his foot.

[-] oce@jlai.lu 7 points 2 years ago

We're just too pedestrian to get it.

[-] nomecks@lemmy.world 41 points 2 years ago

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!

[-] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 2 years ago

If you make it open source they can't steal your idea

[-] dustyData@lemmy.world 4 points 2 years ago

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.

[-] TheCraiggers@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 years ago

Apple and Google have stolen plenty of ideas. They don't care if it's closed or open.

[-] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 2 years ago

If they can't prevent others from using it, seems fine to me.

[-] aesthelete@lemmy.world 10 points 2 years ago

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!

[-] TurtleTourParty@midwest.social 6 points 2 years ago

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.

[-] MajorHavoc@lemmy.world 19 points 2 years ago

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

[-] elxeno@lemm.ee 25 points 2 years ago

It's being re-written in Rust.

[-] HonoraryMancunian@lemmy.world 12 points 2 years ago

TIL the xkcd main character(s?) is (are?) called Cueball

[-] Jakylla@sh.itjust.works 8 points 2 years ago

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

[-] Sotuanduso@lemm.ee 2 points 2 years ago

It's unofficial, but yeah. People call him that.

[-] Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world 0 points 2 years ago

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"

[-] Mic_Check_One_Two@reddthat.com 2 points 2 years ago

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.

[-] overzeetop@lemmy.world 0 points 2 years ago

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.

[-] greenskye@lemm.ee 1 points 2 years 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.

[-] FrullaPapaya@lemmy.world 0 points 2 years ago

What are more efficiente and better implemented formats for documents sharing?

[-] MajorHavoc@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

Markdown is gaining traction. There's lots of tools that will edit and display Markdown consistently, and without a dedicated tool, it's just a very readable text file.

And, most importantly for today, it's easy to generate a PDF file from, haha.

this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
913 points (100.0% liked)

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