“Come with me if you want to live”

deleted by creator

So who are the good guys, mind you telling? As far as I’m aware, currently it’s a choice between Chromium based browsers and Firefox and its forks. So really just 2 options in the grand scheme of things.

The Expanse

Same here, I liked seasons 1-3 better than books 1-3 but books 4-6 better than seasons 4-6. And then there’s the amazing books 7-9 which sadly didn’t get adapted at all.

But I mean, it’s the same thing as this FB/IG case, no? Only worse because even if you pay, you still have ads.

The biggest Czech website (Seznam.cz) recently changed their policy and now force you to choose between: free tier with personalised ads or paid tier with anonymous ads. Yes, you’re reading it right, even if you pay, it doesn’t get rid of ads, they just stop tracking you. I have no idea whether it’s legal but the EU should definitely take a look.

Edit: Ok, I think they only offer you this choice when you’re using an account. I tried it in a private tab and it seems I can decline personalized ads there. Does that make it legal? If yes, then they’re some sneaky bastards.

Or Polish trains.

Not to mention that even if you personally managed to switch to something else, if you’re not doing some completely solo work, you will still receive files from others (or may be expected to send files to others) in Adobe format. So even if you wouldn’t be using it, you’d still have to pay for it to stay competitive. At which point you may as well use it because of what you said, that most of the alternatives are missing those expert features. So in professional setting, there’s unfortunately no escaping Adobe. Someone would have to come up with an alternative feature full package of apps covering all bases (because Adobe isn’t just Photoshop and not just graphic design but an entire interwoven ecosystem used in various related fields) and then work really, really hard to push the industry toward it. And it would still probably take a decade or two. So realistically, it would have to be or become some big corporation that would likely turn evil too as the time goes. Or some open source miracle like Blender that would have to attract enough big sponsors.

Not defending Adobe, just saying how it is. I have enough grievances about their software (how they managed to fuck up something as simple as Acrobat is beyond me) but you just have to deal with it or look for a job in another field. (I’m lucky enough that Adobe is only secondary software for me but even then I still can’t escape it.)

who find Firefox difficult to use

WTF? HOW? How is it difficult to use? It works like any other web browser?!

I honestly don’t understand why anyone would refuse to switch from away Chrome. It’s not like the other browsers lack functionality or are slow. The only problem they might encounter is some rare incompatibility which is the result of Firefox (and its forks) small market share and web devs not caring enough.

I’ve never used Chrome as my primary browser and I don’t think I missed anything. I started using Opera years before Chrome was even a thing (back when everyone was using IE) and then when the old Opera died, I didn’t think even for a second about switching to Chrome and went straight to Firefox. Which could at least be highly customized to bring some Opera exclusive features (eg. mouse gestures, tab grouping) back.

To be fair, let’s be glad that 80% of people don’t use an ad block. If it were the opposite and 80% did use ad block, web services would be much more aggressive in combating ad blockers and many more of them would end up pay-walled (although it seems we’re heading there anyway).

On one hand, I feel kinda bad that my ad-free experience is only supported thanks to those who do undergo the torture of ads, on the other hand, the companies have only themselves to blame. If web ads were decent, only limited to sides and headers or even between paragraphs of web pages and didn’t cover the content you’re trying to view, didn’t try to trick you into thinking it’s part of the content, didn’t lead to malicious websites, didn’t autoplay videos with sound or didn’t put unskippable ads before and inside videos, I would have never felt the need to install an ad block.

Isn’t this how it always goes with any kind of censorship? It doesn’t even matter if there were good intentions behind it or not, the result is the same.

You can’t possibly have every feature on a keyboard shortcut, even just all those various formatting features in Word for example where you often have to choose something from a list of options. And even if you somehow did manage to have a shortcut for everything, you’d still only remember those you use frequently enough.

Not to mention, I’m pretty sure most of those shortcuts from 2003 still work today.

Ribbon is one of the best inventions Microsoft ever came up with and I will die on this hill. I’m old enough to remember very well the suffering when I was trying to find something in the classic menus or among the billion equal sized icons scattered across multiple toolbars in old MS Office versions. When Office 2007 came out, everything was suddenly so much easier to find, often with less clicks. I don’t see any reason why I’d need the old style menu in addition to ribbon.

Does LibreOffice finally have ribbon or does it still look like MS Office 2003? You can hate on Microsoft all your want (and I’d gladly join you in most cases) and I get the privacy concerns but the Office suite is, after all those decades, still unmatched (well maybe except Outlook).

The crazy part is that your brain is doing similar processing all the time too. Ever heard of the blindspot? Your brain has literally zero data there but uses “content-aware fill” to hide it from you. Or the fact, that your eyes are constantly scanning across objects and your brain is merging them into a panorama on the fly because only a small part of your field of vision has high enough fidelity. It will also create fake “frames” (look up stopped-clock illusion) for the time your eyes are moving where you should see a blur instead. There’s more stuff like this, a lot of it manifests itself in various optical illusions. So not even our own eyes capture the “truth”. And then of course the (in)accuracy of memory when trying to recall what we’ve seen, that’s an entirely different can of worms.

Ah, thanks for the explanation.

Over here, when you’re applying for a loan, you’re the one who has to bring the proof of your credit worthiness - typically your employment contract, bank statement etc. - they can’t have it automatically without your consent. Also you have to prove your identity with your ID (either the physical card which is mandatory to have, or I guess nowadays a secured electronic identification if you were to do it remotely somehow). So I was genuinely lost in this comment thread, not knowing what the exact process was in America.

What does that mean?