This post mentions that Europeans have a “right to good administration”. When I dug further, it means (for example) that apparently if you file a report, request, or complaint with a European government, they cannot simply ignore you. They must acknowledge you. And if they need to make a decision on how to handle your request, they must inform you of their decision and also state the reason for their decision.

It all seems like basic common sense stuff. But in Trump’s US, consumers just get ignored. Telecoms have no incentive to comply with the law under Trump’s FCC and FTC. So there are plenty of things to complain about to the FCC and FTC, but they simply ignore the complaints now.

Is the only recourse to file a lawsuit? It would seem silly to sue the FTC or FCC for ignoring complaints. But AFAICT, the FCC and FTC answer only to Trump. Correct?

SDF is defederated from thelemmy.club. When an SDF user searches specifically for !mildlyinfuriating@thelemmy.club or !Android@thelemmy.club, the search tool gives “no results”.

This is a user-hostile act. Refusing the inform the user is an assault on the user’s dignity. We know the community exists. What happens when the Lemmy server is proactively defederated with is that it will not connect to the defederated node even to check if a community exists. That’s all fair enough. But the user should be informed. Not just that the node is defederated but also the rationale. That’s necessary for respecting the user’s dignity. It’s disrespectful to the user to regard them as unworthy of information.

What should happen

The search tool should respond with:

“Unable to verify the existence of !mildlyinfuriating on thelemmy.club because thelemmy.club is defederated. The reason it is defederated is: ‘the host is mismanaged by pro-Trumper bootlicking nutters’” (for example – whatever the admin wants to enter).

Bonus points for overachievers

It would be extra useful if the Lemmy backend could periodically grab a dataset from a directory service like Lemmyverse. It could then use that information to perform better and give better information. The search tool could then say “the community exists according to our records, but …”

PDF layers can be created such that they display on the screen but are withheld when printing. This code should disable the OCG layers from printing:

\usepackage[printocg=never]{ocgx2}

When compiling a doc with the above and printing this way:

lp $mypdf

The layers still print. It’s unclear if latexpdf is failing to generate the PDF correctly (i.e. a bug in the ocgx2 pkg), or if the lp command is failing to treat the PDF correctly. It’s worth noting that the ocgx2 documentation is non-existent/minimal. It seems to be a fork of ocgx which extends ocg-p. The ocgx docs state generally that ocg-p options are supported.

There is a fucking annoying “s” in that name. If the name were lemmy.pleasetopfaxing.social, it would be sensible because there would be nothing wrong with asking for improvement over faxing.

But until something comes along that actually improves on faxing, this whole instance is inherently a stain of ignorance.

(edit) we need a counter domain: lemmy.plzstoplickingboots.social for fax users who refuse to feed gmail, MS, and other surveillance advertisers who have converted email into a technofeudal network of oppressive fiefdoms.

I tried to search for communites using the query string ‘tea’. Got a flood of shit about steam.

Bug 1: It’s first of all a shame that it’s not smart enough to rank whole-word matches to the top. Communies simply named “tea” have a low rank and some do not even make it to the first page.

Bug 2: We have no word boundary expression. I should be able to search for '\<tea\>' to limit to whole words.

Maybe the devs worry that the modern day population can’t handle that.

Bug 3: Certainly we should at least be able to do 'tea -steam' to nix bad results. That query finds nothing, so apparently it is ANDing the two conditions and also treating the '-steam' literally.

Icons for PDF annotations need to pop out with high visibility so you can see them stand apart from the main content. So PDFs often specify colors like bright yellow, fuschia, or dark blue. This is sensible. But then in Okular clicking on the annotation icon results in a pop-up note that uses that same foreground color of the icon as the background of the note with black text on top of it. It’s horrible for reading the text.

I produced a PDF using LaTeX and the pdfcomment package. I specified no color, as I do not want to control or dictate to readers what color is used. So it’s left to the viewer to choose sensible colors. Okular chose dark blue for the icon (good). But then when expanding the icon we have black text on a dark blue background. This is a terrible default.

There is some mention somewhere that Okular colors can be changed in a Qt config tool of some kind, but the problem is that the color of the icon and the color of the note’s background is the same configuration setting.

Or am I missing something?

Update: If you click on a pop-up annotation, the color is unreadable. But if you hover over the icon, the popup has a reasonable light gray background. Hovering does not always work though… it doesn’t seem to sense the mouse position, depending on what the last action was.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/58764195

I was in the non-profit shop of a local charity. They accept donations of used computers then resell them to the public. The profit goes to charity. I asked for their oldest machine. It had an AMD chip from the 16h family. Thus, a spychip.

So their oldest machine was still too new for me. I asked why don’t you have anything older? They said the general public would not accept anything older, and so the shop also does not accept anything older. When machines are rejected, they go to a factory that destroys them and recovers the raw metals.

It’s sad to see that pre-spychip machines are being destroyed and that even 2nd-hand customers are being limited to anti-consumer spychip hardware.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/57532633

Of course what this means is people who are not in Trump’s exclusive fiefdom will be excuded from access, at least for a period of time.

It’s being challenged as unconstitutional. But I think more basically it’s a violation of human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Article 21

1. Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.
2. Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.

Trump’s “early access” program is inherently partaking in governance as it is communication between reps and those they represent. Knowing what is going on inside that nutjob’s brain is part of the democracy equation – as precursor to protesting his next stupid idea. Yet in this case it would be exclusively available to paying subscribers, not everyone as required by art.21.

Trump’s move violates both paragraph 1 and 2 of Art.21.

Of course what this means is people who are not in Trump’s exclusive fiefdom will be excuded from access, at least for a period of time.

It’s being challenged as unconstitutional. But I think more basically it’s a violation of human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Article 21

1. Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.
2. Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.

Trump’s “early access” program is inherently partaking in governance as it is communication between reps and those they represent. Knowing what is going on inside that nutjob’s brain is part of the democracy equation – as precursor to protesting his next stupid idea. Yet in this case it would be exclusively available to paying subscribers, not everyone as required by art.21.

When a scanned document is slightly rotated anti-clockwise, this causes a problem for OCR because the 2nd half of every line appears before the 1st half of every line. The incorrect order is a disaster for language translations.

The FOSS tool to deskew is unpaper. But it often fails to deskew. There are --pre-rotate and --post-rotate options which you might expect to give some manual control, but strangely you can only rotate by 90°. The unpaper options are not well explained.

What are folks doing in this situation?

I recall from ~20 years ago Windows paperless tools had a deskewing function that was manual. You draw a line under a line of text on the page and that input is used for rotation. It was limited to PDFs but at least it worked. Is there anything like that in the free world?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/56533539

All the websites of the Washington secretary of state are a shit-show of incompetence. The BBB (which runs an access-restricted tor-hostile website) has the physical address ‘1000 Station Drive, Ste 222 DuPont WA 98327’. Mail to that address is refused.

Of course it’s then interesting to investigate whether they use that bogus address just on the web, or if they also have false registration records. These pages are dead (at least to tor users):

• https://search-sos.org/washington-wa-business-entity-corporation-search/
• https://secretaryofstate.com/washington

This page renders but finds nothing for “Better Business Bureau”. The digital archives renders but finds nothing for “Better Business Bureau”.

An entity search page says "better business bureau" is already in use in Washington and mentions “THE BETTER BUSINESS BUREAU, INC.”

The business licensing dept gives a form for looking up whether a business is licensed but they push an invisible CAPTCHA. I won’t lick google’s boots so not running google js is why the captcha is broken.

Digital is always better in some ways, but of course not in every aspect. There are some cases where the analog mechanism still has merit because it does /something/ that digital cannot – yet it is being phased out anyway because of this naive attitude that digital is wholly superior.

VOIP vs POTS

• POTS phone lines are powered. When you have a power outtage, that is when it is most important to have POTS. Yet as a society, we are not smart enough to figure this out. We will all be helpless sitting ducks in power outages, unable to communicate.

• POTS phone lines serve modem and fax transmissions reliably. VOIP is fragile shit. Sure, modems and faxes /sometimes/ /somewhat/ work over VOIP, if conditions are just right… certain codecs must be in play as well as netneutrality (low latency) and QoS. VOIP is ultimately an enshitification.

• Perhaps we could argue that voice quality is better over POTS than VOIP.

FM radio vs. DAB

• Advertising is a reality and channel surfing a shit-show on DAB. Every receiver takes a different amount of time to decode the AAC or whatever is in the digital signal. This means when you hear an ad or some garbage, you must wait 5 or so seconds for every single channel change. In principle, a receiver could incorporate 2 tuners to make this quicker. But I don’t think any do this.

• A bad signal results in silence, which means a lot of people who use clock radios will wake up later than planned. Could also be fixed in receivers, but still all those without such a (currently nonexistent) feature will show up to work late.

fax vs. email

• Although it’s theoretically possible to have an email service that does not expose your email address to the recipient, such a thing does not currently exist. Email forces us to share our email address w/recipients who we do not trust.

• Faxes are universally accepted. But e-mail is a shit-show of Google and Microsoft and others being fussy about how a msg is sent, and rejecting on a whim whatever the fuck they want to reject. Faxes do not have this problem. Faxes just work.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/51259064

Shopping for airfare is clearly a game full of shenanigans. You find a cheap ticket, get a (likely fake) indicator warning how few seats are available with a countdown timer, rush through a lengthy process of being forced to make a shit-ton of decisions like whether you want to buy an neck wrap, selfie stick, a bad travel insurance deal, … lots of shit to get through to slow you down. You finally get to the last screen and it says “price has increased since we first quoted you”. Motherfuckers.

Considering aircraft are quite shitty for climate, why not make the airlines shenanigans backfire against them? We have bots arbitrarily hit the air travel sites, enter bogus orders but never submit the last page. Just give the airlines a false indicator of demand. This games their dynamic pricing to quote prices higher than optimum. Any deviation from optimum prices translates into lower profit, likely a consequence of lower sales.

Perhaps an org like Greenpeace would be interested in this tactic.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/48532948

Banks are on an unstoppable uncontrolled trajectory in pursuit of KYC over-achievement. That is, they over-collect far more data on people than legally required (before it gets leaked to criminals in data breaches). Banks’ privacy policies are rife with anti-consumer weasel words.

It’s such a shit-show that privacy proponents have no real choice other than to quit banks and operate entirely with cash. Not many people have that level of discipline.

Software can turn this situation around. For example, there are ~6000 privacy-abusing banks and credit unions in the US. If a robot harvests all the privacy policies, fetches AOS apps to check permission reqs, records those with websites MitMd by Cloudflare, and uses all that info to find the lesser of evils, consumers can participate in creating a competition for privacy (as opposed to a competition of meaningless soul-selling fractions of a percent of interest earnings). The heart of the problem is banks are only getting pressure from the side of oppressors and tyranny and no pressure from the side of the people they purport to serve. Software and data can remedy this.

Worth noting that long before the AI bubble started, a university in the US studied bank privacy policies in bulk using a scraper bot that just looked at the standardised privacy disclosure forms for which all banks must conform to a standard layout. The data has rotted by now so their research is not of much use.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/47171718 > The guy could not use “Convection Roast” mode in his oven unless he connects to wi-fi and registers personal data. Apparently because this was a cook mode that was added after the oven was marketed. > > Sure, it is useful to be able to get new features and upgrades after the thing is produced. But because of that, it’s as if they are making the store version deliberately excessively basic in order to twist people’s arms to run their proprietary closed-source spyware. > > I was originally going to tag this as [a/d] (for asshole design), but opted to call it crappy design because upgradability is still a good thing. What’s crappy is the fact that: > * it’s not FOSS > * GE’s server is needlessly in the loop for everything > * ppl must register on GE’s platform and give copious personal info which is then certain to be abused > > To avoid both c/d and a/d, I would insist: > * the app must be FOSS > * the app and appliance both must have no cloud dependency and talk to each other in an off-grid LAN-only scenario > * upgrades must be fetchable over Tor without registration, and side-loadable; users must be able to connect over Tor from a public cafe/library to fetch upgrades

Most (if not all) color printer makers are printing unique tracking dots on every printed page. But some of them are transparent about it and disclose it to consumers.¹ In any case, in the mid-1980s Xerox and Canon developed the anti-consumer feature decades before it became known to the public in 2004. So certainly we can blame them for surreptitiously assaulting our privacy. It’s the surreptitious element of this that is the most infuriating. Transparently disclosing the feature to consumers is the socially responsible approach because at least informed consumers know they are signing up for: * reduction of print quality * higher cost of consumables (more yellow consumption) * loss of privacy * inability to print a black document when yellow ink/toner is empty Xerox and Canon should be boycotted not just for the anti-consumer feature but for concealing it. ¹ citation needed… I don’t recall where I read that some printer makers are transparent about it. I would like to know which ones are transparent just from a standpoint of knowing where the integrity is. ## Update- other threads on this topic: * (law) https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/45605675 * (asshole design) https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/45653037 * (FOSS request for circumvention) https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/45652622

Europe’s block on boycotting banks No law directly prohibits boycotting banks AFAIK, but it’s effectively illegal to boycott banks because: - It is illegal to be paid wages in cash in some (all?) countries. - Some EU countries governments insist on tax payments by bank transfer. This is for all kinds of tax (income tax, property tax, and other forms of tax). - EU level: all cash transactions above €10k are illegal in the whole of Europe. Most of western Europe reduces that limit to €1—3k. ### Belgium’s ban on boycotting energy suppliers Offgrid energy is illegal. ### Denmark: you cannot boycott email, as of this year Denmark eliminates the postal service this year. This essentially means you cannot boycott email because the snail mail option is generally gone. Exceptionally, you can perhaps send letters using UPS or FedEx, but that’s not really affordable if you are boycotting email. Not sure if hand-delivery is an option. Consider Germany, where postal boxes are not always public access and couriers are given a key to the lobby. If that happens in Denmark, then hand-delivery cannot be relied on. ### US ban on boycotting Israel You can boycott the US in the US if you want, but you cannot boycott Israel if your job is from the US government. This tyranny was showcased in Texas when a Palestinian school contractor who taught kids how to speak Arabic had to renew her contract. The new contract required her to agree to not boycott Israel. She could not in good conscious sign such a bizarrely oppressive contract, so she was let go.

I have not tried it but I thought it should be mentioned here.

It requires a newer version of emacs than I have – but that may change soon so I will be able to try it out and perhaps post to !fediapps@lemmy.stad.social.

I was able to embed an EPS file in the source so that the compiler generates the image that the document re-imports. EPS files have different formats and some of them fail because they are binary, so it’s a dicey process.

what worked

I started with a large JPG which I was importing this way:

\includegraphics[width=18mm]{big.jpg}

Looked nice but quite wasteful as the whole JPG ends up inside the PDF only to be scaled down to 18mm wide. So I needed to resample it. But I also need to distribute the tex doc and really can’t be dealing with distributing multiple files. EPS files can be simple ascii text and they can be embedded in the code. So I ran ImageMagick to shrink the image and produce an EPS file:

$ convert big.jpg -geometry 100x small.eps

The the scaling option (width=18mm) can now be omitted: \includegraphics{small.eps}. It was the right size but blurry. WTF? I don’t know the problem exactly but I recall that ImageMagick has some shitty defaults that ignore attributes of the original image, thus forcing users to figure out what parameter to provide in order to maintain original attributes.

I could not be bothered to investigate. So I made the image 50% bigger than needed and made latex rescale it (sloppy but works):

$ convert big.jpg -geometry 150x medium.eps

In LaTeX: \includegraphics[width=18mm]{medium.eps}

Job done. But sloppy because I should not have to make the image bigger than displayed and then downscale it in LaTeX to avoid blurr.

better, but fails

So I used #GIMP to shrink the image. GIMP is a different kind of shit-show because it crashes Wayland, but I was finally able to scale the image faster than GIMP could crash and GIMP did a good job. That is, the EPS file was the right size and without getting blurry. Thus the resampling was proper.

But the EPS file produced by GIMP is not ascii text. It has some characters that fuck up the ability to embed the image in the source code. Fuck me. There are different EPS flavors and even a badly documented eps2eps tool.

Perhaps I have to use GIMP to scale to a PPM and then ImageMagick to convert the PPM to EPS without scaling. Assuming that works, an annoyance remains: an EPS ascii text file from ImageMagick has many lines which requires a lot of scrolling to reach the LaTeX code after it’s embedded in the code. Are there any other non-binary image formats apart from (e)ps?

PDF is a one. A PDF can also be binary or ascii. If the effort is made to ensure an ascii PDF, I think the downside is the final document is no longer versatile (can only be PDF not PostScript).

SVG is another ascii image format but I’m not confident LaTeX handles it well.

I am tempted to follow this approach to make a definitively ascii EPS file. But it would be useful if there were a way to make an EPS file that has no more than 20 or so linefeeds.

There is an inline-images package… I might fiddle with that if the EPS gives too much issue.

Update

I looked more into ImageMagick. The complexity is staggering because there are six approaches to minifiscation:

-sample -resample -scale -resize -adaptive-resize -thumbnail

Resizing turns out to serve my purpose well. But then there are 30 different filters listed by convert -list filter. So I tried them all:

convert -list filter| while read fltr; do convert source.jpg -filter "$fltr" -resize 215x "$fltr"215x.eps; done
montage *215x.eps -tile 8x miff:- | display -

They all looked the same AFAICT and all were decent. So I just used the default filter in the end. I’m glad I could ditch GIMP given how badly it behaves on Wayland. The encoding from ImageMagick is very safe for embedding in LaTeX docs, as it seems to use only HEX symbols (0-9,a-f). Here is a sample:

4D4D48454342413E3D3F3F40403F3B3A3C3D40413E393835322D26211B1C1B191C1B1C1A
1A19171314172828292B3844474C4B5256554B44474B555B5C5A585857585C63676F777F
868C8D9096999CA0A2A3A6A7A7A9AAACADAFB1B1B1B2B4B6BABCBDBEBEBFBEBEC285302F
442F11120D0E1B32230F14201B0D101B23231418293E42514A6A4653605B393F4B523C4C

OTOH, it’s so limited that an image of approximately ~18x25 mm ends up taking almost 1600 lines of text in the document.

GIMP’s output is apparently also ascii. I don’t know how to test that other than to grep it for something arbitrary and see if grep prints that the file is binary. The encguess command prints US-ASCII. GIMP uses a broader range of ASCII which is normally preferred but something causes pdflatex to choke on it.

I’m struggling to find docs on the Lemmy API which are not jailed in some shitty closed website.

This seems incomplete. This is in a Cloudflare jail. This is apparently LISP-specific (I am looking for the HTTP API). This page crashes Firefox and is incomplete. This page cannot be reached (at least, not from tor). This may be complete, but it’s highly interactive and probably saves as garbage. There is a download option, but the file is JSON! WTF? Why? It’s supposed to be a manual.

And ideally, I would like it in a PDF for offline use.