Ich kann Deutsch erst am Niveau B2 sprechen.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • I know PDF providers who visibly print the customer’s name or number in the header of every page, along with short copyright text. I use qpdf --stream-decompress to make the PDF into human-readable PostScript, and then Python+regex to remove each header text, which stand out a bit from other PDF elements. The script throws an error if more or fewer elements than pages have been removed but that hasn’t happened yet. Processed documents sometimes have screwed-up non-ASCII characters in the Table of Contents for some reason but I don’t have the originas anymore so IDK if it’s my fault. Still, I wouldn’t share the PDFs unless in text-only or printed form because of any other steganographic shenanigans in the file. I would absolutely torrent them if I could repurchase them under a new identity and verify that the files are identical.

    BTW, has anyone figured out how to embed Python code in PDF? The whitespace always gets reencoded as x-coordinates so copy&pasting it never preserves indentation. No, you can’t use the Ogham Space Mark (Unicode’s only non-blank character classified as a space) for indentation in Python, I tried.







  • Yes. It’s not wrong 100% of the time, otherwise you could make a fortune by asking it for investment advice and then doing the opposite.

    What happened is like the current robot craze: they made the technology resemble humans, which drives attention and money. Specialized “robots” can indeed perform tedious tasks (CNC, pick-and-place machines) or work safely with heavier objects (construction equipment). Similarly, we can use AI to identify data forgery or fold proteins. If we try to make either human-like, they will appear to do a wide variety of tasks (which drives sales & investment) but not be great at any of them. You wouldn’t buy a humanoid robot just to reuse your existing shovel if excavators are cheaper. (Yes, I don’t think a humanoid robot with digging capabilities will ever be cheaper than a standard excavator).









  • You’ve never used function keys? The dual function is annoying even inside the OS. I have to help several people with laptops and you can’t tell what mode they’re in, the user often doesn’t know either.

    On laptops, you never know if the F-key behavior is defined by the OS, BIOS or keyboard driver. I just mash F2, F8, Fn+F2, Fn+F8, Del as often as I can (these are the most common keys to do the trick). You can reduce the options with a USB keyboard with just normal F-keys.

    Some laptops don’t have a key you can hold to enter BIOS settings or boot menu (maybe to start booting before the keyboard is initialized?) and there is a reset button hole for that.



  • Even basic things in distros are quite different, for example the frontend for settings, so tech support threads will show how to do it in the backend. Oh well, but then there’s someone who suggests

    sudo nano /etc/default/grub
    

    If you’re a noob, run this and get a “nano: command not found” error, you’ll google it and learn to resolve it using apt. However, Manjaro’s package manager is pacman but you don’t know, so you install apt using a weird guide without knowing what it even is. The next update then wreaks havoc on your system.

    My first install ended in a dependency hell because of this.