just breathe.

Pan × late 20s × she/her × ao3: eyes_onthehorizon keep your eyes on the horizon no terfs, no maps, no fash.

[fremulon]

when someone asks my political views

[kremlin]

uninstall adobe acrobat. it is malware. it has been malware. these aren't opinions: acrobat meets the definition of malware.

it installs a user-login-time "startup" executable that ignores any windows directives to disable it on startup. doing so only removes the even-more-malicious taskbar-icon-creating advertisement-notification-creating process. no matter what you do, the sleeper "updater" process starts when you log in, and runs perpetually

it sends & receives encrypted network traffic both periodically and non-periodically. both are bad, both are suspicious, and a program doing both is more suspicious than the sum of their parts. and to boot: acrobat will polymorphically edit its code after such network activity

this isn't new: it has always done this. now, it does not even do the thing it is meant to: provide a way to interact with documents, which is amongst the very first features computers were built to provide. you can merely open PDFs and read some of their content in the narrow space between the requests for adobe to give them your money, and interface for features you cannot use (because you don't) or do not, have not, and will not ever need

adobe and microsoft would very much like the user's cultural norms around computers to allow for advertisement built into the local software and even operating system itself. the web being 100% advertisements was not enough! sure enough, acrobat will hijack the windows notifications system thing to give you the 2026 equivalent of pop-ups

i don't really know enough about windows software equivalents, so i'll paypal $20 to the first person that reblogs this with a list of 3-5 PDF reader/editor/etc acrobat equivalents that meet the following criteria:

open source, locally-built executables must match checksum of prebuilt distributed executable

no paid features/premium version/subscription/whatever

not a toy hobby project thing, must be windows-users-proof

cheers

[andmaybegayer]

Firefox's built-in PDF.js viewer: does everything you could want from a basic viewer, fast enough search, and can now do annotations for filling in forms and such

KDE Okular: is a decent viewer and can also do basic annotations, and is so not-a-toy that you can even download it on the Windows app store.

LibreOffice Draw: I don't ever really like having to open this but if you have to edit a PDF in detail it does work, and doesn't just vomit up a bunch of polygons when you give it text to work with. Better as an authoring tool than an editor.

[ms-demeanor]

I've 100% replaced free acrobat with the firefox built-in and it works wonderfully for general office use and research/reading/viewing. It doesn't have robust redaction capabilities, but if you need to fill and sign and highlight a form it's actually much more intuitive than acrobat reader.

[spaceshipsandpurpledrank]

It's so nice to see black men be vulnerable and fun.

[skygenders]

[motherfuckingshakespeare]

A HANDY CHART FOR THOSE OF YOU WONDERING WHAT THE FUCK IS UP WITH THESE. NOTE THAT THESE ARE ALL THE INFORMAL AND YOU IS THE FORMAL SO LIKE YOU WOULD ALWAYS ADDRESS YOUR SUPERIOR/ OLDER PERSON/ SOCIAL BETTER WITH YOU BUT WITH YOUR BUDS YOU CAN USE THESE. 

[heroineimages]

I’m not sure I knew the thy/thine distinction. Thanks for this!

[onbearfeet]

THINE IS ALSO GRAMMATICALLY EQUIVALENT TO YOURS.

“It is yours” and “It is thine” differ only in their level of formality.

[anti-parent]

teamwork makes the dream work. and dreamwork. makes shrek

[anti-parent]

fantastic. i love it. i posted this after my wife said it yesterday and as i was doing it i was like "this can't be an original thought. as soon as i hit post someone's going to say 'you stole this from a tweet from 2014' and i'll say 'no, i stole it from my beautiful wife.'"

[viewfindercomics]

sippy sippy

[forsythefrontier]

When you have nothing better to do on a space ship than listen to some gossip.

The book explains how Rocky easily learns English, so I kinda like the idea that he could potentially understand some animals, like whales.

[tinyyellowflowers-blog]

Was talking to a coworker today who explained that her grandfather was like Snow White “but Californian. And an old man.” in that the creatures of the forest would follow him around and presumably duet with him.

“When he died the ravens sat in the trees outside for a week, watching. Taking turns. A horde of raccoons tried to break into the house every night, tearing at the siding. Eventually they gave up, but it was unsettling.”

“Aww. They were checking on him!” I said, like a normal person. Internally, I thought “Maybe you could do the thing you do with dead pets, where you show them to the living pets so the living pet understands they’re gone. But I guess if you did that to a bunch of scavenging species, they’d be like “Well, that’s very sad but he IS food now.” So what you’d need, for human sensibilities, is some sort of transparent corpse barrier. Like a see-through coffin oh that’s what the dwarves were doing! You’ve stopped paying attention to this conversation about the loss of a beloved family member you gotta phase back in.”

[sun-ni-day]

oh that's what the dwarves were doing

[iamthelowercase]

Hello, tumblr! I saw something on here the other day that worried me, so I decided to Do Science about it. But I can't do it alone: I need your help to build the dataset!

Here's what I need you to do:

If you see a post with a "mature content" label, and it's 2026, DM me a link to the post.

Yes, that's really it.

I am hoping to collect several thousand such posts, so that I have a decent sized dataset. I do not care what the post is about; if it's labeled as "mature content", I want to add it to my dataset.

If I get 10,000 posts in my dataset before August 31st 2026, I will post my preliminary findings then. I won't feel comfortable calling my findings "settled" before 2027, unless I get over 50,000 posts.

[zoesupreme]

sometimes the nut doesn't bring any clarity at all no matter how hard you bust it. the delirium only deepens.

[zoesupreme]

man...

[despazito]

This Canada day let's celebrate the Hudson's Bay Company once owning 5% of the earth's total landmass now being relegated to a shitty kiosk in select Canadian Tire locations. Good riddance.

[despazito]

[alnitaks]

starry.eyed.stitcher

[segamascott]

[ms-demeanor]

To have a computer reliably recognize a picture of a red-winged blackbird the computer must first imagine the universe.

[ms-demeanor]

I am having complicated and frustrating thoughts on AI again (as always).

[ms-demeanor]

I don't know if I've expressed this but part of the thing that has been making me bugfuck insane about discussions around AI image generation is knowing people who have worked with computer vision for decades.

[ms-demeanor]

I should fire up my 2005 macbook with CS2 installed on it and edit a photo entirely with "AI tools."

[ms-demeanor]

This is a 1980 computer science master's thesis by Ellen Hildreth on computer image recognition and creation. (Link downloads PDF)

The paper demonstrates the development, training, and testing of the Marr-Hildreth algorithm for edge detection in digital images.

[ms-demeanor]

Every time I'm gearing up for a good academic rant on this subject I further entrench my hatred of copyright.

[ms-demeanor]

Look. I understand that people are concerned about training models. I really do get that, that people have intense feelings about their photos or drawings or image being used to train AI. I even kind of get wanting to weaponize copyright against that because you don't know what else to do with those feelings.

I am currently building a multi-decade chain of papers on computer vision and image generation to have this discussion, and I would like to do so in a moderately calm manner.

Unfortunately if I want to cite a journal article from 1983 in a tumblr post, the copyright holders of this article about image restoration and pixel randomization want $248 per section of excerpted text (<500 words).

So the calm has now gone away.

[digitaldiscipline]

This is the 85 year old creator of Roger Rabbit:

[nyanletnest]

bwaow