I have Foxit installed and can usually use that, but am forced to have Adobe Reader installed for other reasons.

Adobe Reader will now never be updated on my machine. It’s a small price to pay. And Foxit is great for most pdf tasks.

There was a point not so long ago where Adobe Collaboration Sync got so bad on my Windows 10 box it wouldn’t let me close any pdfs that were open. “File in use” error, even if all Adobe programs were closed except for that pdf. I’d have to go into Task Manager and manually kill it. Between that and Adobe Updater I couldn’t get rid of it by any known means, and it was choking the shit out of my machine.

I’m transitioning to Linux but not there yet, still need the Windows box for now, so I had to do something. But I’m old school, so it was a DOS batch file to the rescue. I call it “kiladobe.bat”:

taskkill /f /im armsvc.exe       
del "C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Adobe\ARM\1.0\armsvc.exe"      
taskkill /f /im AdobeCollabSync.exe     
del "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat DC\Acrobat\AdobeCollabSync.exe"      

It’s now a scheduled task in taskschd.msc. I put kiladobe.bat in the main Adobe program folder (heh) and run that task as administrator at startup and every four hours or so, give or take an hour.

No more problems.

Now, all that remains is that every so often I see the command window flash up for a split second because this batch file is killing Adobe shit, and it just makes me smile. (I could probably make it stop flashing up the CLI, but I genuinely enjoy the reminder of how I’m fucking Adobe’s virus-like install and lock endeavors up the ass.)

EDITED TO ADD a simple “@echo off” by itself as the first line would probably turn off any appearance of the CLI, if anyone wants to use this text for their own batch file. If that didn’t work I’d probably throw a space and a “>nul” at the end of each line to grab the output and throw it into neverneverland.

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Install Blocktube or another extension that stops videos from starting when you open the link, and read the transcript. It used to be at the top, just under the video itself, but now they’ve moved it to the bottom of the video description so you have to go through all the affiliate links just to get to the fucking transcript button.

But once you’ve found it, transcriptions are your best friend: skim it to see if there’s any real reason to watch (usually not) and enjoy that portion of your life that you just saved for things that YOU want and not what Google and that content creator want. The transcript will also tell you what portion of the video you need to watch, if actually watching it suits your needs.

I also regularly speed up videos; 1.25 is great under most circumstances, 1.5 if they’re really trying to draaaag shit out. You can always slow it down again, but it’s great for getting through the fluff if you need to hear it all (like repair videos for something you’ve never done yourself).

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Excellent response. You put it perfectly.

I like this sub exactly the way it is. If something isn’t for me, I move on. Not a big deal. And OP asked a great question. I never thought about it either, lol.

Admin approval with some text that needs a little bit of thought to fill out is surprisingly effective and definitely slows down spammers a lot.

I had to do that on dbzer0 and I think beehaw, they were both a fun exercise and took no time at all. Hell, I ended up submitting a wall of text about Sacco and Vanzetti on dbzer0 if I remember correctly, lol. But if nothing else they knew that it was 1) a human, and 2) I really believe what I was saying.

If the point is to get regular users who are thoughtful participants in online communities, requiring an email address and the typing of a few coherent words on their own behalf is NOT a barrier to entry, or even a much of a bar. After all, these people are applying to join a forum in which they are presumably going to spend unlimited time typing statements of their own creation in the future. Instance owners are just requiring a bit of that up front, and it’s not a huge ask.

It is, however, a very frustrating requirement for people who want to open multiple accounts for spamming and trolling purposes, and for that reason alone is a great filter for applicants.

I never heard it explained that way. What an excellent comment. Thank you for taking the time.

It was mandatory but essentially had to be done on your own time.

In the US, if you are an hourly non-exempt employee, that is overt wage theft in all 50 states. If a task is made mandatory by an employer, they must pay you for the time you spent on it.

I know this doesn’t help you now, of course, but it’s good to know in case you run into it again and feel like pushing back with a report to the Dept of Labor.

I am really sorry for your loss. I wish peace and healing to you and all who loved your mother.

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Eventually it started slipping

If you still have the printer (you may not but I’m going to put this out there for others too) that sounds like a simple roller replacement, and rollers/pickup pads are usually considered “consumables” instead of “parts” because they all wear out over time. This is true for most if not all consumer printers, ink and laser alike.

Replacements should be pretty easy to find for even old printers, and the installation is usually pretty straightforward. Last year I was still able to buy a roller replacement set for a 19 year old HP, and it took me ten minutes and one Phillips head screwdriver to replace them all.

You can also just take out and clean the hell out of anything rubber with isopropyl alcohol, letting it dry thoroughly and then putting it back in, or if possible rotate the rubber on it to present an unused side, I’ve done all that a few times too.

For pretty much any model printer, search on the printer model number and “maintenance kit” to find available roller/pickup pad replacements for sale, and printer model number plus “service manual” to get replacement instructions if you need them.

Of the two positions stated, theirs in the interview feedback and yours here, yours is BY FAR the more reasonable. That they would even feel free to say that to you indicates a bizarre level of entitlement or pre-employment loyalty there, one that’s made worse if it was the literal truth.

Entitlement is like an iceberg: what you see is just the tip. There’s always a whole lot more right behind it.

So let’s go there. I haven’t seen anyone else bring it up yet, but hypothetically, let’s say you drank the koolaid about their brand and, to increase your chances, you did spend a wad of cash (that you probably can’t easily afford) on their product before you even got to the interview. You walk in with that experience, able to tell them you’ve had their lessons and talk about their platform from a user’s experience, etc. Great!

Now what? How much farther does that actually get you? Not a goddamn bit, IMO, since you’re still behind anyone who has ever worked on a product of their own brand, and/or kissed whatever other invisible and undefined rings they want most but were not actually disclosed in the job posting. You spent all that cash, but your deficits as a candidate are still hanging in the air: you’ve never actually worked on it, just familiarized yourself with the product, albeit at a cost to you.

I am so glad you are writing this from the perspective of “should I have spent the cash?” rather than the perspective of “I spent this cash and now I’m out” because above and beyond the weirdness of their behavior, the last place you ever want to sink cash is on a job posting that can’t be bothered to include its most important requirements. Doesn’t matter that it’s a well known company, individuals and departments can be unethical too, and these certainly were.

It’s also entirely possible there’s an internal battle going on over this job, with some insisting it should go to someone already in-house and others, possibly even company policy, forcing it to be posted to external candidates – but in reality it has already been decided and they are just going through the motions of ticking the boxes until they can hire the one they wanted from the start. If so, you were never going to win it, and the whole thing was a gargantuan waste of time.

Add to that the fact that the posting itself omitted the company’s own most important requirement for the job, and I can only add to the chorus of people here who have already said you dodged a bullet.

Relax, you did good. Glad you made the decision you did. Best of luck in your job hunt.

Awesome. Joined. Thank you.

When the Reddit admins figured out that a large portion of the site is now bots

Just fyi, bots use API calls. Thus, Reddit has ALWAYS known exactly what percentage of users and posts are bots, and which bots are Reddit’s own.

And it’s not the first time. You could almost say it’s what Reddit is built on. When Reddit was first launched, the founders used alts to build numbers; now it’s bots.

My own personal view is that they’ve used bots all along. More recently, they made up for drastically reduced numbers last summer with bots, and that’s when the writing was really on the wall for Reddit because at some point it becomes a serious legal liability to continue to sell ad space and accept ad money based on numbers of users and posts that simply do not exist in reality.

So the IPO has to happen sooner rather than later, and RDDT will tank as soon as it goes public, which is why they’re trying to sell the rubes as many shares as they can at a guaranteed pre-IPO price: that’s free money for them, which they will take and go while Reddit implodes.

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This pre-IPO invitation to buy is the “pump” part of pump and dump, of course everyone hates it, lol.

“I think it’s pretty cool that Reddit is doing this IPO offer to their mods and users,” a Reddit user who asked me to identify him as Kevon tells me. “It’s a nice little thank you that actually may have some monetary value.”

Kevon’s considering buying shares in the Reddit program, and may buy more once it goes public, if he feels the stock is undervalued.

Kevon sounds like a nice guy, but someone should explain to him the difference between being given options and buying shares at the IPO price. Reddit’s not doing him any favors.

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