@pluralistic I know it’s much much simpler but I feel the same way about those posts on other social platforms that are a raster image of text rendered on a solid or color gradient background. And there’s almost always a misspelling or grammatical error in the text.

“Let’s use 200KB+ of pixels to convey <1/2KB of information as an SVG *including the special font and background gradient!*” Not searchable or indexable without OCR, which anymore means an LLM. The waste multiplies!! Ahhhh!

@pluralistic : my philosophy is now to answer by email all the requested information. I let organizers dispatching those information. I don’t join any groupchat, I rarely fill any forms. If requested, I say "here are the information".

I’m of course not rigid (it makes sense if they ask speakers to vote or if they ask writers to fill their signing availability schedule)

But, surprinzingly, replying only by email and being straight to the point earned me a lot of respect by organizers.

@pluralistic Have they....met you? Or even read anything you ever wrote?

@pluralistic Computers are hard. There are probably two explanations. First is this person was shown how to accomplish this series of actions and they’ve been imitating it since. The second is they were shown a few parts and figured out how to link the steps together themselves, and proudly demonstrate how to send links in emails to new staff.

@pluralistic what do you mean? Sounds like the height of efficiency

@pluralistic wait until you hear about Belgium's eBox/Doccle system

@pluralistic
Working for a health company that takes soc2 compliancy very seriously. Sometimes you have to do the screenshot to show you did not alter anything. You can also send the needed data in text with the screenshot

@pluralistic The number of times I've asked for something like a key that needs to go into a DNS record and received a screenshot in a word document in response is ludicrous. This is the sort of stuff that's error prone when manually transcribed (especially in the case where I receive a 6MB *photograph* of the web page.)

If only there was a way to select, copy and paste text information directly into an email...

@pluralistic The most important thing is that Microsoft doesn't feel left out.

@pluralistic I wish there was a version of email with the ability to embed links, and maybe other formatting. Some sort of language for marking up "hypertext" as I like to call it.

@pluralistic i remember once having a project manager email me a word doc of a screenshot of a location on the server where a file i needed was. it's a kind of rube goldberg machine of sending information. at the very least, it makes a good story