Could this be solved by having two renderers, and only using the proprietary Adobe one needed?

So what do you do when the pedantic gold standard of epubcheck says your book is fine, when it works without issue on Amazon Kindle, Apple Books, Thorium and everywhere else and yet Kobo says it’s “corrupted”?

I dug into this matter and found out that Kobo uses RMSDK, “Reader Mobile Software Development Kit”, Adobe’s proprietary ebook rendering engine.

Once the stylesheet was identified as the source of my woes, I could finally drill down to find which specific line was causing the issue. After creating a dozen more variations with different subsets of my stylesheet I eventually identified the culprit. It was this line:

.copyright img {
    max-width: min(150px, 30vw);
}

Once I changed it to the more old fashioned max-width: 150px; ADE opened it just fine.

But what is the problem here? The above code is perfectly valid CSS level 4, it’s just not supported by RMSDK, because its CSS parser is frozen in approximately 2013 — no flexbox, no grid, no math functions, no custom properties. Just good old float, bad font handling, and silent crashes when it sees anything it doesn’t recognize.

It’s the year 2026. Thanks to the horrendous RMSDK which Kobo decided to use as their backbone for all book rendering (probably for DRM reasons), a single line of perfectly valid CSS turns a perfectly valid EPUB file into a “corrupted file” on Kobo and just drops the whole book. No clear error message, no fallback. Just a massive fail.

What kind of info?

If you are scraping the project sites and having an LLM put together guides, they will likely go out of date over time and likely contain vital errors already. It would be much better if you simply direct users to where they can read the current up to date information.

How would this be better or more helpful than selfh.st? It is more reputable and more likely to stick around

Some sources are still better than others.

They do?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/fifthestate

On the consumer specific side: https://www.cbc.ca/news/marketplace

Oh I see, that makes sense :)

Maybe these communities then:

• !opensource@lemmy.ml
• !opensource@programming.dev

You could also post about the community in !communitypromo@lemmy.ca

This sounds good to me, thank you for putting in the time for this!

I didn’t know about your project, it looks cool! I think you could share it outside of your community some more, maybe you can crosspost them to !fediverse@lemmy.world?

I feel that some further refinement is needed. I agree with the sentiment behind the latest version of the rule, but I think it still doesn’t address the recent issues.

The way I see it, there is a very specific type of post that has started showing up very recently, and is getting lots of downvotes. Users here are justifiably suspicious of the pattern.

The ones that get downvotes are usually:

• from new accounts
• the user makes one post, and at most they only responds to comments in that one post
• the software uses the help of LLMs, while the post and/or comments are also helped by LLMs
• the software is made to look “professional”, whether it is the UI, the demo, or the README

I’m not sure what exactly the end goal is, but I don’t believe the story that they all use where they “had this problem and now want to share their solution”. I’m concerned that there is some other end goal, whether it is link farming, SEO manipulation, LLM search result manipulation, or it’s the setup portion of a cyber attack where questionable code will be added later (if it isn’t already).

Normally I would suggest to just moderate it based off of “you know it when you see it”, but in this case it’s difficult since it’s very similar to legitimate posts. There are real users that want to post with a new account, such keeping their professional life separate from their main account. It’s also hard to differentiate it based on licenses, because those recent accounts almost always license it as FOSS. I also don’t think it’s fair to exclude all AI assisted code, since it’s very common to have that now.

Perhaps instead of a rule, we could even try some of the following:

• To reduce the risk of OpenClaw style bots creating content here: AI is ok for the code and external text (ex. the README), but the post here should be written by a human. It’s not like the post needs to be that long to express why someone should look at it, and it won’t go through that many edits. Translations should be done through traditional translation software.
• To prevent driveby posts, we could automate a comment on new posts see if a user knows where they are posting. Asking about their favourite threadiverse community, or how long they have been a member here, or even how they learned about the community might separate bots from real users. It works pretty well for our registration applications on lemmy.ca / piefed.ca etc.

On top of being suspicious, I think it boils down to “projects that have a future” and “projects that don’t have a future”. People in this community want to run software that is likely to stay useful and safe over time, and that’s at the core of why these recent ones are downvoted.

In the workplace, there are still a lot of domain specific programs that don’t have Linux support. Companies don’t have much of an incentive to port that stuff over. As for the people who just need a web browser, they probably would use Linux just fine if they could buy a computer at BestBuy that comes with Linux preinstalled

Compare that to LLM programs, where it’s a matter of “download this app instead of that one, because this one is free and that one costs $25 a month”

Having an option vs not having an option

Also Linux and Windows are pretty different in use cases and capabilities. Meanwhile, local AI models have a very similar user experience. If hardware was cheaper and people could run better LLMs locally, they wouldn’t pay monthly for it.

Is ambitiousslab@feddit.uk also the author of the blog?

A blurb about the article is nice and helps to convince people to click on the article, but it isn’t necessary. From what I can tell, ambitiousslab seems to be sharing things that they find interesting and doesn’t follow the pattern of the usual bot spam we deal with

Would CoMaps be a better recommendation than OSMand?

For those who are familiar with Ente, how are their apps? I use something different for 2FA and photos, but I need recommendations for people who don’t want to deal with selfhosting and backing up Aegis

Network effect is the biggest problem for messaging services, and so I would still push for Signal over the alternatives that are technically better. This guide seems like it is focussed on users who are new to the space

I agree with the Linux recommendation, but I’d offer CachyOS over pure Arch for newcomers. The limine bootloader gives a lot of peace of mind, since you can tell the user “if you get a bad update, reboot and pick an older option on the first screen”.

Thanks!

A big reason for me is that people can tell who the source is more easily, instead of seeing a generic Yahoo link. If someone is blocking or flagging a particular domain through their app / front-end, then it won’t work for a yahoo link.

Also while I don’t think Yahoo is doing something illegal, my gut says that these articles are harming the smaller news orgs. When Yahoo/MSN publishes the full article, the user likely doesn’t notice who the actual news org is, likely doesn’t go to the real news orgs website, the news org has a harder time building a brand / reputation, and over time they might become even more dependent on Yahoo to stay afloat. A lot of the time when I look up a story, the yahoo page ranks above the actual original source, and that feels wrong to me

Meanwhile

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Canuck

@sanitation@lemmy.today, could you edit the post to use this link instead?

They put out a LOT of updates in a row a few months ago

Hopefully the maintainers are taking a break, and they aren’t burned out.

Are they though?

At the very least, no one is doing it here. I’d rather have a rebuttal comment if/when a post that tries to do that, rather than seeing these posts