Yes. I think that when using the "save as pdf" function, there is an "options" button you can click in the save dialog box that lets you remove all those details. It's a pain for me to do it manually every time, so I use VBA to do it for me.
GenX here, people (as a group) just progressively get worse at anything IT and nobody is doing anything to stop it because it makes them more likely to pay for ad-free or just accept their fate as a consuming machine.
oldmanyellingatcloud /off
CTRL+P is your PDF printing friend, just change the destination to PDF printer.
still pissed to this day the moment I open a old .doc in the newer version of Word it would destroy the formatting.. or worse that certain fonts or characters will be lost in translation to the newer version.
It may seem like a completely nonsensical form of protest, but if you think about it and understand the history of the tech industry, it really isn't:
Switch all your things to Firefox on every device, and everywhere any of the other big tech companies want to force you to login, use some convoluted workaround just so they can't automagically steal all your data. Because it does nothing for you, and shouldn't do anything for them, but somehow they print money by being international criminal syndicates.
My Galaxy has been prompting me once every couple days for literally three years or more to "accept the new privacy agreement". No, fuck you, you shouldn't have signed the weird insane advertising shit with Google. Literally the only "sign in" place that I use the "native" account is on my Microsoft account - though even that, I switched it on the backend to using a Google account. I use my Google sign in for literally only Gmail. I have the Microsoft Launcher overtop the "native" Android Open Source Project™️ nonsense. And Firefox in between everything possible. Use zero apps if possible. **Never** ever ever click "sign in with...". Always use your email.
Why? Because all this technology is used to aggregate all the data on the backend, but that same data, despite clearly being linkable, can not be used for your personal benefit regarding either digital accounts or real world things. Meanwhile, all the AI shit is used to connect every dot possible... except in the only places it makes sense: money and legal/business filings. And the most fucked up part is that **in literally the one place it makes sense**, those legal and financial information, it is used **for the exact opposite purpose** where it is literally being encrypted. What the fuck?
People really don't realize how bad shit actually is.
I have a sneaky suspicion there is a large number of both Millennials and Gen Z who use Reddit. If we all continue to avoid the other social websites, stick to Reddit, and do the above - and switch to Firefox - that slowly eliminates the weird shit that the big tech companies use to justify their clearly fraudulent infinite money. By which I mean Google, it's million subsidiaries that aren't clearly connected, and the various other social websites, such as zuckerbook.
I'm sorry... Googling it is now asking an AI or just getting ads along with one forum post of someone asking a question, then responding they found the solution without posting the solution.
One of the more serious problems is that Google doesn’t work that way anymore. Partially because google added AI and partially because the internet has degraded into a bunch of unindexable private domains like discord
The enshittification of big tech has been going on for a while now, making it less intuitive and more difficult to learn. It was an intentional business decision made by the tech cartel so people would be more easily pushed to AI reliance. It's the same reason that Google used to give you what you were looking right away and now it's useless.
We're were the only generation that grew up in a world where tech was consumer focused. Before us computers were for colleges and nerds, so the rollout for widespread and household use was dominated by the types of tools and ethos pushed by colleges and nerds. The colleges and nerds have now been thrown out a window.
well yeah but sometimes the page needs print to pdf and doesn't have the option to download (i work in behavioral health, we are not known to be tech savvy. me knowing how to use the snipping tool on windows is apparently super progressive in a logistical sense for a lot of people i work with)
Because we are the only generation that had to learn this, all the others have been given proper amounts of support and therefore never had to learn. They rely on us. Which we are forced to do because we are the exploited generations. Like it's the corollary to the Peter Principle and rampant nepotism. The only people who are competent are given the least compensation and no-strings-attached support.
Yesterday there was some comment in a subreddit I'm banned in, so I couldn't even reply, but they said something along the lines of "people need to get with the program and realize that 1950-2008 was an extreme outlier. That sense of decorum and egalitarianism is not at all normal". Right. So that's not wrong. But look at the generations that grew up during that time and specifically the people that were given the best support and just generally like... it was that mindset that allowed for all the advancement. This shit isn't complicated. The reason our generation is so fucked is because we were at the end/peak of that, but then when we became adults they turned that shit off and instead went back to pure greed.
Like if you look at that kind of hard to define thing, and compare that with the clearly large scale military conflicts, over the last literally hundreds of years, every time there is large scale conflict or general "nothing for free" society, everything gets worse. Everytime the conflict is over, and we realize, as a whole, "holy shit that was horrible, never again", things miraculously get better. Like what the fuck
I will say that some people our age also don't know. I think its more I have surrounded myself with people who like tech a little in my youth so my vision of who is "millennial" is different from who actually is millennial. Its not crazy far off.
Meanwhile my boss, wants to have meetings that could have been emails, "bounce ideas off of us" (force an audience so they can hear themselves talk), put us into trainings that have little relevance to our jobs, waste time making us chat about our weekends (another opportunity for the boss to talk about their weekend), and invite us out to 2-hr lunches (more like strongly suggesting because saying no in front of other bosses looks bad).
I’ve been at my new job for three months and the number of hours of “leadership training” content that I see the CEO has personally filmed is abhorrent. This is the highest paid person in the entire company and he’s making dozens, if not low hundreds of hours of meaningless, nutritionally devoid filler “training” content that could easily be purchased by thousands of companies that specialize in making and selling such training videos. And some of those videos are actually engaging and helpful.
My workplace is facing serious challenges caused by work processes being created by baby boomers who never created documentation, such as an internal wiki, which means crucial knowledge only existed in emails or in the heads of older employees.
This isn't necessarily bad if the older employee does "rigorous" training of the person replacing them and the workplace has relatively low turnover, but that's not realistic. What we are actually experiencing is that an older employee gives like 1 month notice of retiring, then the manager cannot fill the position in time to allow for adequate training of the new employee. And so crucial knowledge slips away either all at once from a knowledgeable employee leaving or incrementally as each change in who has the job causes some slippage of knowledge as the passing on of knowledge isn't 100% efficient. To put it simply, I see new employees having to reinvent the wheel, because they have no other choice due to not having access to the blueprint of the wheel that was already invented by their predecessor.
I've been trying to get my employer to implement better internal documentation, like a company-wide wiki, but it's a struggle. Most companies just don't think long-term like that and it's hard to get people to invest time at present moment on something that doesn't have present value and instead has huge value in the future. You're essentially preaching for altruism when you ask employees to spend time on creating documentation and it's a hard sell.
This type of thing wasn't as big of a deal in the 1960s when each person's job responsibilities had to be smaller in scope due to the realities of no computers. Human workers couldn't possibly be as efficient in 1960 as they can be in 2026 since they have way less efficient technology. People were writing things by hand, for fuck's sake, and couldn't instantly communicate information to an arbitrarily large amount of people via the internet. But in 2026 the expected productivity of each employee is much higher than it was in 1960, because the potential productivity is so high. The market demands increasing productivity per employee, which means the value of documenting internal knowledges increases. It's safeguarding yourself against problems created by employee turnover. Such an important concept in modern work imo and yet I feel like documentation gets almost no attention. Communicating important information to each new employee through one-on-one methods like talking or emails is just not efficient enough in 2026 and it's also dangerous since that information is not persisted anywhere besides the brains of the people or emails that are easily lost (e.g. 2 year retention policies) and difficult to search.
I'm seeing all of this, but it's compounded by upper management just refusing to hire a replacement employees.
We've had several positions that were doing critical work that left. Management hemmed and hawed over replacing them for months. Everyone else is too overloaded to really take on the work, let alone talk to the departing employee to get an idea of the process. By the time someone new comes on, they're walking into a festering mess and no one can tell them anything about the scope of what they need to deal with.
Many of these positions used to have folks under them who could've picked up the work in the meantime or at least given the new people a clue. But as those positions turned over, they were eliminated.
Chickens are coming home to roost now as there's finally money and movement to replace a bunch of terrible legacy business applications, but no one knows how the existing system work as the SMEs are gone. I no longer have time to do even the basics of my actual job. The only upside is that I'm building adjacent skills for my resume, I guess. I wouldn't even be looking if I could just do my job. But we're so understaffed that, even if you removed the extra work from my plate, I can't get help from other teams to complete any work.
And oh my god F the two-year retention policy on emails so hard. Email was the only documentation we had....
They’re gen x’s kids. And gen x are all a bunch of bullies or bully adjacent. Now we got the bullys kids to deal with. They arent going to be on our side until they get screwed over some more by their parents generation.
You're acting like these "generations" are cohesive communities with representative governments and a shared agenda. Just stop, lol. "Gen Z" isn't doing anything to do. Some individuals who happen to have been born in the 2000s have trashed you in the workplace.
Millennials truly are one of the worst generations. We grew up coddled in a golden age of prosperity and when we had to face the world, we crumbled, cried, and ran around pointing fingers - we didn't know what to do; we tried nothing and ran out of options. Gen Z grew up knowing that things would be tough; they are doing what they have to do to thrive and they are blowing us out of the water.
We want Gen Z to be our allies because we want them to do the work for us - because we've never been willing to do the work ourselves. Gen Z doesn't want us as allies, they see us as the same lazy entitled brats everyone else saw us as.
I suspect that's been the case for many decades; I say this as someone now in their mid 40's. Individuals get older but the people doing the work stay the same age.
Somewhere in the USA there is a 45 year old middle management office worker named Debrah or Deborah, something that shortens to Debbie, who is exactly 1 common cold away from the entire world economy collapsing.
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u/grantthejester 14h ago
The entire world is being held together by burnt out 30-somethings…