Is your life really improved by having access to <tilted heart face>?
Unicode is a massive clusterfuck. We’ve completely eliminated most of the advantages it might have held in the first place, like unambiguous character seeking from an arbitrary offset into the encoded byte stream. Now you have characters composed of multiple codepoints, for a few legitimate use cases like diacritics (which should actually not be handled this way) but mostly for dumb hybrid emoji shit. “Zero width joiners” should not exist. Even the diacritic stuff is total nonsense, and unsurprisingly has resulted in multiple serious vulnerabilities on various platform (iOS has had like 5 diacritic-induced crashes).
It’s fine to have a panlingual character standard, but it should be implemented as a minimal set of complete characters (no multi-codepoint bullshit) without pictorial nonsense like <various stupid multi-codepoint emoji> which should obviously be handled by a generalized vector graphics format.
Edit: in a hilarious demonstration of my point, HN strips emoji from the post text!
It’s also a way for large tech companies to unilaterally exercise neurotic political projects, like replacing the emoji for “pistol” with a squirt gun. Apple or Google can do whatever they want to Emoji in violation of the Unicode standard and other vendors are more or less forced to follow suit.
> putting that time toward actually cleaning up neighborhoods or tutoring underprivileged youth
The US has tried again and again these naively optimistic programs targeting “neighborhoods” and “the youth”, to no avail whatsoever.
The terrible reality is that the long-term prospects of a civilization are inexorably dominated by its demographics, and the demographics of the US are spiraling down towards disaster. We have exhausted the Flynn effect and our intelligence levels are declining. We continue to bulk-import millions of people with heritable intelligence levels below those required to sustain the level of civilization we have enjoyed in the past. Those segments of our population that produce enough wealth to sustain our political program are reproducing below replacement rate.
Unless we pull off a massive demographic reversal, which is probably impossible at this point, China is absolutely correct. The future of the US is, optimistically, Brazil, and pessimistically South Africa.
The biggest gaslighting of this whole affair has been the political adherence to clearly insane propositions like forcing everyone to wear masks (questionable in any case) but allowing cloth masks (which do, at best, ~nothing, unlike actual rated masks, so definitely pointless) or quarantining billions of young people who accumulate less than 25 micromorts of mortality from covid contraction in the name of adding (on expectation) a few life-months for geriatrics who are not contributing to society and are about to keel over anyway.
The unnecessary manmade destruction of utility over the last year is nearly unprecedented, perhaps the most devastating since WW2.
Why would they have dumped billions into developing these vaccines in the first place if they expected to just lose the IP rights right away anyway? You might be able to save a small number of extra people this time by screwing over the vax manufacturers, but a lot more people will die next time when no one is willing to put up the R&D money.
Last time I looked into this, Apple actually used quite a bit of clever crypto engineering to protect user privacy. It's not just a big database of locations that Apple keeps.
Do you support the right of businesses to refuse business to homosexuals, for example, on religious grounds? If you come back with “homosexuals are legally a protected class”, that’s evading the question and functionally equivalent to “no I don’t actually support freedom of association”.
I ask because in my experience most people on HN only support freedom of association when it’s politically expedient for them.
The evidence is quite clear that going to college doesn’t actually improve life outcomes very much at all. We mistakenly thought it did for a while, but what was actually happening is the people who were going to college were smart and very likely to succeed anyway.
> Those things, in America, trend disproportionately White.
It's funny how people never bring up how this effect is shockingly disproportionately mediated by Jews and not, like, Appalachian or midwestern whites.
If they weren't using this as an opportunity to pump some shitcoin, this might make sense. Bitcoin Lightning integration would be much less suspect, for example, because A) it's already well established B) they're not going to make a quick buck off it.
Unicode is a massive clusterfuck. We’ve completely eliminated most of the advantages it might have held in the first place, like unambiguous character seeking from an arbitrary offset into the encoded byte stream. Now you have characters composed of multiple codepoints, for a few legitimate use cases like diacritics (which should actually not be handled this way) but mostly for dumb hybrid emoji shit. “Zero width joiners” should not exist. Even the diacritic stuff is total nonsense, and unsurprisingly has resulted in multiple serious vulnerabilities on various platform (iOS has had like 5 diacritic-induced crashes).
It’s fine to have a panlingual character standard, but it should be implemented as a minimal set of complete characters (no multi-codepoint bullshit) without pictorial nonsense like <various stupid multi-codepoint emoji> which should obviously be handled by a generalized vector graphics format.
Edit: in a hilarious demonstration of my point, HN strips emoji from the post text!