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@CharlotteBuff

Also, thanks for making me look at unicode.org/reports/tr51/#Flag, which contains the following statement, which IMO is self-ridiculing:

> Although a pair of REGIONAL INDICATOR symbols is referred to as an emoji_flag_sequence, it really represents a specific region, not a specific flag for that region.

@CharlotteBuff

The thing that I complain about is that I can write a piece of text that, when rendered, has some meaning, and the rendering of that very same byte sequence (e.g. in message logs) later will convey a different meaning.

A text encoding can choose carefully how the symbols that can be encoded are defined, so that they won't be misused (as I suppose you'd call using regional-s regional-y to represent the Assad regime) in ways that will be unambiguous at one point in time and have unambiguously different meaning at another point in time.

We have a practical case of encoding of country flags causing problems.

To recap, flags are encoded as sequences of codepoints corresponding to letters in the country's ISO code (so, Polish flag is <flag-p> <flag-l>). There is no heed paid to their mutability over time.

The Syrian flag will at some point start being rendered differently. Then, all the previous statements about Assad's government that used the flag will start rendering as if they were about the rebels.

I'm sad at Unicode's failures to fully and immutably encode the meaning of whoever wrote the text (see Han unification for counterexample to "fully").

@glent This also looks borked? I can't imagine how you could get pH of 0.2 in a water treatment plant.

@whitequark @mcc

But that only applies to things that are likely to be present at a jobsite, so people who don't work next to a workshop/lab/something like that will still have the same problem with stuff like assorted resistors.

@mcc @whitequark

An electronics parts store in Kraków that I frequented used to do that for stuff like connectors or resistors that would normally be packed in units of ~100.

@regehr I think there were many worse zoom catastrophes in courts (well, catastrophies for the person in question but often arguably better results for the society).

@ckfinite @whitequark

Seconded.

On a similar note, it should be easy to find pirated Kongsberg simulators of an engineering plant of a ship with Diesel main engine and steam TG paired with a shaft motor-generator.

@susankayequinn @djg

If you don't mind me asking, I'd like to better understand how people think of special tableware. (I myself don't feel a need to use/have special tableware.)

My best approximation of why people like to have and use special tableware is similar to reasons for using makeup or aesthetically pleasing clothes. Is that a roughly reasonable comparison or very off?

I would expect that, given this is mostly about visual aesthetics, the desire to use special tableware would often cooccur with desire to make/serve visually aesthetically pleasing food. Am I roughly correct?

@billseitz @mcc

If they drop _codepoints_, then they amusingly will treat strings differently depending on whether they specify e.g. accented characters via individual codepoints or using combining codepoints for accents.

@mcc

Sometimes the information isn't there. E.g. "I want to tell if this UTF-8 string contains Japanese or Chinese pictographic characters" is sometimes unanswerable.

@cstross

I think iPhones themselves contain barometers.

@johncarlosbaez I'm confused. The system as described only delays images of satellites by a few days, but at the same time tells everyone explicitly what was redacted those 3 days later (you can run the same comparison on the published images and compare the results with previously published alerts). So this only makes sense if what is protected are images of events, and only for a short time. Do I misunderstand?

@niconiconi any divisions present? If not it's really bizarre, because casting down to u32 could be pushed off to the very end.

@falsevacuum or rather the electron (if they aren't all the same one, why are they identical?) :)

@mcc this sounds similar to the reason why some types have an into_parts method and a corresponding from_parts "constructor".

@_dm starlink benefits greatly from being run by SpaceX. If since other company was foolish enough to try starting the same thing by contracting SpaceX to launch their stuff (iiuc everyone else combined would struggle to have capacity), SpaceX likely could extract ~all their future profit. This send to me like benefiting from being the only company capable of doing X by making it infeasible to compete in Y.

Granted, this is not where his profits not his valuation increases mostly come from.

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