About race fetishism and commercial exploitation, I believe

I do

I think part of it is the deceptive simplification of political alignment into a single axis with two poles you assign whatever significance you want to.

Gov’t control can be used to regulate companies for killing us for slightly larger profit margins, but also to surveil and eliminate dissidents. It’s just not adequate to judge a political stance by.

I wish you a speedy and affordable recovery

Which words do you mean? Because I understand them all. They convey information, the fundamental point of language, hence they don’t detract. Just because you can’t make sense of them doesn’t mean they’re nonsense.

If you’re talking about “Mach Yeet”, yeet refers to forceful movement. This specific combination then means really fucking fast. The exact speed doesn’t matter. The frivolity of the language underscores their excitement or might just be their idiolect.

Either way, so long as it’s nothing hateful or harmful (beyond hurting your linguistic sensibilities), trying to police other people’s vocabulary is narrow-minded and needlessly stuck-up.

Why don’t you yeet that shit (throw it far away) and come join us in watching the fascinating evolution of language?

For some character sets with a lot of different characters like the Han Unicode representation, that could be cumbersome. Granted, Han might not be a great risk for confusion so you might just whitelist them collectively, but my point is that the approach would have to be more nuanced and complex. Ultimately, humans are complex and so are their languages.

If AI constantly refined its own output, sure, unless it hits a wall eventually or starts spewing bullshit because of some quirk of training. But I doubt it could learn to summarise better without external input, just like a compiler won’t produce a more optimised version of itself without human development work.

To clarify, I meant that from the devs’ perspective: The effort of individually vetting every single character for possible confusion is immense, and the end result would still be just as western-centric. Imagine having a domain name in Greek where some characters are replaced because they might be confused for Latin characters. Or, conversely, having a few characters replaced by similar Latin ones for an attack, which your solution wouldn’t catch.

The result would also still be unreliable even for Westerners. If some other character set you didn’t vet also contains similar looking characters, there’s a new surface for attack.

To properly close that security gap would be an immense arms race… or you could simply shut down the entire attack vector.

So when you consider the importance of protecting gullible people from insidious attacks and the complexity of trying to allow non-Latin characters without creating openings, the question “How widespread are non-Latin URLs in my target audience and is it critical that they be rendered in their native script?” becomes a calculation of cost and benefit.

It’s a shit compromise to deal with the shit fact that some people being assholes ruins good things for the rest of us who aren’t.

Yeah but the compilers compile improved versions. Like, if you manually curated the summaries to be even better, then fed it to AI to produce a new summary you also curate… you’ll end up with a carefully hand-trained LLM.

Though I guess that would be a lot harder.

From the devs’ perspective, the relevant question will be this: How hard is it to map out all the lookalikes, and just how important is it to render foreign domains properly?"

As in, desgined to fail early? I highly doubt that.

Even if it were true, lightbulbs still last longer and are way cheaper. Whether I have to replace them every six years or every five years doesn’t matter as much.

No bad friends! Focus on the upsides

Eh, I’ll worry about that if and when we get to that point. Who knows, maybe they turn out really fuckable.

Really, Rule 2 should be enough. Inanimate objects can’t give consent.

As I understand the hostility towards merchants, it essentially stemmed from a one-sided view of their behaviour:

The king (or Duke or whoever) demands taxes in coin, so you need coin. Up pops a merchant offering to buy your surplus grain, but trying to haggle the price down to as little coin as possible.

You have to find some buyer so you can afford the tax, and the merchant exploits that necessity. To afford the tax, you may end up having to work more so you can sell more. But then a bad year rolls around, you struggle to survive at all, and to add insult to injury that merchant is offering to sell you some of the grain you need… for much more than he last bought some from you, carving a profit out of your misery.

Of course, from a modern perspective we can see that the merchant is an important logistical service provider to feed the city folk that do non-agricultural labour (some of which may circle back to benefit the farmers, like ploughs), the profit essentially being a wage for that service, and the real vampire are the aristocrats that grow rich off that circle of exploitation.

But as farmer, you don’t see the king get richer. There’s no newsfeed showing pictures of the grand new mansion he built himself. You see the merchant trying to squeeze you for as much as possible, and you hate him for being a leech.

I’m guessing most of the inland farmers holding those views had less contact with the pirates, but also, if using force to take what you want is normalised anyway because there’s another war rolling past every few generations (if not more frequently, depending on where you live), piracy may seem less “wrong” too.

Historians used to be extremely reluctant, due to lingering Victorian-era mores, to acknowledge GSMs in history.

Alternative explanation: They were eggs / so deep in the closet they didn’t even know they were.

(Probably not, but I like my version of history better)

Product packaging for non-foods

What, you don’t think 1cm² of product should be packaged in a 7×10 cm doubled-up plastic sheet?

Obvious cruelty aside, tossing city-dwellers on a bit of land and telling them to become farmers has to be astronomically idiotic. It’s like having a boss that doesn’t understand what their employees are doing, except a lot deadlier.

Shai-Hulud actually does some good though. Bless the Maker and His water. Bless the coming and going of Him. May His passage cleanse the world. May He keep the world for His people.