Notices by Michael T Babcock (mikebabcock@floss.social)

@dalias @krans so you have a system that uses arbitrarily large numbers. You can store those numbers as very large words or dwords or you can encode them into smaller serially-decoded parcels.
UTF does that.
Each UTF byte is either the start of a larger value or a follow-up value (based on the high bit being set). This means the first 127 characters in ASCII and UTF-8 match by the way.
Small numbers? fewer bytes to encode. Large numbers? more bytes. UTF=variable. UCS=fixed.

@dalias @krans the result of which has been that languages that primarily use ASCII benefit greatly in byte-count from using UTF-8 as an encoding system, where languages like Japanese (iirc) end up using 3 bytes in UTF-8 but only two in 16-bit encodings.

@krans @dalias aside, this is just more proof that the terminology needs revision.
The fact that Unicode is just a numbered list of possible visual language thingies that can sometimes be combined to make other logical language thingies and those numbers can be encoded in a bunch of different ways is already complex enough for most people.
(Never mind 16+ bit encodings having endian issues)

@dalias @krans I prefer to think of UTF as an encoding system of UCS, as that's how it was designed even though sometimes it has other side-effects.

@luna@pony.so basically, iterating bytes in UTF-8 or words in UTF/UCS-16?

@krans oh okay, my reversal I'm sorry. As a Python programmer we just call those characters because Python innately differentiates between characters and encodings. My C++ knowledge is 10 years out of date alas so I'm not helpful but good luck!

Fantastic article on road safety and putting systems in place to actually reduce the fatalities caused by car society:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240517-vision-zero-how-europe-cut-the-number-of-people-dying-on-its-roads
"The pattern that began to emerge revealed that crash victims were not, as many in the road transport sector, assumed – drunk and irresponsible drivers. For the most part, they were people who made small mistakes within a system that had no margin for error."
#cars #safety #driving #urbanPlanning #roads #government

@hacks4pancakes @evacide ... for every person who puts their head in the sand and says they don't follow politics?

@AnthonyJK I'm pretty sure there's nothing you can do that will stop a ship that size from destroying infrastructure it collides with.

@jon this is being discussed in #Canada; have the system automatically file your taxes for you and if you think they're going to screw up, you're free to file them yourself (or through a tax preparer) instead.
Here it means many people who aren't receiving government benefits based on tax filing would suddenly receive them automatically.
https://beta.ctvnews.ca/national/business/2023/3/30/1_6335333.amp.html
#taxes #government

Just a #tree in the dark #backlit by a street lamp. #photography #photo

@aral what is it with this continued fallacy some people perpetuate that using a network is actively supporting it's owners? As though shopping at specific stores or buying certain products means we support the political views of those millionaires, when in fact most people just want to live their lives in peace.

@wwahammy we should have a programmer's #guild in the west, think SAG-AFTRA / ACTRA which would give all programmers standing no matter their workplace, and allow for much better wage protection than doing workplace-by-workplace #unions.

@thelinuxcast is it better than K-9 mail?

@silverwizard keeps your tips good too :)
Okay fine that was a bad pun.

@silverwizard sticky tack is even better because you get your finger back to do other things with :)