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155 Following
665 Posts
Wikipedian, character encoding nerd, engineering graduate, software programmer ; genderqueer 🜬, not that much of a "trap", but proud of it
Homepagehttps://harjit.moe/
Pronouns(th)ey/she/he in descending order of preference

you might be able to tell that yes, I, lady with a debilitating anxiety disorder about things like crossing streets, who had a massive roly poly fluffball made of pure love suddenly dropped into her life, and who moved heaven and earth to push herself to make sure his life would be as safe and healthy as possible, really take it kind of personally when a complete stranger who hasn’t even seen my dog outside of a candid photo decides to tell me I’m doing it wrong

there’s been a lot of learning as we go. there’s been a lot of taking advice from people who actually met Odin and observed him. we switched to the gentle leader on the recommendation of an old lady in a power chair who hangs out at the public drug-doing benches and calls herself “the mafia mother”, and it was a miraculous improvement in our ability to communicate clearly to Odin. on our way home tonight, I spotted glass on the sidewalk and had him stopped still in under a second.

number of people he’s hurt: 0, other than accidentally bruising me as a puppy.

number of animals he’s hurt: 0.

number of angry old guys he’s slimed on the tram: okay yes 1 sorry dude

number of other dogs who have attacked mine unprovoked: idk probably like 5

number of people who have been REALLY weird at me purely because he’s big: way too many

For those who haven't seen it yet, @CharlotteBuff's spectacular critique of the emoji working group's selection process for Unicode 18:

https://www.unicode.org/review/pri537/feedback.html#ID20260328102651

Somewhat brings to mind this seminal masterpiece from Michael Everson and the late Andrew West:

https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2017/17393-wg2-emoji-feedback.pdf

---

My own take:

I agree insofar as the precedent by which CHIPMUNK encompasses tree‑squirrels would suggest that BUTTERFLY would encompass monarch-butterflies (and if not, then tree-squirrels should definitely be disunified), if there's any desire for a consistent character-encoding model.

Disunifications are sometimes appropriate but not to be undertaken lightly, considering that they are inherently disruptive: existing fonts or implementations will suddenly, retroäctively, be showing one codepoint with another codepoint's glyph (which, depending on the font fallback stack, might result in near-identical glyphs for two codepoints with all the security implications of that); existing documents/posts/messages will suddenly, retroäctively, be using the “wrong” character.

I was honestly quite skeptical of the disunification of U+1FAAF from the misnomered U+262C as an apparent test-case[1] for the Unicode Technical Committee setting an indefinite moratorium on new variation-selector emoji[2] considering that U+262C had *already* long been implemented with colour-emoji presentation by a certain major vendor (and may even need a technically-Unicode-nonconformant variation-selector sequence to *prevent* it from so displaying).

[1] https://corp.unicode.org/pipermail/unicode/2022-September/010317.html

[2] https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2023/23252-legacy-disunification.pdf

Public Review Issues

文字情報基盤検索システム

文字情報基盤のデータベース検索および情報取得を行うウェブサイトです。

Cloudflare just published a vibe coded blog post claiming they implemented Matrix on cloudflare workers. They didn't, their post and README is AI generated and the code doesn't do any of the core parts of matrix that make it secure and interoperable. Instead it's littered with 'TODO: Check authorisation' and similar

https://blog.cloudflare.com/serverless-matrix-homeserver-workers/

Building a serverless, post-quantum Matrix homeserver

As a proof of concept, we built a Matrix homeserver to Cloudflare Workers — delivering encrypted messaging at the edge with automatic post-quantum cryptography.

The Cloudflare Blog
Plural of “mutex”?
Mutexes
38.7%
Mutices
35.5%
Mutexen
6.5%
Muteges
0%
Mutexar
3.2%
Mutex (same as singular)
16.1%
Poll ended at .

I'm just making a note of this because I'm old enough to remember and a lot of people aren't – I saw someone claim that Google stole the name Chrome "from Firefox's internals", which makes no sense.

Back in the early 2000s, "chrome" was common programmer slang for "user interface". Like in general. Any user interface at all was "the chrome." I have no doubt Firefox's older source code refers to it as chrome, because I'm pretty sure I was referring to UI as "chrome" in my own university homework assignments at the time.

The term became much less common after Google Chrome launched because it became too confusing. Google's own claim is that the name was inspired by sports cars, and the programmers found it funny because having less "chrome" in the UI sense was an explicit goal. Whether that's true or not: they definitely didn't spitefully steal some secret Firefox codeword???

The above post is not to be construed under any circumstances as general approval of Google and everything they have ever done ever, and anyone yelling at me about how I'm a bad member of their religion because I said this SPECIFIC accusation is ahistorical will be blocked to the moon and back.

.
Chicken pizza
100%
Chichen Itza
0%
Poll ended at .
'Tin pest' makes more sense to me. Tin just doesn't want to be locked down in a shape like that. I get it. But why would any metal want to grow hair??
https://xkcd.com/3115/
anyway TL;DR fuck AI but also fuck people who detract from the real problems by exhausting everyone with misinformation and fake scares
I am absolutely devastated to hear that Asian scripts expert Andrew West has passed. I have a long-term project on the back burner that I intended to present to him one day after he kindly sent me the data I needed to do it. https://corp.unicode.org/pipermail/unicode/2025-July/011467.html
Andrew C. West 魏安 1960–2025