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elilla&, triumphant over the precepts
elilla@transmom.love
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most people who are into writing systems are not into computers and vice-versa. so Unicode drama was a very particular kind of hobby drama. most of you have no idea how funny the current situation is.
see, it gets pretty tricky to define what's a "character" across every writing system in the world. for 20 years, Unicode had very strict rules about what gets into the standard: no "rich text" or "graphical variations", only "plain text abstract characters" are defined. you might think that "A" is a big pointy wedge with an horizontal stroke but from the point of view of Unicode, "A" is a number (65) and a name ("LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A") and some properties ("Letter", "Uppercase", "Narrow", "Left-to-right"). the facts that "A" is usually this triangley thing, but in some styles A looks more like a round oval with a tail, and in blacktext A looks more like an U shape—all that mean nothing to Unicode. all of those are merely graphical variations ("glyphs") of 65, LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A.
this gets of course fuzzy at the edges. The character 骨, "bone", can be written with the top component facing left, or facing right. This is unarguably a "graphic variation"—it's still the same "abstract character"—so Unicode leaves that for the font to decide. Unfortunately it has become custom in the modern era (but not in historical texts) that mainland China draws it to the left, whereas Japan and Taiwan and the others do it to the right. This means that when people changed their systems from legacy encodings to Unicode, suddenly their characters would be drawn in the hated Chinese way / the hated Japanese way, and since Unicode is a "foreign imposition" they would blame foreigner ignorance of their cultural nuances. In fact the Unicode hànzì team was made of specialists from East Asia and the reasoning for this bug was perfectly logical for nerds: if your system is set to Japanese it should be using Japanese fonts with the glyph to the right, it's not our fault if Microsoft/Linux/etc. is getting the wrong fonts. but in your legacy system it would "just work" and look right; upgrade to Unicode, problems happen. the dorks at Unicode would have endless discussions over this and reject the idea of adding "Chinese 骨" and "Japanese 骨" as different characters because that's technically Wrong, these are the same abstract character.
multiply that by a thousand. imagine 20 years of strict gatekeeping like this, with people constantly proposing new characters from this and that source and the guardians of Unicode rejecting them because they can be understood as merely graphical variations of existing characters, or as too obscure to be worthy encoding, etc. (it took so long to get hentaigana into Unicode, like ~8 years between proposal and finally having the characters encoded! you can't represent any premodern manuscripts without it!)
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then Japanese people start making cellphones with Internet, before everybody else.
and they put "picture" (e) "characters" (moji) because they're cute. each company makes their own emoji set, incompatible on purpose so you have to buy into their special, incompatible little internets.
see, the only situation where Unicode would make exceptions to their strict gatekeeping was "round-trip compatibility". a character like ª is just an especially typeset 'a' and thus should not count as an abstract character. but some previous text encodings like ISO-8859-1 already had an 'ª' separated from 'a'. so if you converted a text file from ISO-8559-1 and Unicode had no 'ª', it would become 'a', and now you can't distinguish it from regular 'a', so there's no way to convert it back to ISO-8859-1. you cannot "round-trip" between encodings. so in this case and in only ☝️ this case, the Consortium would allow breaking the usual gatekeeping rules, carefully and case-by-case.
then a guy from Google asked to add all the Japanese emoji from every vendor. after all, without that you couldn't represent Japanese meeru messages in Unicode and convert them back. the Consortium obviously refused all those silly pictures as out of scope. so Google teamed up with Apple and kinda highkey threw their weight, financially and otherwise, transparently because they wanted this feature in the nascent smartphone consumer culture, and powerful interests completely overrode the cabal of writing hobbyists who had hitherto kept Unicode so pure. after years of elaborate technical criteria refusing tons of characters that people proposed for serious use, Unicode 6 (2010) included the first set of emoji.
fast forward to now, and all of those Unix greybeards and linguistics associates just nod sadly in a corner from the purely ceremonial Consortium chairs at whatever Big Tech mandarins came up with this year, like, "yeah sure that's what we need, U+1FAE9 FACE WITH BAGS UNDER EYES , whatever. U+1FAC8 HAIRY CREATURE , why not at this point."
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Kevin Graaf
kevin@kbg.shI’m wondering if anyone would be interested in some kind of network for those in or engaging with academic CS or math who are skeptical/suspicious/or otherwise opposed to LLMs/“AI”? Personally, I feel a great deal of loneliness on this matter at the moment, and would appreciate the camaraderie if nothing else! I’m thinking this could be a Signal group chat if nothing else. If you’re interested, let me know with a response to this post. Would also appreciate boosts for visibility!
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Yusef Napora
yusef@hachyderm.io
Ethics aside, we can clearly no longer deny the utility of necromancy. Perhaps a year ago, when the pathetic shambling of the animated dead so often made a hollow mockery of our arts. But now! Incantations that once took weeks of toil can be wrested from their tormented souls in mere minutes!
Without the awesome power of the newly dead coursing through our veins, how are we to solve the great problems of our age, like the mysterious disappearance of so many of our elderly and sick friends, or the festering piles of rotten flesh that now clog our streets and homes?
If you still have qualms about using the large soul providers, you can always obtain your own local, free range specimens, although of course they won’t obey quite as faithfully as ones from the leading charnel houses.
Honestly, do you want to be left behind?
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Earthshine - @ DEFCON34
earthshine@masto.hackers.town"AI" doesn't "escape sandboxes" or "commit cybercrimes." Careless software developers write software that can do that, then run it without proper industry safeguards that have existed for decades, then get off the hook for the consequences because yall keep letting them claim "ai did it." No it fucking didn't. Stop personifying LLM agents. Stop letting others personify LLM agents. Call them on their bullshit and don't let this nonsense spread.
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Jon Worth
jon@gruene.socialRight then!
Record attempt: Longest train journey in the EU is live!
https://crossborderrail.eu/longestjourney/
#CrossBorderRail #LongestTrainEU
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Ritalin Invitees
intransitivelie@beige.partyI regret to inform everyone that my copy of QBittorrent escaped its sandbox last night and downloaded a whole bunch of content owned by major corporations, and then my copy of Jellyfin broke containment and added those unfortunately-downloaded media files to its various libraries. I'm conducting an internal investigation to figure out how this happened, which will involve consuming these media files until the answers become apparent. Thank you for your cooperation during this trying time.
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juliette
juliette@mastodon.greenIt’s really cool that Europe is hosting the next Solar Eclipse but I really don’t understand ESA’s choice of Iceland and Spain for the location. Those aren’t really central for most people. Bit of a shame. I hope they plan better next time.
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Ruth Mottram
Ruth_Mottram@fediscience.orgThis is so cool - if you're in Denmark, find out how much of the partial solar eclipse you'll be able to see on Wednesday...
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Greg Wilson
gvwilson@mastodon.socialPlease help if you can: I am working with some students who are studying programmers' beliefs about software engineering folklore. If you can spare a few minutes to answer the question in https://survey.bth.se/survey/2545, we would be very grateful. We would also be grateful if you could circulate the survey link to colleagues and friends - we would like to reach as diverse a demographic as possible. Thanks in advance.
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mhoye
mhoye@cosocial.caSome Stanford researchers dredged out the absolute dregs of r/AmITheAsshole for all those stories where _zero_ humans supported the poster, where one hundred percent of them said yes, you are unambiguously the asshole, and fed them into LLMs as first person scenarios to see what the LLM had to say.
Unethical, harmful, cruel, criminal, didn't matter: the slopbots took the faux poster's side about half the time.
Edit: preprint on arxiv https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01395
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec8352
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Rairii 
Rairii@labyrinth.zone
i didn’t think it was physically possible, but there’s finally something worse than curl | sh
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Matthew Miller
mattdm@hachyderm.ioJob news!
Starting this week I’m switching back to an individual contributor role to work on Lightwell. (https://www.redhat.com/en/lightwell)
Still working to figure out the shape of the new job, but the essence is: we intend to make this good for upstreams. Not as a “way to give back” or mere marketing claims, but because that’s the only way this works long-term. I’m going to help make that intention into fact.
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Jonty Wareing
jonty@chaos.socialConvinced that home assistant is a covert operation to sabotage productivity of people who would otherwise spend weekends inventing things
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Steve Gisselbrecht
stevegis_ssg@mas.toHow chocolate is made, in case you're curious (a thread):
Cacao grows within about 10° of the equator. The trees are WEIRD-looking small trees and the fruit kind of grows straight out of the trunk and large branches. Fruit growing out of a trunk looks very wrong to me but I have no complaints about the result.
The fruit is a pod, shaped like and slightly smaller than an American football or rugby ball. Like so many other fruits, it contains a number of seeds, each with a thin shell of its own, embedded in pulp. (Does this make it technically a berry? I find I'm curious without actually caring.) The pulp is edible and can be pressed for juice, but spoils very quickly, so it's not typically eaten outside chocolate-growing areas. I've had the juice once (from a carton, far from the equator) and it was … okay. Kind of fruity/musky, a little sweet and a little tangy and with a pronounced "damp basement" note. I'll pass.
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mhoye
mhoye@cosocial.caSee page 20, but here's CISA pointing out that the OSI's (frankly dishonest and cowardly) decision to bless "open weight" models as "open" was not just wrong but dangerous.
https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2026-07/open-source-software-security-principles.pdf
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Lesley Carhart 
hacks4pancakes@infosec.exchange
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Alex Bird
alexanderbird@mstdn.caRE: https://dair-community.social/@emilymbender/116811128152569506
Some great alternative terms and phrases to communicate about "AI" without adopting all the misleading marketing terms:
"artificial intelligence → probabilistic automation"
"prompt → text input"
"answer → output"
"chatbot / conversational agent → conversation simulator"
"who’s right? → is the machine output correct?"
(& more in the article)
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Mark Holtom (aka Kingbeard)
MarkHoltom@mastodonapp.ukImagine getting the brief to write some copy on a fucking bin bag and then smashing it out of the park like this. Sensational effort.
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Charlie Stross
cstross@wandering.shopIt never ceases to amaze me how today's techbros vision of the future they want defaults to fully automated leopard-face-chomping neo-feudalism rather than fully automated luxury gay space communism
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