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coffeelingon Omacom Foundation launches with $8M

Not close to just dotfiles of Arch. It used to be that, sure. That was a year ago. Now they have their own packaging infrastructure going on, both different stages of Arch mirrors (stable is a ~month behind Arch to catch buggy packages and supply chain attacks) and run their own extra repository for other software. The Omarchy stuff isn't dotfiles, it's proper packages served by their own infrastructure nowadays.

coffeelingon old.reddit.com Now Requires a Login

Lobste.rs deliberately blocks Brave due to the maintainers having ingested all the FUD.

coffeelingon Show HN: Adblock-rust Manager – Firefox extension to enable the Brave ad blocker

You haven't heard about it because it is a lie.

Brave has a tipping service that lets users tip creators with Brave's crypto coin, BAT. When they launched the tipping service, they put out a pool of their own BAT and let users tip with that BAT. Their initial UI for the tipping app was sadly bad, and didn't really properly show which creators were signed up for the program, which weren't. If the tips from the pool were given to someone not on the program, Brave would hold them assigned to that person for 30 days, then return them to the pool. No user's resources were affected.

Tom Scott gave them some harsh criticism for the UI, and Brave improved it within a couple days, resolving Scott's complaints.

coffeelingon Show HN: Adblock-rust Manager – Firefox extension to enable the Brave ad blocker

Chromium has better security than Firefox, especially on mobile, where Firefox's site isolation is either nonexistent or rudimentary.

coffeelingon Show HN: Adblock-rust Manager – Firefox extension to enable the Brave ad blocker

Mozilla wants to do quite a lot more than just make a browser - for years, under Mitchell Baker, they weren't really primarily browser makers even. After she's left, Firefox has gained a new degree of focus and we've actually gotten good new features.

Also Firefox is made by Mozilla Corporation, and they're funded by Google money. Firefox defaults to Google search and search suggestions on, which is an awful privacy posture.

coffeelingon Firefox Has Integrated Brave's Adblock Engine

Brave's an easy slot-in - fiddle with settings or buy Brave Origin, and you get what's basically Chrome, except it has a built-in ad blocker that can do stuff extension-based ad blockers (even MV2 ones) can't do on Chromium, the profile sync backend is end to end encrypted, and you get ~uBO grade adblock on mobile.

A chief benefit is that Chromium is much more secure than Firefox, especially on mobile.

coffeelingon Firefox Has Integrated Brave's Adblock Engine

Brave has an end to end encrypted sync service as well.

coffeelingon Firefox Has Integrated Brave's Adblock Engine

Both. Brave is FOSS.

coffeelingon America's Expanding Domestic Surveillance

Chat control was shot down, and will be proposed again. And again. And again. Until the people/governments vote correctly, and then dismantling it won't be up for a constant vote.

coffeelingon Is my blue your blue?

Cyan isn't between green and blue, at least not completely. If you take green and blue, you won't be able to represent a good chunk of cyan hues. It feels greenish and blueish, but is neither, and is broader than any combination of the two, which is partly why some bright cyan objects (like the bird eggs on Wikipedia) look kind of unnaturally intense. Those eggs are a bright, slightly blue-leaning cyan.

coffeelingon Is my blue your blue? (2024)

The funny part about color spaces being that you can't make (pure) cyan out of green and blue, which is exactly why CMYK is used over RYB in inks.

(I mostly think about colours in Hue-Saturation-Value terms, and a hue wheel of blue-cyan-green-yellow-orange-red-purple)

coffeelingon Microsoft blocks trick to unlock native NVMe driver, but workarounds still exist

The fucked up thing is Windows is the most stable Linux environment to build against. Linux overall relies far too much on the idea that the software is either actively maintained, or open source and can be recompiled for new systems.

coffeelingon The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

A lot of Apple's services revenue is Apple Store mobile games, AIUI.

coffeelingon Brave overhauled its Rust adblock engine with FlatBuffers, cutting memory 75%

Chromium is still markedly ahead of Firefox on security, especially on mobile.

coffeelingon Brave overhauled its Rust adblock engine with FlatBuffers, cutting memory 75%

Yes. They are weaker, but Manifest v3 has been tweaked a good bit since the very initial announcements, and people have figured out ways to compress old-format blocklists into Manifest v3 compatible rulesets that can remain surprisingly extensive. They are weaker than v2 blockers or Brave Shields, without a doubt, but they do still do a decent job.

coffeelingon Microsoft Office renamed to “Microsoft 365 Copilot app”

They're not rebranding Office, the app suite.

They had Office.com, a hub website, and a desktop app called Office that was basically just a wrapper for said hub website. They also had a mobile all-in-one app called Office. As far as I can tell, those are what are being rebranded and made to default to an AI chat view on login, not Office as a whole.

coffeelingon No I don't want to turn on Windows Backup with One Drive

It's also weird because Microsoft has some excuse for wasting screen real estate - Windows is used on touchscreen devices and has to at least adapt to them. But Apple stubbornly refuses to put touchscreens on laptops, at which point what excuse do you have to not build good information density?

coffeelingon Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without MS account

One thing I dislike is that Synaptic style proper package managers are being phased out in favour of app stores.

coffeelingon Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without MS account

That's uncharitable: Stability matters, and Linux just doesn't give a fuck about breaking the environment since software is of course FOSS and can just be recompiled from sauce, right?

Meanwhile try to launch a proprietary app and have it work after some years? Lol, good luck unless you constantly update it. Windows, you can still run ancient apps because key parts of the system are stable.

coffeelingon Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

I've tried their Arc Search mobile browser, and the UX is just absolute trash unless you're specifically using it via search only workflows. It's not really a browser in the normal sense.

coffeelingon I used to know how to write in Japanese

  皮 kawa
  彼 kare
  波 nami

coffeelingon I used to know how to write in Japanese

  > And how did Vietnam and Korea manage to understand their historical texts after they stopped using Chinese characters? And how do they create new words nowadays? I guess they just borrow words and pronunciations directly from English or other foreign languages?

The answer to all of these are the same as everyone else. It's not like Chinese people routinely read the old classics in the original, and even then they're literally taught Classical Chinese in school as a separate language, because it is. But other countries have scholars who study the old languages and also work to translate classics into modern language for wider use - I certainly can't read Greek but have Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics sitting on the bench next to me, translated into modern English.

Creating new words happens the same as it does everywhere - people genuinely coin new concepts, they loan foreign concepts as direct loans or calques, or form compound words from existing ones. "creating new words" with Chinese characters is literally just using foreign words to form compounds, something utterly routine everywhere else. It's just not treated as a magical event elsewhere.

For example, people routinely marvel at the ability to make compound words in kanji. But, may I introduce you to German, a language written with boring old non-mysterious Latin script that's famous worldwide for its heavy use of compound words.

  > From what I understand, Chinese characters carry so much meaning that they’re really hard to replace.

They're really just scribbles that point at words or morphemes of the language they're used to write, same as phonetic scripts in that regard. They do let you do some tricks that are hard otherwise, like indicating which nuance of a word you intend by your choice of character, and the common stylistic trick of writing some set of characters and then imposing completely arbitrary readings on them by writing clarifications next to the characters being abused.

For example, in Frieren, in one of the early chapters, Frieren says:

  Zorutoraaku wa hito wo korosu mahou dewa nakunatta.

In hiragana:

  ゾルトラーク は ひと を ころす まほう でわ なくなった。

The manga writes it like this, however (furigana in parentheses after the kanji):

  人を殺す魔法(ゾルトラーク) は 人を殺す魔法(ひと を ころす まほう) でわ なくなった。

人を殺す魔法 should be read "hito wo korosu mahou", ie. "magic that kills people", but the manga instructs us to read it first time as "Zorutoraaku", the name of the spell, and the second time properly, when Frieren's supposed to say its description out loud. There's no clarity issue here, it's just a stylistic trick.

For fun, the same line from the Korean translated version:

  졸트라크는 더 이상 인간을 죽이는 마법이 아니게 됐지
  Jolteurakeuneun deo isang inganeul jugineun mabeobi anige dwaetji.

coffeelingon I used to know how to write in Japanese

Korean faces the exact same problems as Japanese, though - the language structure is similar, they have a ton of Chinese loans, and have in general gone through a largely identical history of writing development. They have somewhat fewer homonyms than Japanese, sure, but they still have tons from Chinese loans (hell, "coffee" and "nosebleed" sound the same, as do "blood" and "rain" in many cases).

It's somewhat hard to believe that Japanese sits in some magic spot where a phonetic script wouldn't work just fine when Korean does it fine, and on the Sinitic side people write books in pinyin, Vietnamese is phonetic, and the Dungan people write their 3-tone Mandarin dialect with cyrillic alphabet without even notating tones.

> Maybe you're right that it's all just hard-headed stubbornness from fluent people.

It's not just hard-headed stubbornness - reading kana really is more difficult to proficient readers of today's Japanese, and change is work.

coffeelingon I used to know how to write in Japanese

皮彼波

coffeelingon I used to know how to write in Japanese

It's not pedantic in that the characters themselves really are sound-based and provide a pretty decent clue. That said, it's still just a clue, and there are multiple similar pronunciations associated with any phonetic component, so it's still guesswork in the end.

coffeelingon I used to know how to write in Japanese

Okay. The point is, the typewriter writes 핸-style ㅎ always. Even if it could be a bit taller, but tends to leave the vowel lines bigger.

coffeelingon I used to know how to write in Japanese

Japan has had pro-romanization societies since the 1920's, and even during the last attempt at large-scale script reform after the war, it wasn't just the Americans pushing it: Many Japanese were enthusiastic about moving to a phonetic script because they perceived it as more efficient and modern. Likewise, not every American administrator was in favour of reforming away the kanji, far from it.

J. Marshall Unger's Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan is a good treatise on the subject.

EDIT: Also, this was published in 1877 if I did my date conversions right: https://archive.wul.waseda.ac.jp/kosho/bunko17/bunko17_d0035...

coffeelingon I used to know how to write in Japanese

> If that's true, I don't see how hangul could have had any typewriter-based advantage over hanja. From the typewriter's perspective, there's no difference.

There are mechanical hangeul typewriters that, while more complicated than Latin or katakana typewriters, are still completely usable for normal writing. The reason hangeul fonts are hard is that a hangeul syllable occupies a standard-sized block, and in eg. careful handwriting the writer would adjust the sizes and positions of the characters to be aesthetically nice. For example, in 해 he the ㅎ andㅐ letters are both the same size. When you write 핸 hen, see how the h especially becomes smaller? In typewritten hangeul, that first consonant is always that small, so you can use only one size of initial h and so on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UenaIex_ZXY

You can see from the output in this video how the sizes of letters are very standard and somewhat disproportionate, eg. in CV type syllables the vowel lines are somewhat giant compared to the quarter-of-the-block sizeish consonants, etc.

That way you can still write by pressing alphabet buttons, with some controls as to where you want the letter to go in the block. It's a bit more complicated, but nothing compared to the nightmare that are proper Chinese character typewriters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDkR87zHdXk

coffeelingon I used to know how to write in Japanese

J. Marshall Unger's Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan goes into details on this.

There were kanji abolitionists and pro-kanji people in both the American and Japanese administrations, and it definitely wasn't just a popularity contest. Things happened such as one pro-roumaji principal who enthusiastically took part in roumaji feasibility experiments being assigned elsewhere because he was having results, or one American pro-kanji official decreeing that roumaji publications should be published in triplicate since there were three competing romanization systems - Nihon-shiki, Kunrei-shiki and Hepburn - so they wouldn't unduly advantage any particular romanization system.

This of course also just so happened to make roumaji publishing three times more expensive. Whether fairness or limiting roumaji publishing by financial means was the real motivation is left as an exercise to the reader.

coffeelingon I used to know how to write in Japanese

In the real world nobody is masochistic enough to not adopt spaces if writing without kanji.

Old Japanese videogames couldn't use kanji due to technical limitations. They wrote in all kana but used spaces to make the text easier to read.

Modern Japanese children's books and eg. even Pokemon games still? Same thing, kana and spaces.

When Korean transitioned away from Japanese-style mixed script to purely alphabetic writing, what did they do? They adopted spacing.

The only time "but Japanese doesn't have spaces" comes up, ever, is when people argue against the removal of kanji. It's not a realistic scenario, in light of very recent history and current practice.