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dropbear3on A years-long Turkish alphabet bug in the Kotlin compiler

There are the following codepoints:

    U+0049 I LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I
    U+0069 i LATIN SMALL LETTER I
    U+0130 İ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I WITH DOT ABOVE
    U+0131 ı LATIN SMALL LETTER DOTLESS I

While the names of the first two don't explicitly state that they should be dotless and dotted, respectively, the Unicode standard section on the block containing those two [0] does contrast them with the dotted and dotless versions, at least implying that they should be rendered dotless and dotted, respectively.

Unicode has historically been against adding a separate codepoint for every single language's orthography when the glyphs are (almost) identical to an existing one ("allographs"). Controversy arose when the consortium proposed considering Han characters, which do have language variants, to be allographs, which led to what is known as "Han unification".

[0]: https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0000.pdf

dropbear3on I wrote a Game Boy Advance game in Zig

This is not true of adjacent bitfields, at least for C99:

  An implementation may allocate any addressable storage unit large enough to hold a bit-field. If enough space remains, a bit-field that immediately follows another bit-field in a structure shall be packed into adjacent bits of the same unit.

https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n1256.pdf 6.7.2.1 § 10

dropbear3on I wrote a Game Boy Advance game in Zig

> How would you do [packed structs] in C?

Bitfields! This is valid C:

  struct foo {
    unsigned bg_priority: 2;
    unsigned character_base: 2;
    // ...
  };

dropbear3on Structures in C: From Basics to Memory Alignment

{0} is standard C. {} is currently a (common) compiler extension but will be standard C23: https://open-std.org/JTC1/SC22/WG14/www/docs/n2900.htm

dropbear3on The 0.5 MB of nothing in all Apple Music files (2020)

> Occam's razor says that tooling, or developers, just aren't great at shaking unreferenced content from production builds.

The Cutting Room Floor[0] is an empirical proof of this assertion.

[0] https://tcrf.net/The_Cutting_Room_Floor

dropbear3on Nuclear startup Oklo gets thumbs-down from regulators

And the corollary, "In theory, theory and practice are the same thing. In practice..."

dropbear3on 100 years of whatever this will be

Are those mutually exclusive? Modern society can be a systemic trainwreck and still be better than what came before.