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mkotowski

646 karma · joined July 2, 2021

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mkotowski··on Show HN: A custom font that displays Cistercian numerals using ligatures
> Has anyone proposed Unicode code points for them?

There is "Background for Unicode consideration of Cistercian numerals" (https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2020/20290-cistercian-digits.pdf)

And also one in the Under-ConScript Unicode Registry for the Private Use Area (https://www.kreativekorp.com/ucsur/) (https://www.kreativekorp.com/ucsur/charts/cistercian.html)

mkotowski··on Using Microsoft's New CLI Text Editor on Ubuntu
Many keyboard layouts use the right alt as the AltGr key for additional characters like language-specific letters or currency symbols (or at least many European ones do).

As for the right ctrl, by association with the AltGr, I usually map it as the Compose key.

mkotowski··on Charset="WTF-8"
Still much better when it fails at the first step. I once got myself in a bit of a struggle with Windows 10 by using "ł" as part of Windows username. Amusingly/irritatingly large number of applications, even some of Microsoft's own ones, could not cope with that.
mkotowski··on Charset="WTF-8"
I got curious if I can get data to answer that, and it seems so.

Based on xlsx from [0], we got the following ??d? localities in Poland:

1 x Bądy, 1 x Brda, 5 x Buda, 120 x Budy, 4 x Dudy, 1 x Dydy, 1 x Gady, 1 x Judy, 1 x Kady, 1 x Kadź, 1 x Łada, 1 x Lady, 4 x Lądy, 2 x Łady, 1 x Lęda, 1 x Lody, 4 x Łódź, 1 x Nida, 1 x Reda, 1 x Redy, 1 x Redz, 74 x Ruda, 8 x Rudy, 12 x Sady, 2 x Zady, 2 x Żydy

Certainly quite a lot to search for a lost package.

[0]: https://dane.gov.pl/pl/dataset/188,wykaz-urzedowych-nazw-mie...

mkotowski··on Three hundred words you can spell on a calculator [pdf]
Actually, in English it is pronounced the same as in Czech and Polish: /hɛhɛ/ or /hihi/ (as far as I know). Both are written respectively as "hehe" and "hihi" and are valid expressions for denoting laughter in Polish (and as I assume, it works similarly in Czech).
mkotowski··on TTE: Terminal Text Effects
> (There’s precisely one thing like this I’m aware of terminal emulators adding in recent memory: clickable links, ca. six years ago.)

And they are often disabled by default, as a potential security risk. We don't get to have fun things, do we? (also worth read: CVE-2003-0063, abusing escape seq is unfortunately a valid concern against adding more stuff).

On the other hand, more and more emulators are adding support for various graphic protocols (sixel, iTerm2 format, kitty format).

> I’ve been waiting for one or more terminal emulators to get together and add some ridiculous new escape codes[...]

Well, it's not much, but mintty apparently has some interesting stuff like audio support[0], and codes for font size and font family[1][2].

iTerm2 also has a bunch of custom escape sequences of varying level of usefulness starting from displaying fireworks animation on cursor position to sending system notifications[3] (although sadly I could not get the last one to work for me).

For some semblance of forms, you can check bubbles[4] and gum[5] (binary to easily incorporate the components into shell scripts).

[0]: https://github.com/mintty/mintty/wiki/CtrlSeqs#audio-support

[1]: https://github.com/mintty/mintty/wiki/CtrlSeqs#font-size

[2]: https://github.com/mintty/mintty/wiki/Tips#alternative-fonts

[3]: https://iterm2.com/documentation-escape-codes.html

[4]: https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbles

[5]: https://github.com/charmbracelet/gum

mkotowski··on How to copy a file between devices? (2022)
Maybe LocalSend? https://localsend.org/

Windows, Linux, Android, iOS and macOS. Seems quite cross-platform. Can confirm it works smoothly for Linux and Android at the very least.

mkotowski··on [dead]
Seems to be a variation of this "story bait" from around 2021: https://africacheck.org/fact-checks/meta-programme-fact-chec...
mkotowski··on Bazzite – a SteamOS-like OCI image for desktop, living room, and handheld PCs
I guess this refers to OCI image format from Open Container Initiative: https://opencontainers.org/

Here is Containerfile from the repo: https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/blob/main/Containerfile

mkotowski··on Grimoire: Open-Source bookmark manager with extra features
Yes, but now you can run into risk of becoming 1000-tabs-open junkie like me :-)

Off-topic, but given how people try to apply LLMs to everything right now, I am surprised there is no extension or something similar to help manage bookmarked and open tabs.

mkotowski··on Asciinema: Record and share your terminal sessions, the simple way
There is:

> Web app for hosting asciicasts

> https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema-server

and

> Web player for terminal session recordings

> https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema-player

Edit: From what I can see, the player has option to point to the cast file directly.

mkotowski··on What Is Anglish?
Opinion of a Polish guy: In my eyes, English is pretty bloated, when seemingly almost every concept can have three or more alternative words, each from a different source. It is all matter of perspective, I suppose. :)

I think such feeling can be caused by languages that rely strongly on creating compound words rather than borrowing a new ones (example from the site: Dictionary > Wordbook).

mkotowski··on What Is Anglish?
Actually, lingua franca originally refereed to a pidgin bridge language (also called Sabir) in use mostly by sailors and traders in the Mediterranean Basin. While it also borrowed from French, it was mostly based on Italian dialects from what I read. [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca

mkotowski··on I used DALL·E 2 to generate a logo
Lately, there seems to be an avalanche of tools like DALL-E, was there some breakthrough that helped make these thinks more viable to run publicly?

And concerning creating a logo with such tools: Is there any consensus on an eventual copyright of such works?

mkotowski··on When old historic maps overlap with modern political maps
Part of it was, yes. But going by the image from the tweet, there are many regions recovered, that belonged to the Second Polish Republic and still contained quite sizeable Polish-speaking population. [0]

[0]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GUS_languages1931_Po...

mkotowski··on When old historic maps overlap with modern political maps
Some more examples: - apparently ancient Egyptians had this problem with their own past, but I don’t remember where I read this. If anyone has a source, I would be thankful. - pre-indoeuropean language families in Europe, only Basque remained that we know of
mkotowski··on When old historic maps overlap with modern political maps
Quite funny, when I read the title before checking the link, I first thought exactly about Poland voting preferences.

For anyone interested: the difference in voting exists, because the east part of Poland is less developed and more rural in general. I remember that it is so in part because of how the Russian occupation was mostly of “steal as much as we can” variety, especially compared to Germans. It is also one of the reasons that the west side has much denser railway network.

mkotowski··on Navi- an interactive cheatsheet tool for the command line
> But from a tool perspective both rust and golang support easy static binary creation […]

Honest question: As someone who knows C++ and CMake, what Rust and Go do to make it easier?

mkotowski··on Navi- an interactive cheatsheet tool for the command line
Honestly, I think part of this perception is the fact that things developed in Rust are more likely to advertise themselves as such. For example, I know that micro text editor is developed in Go only because I checked. I have no need to know this as an end-user, but many Rust-based projects seem quite eager to highlight that.
mkotowski··on Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language
> Also w for szcz makes no sense.

Propbably an attempt to use a letter similar to <Щ, щ> graphically.

> Why "x" instead of "z" in cz/sz/rz etc. sounds?

I think it is something picked up from Esperanto. Traditional way to replace Esperanto-specific letters, when not supported, was to change it to a letter followed by an “h”, but there is also a more widely used method using “x” instead.

mkotowski··on How can you be fooled by the U+202E trick? (2013)
> ASCII is enough to write English, or, at least, it used to be back when ASCII was a multi-byte encoding for Latin!

I know of both the over-strike method for traditional typewriters and extended ASCII. But I have no knowlede of a ASCII (extended or not) supporting every sign commonly used in English. Granted, it is not as significant as other languages missing whole letters, but signs like ”,“,—,–,’, which are often replaced with simpler ASCII alternative (",') or their combination (---,--).

Over-strike, from what I remember wasn’t implemented in any well-spread way with standalone ASCII, although I could be simply not aware of it. It gives us then a few more characters rarely used in English language in loanwords (née, naïve, façade).

Skipping diacritics with uppercase letters on displays with too little space happens with Polish language too, so I am aware of the practice.

mkotowski··on How can you be fooled by the U+202E trick? (2013)
> Will there be Unicode email addresses?

Apparently, yes. [0]

> making things more equitable for other languages and cultures

Well, yes. People often hate how compilcated Unicode is, but they also tend to forget that even ASCII was not sufficient for writing English in a proper way. I am not by any means old, but even I still remember the period on the web when non-Unicode encodings were relatively common and how problematic it was.

And, with assumption that by “other cultures and languages” you mean non-English speaking regions: Tolerate is a wrong word. Most people are not English native speakers. If we would go the route of deciding who is tolerating who, nations using Chinese Hanzi and its derivatives would be probably the first to claim they tolerate all the others by the speakers’ headcount alone.

Moreover, deciding what is/can be executed is not so obvious in my opinion. PDFs can have JavaScript embedded, SVG too. Flash games? Python scripts on computers with python installed? It is not just the names, but the very knowledge of what can be considered “executable.”

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_and_email

mkotowski··on Is It Time for the JavaScript Temporal API?
That does remind me: why that even is a thing? Ordering days of a week from zero can make sense since there is Monday/Sunday as a week start divide, and this can be seen as a bypass (0/7 as Sunday and 1 as a Monday), but with months?
mkotowski··on Is It Time for the JavaScript Temporal API?
From my personal experience in Poland:

You can have LTE+ or even 5G in cities, but traveling by train means that in some areas only a select few extra-lightweight pages like Hacker News are able to load before a timeout or connection loss occurs.

So yes, in some situations even that amount of payload could have a meaningful impact.

“Modern” connections are irrelevant if we are talking about regions, which are not viable for a high-speed infrastructure. And such places are almost everywhere. Mountainous parts of Japan, many American regions, or sparsely populated Polish regions.

Of course, how much it is important varies greatly.

mkotowski··on The purpose of DRM is not to prevent copyright violations (2013)
> If you can operate a torrent client or even know what one is, you are much savvier than the average Netflix/Roku/etc user.

Probably depends from where you are. In Poland some 15 years ealier, it was quite a common skill, even for people who rarely used anything else on the internet. Many people had crappy and unstable connections and torrenting was the only viable option for them to watch anything from the Internet.

mkotowski··on Bird populations declining fast across North America
> humans and human society are supposed to support humans

And it is the same thing I am talking about. Abstraction is humans’ way to streamline the process of maintaining the society. Money was created as an abstraction of a reward for one’s labor. Then atop of it more abstractions were built. Existence of stocks and markets is orthogonal to how to maintain a livable environment. In other case communism would do a better job at not starving people to death.

> Grandparent maintains, quite correctly, that our current society is, in fact, tooled to support abstract concepts like "valuation" and "wealth creation" instead of things like clean nutritive food and safe affordable shelter and supportable realistic hope

Give me an example of a society/culture, that cared more about the environment than the ones currently existing. Former societies/cultures were much smaller in scope and headcount to care about such things. Deforestation was a thing during the time of ancient Romans[0], the idea that a species can go extinct (at lest in European-centric culture) started to take roots during 19th century[1]. According to the Wikipedia, Thomas Jefferson was against a notion that species can go extinct (my point is: it wasn’t simply some fringe group’s dogma). Compare this with The South Sea Bubble[2], which was in 18th century.

In short, my argument is: the abstract ideas like “valuation” and “wealth creation” were there well before any coherent idea about taking care of the environment as a finite and common resource was widely accepted.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_during_the_Roman... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction#History_of_scientif... [2]: https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/South...

mkotowski··on Bird populations declining fast across North America
> "Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"

> YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

> "So we can believe the big ones?"

> YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

(Death about belief and humanity, from Hogfather by Terry Pratchett)

> Until human society stops serving abstractions […]

Without abstraction, there is no human society to speak of. No government to organize large scale actions, no incentive to share ideas, no way to exchange goods from places where there is overabundance to the places in need of those resources. Wanting to maintain a livable environment, too is nothing but an abstract thought.

I would dare to claim that human society exists first and foremost thanks to our brains being able to abstract away some processes. Of course, it creates blind spots and shortcoming in the process, but they are in the end an acceptable cost.

> As a believer in the concept of memetics, it is clear that standing in defense of the real is a battle that is being lost, but the consequences will not be escaped forever.

Is it? Seems to me that more and more people are starting to be more proactive in attempts at preserving the nature. Too late? Maybe. Time will show.

mkotowski··on Space-shooter.c: cross-platform, top-down 2D space shooter written in C
What are upsides of using this format instead of a more generic array of pixels (something like output of imagemagick to .h files or PPM files)?

BTW I know one can use resource files (.rc) on Windows to embed various resources, but is there an analogous mechanism for linux binaries?

mkotowski··on Space-shooter.c: cross-platform, top-down 2D space shooter written in C
From the description of the project, I would dare a guess that the intent of this project was to go as self-contained as reasonably possible:

> […] written in standard C11 using only system libraries (with system libraries defined as anything included in the C standard library or supported operating systems).

mkotowski··on USBefuddled: Untangling the Rat’s Nest of USB-C Standards and Cables
In my opinion it is probably something used as a cost-saving trick. Maybe some connectors/sockets/boards just happened to be cheaper that way at the moment. If the manufacturer do not care about being standard-compliant, you get something like that in the process. I mainly (only?) see such things in a more or less cheaply made “no-name” chinese-imported electronics.
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