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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Trantarius@programming.devtomemes@lemmy.worldjust in time
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    1 year ago

    I have a metal cup on my desk. This cup used to be a rock. Humans took that rock, and placed it into an environment specifically tailored to remove just the molecules we want from it. It was melted, using temperatures far exceeding what a human could survive. It was formed into a sheet, then pressed into shape, using tools specifically crafted for that one purpose. It was painted with a compound not naturally found anywhere on earth, because someone thought it should be green. It was packaged in organic compounds carefully formulated and shaped through hundreds of processes to ensure it couldn’t be damaged on its trip to the other side of the planet. All of this for a cup. Why? Because it’s slightly more comfortable to drink out of. A problem that wouldn’t even register with any other living thing, solved with efforts far beyond their capabilities. And that is our closest competitor.

    Humanity has accomplished more in the last hundred years, hell even the last ten, than anything else on earth (or beyond, for all we know) ever has. Yeah, war, greed, and racism are a thing, but it hasn’t stopped us before, and won’t stop us now. You are comparing real people to some idealized fantasy. A fantasy that only seems attainable because of what we have already accomplished, not in spite of it.

    We only aspire to do better because we know what we are capable of.


  • Well letters don’t really have a single canonical shape. There are many acceptable ways of rendering each. While two letters might usually look the same, it is very possible that some shape could be acceptable for one but not the other. So, it makes sense to distinguish between them in binary representation. That allows the interpreting software to determine if it cares about the difference or not.

    Also, the Unicode code tables do mention which characters look (nearly) identical, so it’s definitely possible to make a program interpret something like a Greek question mark the same as a semicolon. I guess it’s just that no one has bothered, since it’s such a rare edge case.