I am guessing that it’s different because they spend weeks and months on the ship. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t be too keen to enlist in the navy if it required not having my personal phone for months on end. They gotta make some concessions in policy to keep everyone sane.

Or maybe they’re banned but people sneak them in anyway.

Edit: then again, if they just snuck them in, they wouldn’t have any connection. They need wifi. So it’s probably allowed.

I’m not from the US. And I think the way they’re trying to tackle it is stupid, roughly for the reasons you say. But on a surface level it’s good that there is some action taken on this matter.

The country does matter. It allows oversight and regulation to a greater extent. And if it turns out that there’s a backdoor in a router, if it’s made locally there will be someone to criminally charge, whereas if it’s made in China or wherever, that would be impossible.

Then again, it’s the US, so they’d probably charge some random worker instead of the CEO who demanded the back door be implemented.

To be honest, this is probably justified. My knee-jerk reaction was “oh look, USA in antagonizing everyone else again”, but consumer routers are a really significant security junction which historically has always been somewhat neglected. I only read a few sentences before the paywall stopped me, but sounds like they’ll whitelist any foreign manufacturers that are legitimate.

Yes, it’s gonna have corruption and bribes all over it… But on paper, it’s justified.

That’s great. That’s not the world we live in.

That’s nonsense.

That’s why patents are relatively short. A patent grants exclusivity for the inventors, which incentives people and companies to invent in the first place. But it’s limited in time so that the whole world benefits eventually. Everything that was invented over 20 years ago is now public domain. This includes a ton of safety mechanisms, some in cars, that never would have been invented if there wasn’t a financial incentive for it.

I don’t like this all that much from a moral standpoint, but this is a good compromise for the world we live in. To say it would have been better if it didn’t exist it all is just plain wrong.

Same video on Nebula: https://nebula.tv/videos/practical-engineering-the-hidden-engineering-of-runways/ (16m36s, presumably because it skips a sponsored segment)

I’m actually surprised he doesn’t look to Nebula from the blog post version of the video.

According to https://joinmastodon.org/about :

Mastodon gGmbH is a non-profit from Germany that develops the Mastodon software.

[…]

Mastodon, Inc. is a non-profit entity in the United States that supports the growth and operational capabilities of Mastodon, including being able to receive tax-deductible U.S. donations and in-kind support.

Doesn’t seem like it was a move, just a different entity. Seems like there’s a bit more history to this if you want to look it up, for example the German GmbH lost its nonprofit status in 2024, strangely.

fucking finally!

I desperately want to know if this is:

1. A toy factory actually finding a creative use for excess stock of the doll head
2. A creative parent fixing their child’s toy
3. Just a joke for a meme

But why?

Bidirectional text only really occurs when mixing languages

And also any time numbers are used in RTL text*, which is pretty common. Besides, you might be surprised how often English words or acronyms are used in everyday texts. If there’s a news story covering the American FBI, there’s no way to avoid writing it as “FBI”, in Latin letters.

There are a lot of top-to-bottom languages in Asia. Some chinese languages for example are traditionally written top to bottom.

But is that how it’s rendered by default when typed into a computer, for example into Notepad? Or into a chatting app like WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, etc.? To my knowledge, they are rendered horizontally unless the software is specifically configured to render them TTB.

But I’m guessing even though Unicode’s stated goal is to encode all writing, TTB is probably where they drew the line.

I believe there actually are a few TTB properties in the Unicode database.

* except that one language that also uses RTL digits. I don’t remember its name or where it’s used, but it exists.

I’m most cases, a consecutive run of RTL or neutral characters would be rendered RTL, while the rest would be rendered LTR. However, if it’s within a RTL paragraph, this would be reversed.

For example, the following two paragraphs have the same path, but the surrounding text is translated:

Open C:\Users\אדם\Documents\דברים\מסמך.pdf and click “Sign”.

פתח את C:\Users\אדם\Documents\דברים\מסמך.pdf ולחץ על “חתימה”.

Depending on your client, these should be rendered differently. If they don’t, click here to see it: https://jsfiddle.net/jex3yfrw/

Edit: looks like Voyager needs a bug report! The web Lemmy seems to render it RTL (correctly) but still left-aligned which is not ideal.

I’m not sure, as I’ve never used them. But I imagine this is a lot more straightforward.

The problem with bidirectional text is that it’s bi-directional. Parts of it are RTL and parts are LTR. The main problem is how to order the characters visually, assuming that they are stored in memory in the order in which they are intended to be read.

For text that goes in only one direction this is trivial. LTR: characters are arranged from left to right. RTL: characters are arranged from right to left. Easy peasy!

The problem, as I’ve said, is when you have a sentence or paragraph with both LTR and RTL text inside it. Then the algorithm is needed.

To my knowledge, there is no bottom-to-top language, and certainly not one that would be mixed in within top-to-bottom text or vice versa. So an algorithm isn’t necessary: if TTB (top-to-bottom) is used, characters simply need to be arranged top to bottom.

To add on to this, I believe TTB text is only used explicitly. By default, all text is rendered horizontally (usually LTR) unless you explicitly set the software to render it top-to-bottom. So if you just have plain text in Japanese or whatever language with no additional markup, it will be rendered horizontally and subject to the UBA.

Yeah, that is pretty much how it works in some GUIs like in the screenshot, where each slash is replaced by >. But if you represent the path in a string, and put that string in some context that doesn’t know it’s a path and that it should be rendered by some special rules, then it’ll just be subject to the usual Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm (UBA).

The UBA is a masterpiece, and I’m not being sarcastic. For everyday text with mixed directionality, such as a WhatsApp chat in Arabic/Hebrew with a bit of English or just some numbers mixed in, the UBA’s default output is the ideal way to order the characters.

The problem is, special cases (such as file paths) just can’t be covered by a universal algorithm. You can insert special characters into the path, namely FSI and PDI (“First Strong directional Isolate” and “Pop Directional Isolate”) to make the text render the way you want under the UBA… But then, when you copy that path, the special characters would still be there so software would consider them part of the path, and then of course, File Not Found.

You maniac!

You complain about ASCII filenames but a few of the examples are obviously Unicode, namely using emoji, well outside of the ASCII character set. But since you’ve brought up Unicode file names, let me introduce you to bidirectional text!

If you use Hebrew or Arabic, some of your directories or files will have right-to-left text in them. This is a recipe for disaster.

If in English you’d have “C:\Users\Adam\Documents\Research\Paper.pdf”, which breaks down to:

1. C:\
2. Users\
3. Adam\
4. Documents\
5. Research\
6. Paper.pdf

In Hebrew you’d have: “C:\משתמשים\אדם\מסמכים\מחקר\מאמר.pdf”, which breaks down to:

1. C:\
2. משתמשים\
3. אדם\
4. מסמכים\
5. מחקר\
6. מאמר.pdf

The entire path goes backwards, and the “.pdf” extension is visually attached to the “Users” folder if the text is rendered naively. It’s insane. Fortunately many GUI shells nowadays separate each path item so they can’t get intermixed like this. Example:

But still, if you copy a path into plaintext, it will still visually look wrong, and there is literally nothing that anyone can do about it. This is the correct way to render this text.

Exact same issues occur in Arabic and the few other RTL languages usedin the world. It’s a massive pain.

Edit: oh, and on commandline on Windows, the required characters aren’t even available by default so you get this lovely thing

Does this break games? Where in the input pipeline is the long press converted to shift? Being in the firmware implies that it’s in the keyboard itself, so even games wouldn’t be able to see that you’re just holding W to go forwards.

Depends how you count. Both : and ! require shift as well.

The funniest thing to me is that any good manual would just say “DO NOT USE SOCKS AND FLIP FLOPS SIMULTANEOUSLY”

The cool and/or awful thing about language (not just English) is that if enough people many the same mistake, it’s no longer a mistake!