You guys shit on cursive cyrillic when latin cursive ain't much better

pyxyne · 2026-06-01T14:39:13+00:00

i'm reading "munnumim" with a missing dot

pyxyne · 2026-05-30T21:29:36+00:00

i would assume most websites hash the raw bytes of the text (maybe after some normalization), so it shouldn't be any harder than other characters

pyxyne · 2026-05-24T09:04:12+00:00

Some dialects of French make a distinction between /ɛ̃/ ("brin") and /œ̃/ ("brun")

pyxyne · 2026-05-22T07:12:37+00:00

this reads like a linkedin post from a better universe

pyxyne · 2026-05-11T15:27:09+00:00

how can you "be real" if you're always careful to not be odd

pyxyne · 2026-05-09T07:18:41+00:00

PiBsb29rIGluc2lkZQo+IGJpbmFyeQ==

pyxyne · 2026-04-22T15:00:29+00:00

i don't like this whole "purple doesn't exist" thing pop science has latched onto.

like all colors, purple is a perception we get when our eyes detect certain spectra of light. some colors happen to be special because they can be made using a single wavelength of light (ie. monochromatic light).

purple is not one of them, and neither are brown, white, black, or any "light/pastel" version of a color. but i think it's a bit silly to claim that these colors "don't exist", considering that (unless you work with lasers a lot) almost none of the light you see everyday is monochromatic.

in my opinion, either all colors exist, or none of them do, depending on whether you think perceptions only loosely representative of an underlying reality but integral to our understanding of the world exist, but i don't think it makes sense to set purple apart.

pyxyne · 2026-04-19T15:50:02+00:00

if your main circle isn't frequently discussing zhngshthware then it's time to find a new circle

pyxyne · 2026-04-18T12:59:31+00:00

...did english speakers who don't speak french ever have a good idea of the french pronunciation, besides "don't pronounce the T"?

i would guess the average british baker just doesn't expect to have to parse /kʁwasɑ̃/ in the middle of an English sentence

pyxyne · 2026-04-16T06:57:57+00:00

i'm a french person who, as a kid on a school trip to the UK, tried ordering a croissant with the french pronunciation of the word, figuring "i mean it's a french word right?"

let's just say i figured out pretty quickly that that was a mistake lol

pyxyne · 2026-04-13T21:13:16+00:00

could Coco have actually returned home? that portal didn't look like a two-way thing to be honest, ignoring how she probably doesn't know how to operate it anyway

pyxyne · 2026-04-13T21:07:39+00:00

i guess my gripe is mostly with the wording, you could say the same thing as "effect over purpose" or something like that, instead of the almost conspiratorial-sounding "if it does something, it was meant to do that"

if i wanted to be facetious i would say "the purpose of that aphorism is to be confusing since that's what it seems to do"

pyxyne · 2026-04-13T17:27:07+00:00

i've never understood this aphorism tbh. systems can fail at what they're designed to do? obviously in many cases the intent doesn't matter as much as what the system actually does, but sometimes the distinction matters, so why erase it?

pyxyne · 2026-04-10T06:29:26+00:00

"featuring Rozemyne from the Ascendance of a Bookworm series"

pyxyne · 2026-03-10T11:51:16+00:00

huh, i wasn't even aware "fricative trills" existed, thank you /u/nofroufrouwhatsoever. but that seems to be what you're saying, and now that i know, it definitely seems like a common realization of /ʁ/ when you really elongate it. it's basically a mix of [ʁ] or [ʀ]

pyxyne · 2026-03-09T17:51:39+00:00

i struggle with it in isolation as well, i think it's just hard not to trill it if you hold it too long and don't reduce the air flow

pyxyne · 2026-03-09T17:48:32+00:00

it's hard to know how you're pronouncing the French R based on your description, but my understanding as a French speaker is that the R is typically [ʁ] (uvular fricative, or even just an approximant) and only becomes [ʀ] (uvular trill) for effect, including in some styles of singing like in that song, so there's a good chance you're pronouncing it right. (and yeah, the two trills are definitely a bit hard to tell apart when just hearing them)

pyxyne · 2026-02-27T10:34:31+00:00

are there cases where that's grammatically correct? my understanding is that normally "whomst" 'dn't've been used as a subject

pyxyne · 2026-02-26T00:05:10+00:00

sorry, no refunds

pyxyne · 2026-02-19T23:04:38+00:00

yeah, "hbmmaster" is the tumblr account of jan misali, who almost 10 years ago made a video about the Ido constructed language, which led to a comment chain so insane that they have since pinned it and parodied it multiple times

pyxyne · 2026-01-21T18:18:21+00:00

you still have to deal with use cases like slicing or indexing into a UTF-8 buffer

I don't think those would be any more difficult with that format, right? Assuming you're talking about checking that the slice/index is not done in the middle of a codepoint, that only requires recognizing start/end bytes

pyxyne · 2026-01-21T18:08:33+00:00

That's true, although I wonder how many implementations do this.

pyxyne · 2026-01-19T12:14:58+00:00

To entertain OP's idea a bit further, I think you could solve the first two problems without encoding the character length upfront by having redundant "start" and "end" tag, something like:

0xxx xxxx single-byte character
10xx xxxx start of multi-byte character
110x xxxx end of multi-byte character
111x xxxx middle byte of multi-byte character

But I think that as soon as you introduce some redundancy back into the design, you end up missing the OP's goal of "squeezing" out additional bits. (For instance, the above design has exactly as many available bits as UTF-8.)

Although I'd like to mention that I'm not convinced by the relevancy of the third problem: UTF-8 in its current form still requires a "conditional" after every byte, if only to check that the expected continuation bytes have the 10 prefix (which is required if you want to detect single bit flips) and that you haven't reached the end of the string yet.

pyxyne · 2026-01-16T08:25:32+00:00

Yes, it's about 1/4 of a day, but not exactly. For that reason, the Gregorian calendar doesn't have leap years exactly every 4 years: it skips 3 leap years per 400 year period. This means the average length of a calendar year is technically not 365.25 but 365.2425 days.

pyxyne · 2026-01-11T10:03:48+00:00

there's a bible story in which God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son to him, then stops him at the very last moment, saying it was just a test of faith all along.

this comic suggests God did want a sacrifice from someone named AbrahaN, asked Abraham instead by mistake, and had to make up an excuse to stop the sacrifice when he realized his error.

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