TFW the Nyingma Buddhist Mysticism t.a. emails me about the "special characters" I submitted for my class certificate.
But: the "special characters" are just Japanese Unicode/UTF-8 encoding. Which is now: over 30 years old (UTF-8 was standardized in 1992).
Did Nyingma Buddhist Mysticism originate in ASCII? No. It is much older.
Indeed, UTF-8/Unicode can also represent Tibetan: རྙིང་མ་「rnying ma」(aka "Nyingma") something that ASCII cannot.
Later in the evening: a Zoom call with folks who are, well they are sporting more gray hairs than I, to phrase it delicately.
Yet at least a couple of questions about the Japanese in my display name there too.
One of them in particular, was a woman who is blind and her screen reader apparently just chokes and spits out "question mark" when it encounters non-ASCII characters.
Not helpful that the WiFi I was using, despite displaying 2-5 bars of signal at all times, well not good enough for Zoom I guess as it kept dropping/rejoining and apparently every time that happened, her screen reader went haywire again. Atrocious UI choice there, but definitely a choice.
Accessibility issues in 21st century surveillance capitalism closed sores proprietary software are heinous enough given that Zoom supposedly has a market cap of approximately $26 billion, you would think maybe Zoom could throw money at improving and addressing those kind of accessibility problems?
I can't. Zoom don't provide source code. So I can't submit Pull Requests/patches. Moreover I long since grew up and I am not a teenager using my Amiga 24x7 anymore who used to relish such challenges.
So, if you make me do binary patching and bust out a hex editor and other tools, I am really really incentivized to hate every piece of code you output and the folks who output it to begin with too for imagining that their source is somehow not worth sharing particularly when lots of paying customers and entire schools and students seem to be unhealthily dependent upon Zoom. Heck, the last time I touched IDA Pro was over a decade ago (2011 maybe? Whenever I was at iSEC Partners and they had boxed copies, something I never saw before or since), and I haven't missed it, really.
However, a senior instructor in Nyingma Buddhist Mysticism balking at non-ASCII characters, to me, is a much more egregious issue with regards to linguistics, lineage, etymology and decades old well established encoding formats and I do not have a good answer to that.
I don't think a good answer exits for that, only bad answers. Did I mention the t.a. is also not a native speaker of English? Because there's also that. Generally, I find that polyglots are more sympathetic to inter-linguistic challenges, but I am not going to be holding my breath on that one.
Are these solvable issues? Sure.
Am I going to be the one to solve them? Well, not the Zoom one. The less that software is utilized IMHO, the better for everyone.
I did at least offer to make my technical expertise available to maybe helping resolve the printer challenges for the t.a. for the Nyingma Buddhist Mysticism class.
But honestly, given that my one remaining paying job I am going to be having a conversation tomorrow about not taking payment for that?
I have an increasingly grim view of anything that is asking me for a penny, let alone a femtosecond of my time and attention, when others have solved these issues, and shared them freely and openly, decades ago.
If you can't refer to the source? What is holding you back?
Meanwhile, in totally tangential open source realms, that OpenSSH 9.9p2 PR I submitted was merged, but GitHub was doing something wonky a.f.
I attached some screenshots and head scratching here:
https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/27712
Moreover, on the macports-dev@ mailing list, someone writing on behalf of the Netatalk team observed something similar? So my best guess is: GitHub is effing up again and I just get to be the "lucky" sort who notices first because while I never ever have found myself needing to go looking for bugs, I invariably seem to encounter them.
But: the "special characters" are just Japanese Unicode/UTF-8 encoding. Which is now: over 30 years old (UTF-8 was standardized in 1992).
Did Nyingma Buddhist Mysticism originate in ASCII? No. It is much older.
Indeed, UTF-8/Unicode can also represent Tibetan: རྙིང་མ་「rnying ma」(aka "Nyingma") something that ASCII cannot.
Later in the evening: a Zoom call with folks who are, well they are sporting more gray hairs than I, to phrase it delicately.
Yet at least a couple of questions about the Japanese in my display name there too.
One of them in particular, was a woman who is blind and her screen reader apparently just chokes and spits out "question mark" when it encounters non-ASCII characters.
Not helpful that the WiFi I was using, despite displaying 2-5 bars of signal at all times, well not good enough for Zoom I guess as it kept dropping/rejoining and apparently every time that happened, her screen reader went haywire again. Atrocious UI choice there, but definitely a choice.
Accessibility issues in 21st century surveillance capitalism closed sores proprietary software are heinous enough given that Zoom supposedly has a market cap of approximately $26 billion, you would think maybe Zoom could throw money at improving and addressing those kind of accessibility problems?
I can't. Zoom don't provide source code. So I can't submit Pull Requests/patches. Moreover I long since grew up and I am not a teenager using my Amiga 24x7 anymore who used to relish such challenges.
So, if you make me do binary patching and bust out a hex editor and other tools, I am really really incentivized to hate every piece of code you output and the folks who output it to begin with too for imagining that their source is somehow not worth sharing particularly when lots of paying customers and entire schools and students seem to be unhealthily dependent upon Zoom. Heck, the last time I touched IDA Pro was over a decade ago (2011 maybe? Whenever I was at iSEC Partners and they had boxed copies, something I never saw before or since), and I haven't missed it, really.
However, a senior instructor in Nyingma Buddhist Mysticism balking at non-ASCII characters, to me, is a much more egregious issue with regards to linguistics, lineage, etymology and decades old well established encoding formats and I do not have a good answer to that.
I don't think a good answer exits for that, only bad answers. Did I mention the t.a. is also not a native speaker of English? Because there's also that. Generally, I find that polyglots are more sympathetic to inter-linguistic challenges, but I am not going to be holding my breath on that one.
Are these solvable issues? Sure.
Am I going to be the one to solve them? Well, not the Zoom one. The less that software is utilized IMHO, the better for everyone.
I did at least offer to make my technical expertise available to maybe helping resolve the printer challenges for the t.a. for the Nyingma Buddhist Mysticism class.
But honestly, given that my one remaining paying job I am going to be having a conversation tomorrow about not taking payment for that?
I have an increasingly grim view of anything that is asking me for a penny, let alone a femtosecond of my time and attention, when others have solved these issues, and shared them freely and openly, decades ago.
If you can't refer to the source? What is holding you back?
Meanwhile, in totally tangential open source realms, that OpenSSH 9.9p2 PR I submitted was merged, but GitHub was doing something wonky a.f.
I attached some screenshots and head scratching here:
https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/27712
Moreover, on the macports-dev@ mailing list, someone writing on behalf of the Netatalk team observed something similar? So my best guess is: GitHub is effing up again and I just get to be the "lucky" sort who notices first because while I never ever have found myself needing to go looking for bugs, I invariably seem to encounter them.