Someone else covered it in another reply, but moles have bald areas. Hairy Ball only applies when it’s entirely covered.

Edit: other comment

I did not need to know that, but I respect the witty way you communicated it

Fair, but also, you could look up XKCD comics by their name or transcript and link to them directly when you come across them.

For some character sets with a lot of different characters like the Han Unicode representation, that could be cumbersome. Granted, Han might not be a great risk for confusion so you might just whitelist them collectively, but my point is that the approach would have to be more nuanced and complex. Ultimately, humans are complex and so are their languages.

If AI constantly refined its own output, sure, unless it hits a wall eventually or starts spewing bullshit because of some quirk of training. But I doubt it could learn to summarise better without external input, just like a compiler won’t produce a more optimised version of itself without human development work.

To clarify, I meant that from the devs’ perspective: The effort of individually vetting every single character for possible confusion is immense, and the end result would still be just as western-centric. Imagine having a domain name in Greek where some characters are replaced because they might be confused for Latin characters. Or, conversely, having a few characters replaced by similar Latin ones for an attack, which your solution wouldn’t catch.

The result would also still be unreliable even for Westerners. If some other character set you didn’t vet also contains similar looking characters, there’s a new surface for attack.

To properly close that security gap would be an immense arms race… or you could simply shut down the entire attack vector.

So when you consider the importance of protecting gullible people from insidious attacks and the complexity of trying to allow non-Latin characters without creating openings, the question “How widespread are non-Latin URLs in my target audience and is it critical that they be rendered in their native script?” becomes a calculation of cost and benefit.

It’s a shit compromise to deal with the shit fact that some people being assholes ruins good things for the rest of us who aren’t.

Yeah but the compilers compile improved versions. Like, if you manually curated the summaries to be even better, then fed it to AI to produce a new summary you also curate… you’ll end up with a carefully hand-trained LLM.

Though I guess that would be a lot harder.

From the devs’ perspective, the relevant question will be this: How hard is it to map out all the lookalikes, and just how important is it to render foreign domains properly?"

As in, desgined to fail early? I highly doubt that.

Even if it were true, lightbulbs still last longer and are way cheaper. Whether I have to replace them every six years or every five years doesn’t matter as much.

You could just google it-

oh wait

Clearly if you arnt building your own web browser from the ground up, your a sheep. This is the only logical conclusion!!1!1!

Obviously. It’s the only way to be sure it has exactly the features I want and nothing else. Anyone recommending anything else has clearly been deluded to accept mediocrity. How else could they think something other than my exact tastes is decent?

Lol, but seriously every modern browser is basically crap ran or controlled by a large company that does fucked up or less then ideal things.

Yeah, it’s fucked that we basically have to pick what flavour of shit we’d hate least. And once we’re all settled in with our least disgusting brand, we obviously don’t want to move anymore. I’m sticking with Firefox and probably will for some time to come. Adjusting to a different UI, migrating all my bookmarks and finding equivalents for my extensions is an effort.

Maybe some alternative will eventually entice me enough to overcome my reluctance to mix up my digital environment. I just hope it’ll be by actually being good, rather than just “not as bad”.

You mean the one from the company that pays out their CEO a fat $6m salary, paid for by Google bribing Mozilla to be the default search engine?

I don’t trust your recommendation. Do you even realise you’re being herded like sheep?

(I actually use it too, but I won’t pretend they’re saints. It also occasionally has trouble with some websites, but I haven’t done any comprehensive testing to confirm whether it’s browser-specific.)

That was the joke I was setting up for :D

What’s your recommendation then?

I think if your organs are all tarred up, you have a problem

Homotopic: Having the same (homo-) topological properties (-topic)

I’m in the process of starting a fight with my neighbours. They complained (indirectly) about our garden being unkempt. I asked them for an appointment to talk directly so we can figure out just what the problem is. I’m not doing shit until they can tell me just what part of my little piece of nature is breaking any laws.

Product packaging for non-foods

What, you don’t think 1cm² of product should be packaged in a 7×10 cm doubled-up plastic sheet?

Tthat’s not south of Antarctica though. It’s below, in terms of the map’s perspective, but “absolute south” is the middle of the picture. Anywhere outside Antarctica is north of Antarctica.