- fully-customizable emojis (think of a RPG-like character customization screen)
- heck, why not full jpegs/gifs?
- some unicode programming script (running Doom)
- ?
That said, some very minor (HN-style) nitpick:
> Otherwise for an n byte code unit this is (5n+1) / 8n, that is 5n+1 content bits out of a total of 8n bits from n bytes. We can rewrite this as (5/8) + 1/(8n) which moderately quickly approaches 5/8 = 62.5%. It is nice that this limit is nonzero and does not depend on n.
Isn't a limit by definition no longer dependent on n?
U+E000–U+F8FF, U+F0000–U+FFFFD, and U+100000–U+10FFFD can already provide you with your own emoji, as that range has been reserved for private use. Extending the range further might make sense if you need even more space in your program, but that's a lot of space already.
2-3 bytes are not much space for anything. Sure, you could use multiple successive ones of these code points and define your own "continuation" encoding in these ranges, but that doesn't seem right to me somehow
That combination is how it already works. You can build combined "characters" (grapheme clusters) from multiple code points, e.g. you could have a "base emoji" followed by a "modifier" emoji, and AFAIK that's how emojis with different skin colors work (one code point for the base emoji (e.g. 'thumbs up'), and a number of skin color modification code points which can be applied to all emojis that involve skin color.
I agree with you that Unicode urgently needs a scripting capability (*), but my plan was to just implement it using invisible tag characters [1] or something like that - but of course allowing a script to be written in a single codepoint is the much more elegant solution.
It also neatly solves the problem of how to write Unicode strings inside scripts inside Unicode strings and also scripts inside Unicode strings inside scripts inside Unicode strings.
Another one: encode instructions on how to draw the glyph into the text itself. The string becomes both the text and the font. Why not make it turing complete and as powerful/complex as TTF.
Imagine someone using the same fully customized emoji multiple times in the same text. Seems like a waste of space. Maybe better to encode just a UUID, and send the image codebook separately.
not only inconsistent over time, but also inconsistently distributed over people. rich people got richer (at least lately) and the less rich didn't get much richer (if at all)
yeah, to me this also pretty much sounds like the approach we started with, we bring our data (as a file) into the application and it stores it back if we want to.
Everything old is new again. We started with timeshare machines (there is only market for 7 computers in the world) where you accessed with VT102 etc terminals.
Then we went to personal computers with local data and code.
Now we are back to a handful of massive timeshare machines (AWS, Azure, ..) that keep your data and let you only access with HTTP/HTML terminals.
Now if people get angry enough with Salas enshittification we'll go back to personal computers again...
In the Bash shell, true is a builtin. It may be a builtin for other POSIX-compliant shells. false is also a builtin.
The key difference is that : is required to be builtin. There are several good reasons for this. For example, syntax: the shell can single out this special character syntactically before searching $PATH.
Also, ":" is a disallowed or problematic character for certain filesystem types. If your shell attempted to omit this builtin, it could not always rely on an external command file by this name.
Lastly, people keep bringing up fish, but it is not a POSIX shell, so its similarities in syntax and operation are coincidental.
> I guess it depends on what you expect. If you expect the train to be on time .. yes, India is much better than Germany. ~80% trains delayed 15 min or less vs Germany 36% trains delayed 15 min or less.
I won't defend DB too much here but saying that 64% of trains in germany are delayed more than 15min is just plain wrong. The official statistics put it at 40% for 6min or more for long distance trains and 11% for regional trains in 2025[1]. I think if there would be 15min statistics, DB would be on a sinilar level to India for long-distance. Not something to be proud of, but not as desastrous as you paint it.
Though, maybe I misunderstood? Do you have sources for the indian numbers?
Hey,
I’m sorry for the delay, had to take a train yesterday (how fitting).
I think you have a point. I got the German statistics from the official site https://zbir.deutschebahn.com/2025/en/interim-group-manageme... and yep.. I missread, dbahn marks passenger trains as delayed after >5 min. Only cargo passengers are marked delayed after >15min.
It seems that India doesn’t really release this data officially but it can be obtained from third parties. In this specific case, I got my figure from a news article. I am not entirely sure about the primary source, they just quote a gov. official statement.
From what I read, the main criticism is that the 80% just takes into account the delay at the last station, not the intermediate ones and 15 min is indeed a lot.
they did not "just announce" that, it was a rather technical decision several layers down, made a while ago. Sure, some things are not easily created without US companies but the overall tendency is pretty clear and it is: reduce absolute dependencies.
It's probably only funny because the commenting germans are aware that there is a much simpler "UG" (without the &co KG), which is pretty much a LLC, which you can open on your own, a bit faster, much cheaper. But apparently OP didn't do that for tax reasons (in a normal UG, if you want to pay yourself, you gotta pay income tax and all the other stuff)
If an american comes and says they founded a public company (with stocks and all), and complained about the fuzz involved, you would also tell them that it's their own fault, right?
That said, maybe the US/Delaware LLC has this component as well, I'm not a lawyer :D
UG is almost always a bad idea. Just go with the GmbH from the start. UGs need to convert to GmbHs over time anyway, it is just added bureaucracy. Your tax accountant alone will cost 3.500-5.000€ in the first year, so you need the money anyway. Starting a UG with 2.000€ in capital is stupid idea, you risk going bankrupt early on. Rembmer, delayed filing for insolvency (Insolvenzverschleppung) is a criminal ofense in Germany and you are risking that to.
- fully-customizable emojis (think of a RPG-like character customization screen)
- heck, why not full jpegs/gifs?
- some unicode programming script (running Doom)
- ?
That said, some very minor (HN-style) nitpick:
> Otherwise for an n byte code unit this is (5n+1) / 8n, that is 5n+1 content bits out of a total of 8n bits from n bytes. We can rewrite this as (5/8) + 1/(8n) which moderately quickly approaches 5/8 = 62.5%. It is nice that this limit is nonzero and does not depend on n.
Isn't a limit by definition no longer dependent on n?
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