I've found that ( at least for me ) that was caused by some entries doing some checks before showing up. Getting a context menu editor and removing some of them can help.
Doesn't matter, it's a shit user experience and Microsoft's fault for putting the onus on the user to fiddle around at that level, rather than putting a hard, very low limit on how long shell extensions can hold up the context menu before they're banned from it.
Oh, I'm not trying to defend Microsoft in any way. Everything they make has been going downhill faster and faster.
Just suggesting a possible way to work around it.
> The correct use is to check whether a submitted identifier contains characters that visually mimic Latin letters, and if so, reject it
That is a really bad and user-hostile thing to do. Many of those characters are perfectly valid characters in various non-latin scripts. If you want everyone to force Latin script for identifiers, then own up to it and say so. But rejecting just some them for being too similar to latin characters just makes the behaviour inconsistent and confusing for users.
What would make sense is to have a blacklist of usernames (like "admin" or "moderator"), then use the confusables map to see if a username or slug is visually confusable with a name from that blacklist.
I initially thought that must surely be what they are doing and they just worded it very, very poorly. But then of the 31 "disagreements" only one matters, the long s that's either f or s. All other disagreements map to visually similar symbols, like O and 0, which you should already treat as the same for this check
Not to mention that this is mostly an issue for URL slugs, so after NFKC normalization. In HTML this is more robustly solved by styling conventions. Even old bb-style forums will display admin and moderator user names in a different color or in bold to show their status. The modern flourish is to put a little icon next to these kinds of names, which also scales well to other identifiers.
In all cultures, there is an expectation that you have to provide a name for yourself that is intelligible to the culture you're interacting with, both in written language and in speech. If your name is Albert and you are going to interact with many Japanese speakers, you'll have to call yourself アルバート in writing and pronounce your name as something like "Ah roo bay toe" to fit in. If you have a name whose pronunciation depends heavily on tones, such as a Mandarin or Vietnamese name, and you are going to interact with speakers of a non-tonal language, you'll have to come up with a version that you're happy with even if pronounced in the default neutral tone that those people will naturally use. If your name is 高山, you'll have to spell it as Takayama.
Similarly, if you're going to create an identifier for yourself that is supposed to be usable in an international context, you'll have to use the lowest common denominator that is acceptable in that context - and that happens to be a-zA-Z0-9. Why the Latin alphabet and numerals and not, say, Arabic, you might ask? Because Chinese and Indian and Arabic speakers are far more likely to be familiar with the Latin alphabet than with each other's writing systems.
The article has examples about people naming themselves "Аdministrator". That's not about machine-readable identifiers, it's about display names. This entire subthread is either people missing that and thinking they're talking about login usernames and the likes, in which case I don't disagree, or people actually believing it's OK to limit people's screen names to a-zA-Z0-9 in which case I say, that's deeply imperialistic and a super shit thing to do.
I think restricting the allowed characters should apply to usernames and other unique identifiers that can lead to confusion (admin vs аdmin with a Cyrillic "а"). So if I write my name as "José", I should be able to make an account called "Jose" and still enter "José" in the name field, if such a field exists in the first place. Although I'm not even sure about this.
If you're saying that "José" should be accepted as an username, shouldn't "Борис" or "김" or "金" also be valid?
It makes sense to restrict the alphabet for things like usernames that should be unique, should be easy to read for security reasons and should be correctly handled by various types of backend software.
I'm not from the US and my name isn't ASCII, but I wouldn't mind spelling it with the English alphabet, even in a name field.
I also don't understand how English has 26 letters, but letters like "é" in "José" or "ï" in "naïve" appear as normal letters. And if I write "Jose" instead, it would read as offensive. In my language that uses Cyrillic, the letters of the alphabet are all the letters we use, period. It would just be wrong to borrow a letter from another alphabet, even if it's the same script, just because someone's name includes it in their language. I have a friend from a neighboring country that changed one of his Cyrillic letters when he came to my country. I would do the same if I went to his country and they didn't have a letter we have.
For logins, we're already used to the fact that they're expected to be in Latin. Having them in the native alphabet is more trouble than it's worth (one system supports it, another breaks etc., easier to remember one, in Latin, across systems) I'd be irritated though if I couldn't use my native alphabet in the user profile for the first name/last name
>Please provide your name exactly as it is in your government documents.
>This is extremely important. Failure to comply will lead to termination of your service with no refund, criminal prosecution, our CEO calling you in tears and a hitman being informed about your last known location
Heh, I had this exact thing when getting certified at Microsoft (remotely). They required me to enter my name exactly as it appears on my government ID (not a single Latin character), but their registration site... simply blocked any characters outside of Latin. I had to obtain an international travel passport to get the "official" transliteration of my name
I've gotten a visa to a country that doesn't use Latin characters. My name got transliterated. At the bottom of the visa there's the machine-readable field that uses ASCII characters, and my name lost a character (a OU became just U).
It's also fun when the official transliteration rules suddenly change: a visa/passport issued in one year has a different name in Latin than a passport issued in another year. I was once two separate people :)
I agree that rejecting valid non-Latin characters in valid contexts is user-hostile, but I should be clearer about scope: this is specifically about machine-readable identifiers (slugs, handles, ENS names) where the character set is intentionally restricted, not display names or user-facing text.
The approach there should be what wongarsu describes below (imo), to style the UI so official accounts are visually distinct (badges, colour, etc.) rather than policing the character set.
namespace-guard is deliberately opinionated for the slug/handle case where you've already decided the output should be ASCII-safe. If your use case is broader than that, confusables detection without rejection is the right call.
Kawa predates Clojure by a decade. (Kawa work started 1996; Clojure's initial release was 2007.) Also, Clojure isn't really focused on high performance, while that has always been a priority for Kawa, which generates bytecode similar to Java, especially if you include suitable type annotations. (It is likely Clojure have have improved in this respect - they have a lot more people working on it.)
Agreed, "Java" was an oversimplification. It's actually JVM bytecode. It's still strange in my book to use an object soup runtime for something (Lisp/Scheme) that feels closer to functional languages to me.
Clojure is a different case, because when you already are on the JVM anyway, then Clojure is still infinitely better than no Lisp at all. It's not the same as putting the JVM somewhere where it wasn't before and where it's not actually needed.
It's like Dr Ian Malcolm says.. "Your developers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should" - Jurrasic Park (almost)
A serious Lisp/Scheme runtime needs a garbage collector. The JVM has probably the most advanced GC implementation around - for that reason alone it doesn't seem particularly strange to me.
> they will (mis)use hate speech laws to censor you i.e Merz and the pensioner story
You mean where the police (not the politician Merz) initiated a defamation case based on a comment on a police department's Facebook channel, which the public prosecutor immediately declined?
I never said it was Merz himself who prosecuted, but if you want examples it's ok.
- Stefan Niehoff, abother pensioner who insulted Habeck himself, was acquitted but after a lot of drama ensued. Habeck has filed 805 suits on speech so yeah
- Nancy Fraser, and the journalist who was sentenced to 7 months in prison
- The Pimmelgate
I am sorry but the average German politician has very authoritarian tendencies and Germany itself has many laws that constrict freedom of speech. For now that is ok that they keep building these laws (its for democracy guys and against hate speech) and when AfD eventually gets in the government, you will get a Coyote's law, where you build tools the opposition will eventually use against citizens as well
I don't hate it, but I suspect that incentives this would generate would not end up producing results that strictly align with the ones you envision and desire.
For one thing, you're essentially mandating data centers to be colocated with power plants and waste water treatment plants, instead of these things each being located independently according to the requirements of their different functions. If that really leads to "ridiculously high reward", why isn't it being done already?
> We can build such a society. I am not sure why you think this is never possible.
Maybe we can, but it is A) a far bigger, older, and more difficult problem than how to structure a computer network, and B) fundamentally not solvable through technological means.
No matter how much technologists love the idea of technology as a liberating force, our worst instincts and dynamics always reassert themselves and soon figure out how to use that same technology to destroy liberty.
Technology is a force multiplier. When large, powerful, institutions adopt technology they can use the leverage to suppress liberty. (Though not all do to the same extent.)
However, large institutions are also slow to move, grow, and change. At the leading edge of technological adoption small groups and individuals can use the amplified power to resist supression.
The trick is to remain at the leading edge and to remind early adopters of the power they wield. If enough of us fight for liberty many institutions will follow.
How so? The second section, "Introduction to Org-Mode and Worg" explains it as well as one could possibly ask for. Are you really that completely thrown off by it being the second section rather than the first (admittedly a bad decision)?
Former prince. And t's not purposefully vague, the article explicitly says "It comes after Thames Valley Police said they were assessing a complaint over the alleged sharing of confidential material by the former prince with late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein"
If you read through the BBC post, it alludes to passing confidential trade documents to Epstein... but of course that's probably because he was being blackmailed by Epstein for f*cking under age girls.
It certainly wouldn't be equivalence, but it would be another 4 years of expanding presidential powers only for a republican to come to power after that, or after 8 years. It really doesn't matter. The system keeps changing to put us more a risk of a bad president being effectively bad.
Two of the most authoritarian decisions by the supreme court have been progressive in nature: Kelo v. City of New London - where the government can redistribute wealth if it benefits the government, and the whole fiasco around the ACA, which defaults every American to being a criminal until they bought health insurance, using the commerce act as justification for the power grab.
About the ACA, whether I agree with national healthcare is irrelevant, this was not the way to do it -- by expanding the government's reach. There has to be consideration for what the administration does.
You essentially seem to be making an argument for the status quo because you're terrified that anyone who promises to improve things will become authoritarian.
No, it's not. When people try to "drain the swamp", several things push them to become authoritarians, even if they weren't before.
1. The definition of "the swamp" drifts from "open, blatant corruption" towards "everyone who opposes me". That's a much larger set, so you need bigger guns.
2. Some people agree that "the swamp needs drained", but disagree on what "the swamp" is, and/or disagree on how to drain it.
3. People don't agree with everything you're doing. (Maybe this is the same as #1 and/or #2.) Some people oppose you because they're corrupt, some people oppose you because they dislike change, and some people oppose you because they dislike your methods. The more force you use, the more people oppose your methods. But as opposition grows, you need more force to get anywhere.
The result is that anybody who sets out to do something like "drain the swamp", if they stick with it as an objective, gets pushed toward more and more authoritarianism to try to make it happen.
Look, Bernie isn't Trump. He's been consistently pushing in the same direction for decades. He actually cares about his issues; he's not just using them as a cover for seeking power. But I think that, if he got actual power (president, not just senator), the dynamics of the situation would also push him to become more and more authoritarian.
(Would he become equivalent to Trump? Hopefully not.)
> Look, Bernie isn't Trump. He's been consistently pushing in the same direction for decades. He actually cares about his issues; he's not just using them as a cover for seeking power.
Exactly.
> But I think that, if he got actual power (president, not just senator), the dynamics of the situation would also push him to become more and more authoritarian.
This is just sheer unsupported speculation. It's silly.
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