onboardram

I think lobbyists use money.

So, you failed to change with time?

Sorry for the late reply, I don't use HN much. No idea if you'll actually notice this, does HN even have a "Reply Notification" feature?

Regarding what you wrote, I agree pretty much. As I said, I am not an expert in this field, so I am not aware of the most cutting edge stuff put there. But even the few languages I know and have seen are so different from each other (some more than others) that it seems unlikely that a single "theory of everything" would suffice for text, especially in the way we process text presently.

Perhaps there is some way to abstract out the differences, but I don't really see how. After all, characters are where the differences only begin. Start thinking about words or sentences and no single route seems viable for the way we do string processing today.

You probably expected a more substantial comment, but I don't really know enough of this field to make one.

Regarding क्स and डे, the difference between them is that the former is a combination of two consonants (pronounced "ks") while the latter is formed by a consonant and a vowel ("de"). However, looking at the visual representation is wrong, since डा (consonant+vowel) would also look like two characters. If you copy these into a text field and try to erase them through backspace or delete, you should see how it all works (assuming the text field functions correctly).

But again, these confusions only exist because Devnagari allows simple characters to form compound characters. That is obviously completely different than how Roman script works, which is probably completely different than various pictographic languages. So, how to reconcile the differences (except by hiring native speakers of every language out there)? I wish I knew, but currently I don't.

I am not a linguist, but as a native speaker, shouldn't they be considered 15 characters? क्स, क्या and र्थ each form individual conjunct consonants. Counting them as two would then beget the question as to why डे is not considered two characters too, seeing as it is formed by combining ड and ए, much like क्स is formed by combining क् and स.

I am personally from one of those third-world countries (India) and in my experience, it's easier to stop using Facebook here since the social fabric is already strong enough that you don't really need Facebook to be able to stay in connection with people. I quit Facebook half a decade years ago when I was 16 and haven't had to use it again.

People used to have social connections before Facebook came around and the methods to form and maintain those connections aren't dead yet since there is a large portion of population who never started using Facebook (my parents, for instance.

There are clients like Newpipe[1] that directly parse the Youtube website instead of using the API.

[1]: https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/

I gave a chance to GNOME 3 times in last couple of years with Fedora 24, 25 and 26 and it was equally bad everytime. Memory Leaks reduced it to a crawling mess in a few hours of uptime, the desktop would freeze up permanently while doing even most basic task like switching windows or bringing up their Expose-thing, mouse will start jittering and lagging anytime icons/textures were being loaded, extensions and themes broke again and again. Who would have though putting a Javascript interpreter in the critical pipeline of (what was supposed to be) a reponsive animation-guided GUI would be a bad idea?

Gave KDE a shot and beside all the bloat ans slowness, the damn thing kept crashing on my lock screen. Seriously?

I have switched to Sway now which itself is far from perfect (GTK3 apps keep breaking now and again, visible tooltips in XWayland windows prevent workspace switching) but at least it doesn't hang up my machine every couple of hours or prevent me from unlocking it.

How the hell did we got here? What exactly are the priorities of people working on this stuff? Here's hoping that XFCE gets ported to Wayland soon enough.

I used to do the same thing over and over, wasting extraordinary amount of time trying to come up with something memetic and charming that would somehow make other people think better of me. I have never been able to pin down why, how or in what way had I wanted them to "think better of me", it was like I had been made to believe in some mandatory social currency that everyone else had and I lacked which could only be gained on Facebook. Also, I was a socially-awkward 17 year old at that time so add in the usual teenage insecurities and vulnerability too.

The only solution I came up with was to quit cold turkey. Fortunately, I also moved to a different city at the same time; so, it was easy psychologically to say good bye to all those connections. It's been more than 5 years and I haven't used Facebook or Twitter since.

It might not be easy for you to do depending on your circumstances and honestly, some times it does lead to trouble when people use Facebook to plan or announce things that I get left out of. I did manage to find a few like minded friends though who don't use it either, so usually it's not that bad.

If you are really serious about this, quitting is the only solution I know of that works.