yerushalayim

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You’re absolutely right that even “Western‑adjacent” names break in systems that were never designed to handle anything beyond ASCII. It’s no surprise that entire writing systems fall through the cracks.

Same goes for Steve Jobs. One of his most underrated contributions was his insistence that typography, calligraphy, and the aesthetics of written language were not decorative extras but core to the human interface. Apple invested early in system‑wide text rendering that treated all scripts as first‑class citizens. It wasn’t perfect, but it showed what happens when leadership actually cares about the universality of writing and makes it systemic.

You’re right that a lot of software comes out of Anglophone or Western contexts, but that’s exactly why these issues persist. The problem isn’t that RTL is “hard” — it’s that most text engines, layout systems, and PDF toolkits were originally architected with implicit LTR assumptions baked deep into the rendering pipeline.

Once those assumptions are embedded in things like glyph ordering, bidi resolution, cursor movement, hit‑testing, line breaking, and font fallback, fixing RTL becomes a retrofit instead of a design principle. By the time a team realizes the gap, the shaping and layout stack is so tightly coupled that adding proper bidi handling feels like a massive rewrite.

You see this pattern everywhere: PDFium (used by all Chromium browsers), various UI frameworks, and even some OS‑level text components still mishandle RTL in 2026. The symptoms are always the same — disappearing text, reversed glyph order, broken cursor navigation, or failure to commit text at all.

This isn’t a niche corner case. Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, and other RTL scripts represent hundreds of millions of daily users. The real issue is that global language support is still treated as optional rather than foundational, and the technical debt from those early assumptions keeps compounding.

Reader mode is nearly a must for me. Our eyes need a break.

HN in reader mode would be a such hugh blessing!

Oh, please!

Skip to minute 13 for the start of the conversation, and please remember to keep an open mind.

If you want to hear the truth about what's really going on with Israel, Gaza and much of the Middle East and even here, the US -- the following video is the most informative and accurate portrait from the ultimate, truth at all costs, insider, anywhere.

Working with AI may not save you time, but when used properly, it will almost assuredly get you better results.

ChapGPT and company (currently) have an inherent disability dealing with mathematics as they are a language based models. So in a way, this is an unfair test.

This rebuttal of the rebuttal does feel earily AI. Perhaps an injection of cynicism?

Not accurate. Factually, some are much worse than others. A few are good to great. Lumping them all together as "garbage" is unjust and is totally counterproductive. Why even try when your efforts are unappreciated?

The government's list of requests is reasonable, moral and necessary. It's the taxpayers' prerogative to demand a merit based system that, in conjunction, upholds the values and freedoms they hold dear.

The elitist and morally detached Harvard and its fellow privileged, largely useless, institutions can exercise their right to refuse the demands and the money.

No need to complicate it further.

Scary can be an effective deterrent against unsavory adversaries.

It is a damn shame that relationship skills and knowledge based on well-established research aren't taught in school as a core subject. Our lives would have been much better for it.