One of the things I don't get is the economics of these trackers.
Someone is serving this amount of data to every visitor. Even if you want to track the user as much as possible, wouldn't it make sense to figure out how to do that with the least amount of data transfer possible as that would dramatically reduce your operating cost?
Perhaps size optimization is the next frontier for these trackers.
Traffic for the static payload is super cheap. And the insane amount of requests is handled easily by modern event-based architectures. The operation costs are most likely only a tiny amount of the overall economics of the tracker's buisness model. The generated tracking data is certainly worth an order of magnitude more then it takes to generate it.
Some language settings (on windows) will auto replace the '' and "" set for ʻʼ and “” as that is the correct spelling in the set language. There is also the lower quotes that can be used but it seems usually a normal comma and double comma is used as codepoint (U+002C, U+201E) ,’ „”.
This really messed me up when I started programming since those quotes will not work when writing in a language that expects a set of the same character but they may use the same glyph. This is one of the many reasons I have my systems set to English.
I agree that for a normal writing environment it may be advantageous to have it auto replace since it is also just easier to hit the same key twice and have it auto open/close.
I have never encountered that behaviour outside of Microsoft Word and its alternatives, I've always had this happen application-side. Is this an IME thing? Or a non-Unicode-compatible code page? Because I don't think there's any other Windows-side automatic replacement of that type.
Many blog engines online will also try to be helpful and replace quotes with smart quotes, which makes copy-pasting source code from tutorials quite a pain.
From what I remember (it was a while back) it was both in notepad, notepad++ and geany.
I was using, probably win xp or 7 at the time. I remember the only way I could fix it at the time was to change the language and keyboard settings to international English.
I can't seem to replicate the behavior now on win 11 even with the same language set and keyboard layout (system language set to English), so perhaps I'm misremembering?
It seems that this keyboard layout does enable typing ¨ U+00A8 so perhaps I am confused with that and that some editors (word etc) do the opening/closing replacement.
IME is not used, though interestingly in Asian languages the do used even different quotes, example Japanese:「x」and『x』
I know that some keyboard layouts come with different characters, which can be confusing when similar-looking keys are in the same place on a US-Int keyboard (nl-NL has a ¨ character almost exactly where the normal " would be for instance), but that's just the OS following the standard keyboard layout. The actual " you would want for programming is on top of the 2 in that layout. Similarly, in other keyboard layouts you will likely find the characters you intended to type with the right (shift+)altgr key combos.
The dead keys setting can be applied to any keyboard layout if you so choose (though it's usually only enabled by default for US International and regional languages that often use dead keys); you could combine dead keys with a ¨-containing keyboard layout if you so choose.
I think there is already great advice in the comments.
This is my two cents.
Iterate and find a way to be comfortable with yourself, perhaps (re)try different things you used to like or try new things you like. If possible in a communal setting (for instance a introduction course in ...). It can be anything from learning a language to a artisan craft.
Mostly look for community you mention you like gaming, there are a lot of gaming related communities out there that are very welcoming!
Also try to go out of your way to leave your comfort zone, this will push you into situations that you are not getting into right now and that may lead to new opportunities.
> we simply ignore it and let the children turn out idiots as well
There is not a lot of safeguarding against this in the real world tbh. At the very least I think the OS or internet age verification is not the place to start improving this.
There is some. Bars won't serve minors. The standardisation of parental controls law (the CA/CO one) is much closer to "bars won't serve minors" than it is to "camera drones will follow minors around to make sure they don't drink alcohol"
Interesting I'm not a native English speaker but in news articles I have always interpreted "controversial" as meaning "under discussion" (perhaps even around a 50/50 divide) hence why they are writing an article about it.
I feel it is the news outlet trying to justify why the topic is important to read about since most people reading it will interpret the issue at hand as having a "common" stance. Usually it is used in topics that are very binary, for or against.
It does have negative connotations. And it does get used by news corporations to influence opinion. I have rarely if ever seen them feel the need to explain why a topic they report is important or newsworthy, and just stating without evidence that something is controversial really doesn't either.
> Usually it is used in topics that are very binary, for or against.
It can be for those topics, but very rarely to describe the side of such topics with which they align.
With e2ee please remember that it is important to define who are the ends.
Perhaps your e2ee is only securing your data in travel if their servers are considered the other end.
Also one thing people seem to misunderstand is that for most applications the conversation itself is not very interesting, the metadata (who to who, when, how many messages etc.) is 100x more valuable.
Someone is serving this amount of data to every visitor. Even if you want to track the user as much as possible, wouldn't it make sense to figure out how to do that with the least amount of data transfer possible as that would dramatically reduce your operating cost?
Perhaps size optimization is the next frontier for these trackers.
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