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ティージェーグレェ /
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2025-02-21 04:17:19

ティージェーグレェ on Nostr: TFW the Nyingma Buddhist Mysticism t.a. emails me about the "special characters" I ...

TFW the Nyingma Buddhist Mysticism t.a. emails me about the "special characters" I submitted for my class certificate.

But: the "special characters" are just Japanese Unicode/UTF-8 encoding. Which is now: over 30 years old (UTF-8 was standardized in 1992).

Did Nyingma Buddhist Mysticism originate in ASCII? No. It is much older.

Indeed, UTF-8/Unicode can also represent Tibetan: རྙིང་མ་「rnying ma」(aka "Nyingma") something that ASCII cannot.

Later in the evening: a Zoom call with folks who are, well they are sporting more gray hairs than I to phrase it delicately.

Yet at least a couple of questions about the Japanese in my display name there too.

One of them in particular, was a woman who is blind and her screen reader apparently just chokes and spits out "question mark" when it encounters non-ASCII.

Accessibility issues in 21st century surveillance capitalism closed sores proprietary software it heinous enough given that Zoom supposedly has a market cap of approximately $26 billion, you would think maybe they could throw money at that problem? I can't.

But, a senior instructor in Nyingma Buddhist Mysticism balking at non-ASCII characters, to me, is a much more egregious issue with regards to Linguistics, lineage etymology and decades old well established encoding formats and I do not have a good answer to that. I don't think a good answer exits for that, only bad answers.

Are these solvable issues? Sure.

Am I going to be the one to solve them? Well, not the Zoom one. The less that software is utilized, the better for everyone.
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