> These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting rigour of devotion and self-abasement and severity to the body, but they are of no value in checking the indulgence of the flesh.

Meaning: sure, looks good, but doesn’t actually help if the suffering itself is your goal.

(Notwithstanding this, Acts 5:41. A lot, in such topics, depends on exactly how you present things.)

If the purpose is supporting NCSA Mosaic… I’m content to say that there isn’t. Definitely not “anymore”.

Whereas the “master” thing was transparent linguistic nonsense and a strictly-US cultural thing that a few people foisted on the rest of the world because they decided to get offended on behalf of a hypothetical group.

  C:\WINDOWS\system32>cd D:\backups\some-huge-directory
  C:\WINDOWS\system32>del /s *

Or just serve the SVG file and use to embed the HTML, and include inside it. In theory you should be able to define a and use , but in practice neither Firefox nor Chromium seems to be handling that properly in a favicon, which is disappointing.

Telugu (a language of southern India) has an interesting traditional numeric system: base ten for integers, and base four for fractions.

   U+0C78 "౸" TELUGU FRACTION DIGIT ZERO FOR ODD POWERS OF FOUR
   U+0C79 "౹" TELUGU FRACTION DIGIT ONE FOR ODD POWERS OF FOUR
   U+0C7A "౺" TELUGU FRACTION DIGIT TWO FOR ODD POWERS OF FOUR
   U+0C7B "౻" TELUGU FRACTION DIGIT THREE FOR ODD POWERS OF FOUR
  (U+0C66 "౦" TELUGU DIGIT ZERO is used for even powers of four too)
   U+0C7C "౼" TELUGU FRACTION DIGIT ONE FOR EVEN POWERS OF FOUR
   U+0C7D "౽" TELUGU FRACTION DIGIT TWO FOR EVEN POWERS OF FOUR
   U+0C7E "౾" TELUGU FRACTION DIGIT THREE FOR EVEN POWERS OF FOUR

Few Telugu speakers even know about this any more—no one can read even the traditional integers (౦౧౨౩౪౫౬౭౮౯), because 0123456789 have replaced them. (This is the case in most but not all Indian languages. Bengali’s traditional digits are still common, so you can enjoy ৪ being four and ৭ seven.)

A couple of articles and discussions about it:

• https://www.unicode.org/wg2/docs/n3156.pdf is the best public resource I know of (Unicode proposals and related papers are often delightful for information on obscure written stuff, because they had to write down and publish the details to get the characters encoded). One tid-bit: NYSE used a similar decimal/quaternary system until early 2001.

• https://blog.plover.com/math/telugu.html from the same site as the current article, discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14683767 nine years ago.

It’s worse than that: the guy you have to do this to impersonate doesn’t have a moustache, so you then also have to draw one on his ID card with a marker.

In Australia, I don’t remember ever really getting spam SMSes. Emails from the bank, yes, but that’s easier to filter if desired. When you get the same old spam messages time after time, you can filter them in email, but text message apps are often not up to that sort of thing.

The really stupid thing is that more than half of the spam is about blocking spam. At least once a month, AD-TRAIND-G sends:

> స్పామర్లపై చర్య కోసం స్పామ్ను రిపోర్ట్ చెయ్యండి. అయితే, ఫోన్ కాలింగ్ యాప్లో స్పామర్ను బ్లాక్ చేయడం వల్ల స్పామర్పై చర్య తీసుకోబడదు. స్పామ్ను TRAI DND యాప్ లేదా సర్వీస్ ప్రొవైడర్ యాప్ లేదా 1909 లో రిపోర్ట్ చెయ్యండి. TRAI DND యాప్లో రిపోర్ట్ చేయడం సులభం మరియు వేగవంతం, ఈరోజే ఇన్స్టాల్ చేసుకోండి.

And AD-AIRDOT-S just sends a random message from a pool of half a dozen or so, mostly English but one or two Telugu, sometimes every few days, sometimes every few weeks. Such as:

> Alert: On receiving unwanted SMS , please complain by calling 1909 or send SMS to 1909 in format 'SMS Content, Sender No, dd/mm/yy' or visit bit.ly/2qBK0vp to report through Airtel Thanks App.

(Huh, that link is now broken. Used to work. Makes it even more dumb.)

I should automate reporting all of this stuff, deliberately to waste their time, and maybe, just maybe, make someone think, “maybe we should stop sending this stuff”.

There was also RCS… I turned that off after a bit, because it was being used purely for spam and undesirable stuff, and you couldn’t complain in the same channels. RCS is dead like this.

I find that difficult to believe. Ten minutes is a long time.

(Also, in case it wasn’t clear: I was quoting from the start of the article in that sentence.)

> It leaves um, uh, er and elongated versions (ummmm, uhhhhh) alone. Those sound like fillers but they’re doing real work in the sentence, and cutting them automatically would change what someone said. The rule erm follows: only remove things that are sound, not language.

> It also doesn’t touch repeated words, false starts, or long thinking pauses. Those aren’t noise on top of the speech; they are the speech, just messier than the speaker would like. Cleaning them up is an editorial decision about which take to keep, and erm doesn’t have an opinion about that.

Think about it. Cleaning these things-that-can-be-just-sounds-but-can-also-very-much-be-load-bearing up is an editorial decision. At the very least, you need to judge based on the surrounding content whether the removal of an um would change the meaning at all; and I don’t think text alone is adequate for that.