Well, turned out that although the Focus -> Do Not Disturb settings had been disabled, the settings were behaving as though they were enabled anyway! It was set to only allow certain apps to show banners. Only when I changed this setting (a few months later nevertheless) did notification banners finally start working properly as before. Perhaps I ran into an extreme edge case that the Apple engineers overlooked somehow, but it does make me wonder whether they are doing anything at all to identify and cover such edge cases.

Perhaps it's more that Fulani speakers truly appreciated having an alphabetic script that is able to adequately represent the distinct sounds of their language without ambiguities, which had not been the case with the Latin or Arabic scripts. Cultural pride also would have played a factor, there's a reason South Korea has a special holiday to commemorate the creation of Hangul script: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul_Day

By comparison, the official Reddit app feels somewhat slower, even on my relatively new Android 12 phone from 2021, having a very noticeable lag when scrolling through articles and comments. For video and photo posts, there's no way of browsing the comments without clicking on the thumbnail and having it auto-play the videos every time, meaning I need to react fast to pause the video (there is practically no way of stopping this). And it doesn't support Android 7 anymore, meaning the only way to access it from my 2018 phone is via the browser.

It baffles me why Reddit would want to cut support for 3rd party apps when they were a key component in the Reddit ecosystem.

Perhaps my memory of primary school's a bit fuzzy in this regard, but the point I intended to make was that handwriting was an unpleasant but necessary thing I had to do to get through school and was not something I particularly enjoyed for this reason. The English literature exams were always the worst because of all the darn essays I had to write by hand. On the other hand, me and my cohort got free school laptops from the Australian government in Year 9 [0] which were great for note-taking in class and took the pressure off the need to rely on my at-the-time mediocre and slow handwriting. While having some significant restrictions including the blocking of external programs and an Internet filter that blocked Facebook, many of us enjoyed hacking these laptops to make it run games or other programs we were not supposed to run, lol. Also we got to get them unlocked and keep them after graduating high school.

These days I see much greater value in having good handwriting, and as others have said around, handwritten notes actually help with memory recall far greater than a typed note ever will. Typed notes still have their place as they can be searched much more quickly than handwritten notes, but I found that handwritten notes are much better for notetaking important and critical procedures (e.g. on-call incident response) so that they can be remembered better. Always good to have not just 1 notetaking option, for sure.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Education_Revolution

The funny thing was that some years later in 2016, I became highly interested in learning other writing systems for fun (and which I talk about on a blog of mine at [1]), which eventually also evolved into a newfound obsession with handwriting that I still practice today. Its really changed the way I see the written word and is a good way to remind oneself how letters on a screen are really the culmination of a few thousand years of scribes iterating through the older sharp, rigid and awkward letters and gradually evolving them into smoother and more fluid forms which can be drawn much faster by hand.

[1]: https://alternatescriptbureau.wordpress.com

The majority of Chinese characters (more than 80%) are 'phono-semantic compounds' where 1 part of the character indicates the meaning and the other indicates the pronunciation. And the majority of these compounds follow a surprisingly regular pattern: for instance, the character '召' is pronounced 'zhao' in Mandarin Chinese, and forms the right side of the characters '招' and '昭' - both of which are also pronounced 'zhao'.

Here's another example - the character '包' is pronounced 'bao', and is frequently found as a component in characters pronounced 'bao': '饱' ('full stomach', with the food radical ⻠ on the left) and '抱' ('hug', with the hand radical ⺘). '包' also forms the phonetic component of some characters pronounced as 'pao', which sounds similar to 'bao': '跑' ('run', with the foot radical ⻊), '炮' ('cannon', with the fire radical 火), and '泡' ('bubble', with the water radical ⺡). I had been studying Chinese recently, and understanding the phonetic aspects of the characters has helped me to read them more easily than before.

Having said that, a lot of these phonetic relations date back many years and some of them have been obscured due to language change. But to blindly assume that Chinese characters are 'archaic' is false - as others have commented, you can say the same for English spelling, which also has spellings that date back many years but do not make sense today, like the 'gh' in 'tough', 'dough' and 'caught'. Also, it would be possible to reform Chinese characters such that every character with the same pronunciation would use the same phonetic component, while allowing for additional components to indicate the meaning. And that was what Simplified Chinese did to a certain extent.