Hacker News: qingcharles

New comment by qingcharles in "The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt"

qingcharles — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 04:48:34 +0000

So I went to check on the font that I'd chosen for my European/Latin/Cyrillic body text, and I guess I got very lucky with my pick:

https://github.com/googlefonts/literata

I'm already strict with marking the html pages with the correct lang and culture tags etc, but I'll be double-checking everything now. Thank you again for educating me :)

New comment by qingcharles in "The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt"

qingcharles — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 22:25:28 +0000

Wow, thank you for this response. This is actually fascinating and frustrating at the same time. So Bulgarian uses the same Unicode points, but also uses the language/culture metadata to let the font know which set to use.

I'm building out a multi-lingual wiki and just about to start adding Cyrillic support, and this really helps me understand that there is more research I need to do to support other Cyrillic languages.

New comment by qingcharles in "Pac-Man, but you're the ghost"

qingcharles — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 15:06:54 +0000

That Pac-Man Vs. looks awesome. I'd love to try that with the full setup on GC. Even has Mario as an announcer!

New comment by qingcharles in "Honda Civics and the Evil Valet"

qingcharles — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 14:57:59 +0000

Or he's calling his mistress/lover from the safety of his car and now he's open to blackmail.

New comment by qingcharles in "GLM 5.2 Is Out"

qingcharles — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 14:06:33 +0000

How much was the Christmas deal?

New comment by qingcharles in "The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt"

qingcharles — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 05:19:13 +0000

I could write all day about how badly RtL languages are treated on electronic devices. Most interfaces just slop RtL text into an interface that is otherwise the totally wrong way around.

One thing that amuses me is that people share these "safe zone" templates for short form video to make sure your content isn't hidden behind the buttons:

https://imgur.com/a/MrIQZen

But look over the shoulder of someone using the Arabic version of TikTok and you'll realize how flawed that is:

https://imgur.com/a/5iLXd2o

New comment by qingcharles in "The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt"

qingcharles — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 05:10:00 +0000

That's a great example of the problem :)

New comment by qingcharles in "The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt"

qingcharles — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 05:09:00 +0000

It's funny -- I hate the way Arabic sounds when spoken, even though I agree it looks pretty. To my ears French and Japanese sound the nicest.

New comment by qingcharles in "The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt"

qingcharles — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 05:06:11 +0000

CJK languages can include vertical and RtL stretches too, to complicate matters. Here's some lyrics I made as a test:

https://codepen.io/kingcharlesone/pen/GgRXLoM

Japanese magazines usually mix three different script types on a majority of the pages like this:

https://imgur.com/a/x61XbIV

(In another quirk some Japanese mags open right-bound, others open left-bound)

New comment by qingcharles in "The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt"

qingcharles — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 05:00:56 +0000

I was lucky enough to date someone from the Gulf, so I forced myself to understand and read Arabic scripts (but not understand the text), which is a huge bonus when creating multi-lingual designs.

I already had a good understand of CJK scripts, and you'll come across RtL there, with things like tategaki which is both vertical and RtL at the same time (and can include quotes in other languages such as English and Arabic). Here's some lyrics I made in that format for reference:

https://codepen.io/kingcharlesone/pen/GgRXLoM

What peculiarities does Cyrillic text have? I've never learned to convert Cyrillic to Latin.

New comment by qingcharles in "GLM 5.2 Is Out"

qingcharles — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 21:23:51 +0000

Link to the Coding Plan (only way to get 5.2 right now):

https://z.ai/subscribe

New comment by qingcharles in "New pancreatic cancer drug might open the door to much longer survival times"

qingcharles — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 20:40:09 +0000

It pleases their voters. All the MAGAs I know think scientists are scammers, funded by Bill Gates, brewing up "fake" viruses to reduce the population and insert nanobots to track their movements.

New comment by qingcharles in "Show HN: FablePool – pool money behind a prompt, and Fable builds it in public"

qingcharles — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 16:52:04 +0000

I was surprised. I expected it to be crypto payments.

New comment by qingcharles in "Kimi K2.7-Code: open-source coding model with better token efficiency"

qingcharles — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 15:04:12 +0000

Also, if you do have SuperGrok, forget using Grok, they are giving you Composer 2.5 in Grok Build.

New comment by qingcharles in "Kimi K2.7-Code: open-source coding model with better token efficiency"

qingcharles — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 15:01:42 +0000

They're not unusable, they're just bad when compared with all the real frontier models.

New comment by qingcharles in "Waymo Premier"

qingcharles — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 04:59:56 +0000

The Waymo I saw the other day, one guy stopped the car, the other broke the window and snatched all the goodies from the occupants.

New comment by qingcharles in "MiMo Code is now released and open-source"

qingcharles — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 18:32:25 +0000

I remember when they made this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiaomi_Mi_1

And now they make one of the fastest cars ever created and frontier-level AI. In just over a decade. 你好!

New comment by qingcharles in "Let's Encrypt bans certificate usage in any US sanctioned territory [pdf]"

qingcharles — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 03:28:58 +0000

Thank you. Had to go looking for these magazines.

http://www.koreanarchitecture.gov.kp/index.php?kt=TWFnYXppbm...

New comment by qingcharles in "Exif Smuggling (2025)"

qingcharles — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 03:16:06 +0000

More than that, you need to check the file is a valid image, not just the mime type. I remember a host that let me upload an aspx file as a jpg and it allowed me to execute it and browse their entire file system until I found the SQL Server and network administrator passwords in a text file.

The passwords were both "internet".

New comment by qingcharles in "Making Graphics Like it's 1993"

qingcharles — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 02:36:09 +0000

If you want to follow this to its unnecessary limits on the PC, the CGA 3D engine in the 8086 version of Elite is probably maximally constrained :)