Thanks! That explains it! Here’s the image you linked for people who don’t want to visit MSN
I really dislike it when people slather AI upscalers onto images for no reason. Very rarely does it improve the perceived quality of the image, most of the time it just changes your reaction from “wow, this is a low-res photo” to “wow, someone tried upscaling this low-res photo”. Here it somehow made the image even worse
Yeah, what’s up with that? At first I thought it was a weird camera/filter, but the more I look the worse it gets. What are those… powerlines? in the background on the right? Why are they next to a building/tree hybrid? What is the flamingo looking thing behind him? What logo is on his cap? Am I paranoid!?
From Wikipedia:
These were defined by October 2010 as part of the Unicode 6.0 support for emoji, as an alternative to encoding separate characters for each country flag. Although they can be displayed as Roman letters, it is intended that implementations may choose to display them in other ways, such as by using national flags. The Unicode FAQ indicates that this mechanism should be used and that symbols for national flags will not be directly encoded.
I don’t think you’ll be able to find a source that specifically says “yeah, they did this to avoid having to make a decision about which countries are important/independent enough to have flags”, but like… why else would they go with this more complicated system over just defining separate codepoints for each flag?
This reminds of how when the unicode consortium had to add flag emojis, instead of opening the can of worms on what countries are independent or not, they just noped out of it and let the implementers decide which combinations of regional indicator letters render as country flags.
Yeah, time to slam that word out of existence!
Aside from the political stuff, I’m also concerned about proton from a technological standpoint. You can’t use a standard mail client with proton, you have to use their own. So, if they wanted to, they could push out a single malicious update which would render all of the end-to-end encryption stuff pointless. You could argue that using Thunderbird + GPG + Gmail is more secure/private.
Now I’m curious, how hard would it be to write a lemmy bot that mimics Stinky’s behavior just to troll people lol. Ask generic questions like “I don’t understand, could someone explain please?” on random posts and then reply with k to any answer with over 4 lines of text. Like a simpler but much more infuriating version of that Tobllort account from the other site.
More like “didn’t exist, but was okay even if it did” lol.