this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2026
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A Spectre Is Haunting Unicode (www.dampfkraft.com)
submitted 3 days ago by floofloof@lemmy.ca to c/technology@lemmy.world
9 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/1287625

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[โ€“] brsrklf@jlai.lu 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

It really does. Weird.

Removing one character got me this though :

This appears to be a string of garbled characters (mojibake) resulting from incorrect text encoding. It does not convey a meaningful message in Chinese.

And removing even more got me to "The ancient city of Loulan".

[โ€“] daychilde@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

LOL. The intersection of language and machine can be fascinating.

Two anecdotes come to mind:

  1. There's a story out there - don't remember the author's name and he hasn't written much and you used to could find the story out there but I haven't been able to in a while as I check every so often - but "Cax6ton" will find info about it and him. It was a really great sci-fi short story (reminding me of the stories from the likes of Asimov and that timeframe) of a kid growing up and having escalating experiences of finding order in random chaos (for example, generating random letters and looking for words). I won't spoil the ending, but it was a really nice story.

  2. My dad used to work on telephone testing equipment, and back in the 80s, there was a device they would use - DECTalk - basically you could connect it to the computer via serial cable and use a terminal to send it commands and text, and it would do text-to-speech. It was relatively primative, but the tech is in a lot of 90s-2000s+ text-to-speech that you'll find on computers (Windows/Mac). Well, I'd spend hours writing things for it to say - oh hey, found someone has put it up on the web: https://dectalk.de/webspeak - oh, this is nostalgic!

Some phrases that amused the SHIT out of me as a twelve year old in 1987:

  • abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
  • taioueoiaueoiauoieuaioeuioaueoiauoeiuaioeaoiueoiaueoiuaoeuoaiueoiaueoiaueioua

Huh. On the physical DECTalk I played with, if you sent JUSt the vowels, it would pronounce them like:

  • a o i u e i o a u e o i u a o i e u a o i e u i o

Actally, even that is different because it used to leave pauses between the letters, and now it speechifies them. lol.

What else? Oh, this was always a winner:

  • sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeit

Yeah, this version is a little different, but it is decently close. The voice is right and a lot of the cadence is, but it feels like maybe a later version than I had. lol

And yes. We were more easily entertained in those days. XD