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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1659 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 9, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Not-so-fun fact: All the little icons on this website are, not actual emoji characters, but private-use characters in custom fonts. For example, underneath a front-page post you see icons that look like this:

💬︎ 81⤢︎ View source👁︎ Subscribe💾︎ Save⚑︎ Report

But that is just in appearance. In reality, each of those icons is a private-use character (inserted as a CSS pseudo-element, so it doesn't even really exist in the page and therefore can't be copied-and-pasted) that shows up as a blank box if you try to use it without the custom font—e. g., , "private-use-F4AD", instead of the proper "speech balloon" emoji. (For details, run searches for 'content:"\f', 'content: "\f', and "font awesome" in this file.) I guess modern web developers don't like Unicode, and prefer to retvrn to Wingdings.

The UN's official "degrees of urbanization":

  • Rural area: Density < 300 per km2

  • Semi-dense town: Density ≥ 300 per km2 and population ≥ 5000

  • City: Density ≥ 1500 per km2 and population ≥ 50,000

The next step is obvious (another ×5 density and ×10 population).

  • Mega-city: Density ≥ 7500 per km2 and population ≥ 500,000

From a glance at the downloadable dataset, using the very-roughly-equivalent criterion "density ≥ 7500 per km2 and area ≥ 67 km2" (which is all that I feel like figuring out in QGIS—I used the "reclassify by table" and "polygonize" tools):

  • Mega-City One (393 km2) is the only US mega-city. Los Angeles (60) is not yet worthy of the title Mega-City Two.

  • Mega-Ciudad Mexico is gigantic, at 673 km2. Guadalajara (152) and León (72) also qualify, but Monterrey (56) does not.

  • If you keep going south, Tegucigalpa (92 km2) and Managua (86) qualify as mega-cities, but Panama City (53) does not.

  • London, 316 km2; Paris, 344; Brussels, 67; Berlin, 88; Istanbul, 230; Cairo, 593; Beijing, 537; Tokyo, 1498; Jakarta, 1865; Lagos, 463; et cetera.

When you make a mistake on your US federal income-tax return, the IRS sends to you a letter telling you that you made a mistake and informing you of your new tax bill. In November, the president signed into law a bill that will require this letter to actually explain what mistake you made, rather than merely saying that a mistake exists and giving to you a new tax bill with no explanation of how it was recalculated.

Quotes from the committee report:

Each year, the IRS sends millions of "math error" notices to taxpayers that propose to adjust their tax liabilities. These math error notices often do not explain the reasons for the adjustments, and some are never received by the taxpayer due to lost mail.

With respect to the description of the math error adjustment, the IRS must include the type of error, the section of the Code to which the error relates, and the line on the return on which the error was made. In identifying the type of error, the notice may not rely on a list of multiple categories of math errors in the alternative. Instead, it must identify the specific type of math error authority relied upon for each specific error on the return.

The itemized computation of the adjustments must address all changes to any component of the computation of taxable income and tax liability or tax due. These items include adjusted gross income, taxable income, itemized or standard deductions, credits (whether or not refundable), losses, and other items specifically listed in the provision.

Some recent commodity prices:

  • Gold (lot of 100 troy ounces): 4500 dollars per troy ounce

  • Platinum (lot of 50 troy ounces): 2300 dollars per troy ounce

  • Silver (lot of 5000 troy ounces): 78 dollars per troy ounce

  • Copper (lot of 25,000 kilograms): 5.9 dollars per pound (0.40 dollar per troy ounce)

  • Aluminum (lot of 12.5 tons): 3100 dollars per ton (0.11 dollar per troy ounce)

Notes:

  • These prices are based on large lots. Individual copper coins (called "rounds", since they aren't minted by a government as currency) actually cost around 3 dollars per troy ounce (when they're in stock, which they are not at the time of writing—but they were a week ago).

  • Iron is traded as raw ore (100 megagrams at 62-percent purity), and steel is traded as finished product (20 tons of hot-rolled coil), so those metals cannot be properly compared with the metals listed above. (If you insist on doing it anyway, 62 percent pure iron ore is 110 dollars per ton or 0.0037 dollar per troy ounce, and hot-rolled steel is 970 dollars per ton or 0.033 dollar per troy ounce.)

Fun Unicode story time.

In 2015, I went to North Korea to teach computer science. One of the things I taught was how to integrate their computer systems to the internet, and one of the major challenges is the lack of compatibility between Unicode and their internal character sets.

In North Korea, when they use Unicode (which is rare actually), they use these private-use code points for special characters for the Kims. The Kims are thought to be so special that their names are always written in a fancy calligraphy, and the Norks don't want to rely on HTML to provide this fancy calligraphy (because that might not always be available), and so they do this calligraphy at the font level. The "advantage" of this is that you can differentiate between an "ordinary" peasant Kim Il Sung (of which there actually were some) and "the" Kim Il Sung at the font level in every computer program. (The North Koreans didn't invent this idea, but rather borrowed it from how some Arabic encodings treat Muhammad and his sayings.) Anyway, this caused problems for US diplomats when we would receive documents from the North, convert them to Unicode, but then all references to any Kim would appear as square boxes and diplomats didn't know whether the document was talking about Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Un, or Kim Jong Il. So I went to Korea to help sort this mess out.

Below is (part of) a memo I wrote for the North's ministry of education that outlines some of the other problems that the North has had with the Unicode standard.

Technical Problems

The Committee for Standardization of the DPRK (CSK) submitted a memo to the Unicode Consortium in 1997 that lists three difficulties in working with Unicode in the DPRK. None of these problems have been fixed in the last 25 years. The problems are:

  1. The official name of the Korean language script in Unicode is "Hangul" (see Section 18.6 of the Unicode 14.0 standard). Hangul is the ROK's name for their script, and the DPRK prefers the name "Choseongul". The DPRK suggested that the name "Korean characters" be adopted as a politically neutral term.

  2. The DPRK and ROK use a different sorting order for their alphabets. The ROK order for consonants is

    ㄱ   ㄲ  ㄴ  ㄷ  ㄸ  ㄹ  ㅁ  ㅂ  ㅃ  ㅅ  ㅆ  ㅇ  ㅈ  ㅉ  ㅊ  ㅋ  ㅌ  ㅍ  ㅎ

    and the DPRK order is

    ㄱ   ㄴ  ㄷ  ㄹ  ㅁ  ㅂ  ㅅ  ㅈ  ㅊ  ㅋ  ㅌ  ㅍ  ㅎ  ㄲ  ㄸ  ㅃ  ㅆ  ㅉ  ㅇ

    For example, in the ROK, the word 까치 (magpie) comes alphabetically before the word 나비 (butterfly), but in the DPRK the word 나비 comes alphabetically before 까치.

    The Unicode standard orders Korean characters according to the ROK-ordering, and so by default all sorting done in any programming language will sort Korean words in the ROK-preferred way. A special extension called a collation algorithm is required to sort according to the DPRK-ordering.

    As of 2022, the current list of collation algorithms does not have an entry for the DPRK-dialect of Korean, and so it is currently impossible in any programming language to sort text alphabetically accoding to the DPRK-ordering.

  3. The DPRK internally uses the KPS9566 character set. This character set contains several characters that the Unicode Consortium does not want to support. For example, it contains political characters representing the Workers Party of Korea, and 4 distinct versions of the character 김 (one for normal text, and one each for Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il, and Kim Jong Un).

    This lack of support for certain characters used by the DPRK prevents documents produced in the DPRK from being opened in tools like Microsoft Word, and even programming languages like Python and R cannot work with these documents. This lack of compatibility adds considerable friction to negotiations, since diplomats between the DPRK and the United States cannot easily exchange documents.

There is at least one more problem with the Unicode standard for the DPRK not listed above:

  1. The current Unicode standard does not support transliteration of Korean into Latin characters using the DPRK's preferred Romanization system, and instead only supports the McCune–Reischauer system. Furthermore, transliterations into non-Latin alphabets are not supported at all, despite the importance of transliterating into Cyrillic. A 2018 UN report on romanization describes a good history of the many Romanization systems for Korean.

Historical Basis

The ROK has been actively and publicly developing their systems for encoding Korean text since the earliest days of the internet. KAIST first developed the KSC5601 encoding method in 1974, and actively worked with companies like IBM and Microsoft, and standards organizations in the US and Europe to ensure widespread support for this standard. The ROK issued an official Request for Comments (RFC) on the encoding in 1993 via RFC1557 to suggest that KSC5601 be the standard format for exchanging Korean emails. When the Unicode Consortium was first founded in 1991, ROK programmers were well positioned to contribute to the developing standard. They had the detailed technical knowledge of developing many of their own internal encodings, they had experience interacting with diverse technical committees, and they had the English communication skills for communicating in the Unicode Consortium's working language.

In contrast, the DPRK has severely lagged the ROK in this area. It's not known when the DPRK first developed their own Korean encoding, but the DPRK's KPS9566 encoding was first published internationally in 1997 and officially registered with the Internaional Standards Organization (ISO) in 1998. It wasn't until August 1999 that the DPRK began discussions for enabling Unicode compatibility. The DPRK submitted an official statement to the Unicode Consortium outlining their difficulties adopting the Unicode standard (summarized above), but since they entered this discussion 8 years after it began, the technical decisions had already been made. In order to not break backwards compatibility, the Unicode Consortium issued a statement that they could not implement the changes requested by the DPRK.

Fun Fact: There are 7 emojis in the current Unicode standard that were added at the request of the DPRK. The DPRK originally suggested that the HOT BEVERAGE emoji ☕ should be called the HOT TEA emoji, but an American suggested the emoji be renamed so that Americans could use it to represent coffee. The DPRK delegation agreed, and so the emoji was renamed. This is an example of technical experts working on narrow technical problems being able to work together in a way that diplomats can't.

This is awesome

Interesting metal prices. Take $3 for the copper, $90 for silver, and $4650 for gold (all APMEX prices), and you get 30:1 from Copper to Silver and ~52:1 from Silver to Gold.

A hair of rounding and you get 2*3*5:1 and 2*5*5:1, which are pretty pleasing ratios. I think I'll suggest these for DnD.

See GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Treasures 1: Glittering Prizes for lots of guidance on using custom coins in TTRPG campaigns.

When you make a mistake on your US federal income-tax return, the IRS sends to you a letter telling you that you made a mistake and informing you of your new tax bill. In November, the president signed into law a bill that will require this letter to actually explain what mistake you made, rather than merely saying that a mistake exists and giving to you a new tax bill with no explanation of how it was recalculated.

I guess I never thought about it, but I didn’t know this wasn’t already how it already worked. It’s amusingly irritating. To build off the common internet joke about taxes:

IRS: “fyi you owe us taxes”
Taxpayer: “how much?”
IRS: “guess”
Taxpayer: *submits tax filing*
IRS: “the amount is wrong btw”
Taxpayer: “how do i fix it?”
IRS: “guess”
Taxpayer: “what happens if i don’t get it right?”
IRS: “fees, interest, penalties, maybe prison… idk”

Anarchotyranny in action. Low income earners and those who work under-the-table don’t have to bother with tax returns, while more productive citizens have to stress over filings lest they get sent to prison.

The hostility of the IRS is quite a thing to behold. Way back when, when I was still on Reddit, I ran into a thread where someone asked for advice on what to do with some income they, or someone in their family didn't declare. In my naivete I asked why don't they just come clean, and got told ny someone else this could land them in prison. Now I don't know if this was just Redditors spreading Redditisms, but I was rather surprised. This actually works in Europe! If you actively confess before they catch you, they don't even charge interest.

The first indication that DOGE was going off the rails was when Elon proudly tweeted that he had shut down the IRS Direct File program. That might be the most out-of-touch thing I have ever seen him do.

The hostility of the IRS is quite a thing to behold. [...] This actually works in Europe! If you actively confess before they catch you, they don't even charge interest.

There is much to complain about Finnish taxes but the tax office's customer service certainly isn't one of them. I haven't heard a single complaint about them and apart from the rather long queuing times on phone (billed as a regular private phone number, not as a typical expensive service number) and some services only being open a few hours per day, their service has always been excellent and friendly. Taxes are of course calculated automatically and most changes and declarations can be done online but if you need to do something Right Now, you may need to call them on the phone.

That IRS change is very helpful. My first experience with e-filing had an error. My Schedule D only included the 4 transactions listed on the first page no additional pages but my paper copy had both and the totals were the same. But it took almost 6 months to finally get a copy of the e-filing report to see what had gone wrong and when I amended my return I ended up getting more back. The taxpayer's advocate was extremely helpful as the IRS contacts simply demanded payment.

I guess modern web developers don't like Unicode, and prefer to retvrn to Wingdings.

At blame are browsers and their handling of images, that's why "UI" fonts are again on the rise.

(1) What problems do browsers have with displaying images? It's my understanding that browser display of images has only been improving, with "lazy loading" specified in HTML and implemented in browsers.

(2) What do images have to do with my comment? I'm talking about emoji, not images.

Can't style emojis, there are already lots of pretty good libraries of UIish fonts. Also browsers had (dunno if they still have) max concurrent download connections limits, also V-aligning images and text used to be a right old pain. Which is why those fonts became so popular.

Edit: Do not cite the Deep Magic to me, Witch. I was there when it was written.

I don't buy that. Browsers are more feature complete than ever, yet websites keep having worse and worse usability.

phones

Sure, they manage to somehow have even worse usability on phones ("Hey, let's prevent zooming just so people older than 25 can't read any of the tiny text or images!").

This makes me wonder what will happen when I use the image tab. This is a ChatGPT "rework to look like a modern photo" of me in a 1966 Sunbeam Alpine, circa 1987. What will we see when I post?

Edit: Nothing interesting happened.

/images/1767953370220446.webp

For some reason your photo brings to my mind some mixture of Michael J Fox and Tom Cruise. Not bad (assuming that was actually you).

It's me but the reconstruction blurred my face grotesquely. Both those dudes were the actors I knew growing up so maybe I was channeling unknowingly. Or something.

I'm having a bit of a reading comprehesion SNAFU.

Can you explain in how far your comment relates to its parent comment?

You have to get into my head and free associate emoji to image to website.

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