261–270 of 328 posts
> Out of desperation I asked ChatGPT. It was useless as usual. This is so real.
Heck, even pasting the "prompt" into non-AI Google and Bing worked.
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that's different, they had location-dependent names at the time of this article too, the issue is specifically about the fact that even if you have location-dependent names you'd use the name that is commonly used in that location, not an arbitrary regulation name.
I thought they used the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) from the USGS. If this buffoonery does pass, it will reflect in the government official data source - and thus on Google maps?
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It’s the reality of doing business all around the world. Either you chose sides, create different releases of software for some countries (deployment nightmare), or just remove such „sensitive“ features.
BTW the USA is now one of these "sensitive countries" where apps have to lie to legally do business. Just like Chinese users see Taiwan labeled as China, American users see (or will soon see) the Gulf of Mexico labeled as the Gulf of America.
yes, we know, there are historical territorial disputes all over the world. But can somebody here make a case that this is not actually/solely to appease China (over Taiwan presumably)?
Chinese denialism over Taiwan is really, really demented. It's not that they just claim Taiwan - they pretend they already own it, and stick their fingers in their ears if you point out facts on the ground. I suppose they did the same with Mongolia, until they couldn't.
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> Aside: my personal belief is that the political charge here lies with Unicode having codepoints for such countries, and downstream dependents of Unicode can readily point the finger. Displaying monochrome text of a country abbreviation instead of a flag doesn't seem like it would appease those who don't want the country acknowledged, anyhow; a "missing glyph" type of thing would come closer. Flags are Political Sym…
It's a bit confusing that folks who consider Taiwan a province and not a country wouldn't take issue (or at least see it as a minor issue relative to the presence of a flag) with it being included among ISO country codes. In other words, if Microsoft were to be walking on eggshells enough to omit flags wholesale, I'm surprised they don't also omit all things that enumerate ISO country codes. I see your point that fla…
Windows also doesn't have an "ISO Country Code Picker" here. They don't provide tools to make flag emoji at all.
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Yeah, but there is definitely no better option. If I come across a site that is not in English, but I see a little flag somewhere, that is a very good indicator that that's the place I can go and change the language to English. (Happens a lot more when you're travelling in a non-English-speaking country.)
https://languageicon.org/ strikes me as a plausibly better option for the scenario you describe.
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> Aside: my personal belief is that the political charge here lies with Unicode having codepoints for such countries, and downstream dependents of Unicode can readily point the finger. Displaying monochrome text of a country abbreviation instead of a flag doesn't seem like it would appease those who don't want the country acknowledged, anyhow; a "missing glyph" type of thing would come closer. Flags are Political Sym…
I can blame Microsoft. Every other tech company and OS figured out how to make it work and they're not exactly buckling under the weight of legal or political pressure on the matter of flags.
Even if very few of the lawsuits actually escalate to violence or war, is any risk of violence/war worth it? Ethics would suggest "all my competitors are doing it" isn't a great answer here, either, and certainly doesn't remove the risk.
I can respect the "no lawsuits at all" preference here.
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You're slightly confusing dialects with countries (there can be ones not tied to a single country), but more importantly, this places no hard limit on design, you can have icon variations for dialects as well. (and yes, language switching menus you can't understand are dumb, especially for more complicated cases where names don't even look similar, but unfortunately common)
As they say: a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. And even that criterium quickly breaks down at mild scrutiny. And not just because of landlocked countries. Linguists try to draw some lines in the sand, but in the end the reasons we call Swiss German a dialect and Luxemburgish a language are cultural and political.
> My approach was to draw an American flag emoji and then look at the pixels to see if any of them contained a non-grayscale color. This works because the Windows fallback emoji is just black/white text This is the kind of thing that works great for a while, and then an OS update flips the table on how RGB subpixel antialiasing works for the subset of your users with a certain type of display, leading to a false posi…
Unicode's mission is to be able to represent all written text. Once you decide that flags should be part of that you kind of have to include all of them. Including a flag in Unicode isn't a statement that you believe that this country exists, it's a statement that you think there are people who use this flag in written communication.
I don't get why Google doesn't want to ship them with Chrome, since they're not taking any more of a political stance by doing so than they are by shipping them with Android.
A 1.4MB binary size cost is massive. I'm a chrome developer and our threshold for what you need to explain the cost/benefit of is 16KB. To me this just isn't worth the cost.