The first draft of Unicode was in 1988. Thompson and Pike came up with UTF-8 in 1992, made an RFC in 1998. UTF-16 came along in 1996, made an RFC in 2000.
The time machine would've involved Microsoft saying "it's clear now that USC-2 was a bad idea, so let's start migrating to something genuinely better".
I don't think it was clear at the time that UTF-8 would take off. UCS-2 and then UTF-16 was well established by 2000 in both Microsoft technologies and elsewhere (like Java). Linux, despite the existence of UTF-8, would still take years to get acceptable internationalization support. Developing good and secure internationalization is a hard problem -- it took a long time for everyone.
It's now 2026, everything always looks different in hindsight.
Blame Java - their use of utf-16 is the sole reason that Microsoft chose it.
Sun sued Microsoft in 1996 for making nonportable extensions to Java (a license violation). Microsoft lost, and created C# in 2000.
At the time, “Starting Java”
was the most feared message on the internet. People really thought that in-browser Java would take over over the world (yes Java, not Javascript)
Sun chose UTF16 in 1995 believing that Unicode would never need more than 64k characters. In 1996 that changed. UTF16 got variable length encoding and became a white elephant
So Microsoft chose UTF16 know full well that it had
no advantages. But at least they can say code pages were far worse :)
I don’t remember it quite that way. Localization was a giant question, sure. Are we using C or UTF-8 for the default locale? That had lots of screaming matches. But in the network service world, I don’t remember ever hearing more than a token resistance against choosing UTF-8 as the successor to ASCII. It was a huge win, especially since ASCII text is already valid UTF-8 text. Make your browser default to parsing docs with that encoding and you can still parse all existing ASCII docs with zero changes! That was a huge, enormous selling point.
Windows is far from a niche player, to be sure. Yet it seems like literally every other OS but them was going with one encoding for everything, while they went in a totally different direction that got complaints even then. I truly believe they thought they’d win that battle and eventually everyone else would move to UTF-16 to join them. Meanwhile, every other OS vendor was like, nah, no way we’re rewriting everything from scratch to work with a not-backward compatible encoding.
Microsoft did the hard work of supporting Unicode when UTF-8 didn't exist (and mostly when UTF-16 didn't exist).
Any system that continued with only ASCII well into the 2000s could mostly just jump into UTF-8 without issue. Doing nothing for non-English users for almost two decades turned out to be a solid plan long term. Microsoft certainly didn't have that option.
At the time it was introduced it was understandable, and Microsoft also needed some time to implement it before that of course. But by about 2000 it was clear that UTF-8 was going to win, and Microsoft should have just properly implemented it in NT instead of dithering about for the next almost 20 years. Linux had quite good support of it by then.
It gets worse for UTF-16, Windows will let you name files using unpaired surrogates, now you have a filename that exists on your disk that cannot be represented in UTF-8 (nor compliant UTF-16 for that matter). Because of that, there's yet another encoding called WTF-8 that can represent the arbitrary invalid 16-bit values.
This is ridiculous. New developers will learn a completely different skill path from what we learned, and they will get where we are faster than we did.
“People asking if Al is going to take their jobs is like an Apache in 1840 asking if white settlers are going to take his buffalo” (Noah Smith on Twitter, I mean X)
In the rosiest view, the rich give their children private tutors (and always have), and now the poor can give their children private tutors too, in the form of AIs. More realistically, what the poor get is something which looks superficially like a private tutor, yet instead of accelerating and deepening learning, it is one that allows the child to skip understanding entirely. Which, from a cynical point of view, suits the rich just fine...
Imagine a tutor that stays with you as long as you need for every concept of math, instead of the class moving on without you and that compounding over years.
Rather than 1 teacher for 30 students, 1 teacher can scale to 30 students to better address Bloom's 2 sigma problem, which discovered students in a 1:2 ratio with a tutor full time ended up in the 98% of students reliably.
LLMs are capable of delivering this outright, or providing serious inroads to it for those capable and willing to do the work beyond going through the motions.
> Imagine a tutor that stays with you as long as you need for every concept of math, instead of the class moving on without you and that compounding over years.
I remember when I was at the uni, the topics I learned the best were the ones I put effort to study by myself at home. Having a tutor with me all the time will actually make me do the bare minimum as there always were other things to do and I would love to skip the hard parts and move forward.
This is absolutely not an objective review. The person who wrote this is a very particular type of person who Alpha School appeals strongly towards. I'm not saying anything in particular is wrong with the review, but calling it unbiased is incorrect.
Calling the Alpha school "AI" or even "AI to aid learning" is a massive stretch. I've read that article and nothing in there says AI to me. Data collection and on-demand computer-based instruction, sure.
I don't disagree with your premise, but I don't think that article backs it up at all.
Ioannu is saying the paper's idea for training a dense network doesn't work in non-toy networks (the paper's method for selecting promising weights early doesn't improve the network)
BUT the term "lottery ticket" refers to the true observation that a small subset of weights drive functionality (see all pruning papers). It's great terminology because they truly are coincidences based on random numbers.
All that's been disproven is that paper's specific method to create a dense network based on this observation
Really? How many?
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