Latin1 was the early default character set for encoding documents delivered via HTTP for MIME types beginning with /text . Today, only around only 1.1% of websites on the internet use the encoding, along with some older applications. However, it is still the most popular single-byte character encoding scheme in use today. A funny thing about Latin1 encoding is that it maps every byte from 0 to 255 to a valid character. This means that literally any sequence of bytes can be interpreted as a valid string. The main drawback is that it only supports characters from Western European languages. The same is not true for UTF8. Unlike Latin1, UTF8 supports a vastly broader range of characters from different languages and scripts. But as a consequence, not every byte sequence is valid. This fact is due to UTF8's added complexity, using multi-byte sequences for characters beyond the general ASCII range. This is also why you can't just throw any sequence of bytes at it and ex...
This morning I saw a post on twitter that said:
The tragedy about waiting 6 months for something is that there aren't many "6 months" in a human life to wait.
This was in the context of a discussion about various services and their relative speeds, e.g. Amazon delivery versus health care or city planning. Amazon might be able to deliver a thing tomorrow. Fixing a road, acquiring a city permit, or getting a doctor's appointment might take several months.
But the general point is true in the long-view of life in its entirety -- the clock is always there, ticking. Time is essentially the ultimate currency. Lost or stolen time can never be returned or recovered.
It reminded me of this post from Wait but Why -- an illustration of the average human lifespan. This hit me hard when I first saw it. Life feels long until you see it laid out in weeks: https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html
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