So... what Seattle does in the International District is this: Street names are written in both English, and... Mandarin, Japanese, Vietnamese. Sometimes its two different signs, sometimes its one big sign. I... don't really see how just putting a sign that writes it out in both languages... is not a reasonable solution to this scenario? But that doesn't really even appear to be the main issue going on here. ... As a person who has maintained large databases... yeah, it is... possible to implement support for nonstandard characters... but you would have to very, very directly legally require this specific level of support, and probably have a lot of lead time. It can be a bitch and a half to fundamentally rework an entire database system to support and uncommon character set, usually security minded practices will have you scrubbing out or charswapping or banning anything that isn't standard... and if there is any link in the chain, at any point, that doesn't properly support your new charset, well, it all blows up. So... that is everything from front end to backend that has to come up with a solution, and the reality is, for just most of such modern software systems... that means you're going through god knows how many vendors and liscensed software, and now they all have to be compliant as well, in more or less exactly the same way. Anyway, the sign in question appears to be written in NAPA: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americanist_phonetic_notation Its basically similar to IPA, but designed for the rather varied, unique and distinct languages of Native North Americans. NAPA does exist in at least comprehensive character standards: https://www.iana.org/assignments/language-subtag-registry/language-subtag-registry Type: variant Subtag: fonnapa Description: North American Phonetic Alphabet Description: Americanist Phonetic Notation Added: 2016-06-24 So it should be theoretically possible. ... Another... weird aspect to this is... NAPA is not like the actual written characters that the Musqueam, or any other Peoples of the Salish Sea... actually ever used. It is a modern, academic alphabet, primarily developed out of trying to basically reverse engineer almost entirely oral, spoken languages. It is not something any of them ever historically used as a written character set, outside of modern academia and modern attempts to revive various languages of various peoples, to encourage their use and prevent the languages from going extinct. Similar to NAPA is Saanich, or SENĆOŦEN, or Sənčáθən. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saanich_dialect This writing system is used by the some of the Saanich peoples, academics and modern language revival movements... very roughly speaking, the Saanich peoples/languahes are a subset of the broader group of Salish peoples/languages ... Another problem with this realm is that... there is no 100% respected as an authority standard on how exactly to use or implement exactly which characters in NAPA to represent exactly which sounds... so... different specific Peoples, Tribes, Academics, etc, may be using different characters within NAPA for the same sound. Its all very confusing from the standpoint of a database / data entry software dev trying to figure out how to actually implement this.

Lol.. I wanted "DRM". But it's been a long day.

I wonder if they could develop this into a tooth coating. Preventing biofilms would go a long way to preventing cavities.

Same, especially when searching technical or niche topics. Since there aren't a ton of results specific to the topic, mostly semi-related results will appear in the first page or two of a regular (non-Gemini) Google search, just due to the higher popularity of those webpages compared to the relevant webpages. Even the relevant webpages will have lots of non-relevant or semi-relevant information surrounding the answer I'm looking for. I don't know enough about it to be sure, but Gemini is probably just scraping a handful of websites on the first page, and since most of those are only semi-related, the resulting summary is a classic example of garbage in, garbage out. I also think there's probably something in the code that looks for information that is shared across multiple sources and prioritizing that over something that's only on one particular page (possibly the sole result with the information you need). Then, it phrases the summary as a direct answer to your query, misrepresenting the actual information on the pages they scraped. At least Gemini gives sources, I guess. The thing that gets on my nerves the most is how often I see people quote the summary as proof of something without checking the sources. It was bad before the rollout of Gemini, but at least back then Google was mostly scraping text and presenting it with little modification, along with a direct link to the webpage. Now, it's an LLM generating text phrased as a direct answer to a question (that was also AI-generated from your search query) using AI-summarized data points scraped from multiple webpages. It's obfuscating the source material further, but I also can't help but feel like it exposes a little of the behind-the-scenes fuckery Google has been doing for years before Gemini. How it bastardizes your query by interpreting it into a question, and then prioritizes homogeneous results that agree on the "answer" to your "question". For years they've been doing this to a certain extent, they just didn't share how they interpreted your query.

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Can anyone recommend a good alternative? I still use it to bookmark most wanted sites.

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