Without taking the disability question into account:

Serifs in print, as they help differentiate the letters.

Sans-serifs on screens, because they often make the letters fuzzy. Unless you have a resolution high enough that rendering their detail is not sub-pixel anymore.

The battlefield between two crumbling post-soviet republics has told us that drones and piecemeal mashups have made big materiel almost obsolete. This is about as major a development as can possibly be. War is never going to be the same again.

Because the number of the drones is not important. The survivability of the target, and cost of the drones versus the cost of the target is.

The Houthis beat the US Navy in the Red Sea. The poorest country in the world went against the richest country in the world, and came out on top. And all of the US military aid to Ukraine has been at best unable to win the war.

This is what asymmetric warfare is. One would hope the US has learned it's lesson in the forever wars, but alas. One would hope that the US had learned it's lesson in the Millennium Challenge war games, but alas.

A fpv drone is about $100, an Abrams tank about $10M. Cruise missiles cost in the $1M range, a US aircraft carrier costs about $10B. With that kind of math you can literally use thousands ofb small ones to kill a big one and still come out on top with lots to spare. Except, of course, you don't need thousands. A few drones or a few dozens of cruise missiles is all you need. And in the case of the Houthis, you don't even need to sink a target to achieve your aim.

China was happy to import all sorts of things, but the US with it's sanctions blunders convinced them that they need to be self-sufficient in everything.

There's one born every minute...

Samsung has famously not allowed their subsidiaries to subsidize each other. If the price of their own memory is not competitive, the memory that goes into their other products shall be bought from outside. The memory subsidiary, like any other, has to be able to stand on it's own, otherwise you end up with dead weight everywhere.

This is now the flip side of that. The market conditions are unpredictable, so they won't make long term commitments, and if our their electronics cannot pay the going rate of their memory, they shall not piss their potential earnings into the wind either.

I would call maybe some internal protectionism is in order. Their consumer electronics won't be able to source memory from anywhere else either, might as well close shop. But they are pretty much the only consumer electronics company that could deliver based on their own supply. Could use it to wipe the floor with competition...

Who knows, maybe the higher ups have not weighed in yet. And let's not forget Samsung like any other chaebol is heavily intertwined with SK government, too. Whether it's owned by the Lee family or SK govt, and/or is the SK govt owned by Samsung instead... these are questions which depend a lot on who is asking, when, and in what context... The current memory bubble is unprecedented in semiconductor history, and there is no playbook to follow. But consumer electronics are pretty much completely priced out of the memory market, and we can expect all sorts of weird stuff to follow.

I said Lingua Franca specifically to draw attention to the fact that no language stays in the position forever. Times change, and languages come and go. Latin came, and went, French came, and went, and English came, and will go, too. Many more languages have had their time in the spotlight, too.

As to the analytic/synthetic, English itself is mostly analytic by now; there's some more European languages that are fully analytic, and some that are somewhat analytic.

But more importantly, no characteristics of a language have anything to do with it becoming dominant. Nor does yours or mine hatred towards one or the other matter one bit. Language spreads not on it's own merit, but on top of other things. Demographics, culture, technology, trade, power... People who have business to do in China are already learning the language. It's a career accelerating move for the individual, and profit accelerating for the company. Since most of the business to do in the world is now in China, at one point the network effect will kick in, and the rest will be easy pickings.

And no, Cantonese is in no way in a bad position in this. It is the dominant language in the Pearl River Delta, which has good dibs on being the most important manufacturing cluster in the world.

Sure it plays an important role. The problem with it is that the meta-language of modern techology design is enshittification.

Well it was pulled out of someone's ass, so it will fit right back in...

I would think that the whole point of 4K is to see detail not seen before? Vomit crew seems to fit the bill.

I guess we first have to pick Cantonese or Mandarin first, but whatever.

I have to wonder then, what language do the tone deaf Chinese speak? There's bound to be about 70M of them.

Me personally, I cannot stand Italian, which is probably the top contender for the most beautiful language.

But my point is. The particular Lingua Franca of the times is based on what the most important country is, be it globally or locally. English being it was based first on the global span of the British Empire, and then of the US. Well the US has been in decline for about 50 years now, and the orange guy seems to have undertaken to finish the job. China, on the other hand, is already the most important country by many measures, like trade, manufacture, and most tech, and is gaining steadily in others like science and diplomatic influence. We already live in a Chinese world, it's just that we haven't noticed. But as everyone finds that their foremost interests lie with the Chinese, the language of choice will follow suit.

When Nadella became CEO, he fired all of QA. I wish I was joking.

English /is/ the language of business and commercial culture, although Chinese will probably overtake in a few decades.

But this is about fonts in end-user product, and if you think that Japanese companies should makd Japanese games for Japanese people in English language, you have a tough sell ahead of you...

In a way, yes. And I'm not even going Itanium here. But here's something I've been thinking about:

Back in the days of yore, Intel had painted itself into the corner with the Pentium 4. It was way too power hungry, and had an unworkably long instruction pipeline. It was a dead end, proper dead dead. The way out came from the left field. They had thrown their Israeli branch office something they themselves could not be bothered with - the design of a mobile Pentium 4. Since the 4 proper was obviously not going to cut it, the Israelis took the Pentium 3, made some improvements here and there, added more cache, and bolted on the Pentium 4 fsb. The result turned out to be the goat that's still remembered by the grumpy old of us.

The Pentium M lineage in a short while became known as the Core architecture, and the rest is history.

But the interesting part wrt/ the current Intel situation came later. After the success of the M, over time the Israeli office basically took over in Intel, to the point where they have been considered not a US, but an Israeli company. So what happened? Was the HQ hollow of any talent, both of engineering, and of management? Or did the management understand that they needed to pivot to where the talent was? Was there any talent in Israel at all, since one could argue the M was mostly off the shelf parts, or did the Israeli management just see their chance, all eyes on them, and wipe the floor with the inept HQ management?. And since we have now gotten to where Intel currently is, did the Israeli office inherit and internalize the HQ dysfunction, or did they bring about their own? We may never know, but it's interesting to have witnessed the behemoth go full circle in the last two decades.

They'll do just fine on the Hill, the House, and the Street tho. In fact, only their kind will do.

Slashdot commentary, obviously.