Noto means "no tofu": fixing dotted circles in Myanmar text | Hacker News Reader

Noto means "no tofu": fixing dotted circles in Myanmar text

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65 pointssteffoz34 comments

They're confusing a few things by saying kanji is written top-to-bottom. Direction applies to all Japanese text, not just kanji -- which are simply one type of moji (characters). The traditional vertical format is called 縦書き (tategaki), and unlike the modern horizontal style (left-to-right), it runs top-to-bottom, right-to-left.

Here's some tategaki lyrics I wrote as an example:

https://codepen.io/kingcharlesone/pen/abgdPgZ

And if you want a really crazy (worst case) localization test, here's tategaki which includes English, Arabic, Hindi and some math:

https://codepen.io/kingcharlesone/pen/jEPNRLP

To be nitpicky, there's also 縦中横(tate-chu-yoko, "vertical mid horizontal")/横向文字(Héngxiàng wénzì "horizontal direction literal character") in which [0-9a-Z]{2,8} are placed horizontally in the middle of a line.

1: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/P...

This is an excellent point, which of course complicates things further :D I'm going to update my worst-case Unicode now.

In “Careless People”, in the chapter on the Rohingya Genocide, a case is made for Facebook’s complicity in it. Essentially threatening and violence-inciting content got past moderation because the font that was used didn’t support Myanmar text. So there would be a report on a post but all the mod team would see was missing Unicode characters and mark the post as okay. By the time the serious violence started it was too late.

Now, I am not claiming a lack of text support caused a genocide, and I don’t think Wynn-Williams is either. Facebook was certainly culpable though, the military had direct controls over what was allowed to be posted and suppressed dissent. The issue could have been caught much earlier on and perhaps mitigated had off-shore moderation teams been able to read posts that were being flagged.

This is from 2016, it's a fairly detailed study of what happens when a rural, barely (or illiterate) population gets access to a powerful social media tool:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/the-f...

https://archive.is/NVOwW

Another one, with many links to other reports for those who don't trust it because "Amnesty is biased".

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

If you read contemporary reporting about anti-Muslim riots in Myanmar https://www.reuters.com/article/world/special-report-buddhis... you may learn that there were Buddhist monks traveling the country, giving sermons to crowds of thousands of people, telling them to treat Muslims as enemies, and stickers being used to visibly signal alignment with the movement.

Careless People is a story about Facebook from inside Facebook, so of course it adopts the viewpoint that Facebook's moderation decisions are very important, but ultimately they were a sideshow to what was playing out on the ground. This goes double for military attacks on Rohingya villages, which can hardly be explained as spontaneous reactions to some Facebook post.

In any case, Facebook moderators literate in Burmese would've known to use the right font, whereas for Facebook moderators trying to deal with a language they can't even read, the font choice would be the least of their problems.

Facebook's direct culpability in the ethnic cleansing in Myanmar had already been well-known and thoroughly reported on many years before Careless People.

The internet and the real world don't exist in separate vacuums. Internet communication and amplification of hate speech helped create an environment where hateful sermons were planned and popularized, and vice-versa.

Facebook pages and posts espousing these viewpoints (using sensationalized or completely fictional justifications) were then amplified by the algorithm. The amplification reached people that were not otherwise inclined to participate, but were convinced through information they received online.

You can't have one without the other. Influence is driven through both in-person physical events/marketing and online platforms. Categorizing the online influence as a "sideshow" completely misinterprets how important online communities have become in radicalization. "Reach" is a key social media metric for a reason.

Reach is indeed important. But the internet is not the only way to generate reach, nor necessarily the most effective one. During the riots in 2012 and 2013, 2% of the population were using the internet https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS?location... and there were 14 mobile phone subscriptions per 100 population https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.CEL.SETS.P2?location... Meanwhile, a traveling monk wanting to hold a sermon about the importance of shunning Muslims could rely on the local religious community to deliver him an audience, and on word of mouth, flyers and posters to inform everyone who didn't attend.

That's not the full story. A few quotes from Amnesty International's report:

> Even before internet access became widely available in Myanmar, Facebook was already the dominant platform in the country.

> In 2011, despite widespread restrictions on internet access, it was estimated that approximately 80% of Myanmar's few internet users had Facebook accounts.

> By 2014, Facebook was estimated to have had hundreds of thousands of users in Myanmar, many of whom were accessing the platform through internet cafes or devices belonging to their friends or family members.

> Prior to 2015, Facebook was only available in Myanmar via an English-language interface, but a specific Myanmar version was launched in 2015.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/asa16/5933/2022/en/

Hundreds of thousands of Facebook users in a country of 50 million works out to less than 2%. It's the same story. The Amnesty report does not strike me as starting from specific instances of mob violence and working backwards to determine the source of radicalization in each case. (And of course the later military campaign against Rohingya villages that they mostly focus on was not mob violence at all.) Instead, they work forward from the information leaked out of Facebook, which of course comes with a Facebook-centric worldview.

Good points. Also, thanks for the Reuters link. Buddhists as a group have for centuries been (fairly) associated with peace and nonviolence. The situation in Myanmar is a tragic anomaly. The article you shared sheds at least a bit of light on it:

> Relishing his extremist reputation, Wirathu describes himself as the "Burmese bin Laden."

Wirathu is clearly a sociopath -- and the furthest thing from a real Buddhist. If only people weren't so easily led by those who use religion as a means of control....

They would just run everything through machine translation and throw African labor at moderating it. There's no way they hire moderators locally. Or probably they just let LLM/Jev/Laya handle it nowadays.

And so, the standards of moderation will be increasingly more inconsistent and chaotic as cultural distances between the company HQ in US to the poster of a particular content increases - I see people complaining about food pics getting flagged as pornography in Japanese all the time.

I can't imagine how random the moderation infra will respond to: anti-Muslim propaganda briefs created by violent fundamentalist Buddhism terrorism groups circulated in the minority inhabited contested forested border areas of Myanmar. That description alone sounds Neuromancer enough to that the system might just fail open, before it digests the content and likewise fail open.

I heard it was because .. in a country where they did tie-ups with mobile operators to 0 rate face book traffic, to make it to the point where the internet and facebook were the same thing to many people, they also only employed a handful of moderators. Meanwhile Politicians were posting incitements to violence on the platform.

Myanmar script along with Georgian script are the most beautiful. I wish I could read them.

It might be easier than you think to learn to read them. I learnt to read a foreign alphabet and compared to the actual language learning part you would be surprised how fast relatively our brains can adapt to new patterns (I’m still a slow reader in the second language I’m learning, but the beauty of reading is that you can take it at your own pace). Even if you don’t learn the language, you could have a new cool ability to write English words out in a different script :)

Dont leave us hanging, is it Korean (hangul) ?

Japanese: # In'urūdo < aiōsutorīmu > yūjingunēmusupēsuesutīdī

Japanese katakana

#include <iostream> using namespace std;

There are some mistakes though, like using ウ instead of ク in インウルード

＃インウルード＜アイオーストリーム>

ユージングネームスペースエスティーディー；

Yes writing English words in a different script is fun.

That インウ should likely be インク. :)

Georgian is really easy. Each of its 33 letters makes one and only one sound, words are spaced, and there's no capital/lowercase. The most difficult part of reading it is pronouncing: the language does not care about syllables. Example: a popular Georgian band is მგზავრები ("Mgzavrebi" / Passengers).

Can confirm: I was on a holiday there and took reading it as a "side quest." Within a week I was fairly proficient. Note: this says nothing about understanding what you read, of which I had none!

> the language does not care about syllables

Georgian does have a well-defined notion of ‘syllable’, it’s just that it allows an unusually wide range of consonant clusters in those syllables [0]. If you want a language which really doesn’t care about syllables there are better examples, e.g. Gokana [1,2]

[0] https://www.lotpublications.nl/Documents/063_fulltext.pdf

[1] https://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~hyman/papers/2011-hyman-go...

[2] https://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~hyman/papers/2015-hyman-go...

Start at က, work your way through Unicode in order: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%80%80#Translingual Some helpful Mon nationalist even made a writing animation for most letters before he got banned from Wikipedia. Fun fact: ပ is made with two strokes from opposite directions instead of a single one like you might naively expect.

I am fairly sure this is because, in many abugida scripts, the dominant writing material was palm leaf and the tool was a sharpened point or curved scalpel-like knife rather than a pen. If you curve inward from both sides, you don't have to contort your hand in a 180 degree pattern, which runs the risk of tearing the palm leaf. This is also why the shapes are all curves instead of hard 90 degree angles.

I've read that theory, too, but ဂ is written with just one stroke and if you look at palm-leaf manuscripts in general https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm-leaf_manuscript there are plenty of angled shapes. (Ironically, the example Wikipedia uses for Burmese has a more square style instead of the now-dominant curves.) So I wonder whether it's all just a post-hoc rationalization for historical happenstance. It would be interesting to know whether e.g. Sundanese ᮕ is similarly written with two strokes.

So many of these scripts basically derive from Brahmi which was famously rock-cut (Ashoka monuments). That type of medium is well suited to angles. Major scripts including Tamil were also enscribed on to metal .. this image shows an evolution directly away from angular toward rounded. https://www.instagram.com/p/CpB1ygEPwJt/

Presumably this reflects a shift from courtly scribe closed-door literacy toward more popular literacy specifically including temple-trained monks who presumably could not have afforded either stonemasons or metal plates for general use.

It would be nice if I don't have to download a gigabyte of fonts whenever noto gets updated.

The problem is that noto lacks support for double stroked text, like "".

So does HN!

Is double-stroked text primarily used for math symbols, or? Might you be able to share an example link or image showing a realistic use case or two? I'd be happy to double-check that our stack can handle it, and amend the post after that with whatever we learn.

Noto actually has a specific math font... I wonder if that would work? https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Sans+Math

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Edit: Just to share what I learned after looking into this a bit...

TLDR: No single font can display every character. OpenType fonts are capped at 65535 glyphs (the vector or bitmap shape to render), but Unicode has 150k+ defined characters. Noto itself is not one single font but a collection of them, at least one font per script (where each script might support several natural languages that share the same written characters). CSS's `font-family` fallback and `unicode-range` mechanisms allow us to define "which font should be used for which ranges (and thus which scripts)". We can mix and match several Noto fonts like this to support multiple scripts & languages together. This mechanism should also allow us to display extended math symbols via the separate Noto Sans Math font.

> Cherokee

Huh, learned something new : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary

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