technologybriefs
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Language

The medium everything else has to pass through.

4
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10:02

NPU terminology

NPU terminology fixes lab data chaos—but only where metrology matters more than medicine.
11:15

UTF-8

Ken Thompson and Rob Pike · 1992

UTF-8 is a variable-width Unicode encoding co-designed by Ken Thompson and Rob Pike in 1992. It guarantees ASCII compatibility, supports all 1,112,064 Unicode code points, and became the dominant web encoding — over 90% of pages in 2019. Its strength is pragmatic interoperability; its weakness is zero tolerance for malformed input and no compression benefit.

9:20

ELIZA

ELIZA doesn’t talk — it mirrors, misleads, and exposes how little it takes for humans to believe a machine is listening.
10:25

Unicode

Unicode doesn’t unify language—it unifies the numbering system so machines can stop guessing what a byte means.