Defeating AIs with a screwdriver

The WhyUPLUSC388 curse

Written in

In Italy we have something that I call the WhyUPLUSC388 curse, AKA the Alt+0200 curse, AKA “how do I write PERCHÉ“.

That LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E WITH GRAVE and LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E WITH ACUTE, together with few other accented characters and the euro symbol are the only characters of the latin-1 encoding used all around the place.

Why? Yes, literally “WHY”. That’s because “WHY” in italian is written “PERCHÉ?”

But there’s a problem.

Dov’è la lettera grande con l’accento al contrario? (Where is the big letter with the reversed accent?)

Everybody writing something using a Windows/macOS keyboard

Let’s type it on macOS

Is it easy to write É on a macOS keyboard? Of course not. You must hold shift+option (AKA alt) and press V. Or shift+e+wait-one-second+2.

The macOS keyboard shown when you press ⎇ and ⇧

What about Windows?

Well, you must type Alt+1 -> 4 -> 4 or Alt+0 -> 2 -> 0 -> 1. One after another.

Why it’s a curse?

People don’t want to waste time searching for something that can potentially break that system written in Latin-1 that then encodes in UTF-8, maybe later in ASCII, and who knows what. So they write something similar:

  1. PERCHE’
  2. PERCHè
  3. PERCHé

What do we learn about this? When there is a solution to a problem widely accepted by everybody, but not the real solution, then often there is no effort to find a real solution upstream.

Until next time.

@online{zaerl2025-the-whyuplusc388-curse,
  author = {Francesco Bigiarini},
  title = {The WhyUPLUSC388 curse},
  date = {2025-04-24},
  url = {https://zaerl.com/2025/04/24/the-whyuplusc388-curse/},
  urldate = {2025-04-24}
}

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