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Yeah, I agree (with you) that your top-level comment is very very correct, and contributes a fantastic point.

And I agree (with some commenters) that the "Uh" makes it look way worse than it would otherwise. :) I learned something from both your comment and from the criticisms. Yay.

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Though I think "you shouldn't rely on the Internet" is not quite summarizing it exactly correctly (not a complaint about the original comment, just trying to improve on the summary). It's not "relying on the internet" that's the problem, it's some weird conjunction of a few things that are each fine. I will try to expand, fumblingly.

(1) Obviously you could have a conversation with an expert-in-the-space over the internet, so clearly it's not the internet that's the problem. (2) Obviously you can get good results off Google, for example by googling "textarea bidi", so it's not Google that's the problem. And, heck it, compared to not having an internet to search, the internet does a lot to reveal the hidden complexity that we wouldn't otherwise even be aware of.

So we could propose that the problem is non-experts doing things (i.e. we could encourage gatekeeping), but wait, that's not right either, because that would imply that Mo shouldn't have created Standard Notes until they were an expert in all relevant things (which turns out to include something something multilingual something), and clearly if Standard Notes wasn't delivering great value without that expertise, then they wouldn't be getting "requests to add right to left language support". So obviously Mo had more than enough expertise to do what they did.

I dunno. I dunno what the pithy version of the takeaway could be. We might just have to settle with the longer version from your original comment.

"[Neither you, nor google, knows] what you don't know. ... So, if you can, ask people, not software. Especially if you don't know the space."




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