[ratinacage]

> As a hack for existing CPUs, it's just about tolerable â as long as it > can die entirely by the next generation.

> Certainly it's a nasty hack, but hey â the world was on fire and in the > end we didn't have to just turn the datacentres off and go back to goat > farming, so it's not all bad.

Off-topic, but what is with the "â" in these sentences? Is that just some weird encoding error, or does it actually have meaning?

[DerekL]

Probably an encoding error. An m-dash is E2 80 94 in UTF-8. (An n-dash is E2 80 93.) I suspect that the original UTF-8 is misinterpreted as ISO 8859-1 or a similar encoding, where 0xE2 is “â”, and the other two are unassigned or control characters.

[hinkley]

Sounds about right.

As a rule of thumb if you see a’s with accents you’re loooking at a UTF-8 encoding problem.