Mark the language, not the emphasis
A delimiter-collision bug gets fixed. Severo marks target-language words in bold so the app can make them tappable and hand them to Stanza, but bold is also markdown's tool for titles and emphasis, so Gemini sometimes bolds a Spanish subtitle (making it look like French) or forgets to bold French (making it untappable, and unpronounceable). The fix is to give the target language its own dedicated delimiter, double brackets, freeing bold to mean emphasis again. A tag that does two jobs eventually does neither.
// trace: where this idea came from
- ↳ video diary @ 11:00 (el bold que marca idioma y también resalta)
- ↳ video diary @ 12:00 (la solución: dobles corchetes para el idioma objetivo)
- ↳ Entry 229-1: The lemma is the unit (Stanza necesita saber qué palabras son del idioma objetivo)
The bug is a delimiter doing two jobs. To make a word tappable for translation and to hand it to Stanza for analysis, Severo needs to know which words belong to the target language, and the current mechanism is bold: the instruction tells Gemini to wrap everything in French between bold markers ▸ 9:58. The trouble is that bold already has a day job, it also emphasizes titles and subtitles ▸ 11:16.
So the two meanings collide in both directions. Gemini sometimes bolds a subtitle written in the user’s own Spanish or English, and the app dutifully treats it as French ▸ 11:23; and it sometimes forgets to bold the actual French, which then can’t be tapped, can’t be pronounced, can’t be fed to Stanza. Juan felt the second failure the day before, doing charades exercises where he had to read words with no way to click them because the marking never landed ▸ 13:34.
un símbolo con dos trabajos no hace ninguno →
The fix separates the two meanings by giving the target language a delimiter of its own: double brackets around everything in the language being learned ▸ 12:00, which frees bold to go back to meaning emphasis. If Severo wants to highlight something, it still can, and the app no longer mistakes a highlighted Spanish heading for a French word ▸ 12:05. The general shape is worth keeping: when one symbol is asked to carry two different signals, the parser can’t tell them apart, and the honest repair is not a cleverer prompt but a second symbol. Give each meaning its own mark, and both start working again…
// continued in
no entry has continued this idea yet: the arc is still open