---
title: Things I Learned - 19 May 2024
date: 2024-05-19T00:00:00+00:00
categories:
  - til
description: I learned about the post-WW2 history of the letter Å in Scandinavian alphabets, the construction of Zalgo text through Unicode characters, and Artificial Analysis for benchmarking LLM API performance metrics like speed and cost.
keywords: [scandinavian alphabet, zalgo text, unicode, artificial analysis, llm benchmarks, orthography]
---

This week, I learned:

- In Scandinavia, Århus comes after Zürich because Å is a different letter. It was added by the Dutch after WW2 to distance themselves from the Germans. [via](https://youtu.be/gd5uJ7Nlvvo)
- Zalgo text is where we combine multiple Unicode combining characters
- [Artificial Analysis](https://artificialanalysis.ai/) benchmarks LLM APIs on speed, cost, and quality.