quarantine 'em

...but I'm taking the check seriously for the purposes of this piece of work.)

So, no, the new changes do not make it possible to send 560 bytes of text per Tweet. That limit stays at 280 bytes. With current encodings.

Twitter has divided Unicode up into two sets for our purposes: "good" (0x0000 to 0x10FF, weight 1) and "bad" (0x1100 to 0x10FFFF, weight 2).

We need a new encoding which makes the maximum possible use of "safe" characters from the "good" range and uses none from the "bad" range.

If we can find 256 "good" characters (trivial), "Base256" would allow 280 bytes per 280-character Tweet, same as Base65536.

If we can find 512 "good" characters (easy?), "Base512" would express 9 bits per character, or 315 bytes per 280-character Tweet.

If we can find 1024 "good" characters (difficulty unclear), "Base1024" would express 10 bits per character = 350 bytes per Tweet

Base2048 -> 11 bits/character -> 385 bytes/Tweet (highly unlikely) Base4096 -> 12 bits/character -> 420 bytes/Tweet (definitely impossible)