Just a little quibble with your point about Tibetan writing - a better comparison would be Modern English written as it was during the Old English period. So like “lord” might be written as “hlafweard”, for example, because it is a direct descendent of that word put through hundreds of years of pronunciation change. English doesn’t come from Latin and “finally” doesn’t come from “ad ultimum”, whereas Tibetan does come from Old Tibetan, the language the script was originally fairly adequately adapted to.
It’s decent for a few hours of fun. Not super long and I wish that they had worked in a lot more interesting environmental and Pokemon interactions for the player to trigger, but I enjoyed it. Hopefully we don’t have to wait 20 years for the next one and hopefully it’s more ambitious if and when it does come out.
The snake and lizard branch is wrong. I care very much about the accuracy of memes, and I have to point out that many lizards are more closely related to snakes than they are to other lizards.
It's actually so he can listen to show tunes.
I think that people will look back on Elon Musk as an utter charlatan and a disaster, and hopefully it will provide people with insight into how the US economy actually functions, and to me that's a pretty exciting prospect.
Actually Star Trek said he’s still beloved 
Even with the phonemes of any two given language varieties that are considered to be “the same sound”, there are going to be differences in what the average pronunciation is, so I assume that’s a lot of what’s going on here. The other thing is that English and Chinese have a lot of phonemes that barely or don’t at all overlap in possible pronunciations, so the algorithm is picking the closest match.
Can I kill one person 8 billion times instead?
Neat. That's called the celery-salary merger. For me "smell" has the same vowel as "bet" and "Al" has the same vowel as "bat", so they're similar but distinct.
The Fast and Furious thing is not a bit, btw. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATF_gunwalking_scandal