16 ms·

The Absolute Denial of Shit

202 points by thebigship 8y ago

draw_down 8y ago
The bit dissusing kitsch was really interesting, thanks for posting!
- sithadmin 8y ago
  It's worth noting that Kundera's interpretation of kitsch (as a socio-political phenomena rather than an aesthetic quality) is pretty fringe and generally not recognized outside the lit crit community. You won't find it being taken seriously in academic circles focused on sociology, politics, etc., mostly because there are far more elegant and explanatory frames of reference for discussing the phenomenon Kundera describes (mostly drawn from psychology).
  - mcantelon 8y ago
    >there are far more elegant and explanatory frames of reference for discussing the phenomenon Kundera describes (mostly drawn from psychology). Such as? I thought "kitsch" perfectly summed up the essence of a restricted, infantilized worldview.
megaman22 8y ago
This is all over the road, but that's not out of the ordinary when it features "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" being name-dropped in the middle of it. I don't really get the axe-grinding about stereotypical nerdboys having some nefarious influence on expression through control of emoji fontsets. Emojis are silly little pictograms. If you want something more varied, send an image or a gif or a meme. Or settle down and type out a few of these things we call words, that have the capability to be very expressive and unambiguous.
- rafael859 8y ago
  I think that the article makes a pretty good point that emoji are increasingly important in communication -- referencing the suggestion of the mosquito emoji that was supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in order to facilitate communication and discussion about the malaria-spreading insects. Even though I don't completely agree with the importance of emoji in modern communication, apparently a lot of people (especially some of those who vote on the Unicode Standard Consortium) do. If you were to accept that emoji are an important part of modern communication, would you not agree that censoring certain images is akin to censoring words? Then, the reference to "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" is very apt. I didn't get the impression that the article was suggesting that the people who vote in the Consortium have any sort of nefarious intensions -- and I don't think that there is much to be gained by a fascist government by censoring the word "shit". The decision to do stems from personal taste, prudence, or social pressure. It is not the intention behind it that we should be afraid of, but the power of some organizations to form our means of communication, independent on how "good" they are, as there are many unpredictable factors that can shape their decisions.
sudosteph 8y ago
Just realized that this is the first time I've seen emoji from a URL render in my browser's address bar. That really surprised me for a second.
- rzzzt 8y ago
  Some domains use emojis as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji_domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji_domain https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2035572 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2035572
- hinkley 8y ago
  Congratulations, you are one of today's 10,000. An early example of this is http://xn--n3h.net/ http://xn--n3h.net/ or snowman in hat dot net (turns out hacker news strips unicode emoji.) Some browsers convert to punycode to reduce the incidence of phishing attacks based on homoglyphs (two characters that look the same).
peterwwillis 8y ago
I think the solution is a universal standard for multimodal interfaces that allows external and attached content. An example of this already exists: in a Facebook comment, you can reply with an arbitrary meme, and I believe Slack lets you define emojis as well. We could extend this to include sound, or even modes for haptic or braille feedback. If there isn't space to attach the mode you could simply provide a URL. This could be turned into a standard, and apps could implement the standard, allowing people to communicate with richer content across a wide array of technology.
- christophclarke 8y ago
  But in slack emoji, you have to modify the universal standard for the workspace in order to add those emoji, and now you're back to where you started. The whole benefit of Unicode is that anyone anywhere can see Unicode on any device that supports it, without introducing added complexity of sending the actual image over the message.
  - peterwwillis 8y ago
    IIRC Unicode was intended to encode and represent text for writing systems. I get that the purpose of emoji in Unicode is to provide a universal way to represent certain pictures, but it's clear that we also don't want to be limited by the set of pictures we can send. It seems a lot more sensible to actually send the picture you want to send, or a link to that picture, because that doesn't need to be interpreted differently by each client... just rendered. Sending the actual image might take more space in, say, a text message, but its actual encoded size should be pretty trivial. For example, one of Twitter's 16x16 color emoji is a 400 byte SVG file. Base64-encoded that would be about 533 bytes. The standard could define the image formats accepted, with probably one ideal format for emoji (SVG) and another for memes (JPEG). Here's another way to think of how you could implement this in a standard. Each message is multipart. The text body is the first message by default. That text can contain references to other parts. That reference could be the name of the part you want to reference in that message, and that name would only need to be unique to that message. But that name could also be, for example, a SHA hash. When you accept messages, you could store the message parts in a database with their SHA hash. When someone sends the same part again in a new message, you can just retrieve that part from your database, rather than storing the same part multiple times. This could allow you to send messages referencing the same gigantic meme file 50 times, but you only ever store it the one time, and after that you just store references to it. The standard would allow you to simply say "please reference part X in this part of the message text, and if you don't have that part yet, here it is, base64-encoded or linked via URL". (What I just described is MIME, but you could reinvent it if you wanted people to adopt it, because people don't like adopting things that aren't new and cool)
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Y_Y 8y ago
Where are the emojis for pain? And why are there so many happy family emojis? People (and "corporate people") who care enough to get emojis put in by buy votes at the Unicode Club seem to have super weird values totally detached from humans who send each other messages.
- rarec 8y ago
  I'm not sure people who would want pain emojis care enough to buy votes at the club. Besides, at least as far as Discord/Slack goes, most people I've found just upload their own little emoticons as they are more meaningful and great for inside jokes on a particular server/team.
- detaro 8y ago
  Have any "pain" emojis been rejected, or has merely nobody officially proposed them? (which anyone can do, no club membership required)
  - paulddraper 8y ago
    IDK, but either way the end result is a system which is unuseful for expressing common ideas.
    - cryptonector 8y ago
      In Japanese, ideographs (Kanji) are paired with syllabic characters (Hiragana) to express things which Kanji alone cannot. Foreign words are spelled in Katakana (another syllabic script). There's also romaji -- a way of writing Japanese in the familiar Latin alphabet. Incompleteness is manifestly NOT a problem for an ideographic script.
  - voxadam 8y ago
    The Unicode Consortium publishes a list of all the requests made to the Emoji Subcommittee.[1] [1] http://www.unicode.org/emoji/emoji-requests.html http://www.unicode.org/emoji/emoji-requests.html
- 8y ago
laurex 8y ago
What surprises me is that there isn't any emoji with an unequivocal meaning of "thanks."
- mankyd 8y ago
  Interesting write up on it: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-emoji-for-thanks https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-emoji-for-thanks
- intopieces 8y ago
  Are there any symbols, emoji or not, that have unequivocal meaning? I recall the discussion around creating the symbol for "radioactive", and the challenges around making a symbol that would convey that meaning for thousands of years: https://web.archive.org/web/20090328112312/http://www.wipp.energy.gov/picsprog/articles/wipp%20exhibit%20message%20to%2012,000%20a_d.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20090328112312/http://www.wipp.e... (original on energy.gov is gone)
- pphysch 8y ago
  Is that surprising? Is there a unequivocal symbol for Thanks other than the word itself?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- spiderjerusalem 8y ago
  I always use :bow:.
amelius 8y ago
I basically want this: - Emoji decoupled from Unicode, and represented as SVG by chat clients. This ensures our expression is not limited by the Unicode committee. - Any user can upload a new emoji as SVG. - Any user can download an emoji that appears in one of their messages, and place it in their own library. - Emojis can also be downloaded from web-pages etc.
- frabert 8y ago
  So Windows Live Messenger all over again? No thanks
  - jcelerier 8y ago
    uh ? I really miss the WLM time, conversations were much more lively and fun
- LeifCarrotson 8y ago
  How is this different from sharing an image? I get the advantages of SVG over JPEG or PNG, but that's just a platform support issue. The other thing that Emoji have going for them is that they're text and can appear where text does, and for that to work I am pretty sure you need a Unicode Consortium.
- walterstucco 8y ago
  Telegram let's you upload your own sets
- gojomo 8y ago
  SVG would make a lot of sense here - but could you settle for content-hash-named transclusion of arbitrary bitmap images as a Unicode escape? It's been proposed! http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2016/16105r-unicode-image-hash.pdf http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2016/16105r-unicode-image-hash.pd...
  - Analemma_ 8y ago
    Oh god why. This is like the 21th century update to Zawinski's Law: every data interchange format will eventually expand to encode arbitrary binary data. Unicode is a text standard and even including wingdings symbols and emoji was pushing it, please kill this in the cradle.
PowerfulWizard 8y ago
The bad news: - They changed the gun emoji to be a water gun, which has a totally different meaning. This retroactively changes previous writings, changing their meaning. What kind of writing system allows people to change your words after you've written them? Emoji is a trash writing system and an agent of kipplization. - Emoji is controlled by corporations that are concerned with maximizing the value of their platforms which will lead them to a PG13, disneyfied, milquetoast worldview. The good news: - In the entire human history, it has never been easier to create and publish text, audio, or video works of any kind. The most popular platforms have severe limitations, but it only takes the slightest effort to use other platforms that are uncensored. - There is plenty of free software that can give you pixel-level control over your output, you don't need to rely on the unicode consortium or any other organization of any kind to determine what you express.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  They changed the gun emoji to be a water gun, which has a totally different meaning. This retroactively changes previous writings, changing their meaning. From the op: In his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera linked this kind of forced conformity to a fascist government’s unbounded desire for control, and its efforts to limit expression to kitsch, a cartoonish denial of objective reality This is also a historical feature of communist governments. All governments, and all societies, in as much as they lose a commitment to individual rights, will tend to grab more and more control in pursuit of difficult goals. It's yet another thing that seems "nice" but which has disturbing implications under the surface for free speech, like Canadian Bill C-16.
  - fhood 8y ago
    So wait, does that make Apple fascists or communists? Wouldn't want to grab the wrong pitchfork.
    - snerbles 8y ago
      It would more accurately be described as corporate-flavored collectivism. Of course, that doesn't make for a good ingredient in angry epithets.
ilaksh 8y ago
Part of the problem is that Google and Apple have a monopoly on this stuff. Not sure we can do anything about that readily, but we should probably at least acknowledge that it's a problem. If we just assume that isn't going to change maybe we could adopt an app that has its own emoji representations separate from the operating system. And/or maybe we need to start some political process working on the companies to improve their representations. I think this is the tip of the iceberg and is more important than most people realize. Censorship is no joke.
mattbierner 8y ago
While good writing and artwork undoubtably can express a far greater range of emotions than emoji—and with infinitely more subtlety—if you ask me how I’m feeling in casual conversation, 90% of the time I’ll reply “fine” or “ok” or “bad”. Being able to easily reply with one of 50 reaction emojis is a great improvement in expressiveness here. Emoji do become problematic when you start asking follow up questions, such as “what does feeling ‘bad’ feel like?” Since you’ve already expressed your specific state when you replied with your first emoji, to add more depth you start having to combine reaction emoji to express something new or repurpose other emoji as symbols. Which sounds a lot like any language actually A far more dangerous problem is that emoji can replace the idea of the things they are intended to represent. For example: the happiness emoji becomes our idea of what happiness is, instead of merely representing the concept of happiness. That seems to be what the article is driving at and it clearly would be bad if this widely happened. The result would be newspeak type language, incapable of expressing many ideas and that is controlled by these huge companies. Worse, using such a language, your subjective experience of life has to fit into the emoji standard because you lack the tools to express or even conceptualize anything beyond it.
mannykannot 8y ago
Given the formation of an international committee and - most significantly - their adoption by parents, we can hope that we have reached peak emoji, and their decline will be rapid.
- 21 8y ago
  Kids haven't stopped using words just because the parents use them too. Or iPhones. Some things are too essential to discard for this reason. What will change is what emojis are used and how. The rare ones which are not used by parents will become used by kids. I already see this.
excalibur 8y ago
> Mosquitoes are the world’s deadliest animal — outpacing sharks, snakes and all others by a wide margin. I do believe you have to specifically except humans from "animals", unless it was your intention to include us, in which case I do believe you are mistaken.
- verall 8y ago
  This is needlessly pedantic, and I think a good proofreader would have cut a "besides humans" aside, did it exist in the original.
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  It is technically the malaria parasite (a protist) but that disease has killed the most humans throughout history - even without is collateral damage like making being a sickle cell anemia trait carrier good for survival historically. So yes they very much deserve the title.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
thaumasiotes 8y ago
> The argument for the mosquito emoji, made by the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, was firmly rooted in public health. The proposal states, “For many parts of the world, the mosquito is more than a nuisance — it is also a danger. Mosquitoes are the world’s deadliest animal — outpacing sharks, snakes and all others by a wide margin.” A mosquito emoji will allow people to easily communicate about the deadly insect to populations of varying languages and literacy levels. This usefulness serves as a kind of inversion of the ways in which other serious or controversial issues are mitigated. Why try to cover up or deny the existence of “real” guns, which are as rampant (at least in the US) as other “object” emoji? This highlights a YouTube policy that I found very disturbing. YouTube judged that graphic violence, defined somehow, was unacceptable and couldn't be shown on their platform. In particular, they didn't allow the posting of beheading videos featuring South American gangs beheading people who they thought deserved it. The reasoning was that allowing people to watch those videos served the gangs' purposes by inspiring fear. But, YouTube made a special exception to their policy to allow beheading videos of ISIS beheading people who they thought deserved it. The reasoning was that allowing people to watch those videos carried the message "look how bad things are in Syria", a message that Google endorsed. I can't for the life of me understand why the reason any particular person uploaded a video to YouTube should determine what I get out of the video. In my eyes, if YouTube was full of videos of gangs beheading informers, cops, and guys who slept with the boss's daughter, uploaded by the gangs themselves, that would be newsworthy and probably draw a lot of attention to the message "look how bad things are in South America". It's not like ISIS was ashamed of the beheading videos they filmed and released for propaganda purposes. Unfortunately, I can't provide a link to substantiate my characterization of Google's policies; my source is an English-language interview between a former YouTube executive and a Chinese consultancy, which I was asked to help transcribe.
- mcantelon 8y ago
  Bogus moral considerations are a great rationalization for censorship, charging Marie Le Pen for sharing photos of reality being a good example. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/01/marine-le-pen-charged-for-posting-violent-isis-images-on-twitter https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/01/marine-le-pen-...
throw7 8y ago
Add the "rifle" emoji/codepoint. it's not even shown.
throwawayjava 8y ago
This article is a perfect example of how the crit lit genre often analyzes the shit out of a stool sample while ignoring the patient's sawed-off arm. (Usually missing the real point because an auxiliary one makes for a much cuter reference to some piece of literature authored c. 1800-1990.) A set of images designed by advertising and consumer goods companies are not optimized for expressing the full range of the human experience? I'm shocked! /s The real critique: we've had <img> since the 1990s, and plenty of more than usable chat systems/protocols/markup languages that allow inline images for about that long as well. Why are standardized emojis so popular, and why do people even give a fuck about them when there are obvious workable alternatives? Emojis are not "radical" or "new", as the author puts it. They are a crippled instantiation of an old and obvious idea, an idea that has itself been implemented in better ways thousands of times prior to the rise of emojis.
oldsklgdfth 8y ago
The best part of this article is discovering "send me sfmoma" > Text 572-51 with the words “send me” followed by a keyword, a color, or even an emoji and you’ll receive a related artwork image and caption via text message Stuff like this makes me happy for technology
alex_young 8y ago
Hmm. I still see a pistol[0] on my Android 8.1.0 messages app. Is this even correct? [0] https://photos.app.goo.gl/w9kPRwUr2UHNQoKa8 https://photos.app.goo.gl/w9kPRwUr2UHNQoKa8
- skiman10 8y ago
  The pistol was changed to a squirt gun in the Android P (Android 9) Previews and betas.
- sorenjan 8y ago
  Here's a blog post about it: https://blog.emojipedia.org/google-updates-gun-emoji/ https://blog.emojipedia.org/google-updates-gun-emoji/
princekolt 8y ago
> queries containing emoji whose colloquial meaning had diverged from their objective depiction, such as the infamous [eggplant emoji], left users unsatisfied. Well but how is that different from how words have worked since the dawn of civilization? If tomorrow the collective society starts using the word kaleidoscope as an euphemism for penis, then any software that statically maps words to meanings will also fail. This is not a problem tied to emojis specifically.
notahacker 8y ago
Emojis are ephemeral, imprecise symbols which in the clients discussed are generally used for short term communication, not persistent information storage. Like the ASCII art they originated from, their implied meaning often doesn't survive font changes. I wonder how many of the people apparently incandescent with rage at the "authoritarian nature" of vendors changing a gun to a water pistol to bring into line with other vendors had similar objections back when Microsoft changed their original scifi toy gun to a pistol back in 2016...
- cryptonector 8y ago
  No more ephemeral than Chinese characters ever were (some were ephemeral, some durable). For example, the list of Kanji to be taught in Japan is updated periodically -- some characters are dropped, some are added. New Han/Kanji characters are invented occasionally -- it can be done because they are actually simplified drawings with one or more root characters and pen strokes added to distinguish them from other similar characters.
TranceMan 8y ago
:-) :-( ;-) Did I miss any? Edit: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/sefSmiley.htm https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/sefSmiley.htm
exabrial 8y ago
"When language is subjugated to corporate interests, we lose our ability to talk honestly and openly about the world, and some uncomfortable and disturbing juxtapositions emerge" Great quote
a3n 8y ago
"He brought a pistol to the birthday party." "He brought a squirt gun to the birthday party." Clear enough?
nabla9 8y ago
Adding new stuff to Unicode should have a delay, 20-25 years from proposal to the standard (roughly a generation). In the meantime it's possible to insert emoji into text as smiley, -smiley-, :) , smiley.jpg, ::smiley:: or whatever you want and the system you use is free to change it into a picture. We end up with standard that is full of ancient symbols from 2000-2025 and new generations of people will abandon them for something else when the culture changes. Emoji from 80s: ________ / "Ship Arriving Too Late to / Save a Drowning Witch" / /\ F. Zappa
- cryptonector 8y ago
  Users of scripts not currently fully-covered by Unicode would NOT be happy with this proposal.
- XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 8y ago
  Many languages will die before being digitized if they have to wait for 20-25 years
otakucode 8y ago
I had been disturbed by the actions of platforms like Google for awhile, fearing that their naive efforts at maintaining "mass market appeal" in the most hamfisted and blind ways possible were going to have unintentional consequences for global human culture. Then I read Eric Schmidt's book 'The New Digital Age.' They are not naive. And the effects are not unintentional at all. Their goal isn't even mass-market appeal. They want to ossify human culture and lock it in place to what it was in the early 2000s when they first became successful. As multitudes in the past have done, upon attaining influence many in the tech crowd have concluded that they know better, and that the general public (of which they of course never count themselves a member) is not capable of the task of regulating their own culture. This is a pretty old viewpoint. It built the pyramids, united Rome, etc. It's old school Conservative thinking, where the needs of the nation (or cult or tribe or whatever) come first, and the individual exists solely to serve that. It requires the presence of 'special' people, typically incarnated gods, representatives chosen by a god, or somehow otherwise fundamentally 'Better' people, like a kings lineage. That brand of thinking ruled the world for a long time, but it got its ass kicked basically completely around the end of the 18th century. I have no idea why the rich people at the top of tech companies seem to like it so much. But it's becoming increasingly clear that these systems of communication are enabling a greater level of control and there are some sick-minded powerful folks who will need to be reigned in as they are more than willing to take those reigns. No one should have those. Global culture can, and eventually will, guide itself. Humanity is a wonderful species, but only in its totality. In the cut-down whitewashed conformal mass that Facebook and Google and others want to construct and sell to people, then try to force on the rest, it looks more like a metastatic infection. The tech companies are unquestionably at war with basic human nature. They do not like humans very much, and they want to change them. Like their forebearers in the Industrial Revolution, they seek to round off the rough edges, smooth out the wrinkles, and will wreak any amount of suffering necessary to do so. Engineers need to think very hard about the ethics of their work. "Just doing my job" holds exactly as much moral weight as "I just did it for money", so keep that in mind. It's an empty dodge.
Animats 8y ago
The water gun emoji controversy got considerable press coverage and is easy to find in Google. Apple was behind it.[1] But they were pressured into it by a New York anti-gun group.[2][3] The Unicode discussion for the "no" symbol (COMBINING ENCLOSING CIRCLE BACKSLASH) suggest the use of "No" on the gun glyph for "no guns": No guns ⃠ That's a combining mark; you can apply it to anything. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-gun-emoji-change-squirt-gun-has-led-google-samsung-facebook-microsoft-to-follow-suit-2018-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-gun-emoji-change-squirt... [2] https://metro.co.uk/2015/08/07/activists-want-the-gun-emoji-removed-from-iphones-5331721/ https://metro.co.uk/2015/08/07/activists-want-the-gun-emoji-... [3] https://www.wired.com/2016/08/apples-new-squirt-gun-emoji-hides-big-political-statement/ https://www.wired.com/2016/08/apples-new-squirt-gun-emoji-hi...
jpzisme 8y ago
Clicked on the article hoping for something substantial about policy to clean up fecal matter on San Francisco streets. Instead got: " a distinct work-life balance has been replaced by free food, ping pong, and services that do your laundry or drive you to work. This puerility is internalized so profoundly that it extends to corporate hierarchies and the way essential tasks are discussed. Software engineers are often colloquially referred to as “rock stars” or “ninjas” in job postings, and childish jargon is pervasive. " Which is ridiculous considering the article is about poop and gun cartoon depictions.
- dec0dedab0de 8y ago
  I have a feeling that by 2016, most people who use emojiis weren't using them on Windows.
vortico 8y ago
Am I alone in thinking that emoji should be completely removed from the Unicode standard? The character set is an amazing collaboration between companies and countries to place all glyphs used by humans in a standardized collection... And then there's a bunch of smiley faces. Seems like someone at the Unicode Consortium accidentally downloaded a "free smiley pack" malware from the 2000's that injected itself into the standard draft. Just deprecate that garbage. There's already a standard to represent all conceivable pictograms: <img> tags and PNG.
- skookumchuck 8y ago
  I'm with you. Inventing emoji has gone way beyond the charter of the Unicode Consortium. One ginormous problem of inventing and adding emoji is there is no credible end to the process. The numeric range of code points will be filled up and then what?
  - cryptonector 8y ago
    Then it will be expanded, and UTF-16 will be put to rest, and UTF-8 liberated to encode the full 32-bit namespace. Hopefully we're a few decades away from that eventuality... I do hope the UC is reserving enough codepoints for existing human languages, and new Han/Kanji.
- slavik81 8y ago
  > Seems like someone at the Unicode Consortium accidentally downloaded a "free smiley pack" malware from the 2000's. A 'free smiley pack' actually kinda describes where it came from. It was the standardization of symbols used by Japanese text networks. It's basically like if the ubiquitous vBulletin smilies had been standardized. I don't think it can be deprecated, but it should probably follow the same rules as other Unicode symbols. It's bizarre how easily emojis are added to the standard in comparison to other symbols. Especially when there are serious problems with differing implementations of the standard.
  - cryptonector 8y ago
    It's not at all bizarre. Adding symbols from existing scripts requires research. It requires experts in that script to document the new symbols. It is exceedingly difficult to fix character definition errors. Adding emoji is fairly simple by comparison. All you need is someone to submit a drawing, character name, and character metadata, and then maybe consensus. Because a new emoji a brand new character, no research is needed to avoid definition errors.
the_zisko 8y ago
Every single comment in here thinks this article is about watergun/poop emoji, which is why we have the problems that the article touches on.
- typon 8y ago
  It's a bunch of programmers arguing about art...
skookumchuck 8y ago
Next up: changing the words in the Declaration of Independence from "Indian Savages" to "Native Americans". Of course, people have already rewritten "Huck Finn" to remove the word that I dare not even type.
chasing 8y ago
You should google how language has always been affected and mutated by capitalism. You'd cry so hard you'd use enough kleenex to fill a dumpster. You might even have to take a break and go play frisbee or ping-pong or spend some time in a jacuzzi.
tzahola 8y ago
This was more profound for me than the whole emoji issue: “What the tech industry can’t obfuscate behind algorithms is often relegated to some form of infantilization, in which a distinct work-life balance has been replaced by free food, ping pong, and services that do your laundry or drive you to work. This puerility is internalized so profoundly that it extends to corporate hierarchies and the way essential tasks are discussed. Software engineers are often colloquially referred to as “rock stars” or “ninjas” in job postings, and childish jargon is pervasive.”
phs318u 8y ago
As a non-American, I find it somewhat ironic that nowhere in this discussion of the gun emoji change - “The Absolute Denial of Shit” - is there any discussion of the correlation of gun violence and gun laws. http://fortune.com/2018/03/20/gun-laws-gun-crimes-state-gun-regulations/ http://fortune.com/2018/03/20/gun-laws-gun-crimes-state-gun-...
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  Of course not - that is a US national myopia. That there are commenters calling out changing a graphic as totalitarian Newspeak yet completely ignoring the core issue that graphic change skirts around is rather comical. It's no longer possible to have a sensible conversation, wherever your views may lie, about the underlying issue unless it's outside the US.
- defined 8y ago
  Although you make a valid point, the article linked to is statistically questionable, and consequently potentially very misleading. “Potentially”, because it may (who knows) accidentally have come to the correct conclusion, notwithstanding its shaky basis, but it could just as easily be wrong. The author of that article even goes as far as writing “Correlation does not equal causation“ and in the same sentence goes on to call it a trend, which I find contradictory.
  - phs318u 8y ago
    The linked article doesn’t in fact draw a conclusion - it is simply drawing attention to the correlation - which is quite striking. And while it would have been equally correct (if not drawing a conclusion) to state that the “trend” (poor choice of word) indicates that states with fewer shooting deaths enact more gun laws (ie. not assuming cause and effect), to do so would have been disingenuous. IF the effect is not the obvious one, then there is possibly a hidden variable driving fewer gun deaths that is associated with populations that prefer more gun laws (even if the laws themselves don’t drive the reduction). At the very least it’s worth further study. And yet here we are discussing the corporate control of emojis on freedom of speech. And while that’s worthy of discussion- we are all still free to use English (or <insert your language here>) instead of a language that is unfree. To the best of my knowledge no one has yet died as a result of misinterpretation of the gun emoji.
slavik81 8y ago
The mspaint Fu Manchu mustache drawn on the photo of the execution of Nguyễn Văn Lém really bothers me. There's a lot of power in graffiti, but it's labeled as being Eddie Adam's original photo.
hsienmaneja 8y ago
Wouldn’t two half votes for $15k be cheaper than the one vote for $18k? Are two half votes the same as a full vote?
throwvondannen 8y ago
Designed by the corporate committee of social fads, emoji represent a lot of things I've come to despise. Overly truncated thoughts, ambiguity, laziness, sometimes plain disrespect. Sure, you can do all of this without the help of emoji, but even if the medium isn't the message, it does modify it and I think it does so for the worse. What I'm really saying is, I'm angry about the kind of person who tends to abuse them. Getting angry over little pictographs on the internet is silly after all, right? :-)
kapauldo 8y ago
So much work to enable leisure.

202 points by thebigship 8y ago

draw_down 8y ago

The bit dissusing kitsch was really interesting, thanks for posting!

sithadmin 8y ago
It's worth noting that Kundera's interpretation of kitsch (as a socio-political phenomena rather than an aesthetic quality) is pretty fringe and generally not recognized outside the lit crit community. You won't find it being taken seriously in academic circles focused on sociology, politics, etc., mostly because there are far more elegant and explanatory frames of reference for discussing the phenomenon Kundera describes (mostly drawn from psychology).
- mcantelon 8y ago
  >there are far more elegant and explanatory frames of reference for discussing the phenomenon Kundera describes (mostly drawn from psychology). Such as? I thought "kitsch" perfectly summed up the essence of a restricted, infantilized worldview.

megaman22 8y ago

This is all over the road, but that's not out of the ordinary when it features "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" being name-dropped in the middle of it. I don't really get the axe-grinding about stereotypical nerdboys having some nefarious influence on expression through control of emoji fontsets. Emojis are silly little pictograms. If you want something more varied, send an image or a gif or a meme. Or settle down and type out a few of these things we call words, that have the capability to be very expressive and unambiguous.

rafael859 8y ago
I think that the article makes a pretty good point that emoji are increasingly important in communication -- referencing the suggestion of the mosquito emoji that was supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in order to facilitate communication and discussion about the malaria-spreading insects. Even though I don't completely agree with the importance of emoji in modern communication, apparently a lot of people (especially some of those who vote on the Unicode Standard Consortium) do. If you were to accept that emoji are an important part of modern communication, would you not agree that censoring certain images is akin to censoring words? Then, the reference to "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" is very apt. I didn't get the impression that the article was suggesting that the people who vote in the Consortium have any sort of nefarious intensions -- and I don't think that there is much to be gained by a fascist government by censoring the word "shit". The decision to do stems from personal taste, prudence, or social pressure. It is not the intention behind it that we should be afraid of, but the power of some organizations to form our means of communication, independent on how "good" they are, as there are many unpredictable factors that can shape their decisions.

sudosteph 8y ago

Just realized that this is the first time I've seen emoji from a URL render in my browser's address bar. That really surprised me for a second.

rzzzt 8y ago
Some domains use emojis as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji_domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji_domain https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2035572 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2035572
hinkley 8y ago
Congratulations, you are one of today's 10,000. An early example of this is http://xn--n3h.net/ http://xn--n3h.net/ or snowman in hat dot net (turns out hacker news strips unicode emoji.) Some browsers convert to punycode to reduce the incidence of phishing attacks based on homoglyphs (two characters that look the same).

peterwwillis 8y ago

I think the solution is a universal standard for multimodal interfaces that allows external and attached content. An example of this already exists: in a Facebook comment, you can reply with an arbitrary meme, and I believe Slack lets you define emojis as well. We could extend this to include sound, or even modes for haptic or braille feedback. If there isn't space to attach the mode you could simply provide a URL. This could be turned into a standard, and apps could implement the standard, allowing people to communicate with richer content across a wide array of technology.

christophclarke 8y ago
But in slack emoji, you have to modify the universal standard for the workspace in order to add those emoji, and now you're back to where you started. The whole benefit of Unicode is that anyone anywhere can see Unicode on any device that supports it, without introducing added complexity of sending the actual image over the message.
- peterwwillis 8y ago
  IIRC Unicode was intended to encode and represent text for writing systems. I get that the purpose of emoji in Unicode is to provide a universal way to represent certain pictures, but it's clear that we also don't want to be limited by the set of pictures we can send. It seems a lot more sensible to actually send the picture you want to send, or a link to that picture, because that doesn't need to be interpreted differently by each client... just rendered. Sending the actual image might take more space in, say, a text message, but its actual encoded size should be pretty trivial. For example, one of Twitter's 16x16 color emoji is a 400 byte SVG file. Base64-encoded that would be about 533 bytes. The standard could define the image formats accepted, with probably one ideal format for emoji (SVG) and another for memes (JPEG). Here's another way to think of how you could implement this in a standard. Each message is multipart. The text body is the first message by default. That text can contain references to other parts. That reference could be the name of the part you want to reference in that message, and that name would only need to be unique to that message. But that name could also be, for example, a SHA hash. When you accept messages, you could store the message parts in a database with their SHA hash. When someone sends the same part again in a new message, you can just retrieve that part from your database, rather than storing the same part multiple times. This could allow you to send messages referencing the same gigantic meme file 50 times, but you only ever store it the one time, and after that you just store references to it. The standard would allow you to simply say "please reference part X in this part of the message text, and if you don't have that part yet, here it is, base64-encoded or linked via URL". (What I just described is MIME, but you could reinvent it if you wanted people to adopt it, because people don't like adopting things that aren't new and cool)

deleted 8y ago

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Y_Y 8y ago

Where are the emojis for pain? And why are there so many happy family emojis? People (and "corporate people") who care enough to get emojis put in by buy votes at the Unicode Club seem to have super weird values totally detached from humans who send each other messages.

rarec 8y ago
I'm not sure people who would want pain emojis care enough to buy votes at the club. Besides, at least as far as Discord/Slack goes, most people I've found just upload their own little emoticons as they are more meaningful and great for inside jokes on a particular server/team.
detaro 8y ago
Have any "pain" emojis been rejected, or has merely nobody officially proposed them? (which anyone can do, no club membership required)
- paulddraper 8y ago
  IDK, but either way the end result is a system which is unuseful for expressing common ideas.
  - cryptonector 8y ago
    In Japanese, ideographs (Kanji) are paired with syllabic characters (Hiragana) to express things which Kanji alone cannot. Foreign words are spelled in Katakana (another syllabic script). There's also romaji -- a way of writing Japanese in the familiar Latin alphabet. Incompleteness is manifestly NOT a problem for an ideographic script.
- voxadam 8y ago
  The Unicode Consortium publishes a list of all the requests made to the Emoji Subcommittee.[1] [1] http://www.unicode.org/emoji/emoji-requests.html http://www.unicode.org/emoji/emoji-requests.html
8y ago

laurex 8y ago

What surprises me is that there isn't any emoji with an unequivocal meaning of "thanks."

mankyd 8y ago
Interesting write up on it: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-emoji-for-thanks https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-emoji-for-thanks
intopieces 8y ago
Are there any symbols, emoji or not, that have unequivocal meaning? I recall the discussion around creating the symbol for "radioactive", and the challenges around making a symbol that would convey that meaning for thousands of years: https://web.archive.org/web/20090328112312/http://www.wipp.energy.gov/picsprog/articles/wipp%20exhibit%20message%20to%2012,000%20a_d.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20090328112312/http://www.wipp.e... (original on energy.gov is gone)
pphysch 8y ago
Is that surprising? Is there a unequivocal symbol for Thanks other than the word itself?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
spiderjerusalem 8y ago
I always use :bow:.

amelius 8y ago

I basically want this: - Emoji decoupled from Unicode, and represented as SVG by chat clients. This ensures our expression is not limited by the Unicode committee. - Any user can upload a new emoji as SVG. - Any user can download an emoji that appears in one of their messages, and place it in their own library. - Emojis can also be downloaded from web-pages etc.

frabert 8y ago
So Windows Live Messenger all over again? No thanks
- jcelerier 8y ago
  uh ? I really miss the WLM time, conversations were much more lively and fun
LeifCarrotson 8y ago
How is this different from sharing an image? I get the advantages of SVG over JPEG or PNG, but that's just a platform support issue. The other thing that Emoji have going for them is that they're text and can appear where text does, and for that to work I am pretty sure you need a Unicode Consortium.
walterstucco 8y ago
Telegram let's you upload your own sets
gojomo 8y ago
SVG would make a lot of sense here - but could you settle for content-hash-named transclusion of arbitrary bitmap images as a Unicode escape? It's been proposed! http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2016/16105r-unicode-image-hash.pdf http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2016/16105r-unicode-image-hash.pd...
- Analemma_ 8y ago
  Oh god why. This is like the 21th century update to Zawinski's Law: every data interchange format will eventually expand to encode arbitrary binary data. Unicode is a text standard and even including wingdings symbols and emoji was pushing it, please kill this in the cradle.

PowerfulWizard 8y ago

The bad news: - They changed the gun emoji to be a water gun, which has a totally different meaning. This retroactively changes previous writings, changing their meaning. What kind of writing system allows people to change your words after you've written them? Emoji is a trash writing system and an agent of kipplization. - Emoji is controlled by corporations that are concerned with maximizing the value of their platforms which will lead them to a PG13, disneyfied, milquetoast worldview. The good news: - In the entire human history, it has never been easier to create and publish text, audio, or video works of any kind. The most popular platforms have severe limitations, but it only takes the slightest effort to use other platforms that are uncensored. - There is plenty of free software that can give you pixel-level control over your output, you don't need to rely on the unicode consortium or any other organization of any kind to determine what you express.

stcredzero 8y ago
They changed the gun emoji to be a water gun, which has a totally different meaning. This retroactively changes previous writings, changing their meaning. From the op: In his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera linked this kind of forced conformity to a fascist government’s unbounded desire for control, and its efforts to limit expression to kitsch, a cartoonish denial of objective reality This is also a historical feature of communist governments. All governments, and all societies, in as much as they lose a commitment to individual rights, will tend to grab more and more control in pursuit of difficult goals. It's yet another thing that seems "nice" but which has disturbing implications under the surface for free speech, like Canadian Bill C-16.
- fhood 8y ago
  So wait, does that make Apple fascists or communists? Wouldn't want to grab the wrong pitchfork.
  - snerbles 8y ago
    It would more accurately be described as corporate-flavored collectivism. Of course, that doesn't make for a good ingredient in angry epithets.

ilaksh 8y ago

Part of the problem is that Google and Apple have a monopoly on this stuff. Not sure we can do anything about that readily, but we should probably at least acknowledge that it's a problem. If we just assume that isn't going to change maybe we could adopt an app that has its own emoji representations separate from the operating system. And/or maybe we need to start some political process working on the companies to improve their representations. I think this is the tip of the iceberg and is more important than most people realize. Censorship is no joke.

mattbierner 8y ago

While good writing and artwork undoubtably can express a far greater range of emotions than emoji—and with infinitely more subtlety—if you ask me how I’m feeling in casual conversation, 90% of the time I’ll reply “fine” or “ok” or “bad”. Being able to easily reply with one of 50 reaction emojis is a great improvement in expressiveness here. Emoji do become problematic when you start asking follow up questions, such as “what does feeling ‘bad’ feel like?” Since you’ve already expressed your specific state when you replied with your first emoji, to add more depth you start having to combine reaction emoji to express something new or repurpose other emoji as symbols. Which sounds a lot like any language actually A far more dangerous problem is that emoji can replace the idea of the things they are intended to represent. For example: the happiness emoji becomes our idea of what happiness is, instead of merely representing the concept of happiness. That seems to be what the article is driving at and it clearly would be bad if this widely happened. The result would be newspeak type language, incapable of expressing many ideas and that is controlled by these huge companies. Worse, using such a language, your subjective experience of life has to fit into the emoji standard because you lack the tools to express or even conceptualize anything beyond it.

mannykannot 8y ago

Given the formation of an international committee and - most significantly - their adoption by parents, we can hope that we have reached peak emoji, and their decline will be rapid.

21 8y ago
Kids haven't stopped using words just because the parents use them too. Or iPhones. Some things are too essential to discard for this reason. What will change is what emojis are used and how. The rare ones which are not used by parents will become used by kids. I already see this.

excalibur 8y ago

> Mosquitoes are the world’s deadliest animal — outpacing sharks, snakes and all others by a wide margin. I do believe you have to specifically except humans from "animals", unless it was your intention to include us, in which case I do believe you are mistaken.

verall 8y ago
This is needlessly pedantic, and I think a good proofreader would have cut a "besides humans" aside, did it exist in the original.
Nasrudith 8y ago
It is technically the malaria parasite (a protist) but that disease has killed the most humans throughout history - even without is collateral damage like making being a sickle cell anemia trait carrier good for survival historically. So yes they very much deserve the title.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

thaumasiotes 8y ago

> The argument for the mosquito emoji, made by the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, was firmly rooted in public health. The proposal states, “For many parts of the world, the mosquito is more than a nuisance — it is also a danger. Mosquitoes are the world’s deadliest animal — outpacing sharks, snakes and all others by a wide margin.” A mosquito emoji will allow people to easily communicate about the deadly insect to populations of varying languages and literacy levels. This usefulness serves as a kind of inversion of the ways in which other serious or controversial issues are mitigated. Why try to cover up or deny the existence of “real” guns, which are as rampant (at least in the US) as other “object” emoji? This highlights a YouTube policy that I found very disturbing. YouTube judged that graphic violence, defined somehow, was unacceptable and couldn't be shown on their platform. In particular, they didn't allow the posting of beheading videos featuring South American gangs beheading people who they thought deserved it. The reasoning was that allowing people to watch those videos served the gangs' purposes by inspiring fear. But, YouTube made a special exception to their policy to allow beheading videos of ISIS beheading people who they thought deserved it. The reasoning was that allowing people to watch those videos carried the message "look how bad things are in Syria", a message that Google endorsed. I can't for the life of me understand why the reason any particular person uploaded a video to YouTube should determine what I get out of the video. In my eyes, if YouTube was full of videos of gangs beheading informers, cops, and guys who slept with the boss's daughter, uploaded by the gangs themselves, that would be newsworthy and probably draw a lot of attention to the message "look how bad things are in South America". It's not like ISIS was ashamed of the beheading videos they filmed and released for propaganda purposes. Unfortunately, I can't provide a link to substantiate my characterization of Google's policies; my source is an English-language interview between a former YouTube executive and a Chinese consultancy, which I was asked to help transcribe.

mcantelon 8y ago
Bogus moral considerations are a great rationalization for censorship, charging Marie Le Pen for sharing photos of reality being a good example. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/01/marine-le-pen-charged-for-posting-violent-isis-images-on-twitter https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/01/marine-le-pen-...

throw7 8y ago

Add the "rifle" emoji/codepoint. it's not even shown.

throwawayjava 8y ago

This article is a perfect example of how the crit lit genre often analyzes the shit out of a stool sample while ignoring the patient's sawed-off arm. (Usually missing the real point because an auxiliary one makes for a much cuter reference to some piece of literature authored c. 1800-1990.) A set of images designed by advertising and consumer goods companies are not optimized for expressing the full range of the human experience? I'm shocked! /s The real critique: we've had <img> since the 1990s, and plenty of more than usable chat systems/protocols/markup languages that allow inline images for about that long as well. Why are standardized emojis so popular, and why do people even give a fuck about them when there are obvious workable alternatives? Emojis are not "radical" or "new", as the author puts it. They are a crippled instantiation of an old and obvious idea, an idea that has itself been implemented in better ways thousands of times prior to the rise of emojis.

oldsklgdfth 8y ago

The best part of this article is discovering "send me sfmoma" > Text 572-51 with the words “send me” followed by a keyword, a color, or even an emoji and you’ll receive a related artwork image and caption via text message Stuff like this makes me happy for technology

alex_young 8y ago

Hmm. I still see a pistol[0] on my Android 8.1.0 messages app. Is this even correct? [0] https://photos.app.goo.gl/w9kPRwUr2UHNQoKa8 https://photos.app.goo.gl/w9kPRwUr2UHNQoKa8

skiman10 8y ago
The pistol was changed to a squirt gun in the Android P (Android 9) Previews and betas.
sorenjan 8y ago
Here's a blog post about it: https://blog.emojipedia.org/google-updates-gun-emoji/ https://blog.emojipedia.org/google-updates-gun-emoji/

princekolt 8y ago

> queries containing emoji whose colloquial meaning had diverged from their objective depiction, such as the infamous [eggplant emoji], left users unsatisfied. Well but how is that different from how words have worked since the dawn of civilization? If tomorrow the collective society starts using the word kaleidoscope as an euphemism for penis, then any software that statically maps words to meanings will also fail. This is not a problem tied to emojis specifically.

notahacker 8y ago

Emojis are ephemeral, imprecise symbols which in the clients discussed are generally used for short term communication, not persistent information storage. Like the ASCII art they originated from, their implied meaning often doesn't survive font changes. I wonder how many of the people apparently incandescent with rage at the "authoritarian nature" of vendors changing a gun to a water pistol to bring into line with other vendors had similar objections back when Microsoft changed their original scifi toy gun to a pistol back in 2016...

cryptonector 8y ago
No more ephemeral than Chinese characters ever were (some were ephemeral, some durable). For example, the list of Kanji to be taught in Japan is updated periodically -- some characters are dropped, some are added. New Han/Kanji characters are invented occasionally -- it can be done because they are actually simplified drawings with one or more root characters and pen strokes added to distinguish them from other similar characters.

TranceMan 8y ago

:-) :-( ;-) Did I miss any? Edit: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/sefSmiley.htm https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/sefSmiley.htm

exabrial 8y ago

"When language is subjugated to corporate interests, we lose our ability to talk honestly and openly about the world, and some uncomfortable and disturbing juxtapositions emerge" Great quote

a3n 8y ago

"He brought a pistol to the birthday party." "He brought a squirt gun to the birthday party." Clear enough?

nabla9 8y ago

Adding new stuff to Unicode should have a delay, 20-25 years from proposal to the standard (roughly a generation). In the meantime it's possible to insert emoji into text as smiley, -smiley-, :) , smiley.jpg, ::smiley:: or whatever you want and the system you use is free to change it into a picture. We end up with standard that is full of ancient symbols from 2000-2025 and new generations of people will abandon them for something else when the culture changes. Emoji from 80s: ________ / "Ship Arriving Too Late to / Save a Drowning Witch" / /\ F. Zappa

cryptonector 8y ago
Users of scripts not currently fully-covered by Unicode would NOT be happy with this proposal.
XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 8y ago
Many languages will die before being digitized if they have to wait for 20-25 years

otakucode 8y ago

I had been disturbed by the actions of platforms like Google for awhile, fearing that their naive efforts at maintaining "mass market appeal" in the most hamfisted and blind ways possible were going to have unintentional consequences for global human culture. Then I read Eric Schmidt's book 'The New Digital Age.' They are not naive. And the effects are not unintentional at all. Their goal isn't even mass-market appeal. They want to ossify human culture and lock it in place to what it was in the early 2000s when they first became successful. As multitudes in the past have done, upon attaining influence many in the tech crowd have concluded that they know better, and that the general public (of which they of course never count themselves a member) is not capable of the task of regulating their own culture. This is a pretty old viewpoint. It built the pyramids, united Rome, etc. It's old school Conservative thinking, where the needs of the nation (or cult or tribe or whatever) come first, and the individual exists solely to serve that. It requires the presence of 'special' people, typically incarnated gods, representatives chosen by a god, or somehow otherwise fundamentally 'Better' people, like a kings lineage. That brand of thinking ruled the world for a long time, but it got its ass kicked basically completely around the end of the 18th century. I have no idea why the rich people at the top of tech companies seem to like it so much. But it's becoming increasingly clear that these systems of communication are enabling a greater level of control and there are some sick-minded powerful folks who will need to be reigned in as they are more than willing to take those reigns. No one should have those. Global culture can, and eventually will, guide itself. Humanity is a wonderful species, but only in its totality. In the cut-down whitewashed conformal mass that Facebook and Google and others want to construct and sell to people, then try to force on the rest, it looks more like a metastatic infection. The tech companies are unquestionably at war with basic human nature. They do not like humans very much, and they want to change them. Like their forebearers in the Industrial Revolution, they seek to round off the rough edges, smooth out the wrinkles, and will wreak any amount of suffering necessary to do so. Engineers need to think very hard about the ethics of their work. "Just doing my job" holds exactly as much moral weight as "I just did it for money", so keep that in mind. It's an empty dodge.

Animats 8y ago

The water gun emoji controversy got considerable press coverage and is easy to find in Google. Apple was behind it.[1] But they were pressured into it by a New York anti-gun group.[2][3] The Unicode discussion for the "no" symbol (COMBINING ENCLOSING CIRCLE BACKSLASH) suggest the use of "No" on the gun glyph for "no guns": No guns ⃠ That's a combining mark; you can apply it to anything. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-gun-emoji-change-squirt-gun-has-led-google-samsung-facebook-microsoft-to-follow-suit-2018-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-gun-emoji-change-squirt... [2] https://metro.co.uk/2015/08/07/activists-want-the-gun-emoji-removed-from-iphones-5331721/ https://metro.co.uk/2015/08/07/activists-want-the-gun-emoji-... [3] https://www.wired.com/2016/08/apples-new-squirt-gun-emoji-hides-big-political-statement/ https://www.wired.com/2016/08/apples-new-squirt-gun-emoji-hi...

jpzisme 8y ago

Clicked on the article hoping for something substantial about policy to clean up fecal matter on San Francisco streets. Instead got: " a distinct work-life balance has been replaced by free food, ping pong, and services that do your laundry or drive you to work. This puerility is internalized so profoundly that it extends to corporate hierarchies and the way essential tasks are discussed. Software engineers are often colloquially referred to as “rock stars” or “ninjas” in job postings, and childish jargon is pervasive. " Which is ridiculous considering the article is about poop and gun cartoon depictions.

dec0dedab0de 8y ago
I have a feeling that by 2016, most people who use emojiis weren't using them on Windows.

vortico 8y ago

Am I alone in thinking that emoji should be completely removed from the Unicode standard? The character set is an amazing collaboration between companies and countries to place all glyphs used by humans in a standardized collection... And then there's a bunch of smiley faces. Seems like someone at the Unicode Consortium accidentally downloaded a "free smiley pack" malware from the 2000's that injected itself into the standard draft. Just deprecate that garbage. There's already a standard to represent all conceivable pictograms: <img> tags and PNG.

skookumchuck 8y ago
I'm with you. Inventing emoji has gone way beyond the charter of the Unicode Consortium. One ginormous problem of inventing and adding emoji is there is no credible end to the process. The numeric range of code points will be filled up and then what?
- cryptonector 8y ago
  Then it will be expanded, and UTF-16 will be put to rest, and UTF-8 liberated to encode the full 32-bit namespace. Hopefully we're a few decades away from that eventuality... I do hope the UC is reserving enough codepoints for existing human languages, and new Han/Kanji.
slavik81 8y ago
> Seems like someone at the Unicode Consortium accidentally downloaded a "free smiley pack" malware from the 2000's. A 'free smiley pack' actually kinda describes where it came from. It was the standardization of symbols used by Japanese text networks. It's basically like if the ubiquitous vBulletin smilies had been standardized. I don't think it can be deprecated, but it should probably follow the same rules as other Unicode symbols. It's bizarre how easily emojis are added to the standard in comparison to other symbols. Especially when there are serious problems with differing implementations of the standard.
- cryptonector 8y ago
  It's not at all bizarre. Adding symbols from existing scripts requires research. It requires experts in that script to document the new symbols. It is exceedingly difficult to fix character definition errors. Adding emoji is fairly simple by comparison. All you need is someone to submit a drawing, character name, and character metadata, and then maybe consensus. Because a new emoji a brand new character, no research is needed to avoid definition errors.

the_zisko 8y ago

Every single comment in here thinks this article is about watergun/poop emoji, which is why we have the problems that the article touches on.

typon 8y ago
It's a bunch of programmers arguing about art...

skookumchuck 8y ago

Next up: changing the words in the Declaration of Independence from "Indian Savages" to "Native Americans". Of course, people have already rewritten "Huck Finn" to remove the word that I dare not even type.

chasing 8y ago

You should google how language has always been affected and mutated by capitalism. You'd cry so hard you'd use enough kleenex to fill a dumpster. You might even have to take a break and go play frisbee or ping-pong or spend some time in a jacuzzi.

tzahola 8y ago

This was more profound for me than the whole emoji issue: “What the tech industry can’t obfuscate behind algorithms is often relegated to some form of infantilization, in which a distinct work-life balance has been replaced by free food, ping pong, and services that do your laundry or drive you to work. This puerility is internalized so profoundly that it extends to corporate hierarchies and the way essential tasks are discussed. Software engineers are often colloquially referred to as “rock stars” or “ninjas” in job postings, and childish jargon is pervasive.”

phs318u 8y ago

As a non-American, I find it somewhat ironic that nowhere in this discussion of the gun emoji change - “The Absolute Denial of Shit” - is there any discussion of the correlation of gun violence and gun laws. http://fortune.com/2018/03/20/gun-laws-gun-crimes-state-gun-regulations/ http://fortune.com/2018/03/20/gun-laws-gun-crimes-state-gun-...

NeedMoreTea 8y ago
Of course not - that is a US national myopia. That there are commenters calling out changing a graphic as totalitarian Newspeak yet completely ignoring the core issue that graphic change skirts around is rather comical. It's no longer possible to have a sensible conversation, wherever your views may lie, about the underlying issue unless it's outside the US.
defined 8y ago
Although you make a valid point, the article linked to is statistically questionable, and consequently potentially very misleading. “Potentially”, because it may (who knows) accidentally have come to the correct conclusion, notwithstanding its shaky basis, but it could just as easily be wrong. The author of that article even goes as far as writing “Correlation does not equal causation“ and in the same sentence goes on to call it a trend, which I find contradictory.
- phs318u 8y ago
  The linked article doesn’t in fact draw a conclusion - it is simply drawing attention to the correlation - which is quite striking. And while it would have been equally correct (if not drawing a conclusion) to state that the “trend” (poor choice of word) indicates that states with fewer shooting deaths enact more gun laws (ie. not assuming cause and effect), to do so would have been disingenuous. IF the effect is not the obvious one, then there is possibly a hidden variable driving fewer gun deaths that is associated with populations that prefer more gun laws (even if the laws themselves don’t drive the reduction). At the very least it’s worth further study. And yet here we are discussing the corporate control of emojis on freedom of speech. And while that’s worthy of discussion- we are all still free to use English (or <insert your language here>) instead of a language that is unfree. To the best of my knowledge no one has yet died as a result of misinterpretation of the gun emoji.

slavik81 8y ago

The mspaint Fu Manchu mustache drawn on the photo of the execution of Nguyễn Văn Lém really bothers me. There's a lot of power in graffiti, but it's labeled as being Eddie Adam's original photo.

hsienmaneja 8y ago

Wouldn’t two half votes for $15k be cheaper than the one vote for $18k? Are two half votes the same as a full vote?

throwvondannen 8y ago

Designed by the corporate committee of social fads, emoji represent a lot of things I've come to despise. Overly truncated thoughts, ambiguity, laziness, sometimes plain disrespect. Sure, you can do all of this without the help of emoji, but even if the medium isn't the message, it does modify it and I think it does so for the worse. What I'm really saying is, I'm angry about the kind of person who tends to abuse them. Getting angry over little pictographs on the internet is silly after all, right? :-)

kapauldo 8y ago

So much work to enable leisure.