431–440 of 665 posts
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How is an emoji a whole new way to communicate? EDIT: I meant this as a genuine question, not as a "how could you possibly think this" response.
A friend asked if he could crash at my place one night and said “don’t worry if not, I got options” followed by the nail-painting emoji. How do you express that in ASCII emoticons?
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If it is contextual and subjective, then we could just use any word or phrase in the same manner to the same effect. Written language itself is just contextual line patterns.
> we could just use any word or phrase in the same manner to the same effect. Written language itself is just contextual line patterns No, we can't. There is an inherent visual component to emojis. A picture worth a thousand words, et cetera . It's not an abstract idea mapping to an arbitrary icon; without prior explanation, many emojis make sense (within a certain cultural context). Kind of like how we can't replace…
What a coincidence, the exact same thing is true about written words.
>Kind of like how we can't replace the essence of giving a friend a gift or a lover a flower with words or an arbitrary icon. Apple understands this in a way few technology companies do.
I feel like you're one of those people who would have been way into flaming guitar gifs and midi on your geocities page in the 90s. I mean, seriously? You're literally saying that sending a gif conveys so much more meaning meaning it is similar to giving a gift or a flower than sending a text.
Maybe you're right: https://tinyurl.com/y7xeu7dc
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> It would be pretty hard to express the sentiment the ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ That's what acronyms were used for. Back in the day of AIM/ICQ I never felt I had issues expressing myself with just text. It was text supplemented with a healthy dose of emoticons and acronyms, which leads me to believe that emoji are redundant
Emoticons are severely limited in their range of expressivity. It’s hard to do much more than :) :( and :/. Acronyms are limited in both range of expressivity and audience size. Acronyms require prior agreement on what they mean, so there’s a barrier to their basic use and another barrier separating people that don’t know what they stand for. This severely limits your audience size and the number of acronyms you can…
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You can’t compare them directly, they’re very different categories of graphics APIs. Metal belongs to the category of “modern low-level graphics API” (which also includes Vulkan and Direct3D 12), while OpenGL is an older higher-level graphics API (which also includes Direct3D 11 and previous). The low-level graphics APIs like Metal and Vulkan allow for much better performance, but they are much harder to use and requ…
To be fair - OpenGL was fairly horrible to use directly. It sat in an awkward middle area between "low level enough to be efficient" and "high level enough to be productive". Maybe I'm biased - every time I looked at OpenGl code I shuddered and ran away to a higher level framework (I'm excluding shader code from this - that's concise enough for me not to mind getting that close to the metal)
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What's the consensus on Metal? How does it compare to OpenGL?
To my understanding, the consensus is that it's, y'know, fine, but nothing particular to recommend it over Vulkan. The main problem people seem to have with it is that it feels unnecessary, like Apple being incompatible for the sake of being incompatible.
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Emoticons are severely limited in their range of expressivity. It’s hard to do much more than :) :( and :/. Acronyms are limited in both range of expressivity and audience size. Acronyms require prior agreement on what they mean, so there’s a barrier to their basic use and another barrier separating people that don’t know what they stand for. This severely limits your audience size and the number of acronyms you can…
There are a lot more emoticons than a few simple faces. Even your example ("¯\_(ツ)_/¯") is an emoticon, albeit one from the Asian side of the pond. I've had long distance relationships over text chat and so I really disagree on the fact that they are limited in their expressiveness. Part of what is off-putting about emoji is that they make text look like early first-language reading materials, where pictures of objec…
At its core, language is a tool. Its job is to allow people to communicate ideas with other people. You're arguing that there's value in not making a tool easier to use because it promotes learning, but I disagree with that point. Sure, there's value in overcoming challenges to benefit learning, but we shouldn't create artificial challenges (like not using emojis) just for that benefit to learning by doing things in a harder way. It's like saying we should use hammers to put in screws because using a screwdriver makes things too easy. I agree that there's much value in learning, but I think learning can be done in a much more efficient and productive way than by refraining from using emojis.
Also, you have to think of the costs associated with the inefficiencies of human language. One example: look at all the scientific work being done in English. Anyone that doesn't speak English fluently is automatically at a massive disadvantage in the scientific field. These non-English speaking scientists have to spend years simply learning English to contribute their work. That's an opportunity cost. All those years could have been spent on their actual scientific work, and those individuals and society as a whole have to live with that loss. I'm obviously not arguing that emojis fix this problem, but I'm saying that simplifying our language tool in some way could.
> Also, are emoji really so universally understood? Are the peach or eggplant really universally understood to stand in for genitalia? Like almost everything the simplest form of emoji are accessible but I do not think everyone in the world is on the same page about the finer points on how to use some symbols
That's an interesting point. There are differences in how emojis are interpreted, but this is no different from written or spoken language. Since the beginning of human communication, people have developed slang words and altered the rules of language. Some of these changes have spread and persisted while others died out or remained in use within specific groups of people. While the peach and eggplant emoji may not have the same interpretations across age groups, different cultures can likely still infer their meaning. For example, the see/hear/say-no-evil monkey emojis likely transcend many cultural and language barriers. Knife + scream + shower head emojis likely convey the shower scene from Psycho to anyone who's seen the movie regardless of culture or language.
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> What’s the text version of a birthday cake? "Happy birthday!" > More challenging: what’s the text version of a singing, eye-rolling T-Rex? Ok, you got me there, because I have no idea what concept is even meant to be communicated by such an absurd thing.
Let me put it another way: what’s the point of these newfangled moving pictures when we already have books?
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How is an emoji a whole new way to communicate? EDIT: I meant this as a genuine question, not as a "how could you possibly think this" response.
I don't mean this to sound in any way cruel or judgemental, but a very large proportion of the population have very limited literacy skills. Emoji are useful for all users who are writing short, personal messages that might be ambiguous in tone. They are extremely useful for people who would otherwise struggle to express or understand tone and emotion using the written word. In the last National Assessment of Adult L…
But as for deciding it exists because people aren't smart enough to use words, U+1F914.
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If it is contextual and subjective, then we could just use any word or phrase in the same manner to the same effect. Written language itself is just contextual line patterns.
How many languages do you speak well? Very likely less than the amount of different native language speakers who understand the vast majority of your emoticons/emojis. I suppose you don't care cause you just speak your native language with other people who are native speakers. But a universal language on top of that has huge benefits in international circles. And, my 3 month old understands the :) smile. One of the v…
I find that difficult to believe. On the other hand, given enough time and global interaction in that medium, it could develop a stable enough meaning across a large enough conceptual space to have a situation no worse than exists between any "standard" language and its various dialects. That'd be interesting, but I'm not holding my breath.
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How is an emoji a whole new way to communicate? EDIT: I meant this as a genuine question, not as a "how could you possibly think this" response.
A friend asked if he could crash at my place one night and said “don’t worry if not, I got options” followed by the nail-painting emoji. How do you express that in ASCII emoticons?