i guess randall got inspired by this discussion: https://xkcd.com/2606/
U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow
271–280 of 312 posts
Re: U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow
#272According to today's xkcd, this symbol means "Larry Potter" https://xkcd.com/2606
Evidently Randall Munroe reads HN, to the surprise of no one.
Re: U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow
#273That is a chaos magick linking sigil.
Re: U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow
#274Dislosure: I'm not directly from the fields of the Sciences Of Angles And Ambiguously Crossing Lines nor I've every seen or used this symbol before. However to me it's, pretty evidently, supposed to be a "no right angle" symbol. (A) It's in the math section, (B) it's with angles, (C) the thunderbolt ↯ is commonly used for "not" or more specifically for dis-proof in this area and (D) at least by my 30 s internet searc…
I've thought that it would be cool to have a Wiki with an entry for each character, describing what it is, and its history. Although that wouldn't help for mystery characters like this one, there are a lot of characters with stories behind them.
Wikipedia already does this for many symbols. See for example...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscellaneous_Technical
Aside from the table describing each symbol, if you scroll to the bottom of the page, it links out to full articles related to each. For a full list see...
Re: U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
It makes me sad to think of all those simple little services we used to run on *NIX machines, like `finger` and `whois`. You'd never want to disclose that information now, but at the time it was quite nice to be able to see if a friend or colleague was around with a simple network query.
I remember when I could connect to nearly any server on the internet on port 25 and manually type the commands to send an email. .
You can still submit mail to virtually any mail server using telnet. I just tried it on Gmail for curiosity, and it did work!
Re: U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow
#276I remember back in the day we used to find publicly exposed Windows FTP servers, create new folders using some messed up unicode characters and upload pirated games and movies there to share with each other. The only way to open those directories was to specifically type the exact path in unicode, simply double clicking on the folder in filezilla or windows explorer resulted in a error. Sometimes the admins themselve…
_vti_cnf
Re: U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel bad for the font designers who have to put all these inane characters in, have to draw them and hint them, and they have no purpose except they have to be there or someone will complain.
Fortunately there are only a handful of such cases. But unfortunately there are tons of commonly used CJKV ideographs; typical Chinese or Japanese fonts are of course not expected to have all Chinese characters (there are almost 100,000 of them while OpenType fonts can only have 65K glyphs), but they are expected to have thousands of commonly used characters.
It must be really nice that even an amateur font designer can single-handedly create a quality font for English usage in his spare time.
For Japanese, it requires a minimal of few thousands of characters and symbols and it still doesn't cover all the commonly used characters today.
Re: U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's not a synonym for "goods", because only one type of thing was ever "wares"; software. It's just for dividing up the sections of your piracy BBS into, like "filez" (files, multi-kilobyte textfiles full of instructions on how to make bombs etc), "imagez", "warez", etc. Citation needed there. I have always assumed it came from fleamarkets where people selling pirated VHS films and knock-off Rolexes would be descr…
Okay, so my citation is, I was there, I was a (fringe) participant in pre-internet piracy culture, starting in 1990. Pirate BBSes would have various "goods" (in the sense you and GP mean) available for download, including images (hint: some of them may have involve ladies), text files, and software. Sometimes there would also be sections for various art media created by users, such as .mods or ASCII art or poetry or…
I too never seen "warez" used to refer to anything other than pirated software. You make a good point about the derivation; it probably is directly from "software". Adding a superfluous Z to the end of a plural mass noun was also a characteristic of l33tspeak, as I recall.
Re: U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was just discussing :man-in-business-suit-levitating: with some friends earlier today. Also an interestingly cryptic background, albeit not an unsolved one. https://emojipedia.org/person-in-suit-levitating/ (Edit: Apparently HN automatically removes emoji.)
The story behind MIBSL is definitely fascinating and some great trivia there. There’s a longer article about it here: https://www.newsweek.com/2016/05/06/secret-ska-history-man-b... that covers not just the inspiration for the emoji itself, but a brief history behind the inspiration behind the inspiration. Lots of levels of metaness to unpack.
I love this! I've always assumed it was a rude boy emoji. Was briefly in a high school ska band :D
Re: U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the thunderbolt ↯ is commonly used for "not" or more specifically for dis-proof in this area and I don't think it's that common. At least, I don't recall seeing it ever. Maybe it's used in non-English mathematics? Wikipedia mentions it's also used in electrolysis so maybe this new one is related to that somehow?
Same. Never seen that symbol in my life. I've seen ¬, ~, !, etc used for not/negation in computer science, math, logic, etc. And some commenters said they used it to mark proof by contradiction, but why is there a need to mark it when you are showing it via proof? A canonical example of proof by contradiction is proving sqrt(2) is not rational. Never have I seen it marked with that symbol. Where would you even mark i…
I was taught it in extracurricular mathematics in Australia. We were taught that it goes at the end of a contradiction proof once the contradiction has been found. We used to write it extra large, like lightning strike. I think of it like a proof mic-drop.