241–250 of 322 posts
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https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F300.pdf This is a case of companies rendering 1F52B to something it is specifically not.
Well yes. I don't think it's really defensible to render a code point using a glyph with a different semantic meaning. But "inconsistent" emoji rendering will always be a thing.
This was done on purpose.
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Umbrella Term is a optimistic description for something so nebulous and used so frivolously. It is more commonly used as "anything I don't like is woke" and "any opinion that doesn't match mine is censoring me."
Censorship has a very specific definition. And changing the pistol emoji to prevent certain ideas or politics from being communicated was censorship. As for woke - I don't understand why people ask for a definition. A quick search brings up many useful definitions: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Woke
Note how the definition there doesn't match any of the three definitions people gave me here, and none of the three here seem to match each other. Also, as your link says, the definition seems to have changed drastically in the past few years, so I can't even be sure that the link has the most up-to-date definition.
So, I was asking someone who seemed to be very passionate about being "against woke culture", to hear it directly from them. This is a conversational site, I figured it'd be fine, but seeing that my question is now downvoted I guess I need to better learn what conversations and questions are appropriate here.
I'm still new around these parts. Forgive me.
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Still 15 minutes fixing something that wasn't broken instead of generating revenue or cutting costs ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Edit - and another 10 defending the decision on HackerNews forums
A strange concern. All those superfluous hours wasted at a private company? Those billionaires will be fine without someone defending their money. Oh and wait until you hear about the Google Doodle...
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Unicode is descriptive, not prescriptive. The point of any glyph at all being allocated a Unicode codepoint, is that the glyph already exists in documents somewhere (either real paper documents, or digital documents in some other legacy encoding); and if Unicode didn't include a codepoint to encode that glyph, then that text wouldn't be able to be faithfully represented in Unicode. Which means that some ephemeral und…
Unicode is definitely a prescriptive standard. Code point 65 is a capital A because Unicode says so -- any such standard is necessarily prescriptive. > Which means that some ephemeral undocumented proprietary encoding might be used instead I'm not arguing against the need of some standard for representing those, I'm just objecting to the technical decision of incorporating them as code points, because they don't serv…
The standard says “pistol”, what a pistol looks like is left to the implementer.
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The official unicode name is "pistol" (explained as "handgun, revolver"), and the example representation is a modern magazine-fed pistol [1]. Changing it back to what it's supposed to be is fine by me. 1: Page 12 of https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F300.pdf (search for 1F52B)
Are you implying that a water pistol is not a "handgun"? Or that you could not make a water pistol that could also be a "revolver"? Does "revolver" include revolver action rifles, so long as you can use them with one hand (sawed offs, etc). If not, why not? If so, would that be a "more" appropriate emoji for some reason? I'm not saying they're further out of spec. But I disagree with your implication that they are so…
Yes. If I asked you to bring me a gun (or a handgun) I don't think anyone would argue I might have meant a water pistol. A water pistol is a gun-shaped object, or an object that imitates a gun, but it isn't a gun.
This seems like approximately the dumbest possible place to have political battles. Isn't the entire purpose of having a standard set of emojis as part of Unicode to enable reliable communication of the concepts and emotions associated with them? In that sense it's perfectly fine if it was a water pistol, a real gun or whatever else as long as it's the same thing everywhere . But the same codepoint showing up as a wa…
The representation itself isn't standardized I think, a lot of emojis don't look very similar across different platforms.
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Unicode is descriptive, not prescriptive. The point of any glyph at all being allocated a Unicode codepoint, is that the glyph already exists in documents somewhere (either real paper documents, or digital documents in some other legacy encoding); and if Unicode didn't include a codepoint to encode that glyph, then that text wouldn't be able to be faithfully represented in Unicode. Which means that some ephemeral und…
Unicode is definitely a prescriptive standard. Code point 65 is a capital A because Unicode says so -- any such standard is necessarily prescriptive. > Which means that some ephemeral undocumented proprietary encoding might be used instead I'm not arguing against the need of some standard for representing those, I'm just objecting to the technical decision of incorporating them as code points, because they don't serv…
You're missing the point. Unicode is descriptive like a dictionary is descriptive: it describes — and thereby locks into place and somewhat formalizes (really: ossifies) — existing usage.
If you prefer, rather than "prescriptive" vs "descriptive", you can pretend I said "proactive" vs "reactive." Unicode as a standard reacts to existing out-of-Unicode usage of glyphs, by defining into existence Unicode code-points to allow the encoding of those glyphs. (Or rather, to allow encoding of any of the equivalence-class-hypersphere of glyph-configuration-space described by the name of the codepoint, as that codepoint. Those particular codepoints have been defined through usage, whether the Unicode Consortium likes it or not.)
But even that's not quite accurate, because, especially with the modern forced assignments by Apple/Google, Unicode in fact is purely describing — documenting — codepoint assignments that the OEMs decided on and implemented unilaterally, ahead of standardization. (I.e., Apple/Google now just allocate new codepoints for emoji and assign them glyphs all on their own — and Unicode then must play catch-up, including those codepoints in the standard only after they're already shipping on real devices and thereby effectively already "locked in" in their meanings.)
> Because they don't serve the same semantical purpose. Instead you could have introduced -- for example -- a simple vector graphics format.
They quite clearly do serve a semantic purpose:
• Screen readers can describe an emoji — and smart ones can even use an emoji at the end of a sentence to add emotional color to their reading of the sentence. This would not be possible if emoji were just vector images.
• LLMs have particular trained associations on what a given arbitrary Unicode codepoint should relate to. It would be prohibitively difficult for them to form the same associations between regular word tokens, and the huge sequence of tokens that collectively represents a vector image.
• Search engines can index emoji just like any other text. No search engine that I know of could embed a vector image in its fulltext index in a useful way.
• If a font doesn't represent an emoji, people can still copy-and-paste the unrepresentable-codepoint-glyph rendering of the codepoint into their OS's character map to get a Unicode-standardized description of the codepoint. This wouldn't be true if emoji were just arbitrary vector images.
Also, if you wanted to oust some glyphs from Unicode in favor of embedded vector images, where would you stop? If U+1F60A "Smiling Face with Smiling Eyes" shouldn't be in Unicode, should U+2660 "Black Spade Suit"? How about U+21F6 "Three Rightwards Arrows", or U+2713 "Check Mark"? U+2766 "Floral Heart" / U+2042 "Asterism"?
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"Comedy should be illegal again."
What a ridiculous overreaction: people are allowed to criticize his poor taste. Unless you want free speech to be "illegal again"
Is it me or does that emoji look a little more like a Ruger SR9 than a Colt M1911? I mean... it's not exactly a SR9 either, but it's definitely not a 1911 as the twitterrer implied.
None of those vendors have previously depicted the pistol emoji as a contemporary handgun.
I grew up with the argument that video game violence causes real violence. At the time, conservatives were keen on censoring violence, blood and gore in movies, video games and TV shows. It was the liberal establishment that defended artistic violence and sexuality. Now it seems like the pendulum swung and liberals seem keen on promoting squirt gun emojis, meanwhile some of the most popular video games on the market…