X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm • Hacker News Board

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#221

Post by Alupis » Wed, Jul 24, 2024, 9:14 PM UTC

xg15 wrote: post #124

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…

> 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?

Does anyone see what's happened here?

A small group of people made a political decision and force changed the pistol emoji into a water gun. Then... later on, someone else undoes the change and suddenly now they're blamed for waging a political battle!

We see this elsewhere too. Github with master -> main, despite master remaining the default everywhere else and causing endless confusion with examples/tutorials all over the internet. Immigrants -> Migrants, voting laws returning to pre-covid rules (and being likened to Jim Crow on Steroids as a result), etc.

There's a segment of society that's in love with renaming/changing things everyone else was fine with, and then when people try to change things back - they're attacked as radical political warmongers.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#222

Post by amadeuspagel » Wed, Jul 24, 2024, 9:16 PM UTC

XMPPwocky wrote: post #214

miki123211 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even worse, the Emoji descriptions (on some platforms) don't correspond at all to what the emoji actually represents. For example, the " " emoji, described by Unicode as "health worker" is called "non-binary doctor" by Apple. If you send that emoji in a text to somebody, and they're e.g. using accessibility software, wearing AirPods and have notifications read out to them by Siri, or have their phone integrated with…

And for me on Firefox on Android, it renders as a blank space!

HN filters emojis.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#223

Post by catapart » Wed, Jul 24, 2024, 9:16 PM UTC

wongarsu wrote: post #98

sharkjacobs wrote: post #15

This is exactly as stupid as changing it to a water pistol in the first place was

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 somehow further in spec than a water pistol. Pistol is pistol.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#224

Post by xg15 » Wed, Jul 24, 2024, 9:17 PM UTC

Muromec wrote: post #210

xg15 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would extend "the same thing everywhere" through time as well, i.e. it's a bad thing to ever change the meaning of an emoji after it's been published, for the obvious reason that this messes with old texts and all other locations where the emoji has been used with the old meaning. This means that the move back then to change the gun to a water pistol was an extremely bad move, no question here. But moving it back t…

It will keep happening the same way languages gradually change and for exactly the same reasons. Being in flux isn’t a bug, it’s the content of culture. Doing the stuff differently compared to /the other group/ to know you belong to /this group/ is everybody’s favorite game.

There are different ways how languages can change. A language changes organically, if individual people simply talk differently than their predecessors, out of convenience, without any specific intent or plan behind it. That's the way languages have always changed throughout history and keep changing.

Deliberately changing a language and pressuring other people to adopt certain changes in their vocabulary is something entirely different. That too has been tried often in history, but has usually led to conflict and was part of expressions of power.

Emojis can change their meaning organically too, if people just start using them in a different way. Eggplant emoji being the most obvious example I think.

But pushing an update to change the glyph would be about the most top-down and deliberate way to change its meaning that I can think of.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#225

Post by labcomputer » Wed, Jul 24, 2024, 9:18 PM UTC

xg15 wrote: post #124

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…

> 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?

Maybe? I mean, Unicode already explicitly does not encode glyphs, but code points. So point 65 is capital Roman “A”, but Unicode says nothing about how it should be displayed.

Going further, certain code points represent characters which Unicode considers “the same” character in Japanese/Chinese/Korean even though they may be different in meaning, pronunciation, and visual appearance. Thus, you need to know which language is being writing before you can pick the correct glyph to put on the screen.

So, while stupid, it doesn’t seem exactly wrong or unprecedented for X to change their glyph from a squirt gun to a pistol.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#226

Post by cmiles74 » Wed, Jul 24, 2024, 9:19 PM UTC

Alupis wrote: post #221

xg15 wrote: post #124

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…

> 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? Does anyone see what's happened here? A small group of people made a political decision and force changed the pistol emoji into a water gun. Then... later on, someone else…

The phrase "small group of people" is doing a lot of work, I think. We had the largest technology/media companies in the country making similar changes.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#227

Post by AnotherGoodName » Wed, Jul 24, 2024, 9:20 PM UTC

londons_explore wrote: post #213

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Custom font is sensible fwiw. You can have a font with a single glyph implemented and you’ll override just that glyph, falling back to other fonts for the non implemented glyphs. This is why sites often have a list of fonts and not just one in the css. It’s also how other languages are supported. No Thai chars in your font? We just fall back until we hit a font with those glyphs available (might be an os level font r…

> This is why sites often have a list of fonts Doesn't that mean every font in the list needs to be loaded? And surely in many cases the sets of glyphs overlap and then a bunch of network bandwidth has been wasted?

The ones that are single/small subset glyph are fine since it’s a few bytes and very cacheable and then the others in the list are usually the well known font types “arial” etc. which don’t even need the site to supply a new font file (you can specify fonts in css with a file or simply a name of a common font/font family). So no real issue at all.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#228

Post by Alupis » Wed, Jul 24, 2024, 9:20 PM UTC

cmiles74 wrote: post #226

Alupis wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? Does anyone see what's happened here? A small group of people made a political decision and force changed the pistol emoji into a water gun. Then... later on, someone else…

The phrase "small group of people" is doing a lot of work, I think. We had the largest technology/media companies in the country making similar changes.

The reality is a small handful of people - or even one person - makes these decisions.

Nonetheless, even if we were to believe 100% of the people at Twitter, Facebook, Google, et al decided on this change together, it's still a small group of people and it still is a political decision.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#229

Post by xg15 » Wed, Jul 24, 2024, 9:20 PM UTC

Alupis wrote: post #221

xg15 wrote: post #124

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…

> 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? Does anyone see what's happened here? A small group of people made a political decision and force changed the pistol emoji into a water gun. Then... later on, someone else…

I can't speak for everyone, but as far as I'm concerned, the initial change to a water gun was just as stupid and damaging as this one. My point is just that changing it back now is not undoing the damage, it's creating even more damage.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#230

Post by derefr » Wed, Jul 24, 2024, 9:21 PM UTC

qsort wrote: post #146

xg15 wrote: post #124

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…

This is why I believe including emoji in unicode was a blunder. A capital "A" is the same in any font; I can write a message in monospace and my interlocutor can read it in sans-serif, or tap in morse code and have it rendered in hand- writing, in all cases the difference is immaterial. On the other hand we don't use pictures in the same way, the meaning of the message depends on the exact picture used as part of the…

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 undocumented proprietary encoding might be used instead (as in “cellphone novels” in late-90s Japan, now permanently committed to the Internet in the form of SJIS encoding + some particular feature-phone’s SJIS pictograph codepage that no modern OS can decode.)

Or worse, that the character and its contribution to the meaning of the document might be lost entirely (as in MSN or ICQ messenger emoticons, where exporting chat logs as HTML would just strip the emoticons out.)

Putting whatever glyphs already exist into Unicode, no matter how rarely, is precisely what makes Unicode uni-code — i.e. an encoding that guarantees lossless archival "transmission into the future" of all texts, such that all texts should be better off transcoded into Unicode. (At least if the intent is to archive their semantic meaning as text, rather than their bytewise representation as data for software-archaeology purposes.)

---

The standard of "if it already has usage, then it must get a Unicode codepoint so that the document can be Unicode-encoded" is all well and good at face value, and worked well as a guideline for the first ~10 versions of the Unicode spec. Until ~2009, pretty much nobody was arguing against codepoint allocations being "warranted."

But then the modern mobile platforms realized that they essentially had a gun they could hold to Unicode’s head — in the sense that any glyph they wanted to invent, they could threaten to release into the wild as proprietary encoding if Unicode doesn’t include it. And because millions of people would be guaranteed to make tweets et al using that new symbol, Unicode is essentially forced to include it. Even though it doesn’t exist yet until that moment.

All the “dumb” emoji—and color emoji in general, and the explosion in variation selectors—came after that. In est, they’re Apple and Google’s fault, not the Unicode Consortium’s.