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Unicode Character “𝕏” (U+1D54F)

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Re: Unicode Character “𝕏” (U+1D54F)

#291

Post by BlackFingolfin »

enriquto wrote: post #186
catiopatio wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point isn’t to be “right” — whatever you define that as. The point is to be understood. Use blackboard bold when it’s what people are most familiar with and will engender the least confusion. You call this the “tabs vs spaces” debate, but I’ve literally never heard anyone advocate your position until you did, just now.

> I’ve literally never heard anyone advocate your position until you did, just now Many mathematicians concerned by typography use real boldface. For example: Terence Tao's blog, Donald Knuth, Paul Halmos (author of "how to write mathematics"), and the famous journal "Publications Mathématiques de l'IHÉS" which is the undisputed gold standard in mathematical typography. They use real boldface for the number sets N, Z…

> "Publications Mathématiques de l'IHÉS" which is the undisputed gold standard in mathematical typography.

It is? Do you have any supporting evidence for this claim?

I just had a look at a bunch of recent articles, and I would very much dispute it. I saw nothing extraordinary, and found the fonts they used rather ugly (though of course that is highly subjective). The use of bold face to highlight theorem/definition/etc. numbers is IMHO very questionable. The boldface letters you praise stick out like a sore thumb, feeling as if they were being emphasized and highlighted when they clearly are not meant to be.

Re: Unicode Character “𝕏” (U+1D54F)

#292

Post by mkl »

yreg wrote: post #208
jonas-w wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN automatically converts these urls to punycode, maybe this is a bug and it automatically converts everything to punycode even though it doesn't make sense?

It's unrelated to HN. Copy pasting 𝕏.com into the address bar still leads to x.com related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack

I already mentioned that, and it's not what they mean. Hover your mouse over a https://xn--971h.com link in a comment on HN and notice that it's pointing to https://x.com. This does seem to be an HN thing; see here: https://jsfiddle.net/rtfhejdy/

Re: Unicode Character “𝕏” (U+1D54F)

#293

Post by mikea1 »

dom96 wrote: post #134
mkl wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure? When I type https://xn--971h.com in it doesn't work, but clicking the link in your comment does because HN has made the href x.com. The browser converts 𝕏.com to x.com before going there too. Moreover, X and 𝕏 are treated as equivalent characters in this context, so whois 𝕏.com looks up x.com, and 𝕏.com's punycode encoding is x.com: https://www.whatsmydns.net/idn-punycode-converter?q=%F0%9D%9... who…

Looks like it's also not possible to register xn--971h.com (I tried both Namecheap and Cloudflare).

Yeah, it's explicitly disallowed by ICANN to register a domain with this unicode character (along with numerous other characters):

https://www.verisign.com/assets/icannrestricted/idn-icann-re...

Re: Unicode Character “𝕏” (U+1D54F)

#294

Post by enriquto »

BlackFingolfin wrote: post #291
enriquto wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’ve literally never heard anyone advocate your position until you did, just now Many mathematicians concerned by typography use real boldface. For example: Terence Tao's blog, Donald Knuth, Paul Halmos (author of "how to write mathematics"), and the famous journal "Publications Mathématiques de l'IHÉS" which is the undisputed gold standard in mathematical typography. They use real boldface for the number sets N, Z…

> "Publications Mathématiques de l'IHÉS" which is the undisputed gold standard in mathematical typography. It is? Do you have any supporting evidence for this claim? I just had a look at a bunch of recent articles, and I would very much dispute it. I saw nothing extraordinary, and found the fonts they used rather ugly (though of course that is highly subjective). The use of bold face to highlight theorem/definition/e…

> It is? Do you have any supporting evidence for this claim?

I don't have any evidence to support this claim. I always thought about it as self-evident, because it was in that journal that Grothendieck published his work, and the same style is used in by the legendary Hermann editor from Paris and by Bourbaki. But I cannot find any non-partisan source of my claim. As for non-neutral sources, you have for example the congratulations on the typesetting by Dieudonnée [0] (who was a member of the IHES), or a more recent article by Haralambous about the Baskerville variant used by the institute [1]. I will retire my claim of "undisputed" if you find a source that says that the pinnacle of mathematical typesetting is something else :)

[0] https://expo-patrimoine.ihes.fr/?page=9&lang=en

[1] http://www.numdam.org/item/CG_1999___32_5_0/

You also have this semi-anonymous blog post [2], that laments the decline in quality when the journal in question was acquired by Springer. Quote:

> How good was the typeface? It was so good, some people submitted their papers to IHES precisely for the beauty of the typesetting

[2] https://www.galoisrepresentations.com/2014/08/15/the-decline...

Re: Unicode Character “𝕏” (U+1D54F)

#295

Post by simbolit »

astrange wrote: post #286
ChrisArchitect wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not computers - humans with accessibility needs, screen readers and such. Someone posting "I'm trying to Tweet on the new 𝕏" will read in audio as "I'm trying to Tweet on the new mathematical symbol x".... think of how any of those fun tweet texts with fancy italicized words made from math symbols read like.... it's brutal

Sure, but they should just fix the screen reader instead of working around it.

This.

Convincing a dozen or so screen reader developers to deal with this is an achievable goal. It is much much much harder to bring millions of twitt...X users to change their typographic habits.

Re: Unicode Character “𝕏” (U+1D54F)

#296

Post by qingcharles »

contingencies wrote: post #276
qingcharles wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure. There was a short period when you could register one letter dotcoms before about 1994. He's owned it since forever that I know of. His first company was called X, which became PayPal. I spent a long time in the mid-90s trying to persuade INTERNIC to let me register b.com.

Shame. That would have made a great Chinese porn site. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%e5%b1%84

I'm pretty certain you can register one-letter IDN .coms. I registered a bunch the day the IDN system went live, and I had no idea what characters I was registering or what they meant and I later let them all lapse.

Re: Unicode Character “𝕏” (U+1D54F)

#297

Post by nephanth »

red_trumpet wrote: post #120
orlp wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right I should've used "as a symbol" not "as the symbol". It's not terribly common.

Now that I think about it, most double stroked characters really represent "concrete" objects, not generic ones. Like ℙ for projective space, or 𝔸 for affine space. Also 𝔽 is often used together with an index 𝔽_q for the field with q elements. On the other hand, Wikipedia[1] agrees with you, that 𝕏 is "occasionally" used for metric spaces. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_bold

I've seen (and used) \mathbb{P} and \mathbb{E} for the probability & expectation operators (so not really a "concrete" object in your sense?)

Re: Unicode Character “𝕏” (U+1D54F)

#298

Post by plorg »

qingcharles wrote: post #270
ranting-moth wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what Elon paid for x.com?

I'm not sure. There was a short period when you could register one letter dotcoms before about 1994. He's owned it since forever that I know of. His first company was called X, which became PayPal. I spent a long time in the mid-90s trying to persuade INTERNIC to let me register b.com.

See about a dozen comments in this thread, PayPal owned it post-acquisition until 2017 when Musk bought it back.

Re: Unicode Character “𝕏” (U+1D54F)

#299

Post by hakfoo »

tiltowait wrote: post #282
hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #239

> X is the future state of unlimited interactivity – centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities. Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine. Audio, Video, Messaging, Payments and AI, all in a single product pitch. I guess then "X" is an appropriate brand for something that even the owner doesn't…

An "everything app" sounds a lot like what I understand WeChat to be. Can't say I want it, but it's not without precedent, apparently.

I'd love to see someone explain the WeChat mystique for people who aren't in its target ecosystem.

It seems like, if you're making something flexible enough to handle payments, various social and interactive services, and yet somehow fall short of being a full web browser, haven't you just reinvented Prodigy for the 2020s?

I assume at this point it largely runs on momentum in a Facebookesque way-- it no longer has to be particularly food at any given service because the sheer mass of its userbase will make it a major player in every market it goes near.

But that doesn't explain initial success. Was it catapulted by a specific environmental condition (i. e. they got zero-rated at a point where mobile data was too expensive to just choose random websites to browse?) or a dramatically better ergonomic experience?

Re: Unicode Character “𝕏” (U+1D54F)

#300

Post by Turing_Machine »

nickthegreek wrote: post #158
Turing_Machine wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Twitter was doing fine. It was losing $4 million per day.

There are no articles to confirm that it was losing $4m a day prior to the acquisition. This is a number that Elon put out (post acquisition) to justify layoffs.

There are no articles to confirm that it wasn't, either.

As for justifying layoffs, Twitter (or X, or whatever it is) seems to be working just fine, despite the dire predictions that the whole thing was going to die within days.

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