Yes, Dutchman here. It seems to intuitively understand when you want local results vs. international. When it doesn't, you can easily toggle above the search results. I'm never looking back.
I wonder if they're ever going to decide that enough emoji is enough, or will continue adding more until every word in the dictionary is an emoji. There have been some ridiculous inclusions in the past years despite more obvious candidates that are still missing.
The great thing about emoji used to be the constraints, which made for a clear overview of available emoji and made people use the limited set in creative ways to express different things. Besides the more extraneous options, they never should've started adding things like skin/hair color modifiers imo, sticking to the single yellow/neutral color instead. Counterproductively, that opened up ways for people to not feel represented.
> I wonder if they're ever going to decide that enough emoji is enough,
Really hard to do by this time. Since they allowed so many it's harder to say no. They have a burrito, but why no kebap, yet? They have person's playing basketball or golfing, but no person playing football (any variant) putting a stop to it gives an arbitrary set and restricts representing develoment in society (they have kick scooters which are modern, but what about the future successor?)
But of course, the more they add the harder it is to use. These new directional ones can be hidden as variants similar to skin color etc is currently handled in UIs, but individual ones ...
Deprecating also isn't an option. Text using those exists. They can't really break it.
There is a precedent (https://blog.unicode.org/2022/03/the-past-and-future-of-flag...) to stop accepting new emojis in certain categories, so the hope is not fully out that that can happen to other sections. Maybe at one point they say "We won't be accepting Emoji proposals regarding sports anymore, unless they're listed by X entity or in the Plympics", or something like that.
> Wait, if a country gains independence and is recognised by ISO, does that mean no flag emoji for them?
> Flags for countries with Unicode region codes are automatically recommended, with no proposals necessary! First their codes and translated names are added to Unicode’s Common Locale Data Repository [CLDR], and then the emoji become valid in the next version of Unicode. These emoji are also automatically recommended for general interchange and wide deployment.
So making it dependent, as you described, on recognition by a different governing body seems quite likely.
Flags are special because they’re made by combining special letter codepoints. A new flag doesn’t change the standard so much as change the way devices display those ligature-like codepoints.
(My favorite fun Unicode fact: naively reversing a string containing the flag for Spain will turn it into the flag for Sweden. ES —> SE)
Welcome to the world where every idiosyncrasy is considered an identity worth representing, through emojis or other means, generating a never-ending breakdown of people into groups that feel excluded.
I genuinely hope that emojis keep being added. A lot of meaning can be packed into a single emoji which (usually) transcends language and culture.
It's been fascinating to see emoji work their way into everyday usage, even in professional settings. I would love to see the day where emoji becomes a viable form of cross-cultural shorthand.
> I would love to see the day where emoji becomes a viable form of cross-cultural shorthand.
I have my doubts regarding this. We're already seeing a situation where different groups within a single culture, the young and the old, use many common emoji in ways that differ dramatically (at least in the west), sometimes even with opposing meanings. If the meanings of emoji aren't stable even within a single culture, how could they ever hope to transcend culture?
People who speak different dialects or languages can still communicate with written Chinese.
I remember at a conference talking to a Japanese guy and a guy from Korea. I wrote my name in Chinese and they could both read it, but said it in their native language.
Emoji are zero cost resources for websites on most devices and have the benefit of matching the users expectations of iconography across the system, not to mention being accessible by default.
It’s really a win win of size reduction, consistency and accessibility.
The only competitive systems are something like font-awesome icons or SFSymbols. The latter isn’t available to sites afaik though.
There's no consistency, because different operating systems and web browsers display emoji differently, and emoji availability depends crucially on the OS or browser version.
The consistency is that if you use a (mushroom) emoji as an icon for your stuff, users on Windows will immediately know what it is because they are aware of how the emojis on their OS work. Same with Android, iOS, etc. Not that all emojis are the same across all devices.
This is less consistent than images, which are generally rendered the same on all devices. Worse, though, is the broken black boxes that appear when someone uses a newer emoji that your browser or operating system version doesn't yet support, which happens all of the time.
> Not sure why you're being so argumentative about a misunderstanding of definitions?
There's no misunderstanding of definitions. The argument is about whether emojis are "really a win win". I don't think they are, for reasons I've explained. Specifically, with regard to needing icons for "berries and maybe more vegetables", you can already do this with small jpgs that would not take much bandwidth, and in general there's more consistency in jpg support across different software then there is in emoji support.
Waiting for the Unicode committee to add emoji for every possible object in the world seems like madness to me.
I’m not sure why you’re struggling with this concept.
It is consistent for the user on whatever system they are on. If they switch between apps, they see the same emoji that they’re familiar with.
The web developer doesn’t have to care what the icon looks like. They just say: use this emoji that semantically means “flower”. They know it may look different to other users but it will look like what that individual user is familiar with.
> I’m not sure why you’re struggling with this concept.
I'm not struggling with any concept.
It's a simple fact that as emojis continually get added to Unicode, not all browsers and operating systems support all emoji, and so one person sees a broken black box where another person sees the emoji. That's gross inconsistency.
> So let’s not use html either because someone can clutch pearls all day that some ancient browser on some EOL system might not support a specific new html tag.
Ancient? The submitted article is "New emojis in 2023-2024" about "the draft emoji candidates up for approval by Unicode this September". Thus, no software even supports the new emoji yet, and ironically they have to use png images to show what the emoji will look like.
I'm done talking with you. This is getting too ridiculous. Moreover, your "pearl clutching" remarks are stepping over the line and violating the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Emojis are great as quick icons that take zero work to source, add in, align with text in the layout and size consistently.
Absolutely nothing wrong with that, especially since people on hn love to complain about inclusion of unnecessary assets in websites that could be more lightweight.
Hh sure I even like to create some. But for this purpose I do not bother. I need something small that I can just use for personal purpose. It works well with outdoor internet - where it is used. Adds bit of accent on minimal site to ease the navigation.
I do not really care if they add more veggies etc. I mentioned it as user-case in context of adding random Emojis.
Speaking as a person with light-colored skin, the default-yellow emoji still basically look like me. Or, a version of me that's on the Simpsons, at least.
I imagine that if I had dark skin, I'd feel a bit alienated by this experience. I'd be using these symbols that were supposed to represent me / my-reactions, but which very much didn't look like me. There'd be this pervasive sense that I was not included, not important enough to be the one represented.
That would kinda suck. I don't have to experience that, and I'm happy to have emoji set up so that people who don't look like me also don't have to experience it.
Put another way, would you care if the default emoji color was changed to be dark-skinned?
> I imagine that if I had dark skin, I'd feel a bit alienated by this experience.
And the change is literally skin deep. They added skin color, but not racial features. The "black man" emoji just looks like a white guy with dark skin.
Imagine if I was a dwarf. I'd feel a bit alienated that all emojis are of tall people. Shouldn't there be a dwarf modifier for every emoji: dwarf man facepalming, dwarf woman shrugging, dwarf man bride, &c
If you felt yellow is too white, they should have changed emojis to magenta or something. Adding variants makes them unusable.
Then I noticed that most of the non-white people I knew were changing them - and actively celebrating when new skin-color variants were added.
I realized that by keeping mine white I was not being ‘color-blind’, I was, at least to some, saying something like ‘I’m happy with the default because I think it adequately represents me’. Perhaps I did feel that, to be honest!
On top of that, I could even be seen as passive-aggressively saying ‘your choice to use the skin colored emoji is unimportant and/or wrong’, which is certainly not what I felt at all!
The whole Simpsons argument (emojis weren’t created in a vacuum - the Simpsons came first and there the ‘default’ yellow is obviously representing ‘white’) was in my mind a little when considering all this.
In other words you succumbed to peer pressure from a crowd that is obsessed with identity labels.
I see people of all shades use tones. To me it just says "btw I'm <race>". I can't help but think "who cares" in the back of my mind. I don't think yellow icons "represent me" either, I'm not self-inserting into The Simpsons.
At the risk of being overly dramatic for a discussion about emoji, I think that dismissing the concept of "color-blindness" in favor of "race consciousness" and other assorted identity politics, which led to hyper-focus on superficial characteristics like skin color, has done more to foster racism than anything else in the last few decades.
The Simpsons features non-yellow characters. Yellow characters are white.
Lego actually is a stronger precedent for ‘yellow is what color you make a person when you don’t mean to identify race’. Once they started adding movie character minifigs they introduced white skin as well.
But the journey there also gives the lie to ‘yellow minifigs we’re never coded white’. The very first Star Wars Lego sets shipped with yellow minifigs for characters like Luke, Leia and Han. It was only once they started to think about shipping characters like Lando Calrissian and Mace Windu that they realized ‘wait a minute, we’re never going to get away with a yellow Lando’.
(And actually around the same time they were also dealing with releasing NBA player minifigs.. the decisionmaking at Lego must have been pretty complicated at the time)
In other words you succumbed to peer pressure from a crowd that is obsessed with identity labels.
That’s not what I consider myself to have done. My non-white friends and colleagues are not, in my experience, ‘obsessed with identity labels’. They were just choosing an emoji that looked a little more like them, and a little less like the ‘default’ [that did _not_ look like them, but arguably did look like me] when representing themselves.
This is all in contexts where I knew who I was communicating with, btw (Slack, text messages etc.). In anonymous settings I might think differently.
In a ‘color-blind’ world perhaps it would not really matter to you what color people’s emojis were, just like in real life?
As a bit of a meta-comment, I suggest that if you want to convince others of your beliefs you might want to present them with a little more humbleness and kindness apparent in your words. Your first two paragraphs are quite confrontationally phrased.
I also don't get it, it should be a system wide setting and not something the sender specifies, I don't see any point in having some additional info not representing the meaning.
I don't think there's any value to that though, emojis were more neutral before they added a color skin to it. Instead of reading "I'm happy", now you have a combination of "I'm happy but also white" or "I'm happy but also black", I don't think that belongs here and I don't see any point to that.
If you don't like how they appear, some system setting could be made for changing the overall colours to switch them all to black, white, green or any other colour.
The whole feature doesn't make any sense in my opinion anyways. But if people are really sensitive to how emoji appears (a big if in my opinion since emojis are trivial but let's go with it), they could change them in the settings.
Maybe because your entire lived experience has been reordered based on your skin color and how it isn't a light yellow color. Powerful cultural strands exist in your community to push back against constraints placed upon you because of your skin color.
Maybe seeing the only option for skin color in tech be much more representative of white skin color only serves to further remove your lived reality from public debate and understanding.
Nobody has a light yellow colour. It was chosen so as to not to refer to any ethnicity in particular.
BTW. If your skin actually has turned yellow then you should seek the nearest hospital emergency room ASAP, because it can be a sign of acute liver failure.
Like another commenter said in a sibling thread, yellow is still a non-dark color, and yellow characters represent white people in cartoons like The Simpsons.
It’s unlike language because words can fluidly be invented or fall out of use. Emoji is designed by a committee. If it expands to include everything it will just be unusable. Why not just use pictures at that point anyway?
The existence of a committee, even an influential one, for a language does not mean that that committee actually controls that language. In the end, it's always the people who use a language that control it, not just in theory, but also in practice, as evidenced by how many of the Académie Française's proposals for pure French equivalents to English loanwords have failed to supplant the latter. These committees also tend to only concern themselves with low hanging fruit that is easy to point at, such as vocabulary, grammar, and spelling (which is technically speaking external to a language rather than part of it), while barely if at all targeting anything that would require more than an elementary-school-level understanding of language, such as phonetics/phonology, so their commentary also rarely even covers all aspects of the language.
I input Chinese everyday and it’s fairly simple. You input a phonetic sequence and choose the character. I already find it hard to use emoji. It takes forever to scan through the faces to find the one I want, and search online sometimes helps because emoji often have a popular use that isn’t congruent with their “official” purpose.
I don't know if there's a default OS solution that's any good, but I have a file of emoji + their text names and I use bemenu (like dmenu) to filter through it by name and put the selection on my clipboard. I bind this script to super-z on my keyboard in my Sway config. I based it on something[0] I found online that used dmenu or rofi and input the text for you. I adapted it to work better on Wayland by using a Wayland-native menu instead.
Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android all have dedicated emoji keyboards with search readily accessible. All Apple keyboard (software or hardware) from the last… 5(?) years have a button to bring it up!
Though in Linux there isn't only one window manager. This guy/woman/? chose to use his specific window manager (probably a tiling one), but he/she/xe could also use GNOME if he/she/xe wanted to. GNOME does have an emoji keyboard.
btw, this is much cooler than GNOME or whatever...
> They chose to use their specific window manager (probably a tiling one), but they could also use GNOME if they wanted to. GNOME does have an emoji keyboard.
There you go! Made it much easier for you and the reader!
But really,
> I'm not sure which window manager they're using, but GNOME does have an emoji keyboard
I can't remember which program it was, but there's one that has Unofficial support for combining most emoji (so (cowboy) (cat) becomes a cowboy cat, for instance). I kind of like that idea.
Mobile-phone OS vendors like Apple and Google invent cute little pictures for people to send to each-other in text messages (and, mostly coincidentally, type into other apps and post to the web.) Then they tell the Unicode Consortium that they've invented these little pictures, and they're planning on putting them in their software, and so the Unicode Consortium better assign them codepoints, because if they don't, they'll just encode those pictures with a proprietary encoding and send them anyway, like ICQ and MSN did back in 2001.
And then the Unicode Consortium does give them a codepoint — because the whole point of Unicode is that there shouldn't be any text on the Internet that can't have its meaning determined 50 years from now because it was encoded in some proprietary now-lost encoding.
This is how it was from the very beginning. The first emoji codepoints in Unicode were added in order to have a valid projection-mapping into Unicode of the "SJIS with emojis" text written on Japanese mobile phones that became common on the Japanese Internet — including documents like "cellphone novels" with high historical preservation value.
Speaking of obvious candidates, somehow Unicode still doesn't include the "external link" symbol, despite it being used almost everywhere (and fitting the original mission of accurately transcribing text)
This is why I stopped using emoji 5 years and never looked back. It's a really stupidly designed system if you need operating system updates just to read text! I won't participate in that insanity anymore.
Emoji have become trite, lazy, and practically meaningless, especially a few such as "face with tears of joy", "rolling on the floor laughing face", and "fire". Emoticons used to be a supplement for words, indicating the tone of the words, but now emoji are a replacement for words, the ultimate illiteracy.
The reductio ad absurdum is the recent Canadian legal case where the court determined that a "thumbs up" emoji signals a binding contract.
> People have been using things like "lol" and "lmao" since long before Unicode even existed
Sure, but how are emojis superior to this? Text is universally compatible, whereas emoji introduce compatibility and versioning issues across browsers and operating systems.
Besides the technical universality of text, it's also demographically universal. We've replaced "lol" with laughing-face-of-specific-skin-color-and-hair-style-and-gender-and-,etc., which is a worse situation than the original.
Of course "lol" is English-specific, but if you can't read another language, then what exactly would you be laughing at anyway? Different languages are always a barrier to communication, regardless of whether emoji are used.
> Text is universally compatible, whereas emoji introduce compatibility and versioning issues across browsers and operating systems.
To be specific, they introduce a lot more of such issues, but such issues were already there with plain text as well. Fonts that don't support some characters, fonts where some characters are displayed incorrectly (the whole CJK unification fiasco), fonts where some characters are not distinguished (I've run into the is-this-an-I-or-an-l issue quite a few times, personally).
> The reductio ad absurdum is the recent Canadian legal case where the court determined that a "thumbs up" emoji signals a binding contract.
Why do you believe so?
If "Looks good," "Ok," and "Yup" signal a binding contract, as detailed in the case you're talking about, I contend it's perfectly reasonable for :thumbsup: to also signal a binding contract between the same parties. [0]
Consider:
> 5. For instance, on July 14, 2020, after discussing and agreeing on a contract with Chris Achter, I prepared a contract for the sale of 185 metric tons [sic] of durum wheat from Achter Ltd. to SWT for a price of $312.31 per ton [sic]. I signed the contract and then took a photo of it using my cell phone and sent it to Chris at 306-264-7664. I messaged: “Please confirm terms of durum contract.” Chris texted me back: “Looks good”. At the time, I understood this to be that Chris was agreeing to the contract and this was his way of signally [sic] that agreement. Achter Ltd. delivered on this contract without issue. A copy of the contract and text message is attached as Exhibit “B”.
> 6. On September 11, 2020, after discussing and agreeing on a contract with Chris Acter [sic], I prepared a contract for the sale of 131 metric tons [sic] of durum wheat from Achter Ltd. to SWT for a price of $284.77 per ton [sic]. I signed the contract and then took a photo of it using my cell phone and sent it to Chris at 306-264-7664. I messaged: “Please confirm terms of durum contract”. Chris texted me back: “Ok”. At that time, I understood this to be that Chris was agreeing to the contract and this was his way of signally [sic] that agreement. Achter Ltd. delivered on this contract without issue. A copy of the contract and the text messages is attached as Exhibit “C”.
> 7. On October 21, 2020, after discussing and agreeing on a contract with Chris Acter [sic], I prepared a contract for the sale of 395 metric tons [sic] of durum wheat from Achter Ltd. to SWT for a price of $308.65 per ton [sic]. I signed the contract and then took a photo of it using my cell phone and sent it to Chris at 306-264-7664. I messaged: “Please confirm terms of durum contract”. Chris texted me back: “Yup”. At that time, I understood this to be that Chris was agreeing to the contract and this was his way of signally [sic] that agreement. Achter Ltd. delivered on this contract without issue. A copy of the contract and the text messages is attached as Exhibit “D”.
> If "Looks good," "Ok," and "Yup" signal a binding contract, as detailed in the case you're talking about, I contend it's perfectly reasonable for :thumbsup: to also signal a binding contract between the same parties.
I wasn't criticizing the decision in the case. I'm neither a lawyer nor a Canadian and have no opinion about that.
I was criticizing the entire situation, the absurdity of emoji becoming a matter of legal controversy.
Why is the sequence of bytes representing 是的 (Shì de - yes), valid human symbolic language, but the sequence of bytes representing thumbs up "absurd" language? Nowhere in the Rules of Human Language, Volume 12023, does it say "language must comprise a fixed set of symbols that is locked in time".
This is not about gradual language evolution in general. It's about the specific stupidity of emoji, as I already explained:
> Emoji have become trite, lazy, and practically meaningless, especially a few such as "face with tears of joy", "rolling on the floor laughing face", and "fire". Emoticons used to be a supplement for words, indicating the tone of the words, but now emoji are a replacement for words, the ultimate illiteracy.
Also, even worse, emoji are "evolving" so damn fast and continually that they appear as broken boxes if you're not running the very latest browser or operating system version.
I think every noun should have an emoji. Why not? I'm allowed to talk about lemons, but not limes? Why? Better that every noun has a single canonical representation.
The cyberpunks were by far the most prophetic of all science fiction writers, and I feel like this kind of insight is what drove that. They put forward a future where they were optimistic about technology and neutral to pessimistic about human beings.
This is the best description of how I experience my mind's eye that I've read so far.
I never have trouble imagining things as they do clearly 'render'—I can picture scenes, shapes, faces, motion, the styling of text I remember, basically anything—but it doesn't result in true visual output where I can see things as if I have my eyes open. If the latter is something that people can truly do, then I guess I do have some form of aphantasia.
I've seen people here mention IVPN in the same breath as Mullvad; do you have any insight on how they compare? AFAIK Mullvad is based in Sweden, which is a Fourteen Eyes country, whereas IVPN is based in Gibraltar, which is not.
I've been saying this for a while now. We should abolish this weird cultural tradition/expectation/normalization of continuous "news" consumption and replace it with periodical consumption of in-depth reporting on trends, like you said.
People believe following the news keeps them informed even though the news distors their world view because it mostly reports on exceptions to the rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_bites_dog). "Following the trends" would keep people actually informed as well as provide them with actionable information.
