There are always bears who are predicting the next stock market crash. They always have various reasons that make sense on the surface. They're almost always wrong. But they're always eventually right.
The "race to the bottom" (to devalue fiat currency and drive inflation) is a big reason why stocks, gold, real estate, and bitcoin are valuable to hold. The market will definitely go up ad infinitum, since that is the policy of all central banks.
In the AI era, you just spin up 1024 bots making substack posts prophetizing the future. That's ten binary predictions. Delete the 1023 that fail. Keep the one account that perfectly "predicted" the future.
I rather have one extreme win than 100 smol wins that get evaporated once the market crashes. There’s an expression that goes ”Eating like a chicken, shitting like an elephant”. That’s the beauty of puts.
The derivatives market wouldn’t exist if there wasn’t a legitimate economic need to insure against unexpected crashes. Aka it’s not just bear speculation; crashes happen all the time in markets around the world.
I feel like it would have been better to just allow embedding a small arbitrary bitmap or vector image in text. No one likes the current state where you send an emoji that looks one way on your system and then looks different on the receiving end. And it would have avoided all the conflict over which emojis get added and which don't.
That's a simple hack that fixes this issue, good job.
But now you have many more issues,
if you use a bitmap, it will look pixelated sometimes, some people love to zoom over text at incredible levels.
What about light/dark themes?
If you use vector graphics, then which kind of them? will you use quadratic beziers, allow cubics? And don't think that it is easy to render vector graphics efficiently, there are many issues, parsing, anti aliasing, performance, you are also adding a new security nightmare, a good attack vector with complex to handle, parse untrusted user input.
And boy, we didn't even talk about caching, when will you send those payloads?
when you type one emoji? Then what about the 2nd time? Surely not?
Then how do you know the receiver has not lost your first payload?
Should you batch send most payloads at the beginning? Will that introduce latency? Will you be hated by future generations?
Decoupling meaning, intent from representation, implementation is a good idea from text encoding schemes.
We should not lost it.
Fonts are a perfect example, most people are happy to use them.
They do not overly complaint that you can change the way text is looking.
The same meaning is sent to you, your platform text rendering stack is interpreting it and macos users are happy to have their consistent look, windows users are happy to have their ClearType legible rendering, ..well most are anyways.
Complex subjects rarely call for a simple hack.
Yet I agree, emoji rendering is an issue.
Some people even want to put in fonts rendering code (wasm?) because of how complex it is to handle.
They are not part of any existing writing scheme. I think they could be a different standard like ":+1:" and ":chainsaw:" but it makes no sense for them to be built into text rendering.
> They are not part of any existing writing scheme
They are today, and there is now orders of magnitude more writing that uses emoji than the entire corpus of many of the scripts covered by Unicode.
Language and writing have always been continuously evolving and that process didn’t magically stop when the Internet was invented. The first emoji preceded their inclusion in Unicode, humans used them in writing, therefore they belong in Unicode.
Correction: Unicode emojis are, because they got added to Unicode.
>Language and writing have always been continuously evolving and that process didn’t magically stop when the Internet was invented.
Okay but why should Unicode be a part of it, and a judge on what to include? That sounds like linguistic prescriptivism, while the original role of Unicode was descriptive and the evolution was happening outside of it. Emojis before Unicode were perfectly fine as composites that weren't mandated by committee.
> Okay but why should Unicode be a part of it, and a judge on what to include?
How could it be otherwise? These debates have been a part of Unicode since the beginning, such as which Chinese characters to unify, which ancient scripts to include, which attested glyphs get their own code points etc.
That’s simply what it means to be a standard: Decisions need to be made, and not everyone will agree with all of them.
Ancient glyphs and Chinese characters existed before Unicode, the committee didn't conjure a new form of language out of thin air. The decisions with Chinese writing were necessary due to practicality (there are various composable encodings, including IDC in the Unicode itself, but they're not very practical for a general-purpose text processing encoding).
Unicode emojis did not exist before Unicode, the existing composite emojis/kaomojis/etc were already perfectly expressible in existing symbols, and were nothing like Unicode emojis. This was a huge distraction from their mission, and definitely not inevitable.
Today's emotes became customized, and it's impossible to express them in any encoding. They diverged too much from writing to be called writing, it's a volatile signaling system at best. You can literally make an AI generation or upload your picture, how do you even encode or standardize that? But because of their blunder Unicode got stuck with its role of a judge and censor of a new entirely synthetic language it created, which wasn't the original purpose of the consortium.
It’s for many, many things besides letters, and was designed to be so from the beginning. Pictograms of various types have always been in Unicode, and even in many predecessor codesets.
Unicode is for text symbols, some of which represent one word (e.g. &, U+2116) and some of which represent multiple words (e.g. U+FDFD). Other non-letter characters include numbers, punctuation, and so on.
Can not speak for the original poster, but I tend to agree in that it greatly limits the speed of creativity due to the integration process, creates a very subjective bureaucratic process for inclusion, and that frankly emoji are not a script (yes yes, you can make an argument that they are akin to ideograms, but this analogy breaks down rather quickly). Thus, I think a different technological solution could have been warranted. The story I keep hearing is that it was necessary to get the Japanese telephone companies on board with Unicode rather than their own emoji hacks combined with local Japanese encodings, which I can sympathise with as a necessary (but unfortunate) evil. A word of caution though that I find text with heavy use of emoji largely unreadable as my eyes fixates on the emoji rather than following the text; thus I am likely biased (but possibly still correct).
All things aside though, Han unification [1] remains the worst part of Unicode to me as it makes it impossible to know whether the glyph I am seeing is the one intended by whoever wrote the text (Chinese names in e-mails for example is an utter mess for someone like me that has to have their system set up to mostly handle English and Japanese). The whole Han unification mess more or less necessitates markup and sometimes even the insertions of raster image glyphs for historical and regional texts which is just bloody daft. Yes, Unicode language markers do exist and can resolve this in part. But, they are invisible to the end user, can disappear while copying and pasting, and you have to rely on the original author even putting them there in the first place! Whenever someone struggles to see the issue, I usually propose that we unify the common subsets of the Cyrillic, Greek, Latin, and Mathematical glyphs which usually finally drives home the point.
> I usually propose that we unify the common subsets of the Cyrillic, Greek, Latin, and Mathematical glyphs which usually finally drives home the point.
That would be an awesome compact encoding scheme (and also help with the next 4million emojis)! And given the relatively higher importance of those CyrGrLat, it would force wider proper support that would resolve the issues you raised, which are all app-dependent
> But, they are invisible to the end user
Apps make them visible, some even do that for whitespace chars to highlight the difference
> can disappear while copying and pasting
broken clipboards can be fixed? They somehow manage to retain rich text formatting, surely they cna retain language markers?
> you have to rely on the original author even putting them there in the first place!
Nope, the author's input app can handle that just like the original author doesn't need invisible joiners to use composed emojis
I think that Unicode should have been limited to only depicting existing writing systems. Anything else is imo out of scope for a text encoding format.
So what about ASCII control codes? They are non-printable characters that are part of Unicode, grandfathered in, yet aren’t part of any writing systems.
And home computers have had pictograms as part of their character set since the late 70s/early 80s. For example code page 437 (MS-DOS) had smilies, card suites, and other emoji. Likewise for the PETSCII (Commodore Pet) too.
And not just emoji’s, but full on drawing characters. In fact that was the only way to draw graphics on some early systems, such as Teletext, in the early 70s.
And then you have the question of what pictograms are part of writing systems. For example the media control symbols (play, pause, fast forward, etc). Or how about the fact that some emojis had been part of written text long before Unicode, in the form of “smilies”, eg :-)
I hope this illustrates that the problem was never an easy one to define boundaries for inclusion.
The biggest issue with emoji is that it's not an actual glyph. Just think about the gun emoji. It was supposed to be a gun. It changes from actual gun to toy gun to space gun depending on the platform and year.
Imagine if you wrote the word "gun" and then 5 tech giants decided it was their job to change the "g" to a "b". It's ridiculous how lightly we take preserving messages when the whole industry is supposed to be about data.
They are also not specific enough to encode what they are meant to convey. People pick emojis for what they look, and if they look even slightly different the message changes, yet platforms are allowed to design them however they want and then change the design year after year. The letter "a" is still going to be the letter "a" no matter what. The same can't be said for "emoji covering their own mouth" which either looks shocked or mocking you depending on how it's designed.
Some seem to sincerely believe that renewed immigration law enforcement is morally evil.
I'm not sure why since it was enforced this way for decades before except for a few years recently. Now, I think that one can argue that ICE is overly aggressive, that it casts too wide a net, that too many mistakes are made, that it should focus on specific violations instead, etc. But these are arguments that can be made for any law enforcement agency, and have been for over 100 years in the USA. Sometimes, IMO, they were even justified.
That said, however, it also seems that many have latched onto ICE enforcement actions as a bell-weather pre-cursor to additional actions that will lead to a dystopian outcome. Or is in the process of doing so as we speak.
Thus, if one believes this to be true, then one can see why actions taken to fight/oppose/slow down the process can be viewed in a morally good light and something to be celebrated.
> Some seem to sincerely believe that renewed immigration law enforcement is morally evil.
No one believes that, this is a strawman. Notice how there were no large protests, no continual protests, and no widespread outrage before ICE's tactics were changed and a bunch of insurrectionists were hired? Yes, you do notice that "except for a few years recently".
Is there anything that may have changed in the past few years that may have caused people to be against ICE?
I was just watching a video the other day of ICE protestors blocking NYC bridge traffic. Tons of people coming out of their vehicles pleading with them to move so they could get to their job, drop their kid off, deliver a DoorDash order, etc.
I'm all for fighting against your enemies, even if I don't see it exactly the same way. But when I see stuff like that, it just seems totally disconnected from doing anything meaningful towards their enemies (besides making more of them, I guess).
Those sort of tactics seem to come from the belief that "awareness" is an important precursor to socio-political change. Which, I guess is technically true. But I agree that this particular sort of awareness building is detrimental to their stated cause.
The "we're all a big family" narrative is a psychological ploy to try to exploit the need by most people to feel like they belong to some group. This need is deeply interwoven into our psyche. And as more traditional structures of society (extended family, churches, social clubs, etc) erode, it leaves a void that many cannot really understand. IMO, this particular message is almost never true.
Company "mission statements" and such are a similar tactic. Though I think it's a bit less cynical, because the company leadership sometimes (rarely IMO) believes in the mission to a minor degree.
"The pitch was that AI would give us our time back." <= this was never the case. The pitch is that AI will either augment people to make them much much more productive or replace them altogether.
That's the point. GP deceptively suggests that what the EU escapes in gun deaths, it makes back in spades in heat deaths, providing GP with great ideological schadenfreude. Except this doesn't actually follow, in part because these are fundamentally different mortality categories indeed (and in part because the counting methodologies involved are drastically different, etc).
We do know the consequences. Wealthier nations have essentially eliminated 99%+ of the population of the few species of disease carrying mosquitoes in many broad areas. The effect on the ecosystem was not noticeable. Using cheaper methods to help poorer areas will save 10's of millions of lives and eliminate billions of cases of disease. It's overwhelmingly worth it even if it caused ecological harm. To not do this is, to even fight against doing it is, IMO, immoral.
Probably because those ecosystems were not here anymore, as they were bulldozed to remove the mosquitoes.
The whole aquatic ecosystems were destroyed. There is hardly anything more noticeable than that. You believe that there was not any effects on survival of migrant aquatic birds, local fisheries, extinction of endemic fishes, frogs and aquatic plants, local microclimate, or management of water reservoirs?
Then why wealthier nations are massively trying to restore this habitats again to protect themselves from floods, restore biodiversity and assure their water supply?
The impact would be saving the lives of thousands of people in the short term and millions of people in the long term.
Even if it is somehow true that mosquitoes play an important part of some ecosystems, to me, it's worth the ecological damage to save the lives of millions of men, women and children in the future and prevent the suffering millions more.
hm, you're right. looks like they just take the official figure and slap a constant on it. regardless, I still think the official figure is fundamentally flawed and doesn't reflect the health of the job market ~ underemployment, workers that gave up looking, etc
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