Off topic: Perhaps it's just me, but I have a pet peeve about emojis in anything formal. Even before LLMs, I instinctively took a repo less seriously when README.md had emojis in every section. And now LLMs have popularized that style, it's the first signal for me to vibe-detect AI repos.
I do use emojis. I love them, actually, but only in message apps.
I don't like to see them anywhere. They were cool for a while back in version 1.0 when there were a few that everyone knew and used in creative ways, before Apple* decided to make so many that you need a search bar. It's kinda like Pokémon. At this point I only get them in text messages from old people.
* yeah I know technically the Unicode Consortium, but Apple pushed it hard
Emoji (and their predecessor, emoticons) are IMO the greatest new feature for written language that has happened in generations. Eschewing them is certainly a choice you can make, but I personally think it's a poor one.
Authors can now bundle emotional sentiment in text communication. Not being able to do this in the past was usually just an annoyance but could occasionally turn out to be extremely problematic. Countless miscommunications have occurred due to recipients not correctly interpreting an author's tone, and we now have a tool that can help reduce or potentially eliminate those misunderstandings. It's early days, so we're still seeing teething issues: different emoji sets conveying subtly different cues and evolving social norms around their use. But they have incredible potential.
Again emoji 1.0 was good. You can convey what you need with a small subset of that even. But even if modern computers were limited to emoji 1.0, I suspect they'd have been equally spammed to the point of losing meaning anyway.
However, the lack of standardization between platforms causes its own miscommunication. Some of the icons between Apple and Google can be interpreted in significantly different ways.
There is also the pistol[0] which depending on the platform is a water gun or revolver.
I think the site owner actively filters them out and has been doing so ever since you joined this site in 2011.
But no matter the reason for the complete lack of emoji, the fact that you like this site enough to participate here is evidence that emoji don't actually improve public discussion as much as you think they would.
There are many many sites on which you could have chosen to participate where emoji are common and can be used freely.
I do not use emoji and I do not have (and do not want) colourful emoji on my computer (emoji as ordinary text characters would be acceptable for the purpose of displaying texts that have emoji, but I don't really need to that much, even if the texts have them, so I can do without that, too). The reason does not have to do with AI; I think that things can rarely be explained better with emoji, and is usually better to explain by text, and sometimes also diagrams will help (for computer programs, having good documentation is very helpful). (I also don't like Unicode.)
> We mapped almost 1:1 to SoftBank’s set, though Apple chose to omit a few of the more risqué ones.
Which are these risqué emojis mentioned here? I don't think I have ever seen any that are even slightly graphic, which is probably why all the emoji slang conventions have spread like fire (Aubergine, Peach, etc.)
I was going to say that the love hotel emoji was the only one I could think of, but in the process of trying to find the emojipedia link (https://emojipedia.org/love-hotel) I found a Reddit thread that leads to a now-defunct blog post:
It's virtue signaling - nonsense from the same people who unironically say things like "lived experience" and "emotional labor." It shows they're part of a particular group, so they're Good, and if you're not, you're Bad.
I disagree - I think it might be more about predictable-hassle-avoidance.
The media landscape is all about creating sensation, trying to find an edge from something a politician said or a corporation did to generate a headline and some clicks. And as we know, companies like Apple are heavily scrutinised because they’re even better at driving clicks.
So I think Apple is incentivised to look for things which in a reasonable world wouldn’t even register, but which might cause some minor sensation they’d have to deal with, and snuff out that risk beforehand.
Stickers are for you. Plenty of uncensored content and as soon as you send one from one of your packs, the recipient can start using them anywhere as well.
That's a good question. Comparing the Softbank emoji from June 2008 [0] and the initial batch of Apple emoji that shipping in iPhone OS 2.2 (Nov 2008) [1], it doesn't look like there are any missing at all, it's a perfect 1:1 mapping.
Maybe edit rather than omit? Apple changed the people kissing with actual lip contact, the 1910s-looking cancan dancers, and the stink lines on the poop.
Seems to be some sort of design agency or similar, it's basically internet-law at this point that those always fuck with the scroll movements of your browser, for some reason.
Alex Schmidt, a humor writer (formerly of Cracked and others) did this process for the bison emoji. I enjoyed his “miniseries” about it: https://www.bisonemojipodcast.com/
I was looking for a pirate emoji like 5 minutes ago. I'm sure it's not the first time but I'm super surprised that still isn't in there. Seems so obvious.
What’s next, a cowboy emoji? A ninja emoji? But seriously, as much as I like emojis, I kind of feel like they should stick to emotions. Maybe other intangible things. They’re hard to convey verbally (and succinctly), simple concrete nouns are good for a bit of fun and for UI icons, but really not very useful if we’re being honest. Unless you’re texting with a lizard, or my lazy elementary-school niece who shouldn’t really have a phone anyway…
We got the mpreg emoji instead of a chainsaw, which makes me feel like we need an emoji lobbying group for things like sex, drugs, sawed-off shotguns and jury nullification.
If the author is reading this, the hyperlink to the book in the first paragraph is broken. Looks like it's attempting to direct you to an absolute url that was meant to be relative.
I do use emojis. I love them, actually, but only in message apps.