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Emoji 12.0 brings us waffles, more diversity, suggestive "finger pinch" glyph
There's a push for more diversity with this new emoji release. We have emojis for deaf people in three genders (male, female, and genderless) and five skin tones, an ear with a hearing aid, people in motorized and unmotorized wheelchairs, prosthetic arms and legs, a guide dog and a service dog, and people with a probing cane. There are actually only 59 distinct new emoji types in this release, but everything that depicts a human comes in five skin tones and three genders, which pumps up the numbers. You can really see this with the "People holding hands" emoji, which is completely configurable for a total of 70 possible combinations.
The emoji that's causing the most buzz is "pinching hand." Emojipedia's example shows a thumb and pointer finger with a small distance between them, which could also be interpreted as a hand signal for "small." People are already coming up with, uh, "suggestive" uses for such a glyph, and if the actual implementations follow Emojipedia's design, the glyph could end up on the naughty list next to peach and eggplant.
Thank you, Emojesus. ✝
By the way, what happened to calling it Unicode 12.0? Maybe they'll call it that in June.
Unicode Consortium blog post. Also at Emojipedia and 9to5Mac.
Previously: 38 New Emojis to be Introduced in 2016
Unicode Considering 67 New Emoji for 2016
Unicode 9.0 Serves up Bacon Emoji, 71 others, and Six New Scripts
Unicode 10.0's New Emojis
Stink Over Frowning Poo Emoji at the Unicode Consortium
Related: Apple's New iPhone X will let You Control the Poo Emoji with Your Face
Google CEO Drops Everything to Fix Cheeseburger Emoji
Microsoft Briefly Left Holding the Gun Emoji
Battle of the Bagel Emoji
(Score: 5, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Thursday February 07 2019, @08:44AM (17 children)
Clearly the Unicode consortium has lost their mind. Maybe it is time to start over with a new standard? It would also be the opportunity to fix the very few errors the Unicode consortium made in their early times, which cannot be fixed without introducing incompatibilities. A new standard would be free to do those things right, right from the start.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @08:55AM
That is an excellent idea!!!
https://xkcd.com/927/ [xkcd.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Thursday February 07 2019, @09:01AM (9 children)
There is only one worthy standard: ASCII
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @11:31AM (7 children)
So in your mind, the only worthy standard is one in which you cannot write properly the majority of languages?
ASCII is great if all you want to do is write programs (and even then, originally Pascal's “:=” assignment operator was only a digraph to be used on machines whose character set lacks the “←” character—one of those lacking character sets is ASCII). ASCII is utterly lacking if you want to write text.
Also remember that Unicode support was a much-wanted feature early on on this very site (and before on the Green Site, except there nobody listened to user demand). And it certainly wasn't because of emojis.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday February 07 2019, @02:37PM (6 children)
FTFY. I even offered to show them how to do it after they got new ownership who said they wanted to make it happen.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @02:42PM (1 child)
Well, I stopped visiting the Green Site shortly after this one was launched, so I wouldn't have been able to tell the current status there.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday February 07 2019, @03:17PM
I scroll through the stories (not the comments) while I'm on the shitter. Seems appropriate.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday February 07 2019, @06:56PM (3 children)
Their singular advantage over this place is the "no-unicode" policy. Unicode is the systemd (emacs?) of text input. It tries to do everything. Shoulda stayed with good old ISO-8859-n:
"The ISO/IEC 8859 standard is designed for reliable information exchange, not typography" [wikipedia.org]
Unicode hardly fits that standard. It's to make your twitter posts more catchy.
Though I have to admit, our very own rDT makes good use of it
We could have gone with UCS-4, unicode is the compromise to save space, but at what cost? You start bumping into this [mitre.org]. Who needs these kinds of headaches?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday February 07 2019, @08:02PM (1 child)
You are confusing Unicode (the complete standard describing everything related to the font, including UCS-4) with UTF8 (the variable-length multi-byte encoding of Unicode characters).
The page you linked to is about a decoder for UTF-16, which is again a different encoding.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday February 07 2019, @08:03PM
Noticed only after posting: Where I wrote "font", I of course meant "character set".
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday February 08 2019, @08:19PM
It's not really much of an annoyance from a coding perspective and, aside from everyone's totally understandable initial impulse to do some amateur debugging of my code, we haven't had any abuse of it here worth speaking about. That it allows copy-pasta of text that includes emdashes, non-ascii quotes, and such more than makes up for any headache it's caused.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Apparition on Thursday February 07 2019, @03:52PM
Yep. I'll stick to ISO 8859-15, thanks.
(Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Thursday February 07 2019, @01:37PM
"Clearly the Unicode consortium has lost their mind."
Randall apparently agrees with you: https://xkcd.com/1953/ [xkcd.com]
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Thursday February 07 2019, @03:34PM (3 children)
For example, the English language is evidently not suffix-free. You cannot infer "I love you" after you've seen the "I love you" part of "I love you, but not as much as I used to, and I've found someone else, and I've also changed the locks. Don't try and contact me again, or I'll get a restraining order from the courts".
However, consider the composition of accented characters in TeX (which are based on the old DEC 'compose character' sequences on VT terminals, which I'm familiar with, I'm not familiar with TeX, so might fuck up these examples, however, details don't matter, only principles). E.g.:
In ``H\^otel'', you read the ``H'', that's a known character, you stash that away and continue.
Then you get a ``\'' and know that you've got an escaped sequence for composition.
Then you read the ``^'', and you know that ``\^'' isn't an encoding of anything, so you continue.
Next you read the ``o'', and you know that ``\^o'' is the encoding of an o-circumflex ô, which you stash.
blah, blah, blah, you've parsed ``Hôtel''.
You unambiguously know that you've arrived at the end of an encoding of a character because the modifiers are placed *before* the base character.
Unicode's all "chef female", "vampire male black", presently, rather than "female chef" or "black male vampire", which would be suffix-free. (Because "female" and "black" are not nouns, they're adjectives - if you think that "female" can only mean "female person", then you're speciesist, and a bad person - and as such "female"/"black"/etc. should only ever be used as a modifier.) Not that this infantile communicate-with-images bullshit should be in a revamped unicode anyway, of course.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday February 07 2019, @07:30PM (1 child)
Exactly; that's one of the errors I was thinking of. The irony is that they went to great lengths to make UTF8 suffix-free, and then they spoiled it with the combining characters.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday February 07 2019, @11:10PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday February 08 2019, @08:20PM
Damnit, now I'm going to have to watch Blackula again.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday February 07 2019, @07:15PM
I stand corrected, UCS-4 might be acceptable, if not exactly "efficient".
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..