Unicode Character “𝕏” (U+1D54F) | Hacker News Reader

Unicode Character “𝕏” (U+1D54F)

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414 pointst0m44c287 comments

I'm responsible for this character being supported in Iosevka, JetBrains Mono, 3270, and Cozette, looks like. For arguments I wanted to stick to mathematical convention like f(x) without looking like a regular variable. While the lowercase 𝕩 (subject role) is more common, uppercase makes it a function and is useful in functional programming. More visibility for the character is helpful if it means wider font support, although the real sticking point has been lousy UTF-16 handling on Windows. Like most emoji, these characters need to be represented as a surrogate pair in UTF-16, and terminals in particular often don't handle it.

https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/fonts.html

https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/help/rightargument.html

That's funny; I immediately thought of BQN when I saw this character pop up on HN :)

Haha, same here. I think my brain actually translated the title to "Unicode Character (right argument as a function)".

Misremembered about Iosevka: I requested support for a few other BQN characters after noticing it already had the double-struck ones (https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka/issues/870). The other three were requests or contributions (drew 3270's 𝕏 myself!) explicitly in connection with BQN.

I wasn't familiar with BQN. Clicked through, reminded me of APL. "OH", I thought, "I see how you came up with the name." There was a (disproven) urban legend about Arthur C. Clarke's 2001, where "HAL" was secretly a reference to "IBM", where you transpose each letter by one.

H + 1 = I

A + 1 = B

L + 1 = M

Man, BQN is a clever name. Because,

A + 1 = B

P + 1 = Q

L + 1 = M...

...well crap. That theory didn't pan out at all. Needlessly disappointed myself upon hearing that it's short for "Big Questions Notation".

You're not wrong though; see.. https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/tutorial/variable.html#modif... I guess

Off by Fibonacci, rather than off by 1, I guess.

LOL, was literally going to try entering it on the new MS terminal, and realizing I don't have a windows system readily available to use. Why don't other OSes support ALT+(numpadcode) input for special characters? No idea how to do this on mac or linux.

Anyone else want to try to copy/paste into the new Windows Terminal? It does appear to work fine on MacOS under Tabby (terminal).

This is for math.

In Latex, you get these symbols with \mathbb{}. They are most commonly used to represent to represent number sets, like the set of all integers Z (from the German), set of all natural numbers N, set of complex numbers C, set of all real numbers R, rationals Q (for “quotient”), set of quaternions H (named after Hamilton), or an unknown set F (for “field”). This explains why many of the letters in this series exist in the basic multilingual plane—because R is very commonly used, but A is not. You can find ℝ in the basic multilingual plane at U+211D.

I don’t know why people are interested in the X symbol. It’s just there to complete the alphabet. There are many other ranges like this used for writing mathematical formulas, like the range of bold letters, fraktur, script, etc.

because elon renamed twitter to "x corp", bought the x.com domain and shoved this character on it.

He (or a company of his) has had the x.com domain for decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com

No, it changed ownership many times since 1999.

> On July 5 2017, Musk repurchased the domain name X.com from PayPal

They even took a little jab at him when it happened

> "We are delighted to sell the domain x.com back to its previous owner"

Was this message posted on x.com?

Am I crazy or was x.com at one point x-drive, the early online storage company?

I get a ‘godaddy parked’ page for x.com (not even a ‘y’ or a ‘z’): https://thetaplane.com/x.com

He owned x.com decades ago and it was part of paypal's acquisition, then they sold the name back to elon a few years ago

The bird is a lot more recognizable, no? Maybe even beautiful?

I thought the same thing. The bird is endearing.

Changing it to X is something some edgy teenager would do. I can't help but wonder if he's trying to destroy twitter on purpose.

This whole Twitter saga is like what happens when a cat catches a bird and doesn't know what to do with it so just slowly tortures it to death for the hell of it

Not only the bird, but all of the associated verbiage. For example, Tweet and Retweet. Do those go away after changing the name and logo?

Yeah lol, Musk wants to call them xs now. Like "your x last night was pretty great" or "will you share your x with me again?"

Not even kidding. https://apnews.com/article/twitter-x-logo-blue-bird-musk-068...

> In response to questions about what tweets would be called when the rebranding is done, Musk said they would be called Xs.

By coincidence, a lot of people I know have already been calling them twats.

Clearly none of the marketing or branding people stayed on. Or he ignores them.

I imagine the former will become xcrete.

Also people less likely to assume its the brand for a pornography site? Feel like people have developed a habit of avoiding (or seeking out) anything with a prominent "X" in the name on the Internets.

It sounds like Elon had the domain and it was burning a hole in his pocket. That's the only explanation, honestly.

Twitter as a brand becomes less valuable the more he alters it, since he's such a polarizing figure, so changing the brand to break continuity seems pretty counterproductive. It just reminds people that Elon is still fiddling with it.

> It sounds like Elon had the domain and it was burning a hole in his pocket. That's the only explanation, honestly.

I think he just thinks he’s getting his revenge and that everyone will see how his terrible idea of x.com was actually genius back in the day. Like a particularly expensive midlife crisis. A bit like some dudes who start playing guitar because they could not back in the day, when it was a useful tool to make friends and look cool.

Hey, I started playing guitar as an adult and it's one of the biggest pleasures in my life. Also, I'm very mediocre.

Haha sorry, no offense meant. Some people don’t do it for bad reasons ;)

> It sounds like Elon had the domain and it was burning a hole in his pocket.

Yeah I wonder if he "sold" it to Twitter, and if so, for how much.

Yeah, but not kewl enough.

𝕏 is used as a symbol for a generic metric space. E.g. if your result is generic over ℝ², ℂ³, etc, you can write 𝕏.

Thanks! I am always a little curious about how these symbols are used. That makes perfect sense to me.

I'm a PhD student in algebraic geometry and have seldom seen this. IME "X" is a generic name for all kinds of spaces (metric, topological, complex analytic, algebraic...), but I don't remember ever having seen "𝕏".

That said, in principal everyone is free to call their spaces how they like. It just makes it easier to read if one sticks to familiar notation.

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

My experience with 𝔽 is “vector space over a field 𝔽”, which is not a concrete object, but I have probably seen F written in a normal italic style more often.

As a counterpoint, 𝔽 when not fixed to a particular size is arguably still generic over "any field", and 𝔾 is most definitely generic for "any group", even if fixed to a particular size.

There might be small cultural differences at hand here. As a German, I prefer "k" or "K" for fields (as in "Körper"), and I think I've seen 𝔾 mostly as 𝔾_a or 𝔾_m for the additive and multiplicative group. shrug

I've seen ℙ used for probability.

I’ve also seen ⅆ as the differential operator and 𝔼(X) as the expected value of X. I think I’ve also seen 𝟙_x, and ⅈ, and ⅉ but I don’t remember for what.

I know 𝟙_X as the indicator function (also called characteristic function) of X in measure theory and probability theory, but I’ve also seen 1_X or χ_X.

ⅈ and ⅉ can be basis vectors or imaginary units although I’ve never seen them in blackboard bold in my lectures.

In set theory blackboard bold P, Q and C are very often used for arbitrary (forcing) posets

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

Cause “X” is a cool letter. Just ask David X. Cohen.

> I don’t know why people are interested in the X symbol.

It's the new symbol for and domain name of the social? network formerly known as twitter.

Not to mention the X.org logo.

The "bb" in "mathbb" isn't for "math, baby" (although accurate), but short for "blackboard bold". These letterforms don't originate with blackboards though, using outlines for thick verticals goes back centuries. They're sometimes called open face.

> This is for math.

Heh.

The "tabs vs spaces" debate of mathematical typography is whether these symbols should be used at all in printing, or reserved for actual blackboards. In LaTeX you can have actual boldface letters, so you should write a boldface letter R to represent the real numbers and so on. Using "blackboard bold" in print looks terribly off to some (many?) people.

Funny. Coming from a non-math background, having only one symbol to deal with feels less confusing than switching around symbols based on the medium it happens to be written on. Did one of the symbols come "first"?

Here you have the whole history:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_bold

Summary: boldface came first, in print, and was widely used. Much later, some mathematicians started to write blackboard bold on blackboards (because actual bold would be very untoward to write on a blackboard). Then, the usage was backported to print.

I find it ugly, a sort of breaking "suspension of disbelief", I don't know how to explain why. Some sort of "anachronistic" feeling, like watching a movie about the roman empire and some soldiers wear watches.

EDIT: as for having "different symbols", this is not the case. They are exactly the same symbol, with different faces. Like when you write the letters "a" or "g" very different on a blackboard as they appear on print.

It sounds similar to the division between “math” and “maths”. It looks wrong depending on where you grew up.

We can compromise by switching to mathematic.

I’m very well acquainted, too, with matters mathematical.

I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical!

Seems like you've got a solid math grounding. If you're looking to expand on your history knowledge, I'd recommend taking a look at Creasy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fifteen_Decisive_Battles_o...

They were spoofing Modern Major General.

So was I :-)

Don’t you mean mathematics?

It’s a useful convention; I’m not sure why you dislike it other than some invalid conception of purity.

Maybe because my favorite math books do not use this convention, but another equally valid and useful convention: regular boldface.

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, Q, T, R, C.

I've never seen a boldface R to mean a set different than the real numbers.

People use both, for reasons of tradition, ergonomics, practicality, available toolset. Boldface is obviously common in places where BB is unavailable, more restrictive, more difficult. Web publishing is a great example.

BB is common, in my experience, in hand-written text where bold isn't really an option. It is, to my tradition, the most common and recognizable way to indicate the most common field sets and also generally is a good stand-in for any "large category" of interest.

Bold is used intermittently in my experience, probably due to its inability to be hand-written. To me, it tends to mean "vector" or "matrix" much more than set. In hand-written forms, I sometimes see "arrow hats" instead, especially for vectors.

> "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.

> 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...

That's pretty typical for how typography develops. Majuscule and miniscule letters were just two different styles of writing the same letter. But eventually, people started using majuscule (i.e uppercase) letters to give emphasis to the beginning of sentences or certain words, like names.

Italic typefaces were created by Italian type designers to mimic the cursive handwriting of the time. They weren't meant to be mixed with roman style typefaces. However, typesetters who had access to both roman and italic fonts started to use italic for emphasis when typesetting texts in roman type.

And of course blackletter is also just a style that originally tried to mimic earlier handwriting.

> having only one symbol to deal with feels less confusing than switching around symbols based on the medium it happens to be written on

See: the entire Latin alphabet.

Sans-serif symbols for screens, serif symbols for print.

Fair

> In LaTeX you can have actual boldface letters, so you should write a boldface letter R to represent the real numbers and so on.

Almost [1] every single student absolutely hates that notation in scripts. Bold is used to draw attention, it should not be abused as being part of the variable/type. Just use the proper symbol.

[1] And I'm only saying "almost" to account for the possibility of there being like 5 super weird people on this planet that think otherwise. I don't know a single person who thinks this is a good idea, even the professors writing their scripts like that think it's stupid and are only doing it due to some nonsense fear of it otherwise not printing correctly due to one single bad experience with a shitty printer in 1950. Or maybe there's some other historical reason for this, but in 2023 I'd classify not using the better notation as malicious.

> In LaTeX you can have actual boldface letters, so you should write a boldface letter R to represent the real numbers and so on.

Why use the wrong symbol, when you can just use the correct (ie, blackboard bold) symbol?

I hated when textbooks/papers did this. Half the time you can't tell if they meant to use the bold letter or if the printer was just being generous on that character. Made legibility quite a bit more difficult. BB letters are unambiguous.

I strongly disagree that the bold symbols are better, even though they’re what blackboard bold was originally conceived to approximate. The reason: Bold font draws attention (ask a typographer about type color), but usually, the bolder symbols are not the ones requiring that attention. (If I read a text about real analysis, I know that the domains and codomains will be the real numbers, for example.) The blackboard bold versions stick out much less when looking at the greater composition of the page.

I respect your opinion, and agree that with some particularly "thin" fonts (most notably, Computer Modern and its variants), the associated bold symbols are too exaggerated and produce and ugly effect.

But there is certainly some dependency on the font. For example, the Baskerville used by the Publications de l'IHÉS is a much thicker font, and the bold letters flow very naturally. Look for example here

http://www.numdam.org/item/PMIHES/

The publications in the sixties and seventies, which are scanned, are very beautiful and the bold letters mix smoothly in the text. You cannot see them "from far away" as happens with Computer Modern.

Curiously, the modern pdfs look slightly different, with apparently thinner fonts. This may be an effect of printing, that smears the ink a bit and produces slightly thicker type?

Then there's always that one prof that uses both on the blackboard. Also Fraktur. Also bold Fraktur.

Do you have a source for this? I have never come across this debate and personally find the blackboard bold convention to be useful, as well as very visually elegant.

It seems to me that it is part of the folklore. Note: not the folklore of math! The folklore of mathematical typesetting, which is a tiny community.

You can find many old and new math texts using either convention. Most often readers won't even notice. There are authors who are adamant against blackboard bold, most famously Donald Knuth and Jean-Pierre Serre. Others simply use regular boldface because of tradition, or because it's the default style of the journal. Most people don't care too much. But I have also heard people expressing strong opinions on each side, that's why I made the analogy with tabs-vs-spaces. Nothing too serious.

Elegance is entirely subjective. I have the opposite opinion: if we can do real boldface in print, which is the original usage, what's the point of using a black-board version? We have the real thing! But I also understand the opposite opinion, voiced elsewhere in this thread, that open bold lettering is a new case, like italics or fraktur, and we can use it freely in print.

They are an accessibility nightmare. I read a comment here recently from a blind person that had to give up on math education entirely due to all of the symbols not being supported by screen readers. It was pretty sad.

One blind mathematician I know prefers reading LaTeX over pdf math for exactly this reason.

I avoid using oddball Unicode characters for this reason,[1] but I also feel like at this point the can of worms has been unleashed, and the screen reader authors are going to have to adapt to a more hostile environment.

It seems like one approach might be something like this, assuming none of them are doing it already. If this is TLDR, the key feature relating to the topic at hand is the point about handling mathematical symbols, so skip everything except that one.

* Pre-parse the entire page and count the number of characters that would be read using a multi-word description. While doing this, create sub-counts of characters that fall into each Unicode script (Latin, Cyrillic, mathematical notation, etc.).

* If the number of characters that would be read using a multi-word description exceeds a user-specified threshold, prompt the user for how to proceed.

* First, tell the user how many different Unicode scripts (and blocks if necessary[2]) are contained on the page. For each set, prompt using the following logic if the user hasn't already set a default:

** If a script/block/whatever consists of abstract symbols, like the mathematical set, offer to read it using the closest approximation in the character set it's derived from. e.g. for 𝕏, read it as "X" instead of "mathematical double-struck capital X". Read both 𝜸 ℾ as "gamma" instead of their lengthy "mathematical..." descriptions.

** If a script/block/whatever represents a spoken language, offer to do one of the following:

** Read it as if spoken by someone fluent in the language.

** Precede it with "the following [n] [script name] characters" and read each one individually, without any leading per-letter indicators, e.g. for "ΑΒΓΔ", "the following four Greek characters: alpha, beta, gamma, delta". Optionally include per-letter capitalization indication, but only if the user has previous enabled that option.

** Replace it with a count and the script name, e.g. "five hundred characters of Chinese script". Provide a way for the user to interrupt the narration and expand that section instead of omitting it.

* Allow the user to store all of the prompt answers as defaults and not prompt them again unless the user resets the option. e.g. "always read mathematical symbols as the closest Latin letter approximation".

* Maybe remind the user that it is an option in edge cases like "this entire page would be read as 'a series of 53,198 symbols you've suppressed reading'".

[1] One of my first full-time jobs, decades ago, was doing UI development with a focus on accessibility.

[2] Pretty unbelievable that the Unicode consortium has taken the position that an apparently unlimited number of stylistic variations on Latin letters should get their own Unicode renditions, but that basically every other culture's character sets gets merged into one style of character even if there are extensive historical reasons to have different renderings, and also has the time to keep adding corner-case emojis, but can't be bothered to provide a single way to easily differentiate "Cyrillic" from "Latin" as well as differentiate "mathematical notation" from "Latin".

That's on screen readers developers. And I don't know when that comment you seem to remember dates back to, but I have had several blind students in my math lectures over the past decade. They seemed did fine.

Ooh, I found a use in the wild! https://www.ams.org/books/memo/1023/

  The central theme of this paper is the variational analysis of
  homeomorphisms $h \colon \mathbb X \xrightarrow []{{}_{\!\!\mathrm
  {onto}\!\!}}\mathbb Y$ between two given domains $\mathbb X ,
  \mathbb Y \subset \mathbb R^n$.

Interesting comment on the Register (by Jedit):

However, it's also exactly identical to Unicode character 1D54F - because that's all it is. And if you examine the full "X" logo in detail, you'll notice that the scratch in the background doesn't reach the X because all the logo creator did was put U+1D54F in a black square and slap it onto the backdrop. It's the epitome of laziness.

https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2023/07/24/twitter_...

When it comes to logos, I'm all in favor of laziness. People get way too hung up on something that unimportant.

In most instances it's unimportant, until there's a legal requirement for it to be unique and trademarked. What's to stop me mass-producing merchandise with that symbol on it right now?

But Twitter, I mean X, doesn't sell anything which could be confused with an imitate.

You're right. It is 100% dumb to be fair!

> you'll notice that the scratch in the background doesn't reach the X

What does this mean?

I've tried finding various images of the X logo on news sites and twitter.com itself and I don't see anything resembling a "scratch in the background" but maybe I'm just missing something obvious.

This tweet has the graphic it’s talking about, and explains better than the referenced article:

https://twitter.com/keewa/status/1683378941732728832?s=20

That mockup appears to have been created by @ch1w33th3d0g -- I haven't seen any official X version of https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1682970592159358976/phot.... So there's no point in making complaints about laziness from Musk in this case.

I believe they mean the marbling: The background surrounding the X is pure black, while the rest of the box is black with a bit of white marbling.

That's what happens when you fire everyone but programmers. I'm surprised it isn't AI generated (isn't Musk starting an AI company? So maybe it actually is)

Fun fact: this has happened before!

> Apple's adaptation of the [⌘] symbol — encoded in Unicode at U+2318 — was derived in part from its use in Nordic countries as an indicator of cultural locations and places of interest.

> ...

> She was browsing through a symbol dictionary when she came across the cloverleaf-like symbol

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_key

That’s not really the same thing?

It’s not like Apple’s corporate logo was scanned from a Swedish symbol dictionary by some random person who passed it off as their work. Which is effectively what happened to X-Twitter.

You can also access x.com when using the Unicode Character https://xn--971h.com (𝕏.com)

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...

whois xn--971h.com returns the same thing as an unregistered domain.

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?

I think so. Then I'm not right about the punycode encoding of 𝕏.com - it's that it isn't even needed. I've emailed dang about it.

It's unrelated to HN. Copy pasting 𝕏.com into the address bar still leads to x.com

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/

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...

$ curl -i 'https://xn--971h.com'

curl: (6) Could not resolve host: xn--971h.com

    $ curl 𝕏.com
    <html>
    <head><title>400 Bad Request</title></head>
    <body>
    <center><h1>400 Bad Request</h1></center>
    <hr><center>cloudflare</center>
    </body>
    </html>

What's that all about then? I'd expect curl to deal with either/or

curl should especially live with a punycode version.

Unless the punycode from the OP is incorrect? From basic online tools, it looks like it simply converts to x.com

I get:

  $ curl http://𝕏.com -v
  *   Trying 34.102.136.180:80...
  * Connected to 𝕏.com (34.102.136.180) port 80 (#0)
  > GET / HTTP/1.1
  > Host: x.com
  > User-Agent: curl/8.1.2
  > Accept: */*
  >
  < HTTP/1.1 200 OK

No https, though. (OpenSSL SSL_connect: Connection reset by peer in connection to x.com:443)

Also https://xn--u1a.com is for sale (where х is a Cyrillic letter, see [0]).

Would be funny to buy it and make a redirect to threads.net.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kha_(Cyrillic)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36844079

Also https://xn--vm8a.com which is on sale for $91M

i thought all non-latin punycode domains were forbidden for purchase on .com?

edit - i looked up the whois, just because it's parked at godaddy doesn't mean it's for sale

Name: XN--U1A.COM

Internationalized Domain Name: х.com

Registry Domain ID: 106236037_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN

Domain Status:

clientDeleteProhibited

clientRenewProhibited

clientTransferProhibited

clientUpdateProhibited

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.

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.

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

These tweets by @SawyerMerritt seem to have been the "inspiration" for X's logo:

https://twitter.com/SawyerMerritt/status/1683150433806692352

Correction to my previous reply: @ajtourville designed the thicker X logo below for our (now discontinued) @OfficialXPod. The thicker logo was inspired by a font he found online (bottom right). I created the video above using the font logo, adding a glow and little lines in the logo to make it look “imperfect."

https://twitter.com/ajtourville/status/1683151957723160576

Correct. This is the logo I designed and, if @elonmusk wants, he can have it for free.

Maybe I haven't had enough coffee, but the allegedly "designed" thicker X, "inspired by a font [Alex] found online", seems to be exactly the unicode 𝕏, but bold? And this Alex guy is taking the credit for designing it?

So what, it's still a logo design.

It's actually time for someone to adopt this character [1] at the gold level ($5,000), which is only allowed for the single entity and doesn't expire---so that X.com doesn't have a chance to sponsor the character at the same level.

[1] https://home.unicode.org/adopt-a-character/about-adopt-a-cha...

>All sponsors are acknowledged in Sponsors of Adopted Characters and our public Twitter feed and will receive a custom digital badge for their character.

Wait, do they mean their public X feed?

Who cares if x.com sponsors it? In fact they should because emojis are so popular on it and Unicode could use the fund. Why should someone try to get this? What is their benefit?

Because it's trendy to hate on Elon.

If he stopped making egregiously terrible decisions in public, the attention would stop.

Thus far there is a positive correlation between “egregiously terrible decisions” (ETD) and attention. From a naive perspective the attention is caused by ETD. However it may be worthwhile to test the alternative hypothesis that ETD are attempts to increase attention. Maybe ETD fit within a larger set of “Attention Seeking Behavior” (ASB).

To the degree that ASB is “rewarded” with any feedback at all, even negative, then it will be reënforced.

Enjoying the attention of others is socially acceptable in some situations. However, an excessive need for attention can lead to difficulties in interpersonal relationships. However, as a tactical method, it is often used in combat, theatre (upstaging) and it is fundamental to marketing. One strategy often used by teachers and behavior analysts to counter various types of attention-seeking behavior is planned or tactical ignoring.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_seeking

going out of your way and spending 5k$ to try make fun of him publicly is not how you make the attention stop.

This is the trump situation all over again. They hate him but they write articles about him every day and make sure we all know what he's up to even when we are actively trying to avoid him and twitter.

appropriate the new name is the universal symbol for close application

I've started telling people to "just 𝕏 out that window." You can hear the outline typeface in my voice.

Strongly reminds me of the X11 logo (one of my favourite designs).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System yup

Yea, kinda feels like X.org would have a decent trademark case if they wanted to pursue it. Both the name and logo are really similar, and it seems like both companies are operating in similar enough categories that its not too hard to imagine there being confusion between the two.

Musk has the deeper pockets. I'm more worried about him suing x.org and winning.

I'm more worried about him suing x.org and losing, but still managing to bankrupt the foundation with legal expenses.

My first thought when simplicio mentioned trademark was that The Open Group -- which would seem to own the X Window System logo -- might need to try and protect their trademark. If they don't, it's easy to foresee how down the road the similarity could become their problem, not Musk's.

The X.Org Foundation might need to do the same for their X logo even though it's a bit different (and I'm not sure if it's trademarked in the first place).

IANAL, but you do need to defend a trademark in order to maintain it after all.

Of course fighting to protect it would probably be costly and financially risky even if they did have a case.

Interestingly, [w3.org Math Double struck] shows example glyph rendering with swapped double stroke stem ("//" + "\" instead of "\\" + "/").

Been looking what the "opf" in the `&Xopf;` HTML entity name of this kind of character means, and apparently it is "Open Face".

It is referenced at [wikipedia Blackboard bold] that mentions that "𝕏 Occasionally used to denote an arbitrary metric space. "

[w3.org Math Double struck]: https://www.w3.org/Math/characters/double-struck.html [wikipedia Blackboard bold]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_bold

an exception to every rule..

look at these beauties..

https://www.fontspace.com/category/blackboard-bold

transatlantic cruise is super swell

I use this X character in my name on Telegram, now everyone will think I'm an Elon stan.

Just change your name to the Twitter bird

The Fail Finch?

"No way! Why should he change? Musk’s the one who sucks!"

> 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 know WTF is about.

In other words, X is the new blockchain.

Basically Google

gmail, gmaps, gmeet, gchat...

https://zombo.com/

You can do anything at X.com, anything at all!

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?

Ah so that's how we're supposed to Google for tweets now. "𝕏 something something".

𝕏 (U+1D54F) decomposes[0] to X (U+0058) meaning that if you search for 𝕏 your search string will likely be automatically converted to the equivalent X.

Of course, while a search engine could conceivably index and search the entire Unicode codespace internet wide, such a task would likely be somewhat unrealistic and provide only limited upside.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_equivalence

i presume x.com or site:x.com will get the trick done

It’s already got to search 1000s of Chinese characters, a few more doesn’t make a big difference.

How do you decide which characters to index? The current Unicode release (15.0) includes 149,186 individual characters. I suppose you can probably ignore U+237C (Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow) seeing as nobody seems to know what it denotes.[0][1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31012865

[1] https://ionathan.ch/2022/04/09/angzarr.html

That is Ellis.

Most search engines for languages like English are indexing words as opposed to characters so choices as to what characters are indexed are made as part of deciding which words to index.

Search engines for CJK languages do tend to work at the character level so a search for “Sona” on a certain site run by (I think) Chinese people will turn up result for “Persona”.

I was involved with an A.I. startup where we had lots of meetings about what to do about all the strange Unicode characters and right now in Mastodon there is a lot of concern that screen readers will choke on 𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐜𝐨𝐝𝐞 𝐛𝐨𝐥𝐝 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐬 while it doesn’t seem that difficult to squash them down to ordinary characters or treat them exactly as <b>unicode bold characters</b>

The essential operation here is not decomposition, but compatibility normalization. Both NFKC and NFKD result in a regular “X”.

No, you're supposed to go to X and search on there. And consume ads.

> Looking forward to #Musk trying to trademark a Unicode symbol, in this case 𝕏 :) Maybe we should start using #x1D54F as the new Hashtag for everything #Twitter and #X #𝕏 :)[0]

[0] https://social.wildeboer.net/@jwildeboer/110768919254064477

Beautiful. :):):):)

Does this affect the potential for trademarking the logo?

Absolutely.

They can probably trade mark it for social media (unless someone already has), but are highly unlikely to be able to trademark it broadly, which clearly is the intention.

Isn't a trademark always tied to its respective business domain?

Yes, but those "classes" can be quite wide, there is for example no way they could trademark it for "Class 9: Computer and software products and electrical and scientific products."

Wait until you find out about "apple" and "windows".

Apple and windows are trademarks for software. You would be unable to get the trademark "Apple" for a company selling fruit, or "windows" for a window fitter, and neither could Apple or Microsoft.

𝕏 is a pre-existing symbol used by, and part of a standard character set for, software. You could probably get a trademark on it for a company selling apples, but I highly doubt you could for a software company.

> 𝕏 is a pre-existing symbol used by

"used by" is pretty debatable. Its a fairly obscure character. I don't think being in unicode by itself is sufficient enough to count.

There is also https://www.x.org/ which seems quite slow. I wonder if it's receiving more traffic than usually..

> its respective business domain

Or to any number of business domains. See the trademark registration for "Wagatha Christie":

https://trademarks.ipo.gov.uk/ipo-tmcase/page/Results/1/UK00...

I don't see a problem with this, it's a generic character used in mathematics. If nobody trademarked it before, it shouldn't cause any issues. If using greek letters like λ in brands is not a problem, then this should fly too.

They could also apply for multiple trademarks with small additions if they launch a new product:

𝕏ₚₐᵧ

Trademarks are against a "class", these can be quite wide. They would clearly want to own that exact symbol for "Class 9: Computer and software products and electrical and scientific products."

Unicode already contains exactly it, it's a mathematical/scientific symbol, even if they did get the trademark in that category (which I doubt) they will never be able to enforce it. With trade marks, if you don't successfully protect them, you loose them.

It’s totally enforceable. It’s a trademark. Who else is doing business with the Unicode doublestruck X?

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.Org_Server

I think this would seriously confuse his core audience, so I doubt that’s the intention. Then again, I think rebranding Twitter to X is a terrible idea, so what do I know.

It is a problem, because if theoretically Musk were to trademark that character (improbable), Unicode would likely be forced to remove that character and break every instance of it across the internet. Not to mention that anybody using that symbol, which already has an established meaning in mathematics, would be infringing on that trademark.

Trademark should be possible, but a copyright will depend if the whole logo surpasses the Threshold of Originality. Ordinary typefaces, plus colors and effects, are below this threshold.

Am I supposed to not notice this mastodon in the room...

I can see users misreading this as a "close" icon in the "share on..." section of every article

Can someone explain what we are talking about here? Something having to do with Musk's son's name?

Twitter is rebranding to X.

$44,000,000,000 well spent

Does this have anything to do with the cage fight/dick measuring content with Zuckerberg? I think almost everybody thought renaming Facebook to Meta was a bad idea, but maybe Musk knows something we don’t. ;-)

> I think almost everybody thought renaming Facebook to Meta was a bad idea

Do they? Why?

I don't see how it did any harm, and people are way more willing to admit an association with Meta than with Facebook.

When it first happened I thought they were trying to evade Facebook’s bad reputation for privacy and politics and made a point to keep calling it Facebook.

After about a year “Meta” had the same stink of death around it as NFTs and I figured I’d be doing it no favor by calling it by its preferred name.

I thought 'Meta' was the same shuffle Google did with 'Alphabet', some of financial / legal shenanigans..

Though speaking of while trawling the wiki page on Alphabet....

> X (formerly Google X) is an American semi-secret research and development facility and organization founded by Google in January 2010.

> Does this have anything to do with the cage fight/dock measuring content with Zuckerberg?

They're both the results of a sad man's extremely public midlife crisis, so yes.

No it's about the renaming of Twitter.

[0] https://nitter.net/elonmusk

So it’s about Musk’s son name

Given that Musk's obsession with the "X" moniker goes back to the 90s at least, I imagine it would be more accurate to say his son's name and this rebrand are both branches from the same tree (see: x.com -> paypal, SpaceX, Tesla model X)

Twitter has been rebranded as 'X'. Elon has the domain x.com and I suppose he wants to use it

Is this like when that Roman emperor named his horse as a senator, or are we not quite there yet?

The most sane interpretation is that Elon Musk was payed to dilute or destroy Twitter. I can't think of anything else that would make sense.

Throwing 44 billion dollars on a company and then gutting it for everything that was valuable including a unique brand that had even its own verb?

But the sad reality is probably that a 12 years old narcissist edgelord in the body of a billionaire wanted a vanity plate.

Seems like a reasonable theory if it's the price to be paid by those in power to avoid future revolutions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Revolution

Or to foment one of his own ;)

This would explain things, if there was a credible suggestion for who's pulling the strings.

The theory of Elop destroying Nokia (consumer) makes sense, because he was at Microsoft, went to Nokia sold it to Microsoft at diminished value and stayed there for a good amount of time. But who would pay Musk for this? And how will he be compensated? Afaik, he's lighting a bunch of his own money on fire. Although, there has been a lot less news from him on Tesla and SpaceX, so maybe it was all a plan to keep him out of those spaces.

I've seen theories about Saudis paying for this in order to prevent the next Arab Spring, in which Twitter played a key role for the protesters to organize themselves. Seems a bit far-fetched, but these days, who knows?

The initially-too-high offer plus downturn in his stock value right after, meant a deal structure that damn-near doomed the company anyway (tons of debt).

Best-case (for him), Twitter as we knew it dies and he manages to turn the burnt-down ashes into something profitable enough to overcome that hurdle. Twitter per se cannot reasonably get out of the hole he's dug for it.

Though, arguably, the brand itself was a huge part of the value, and he just threw that in the trash.

You know a guy's going down a weird path when all defenses of his behavior amount to "I know the last twenty things he's done have looked insane and none of it's made any money, but he's got a secret genius plan, I swear! 5D chess!"

The US is already there, with an almost brain-dead 90-year old Senator being as good as gone, so that a privately-owned company doing whatever its largest owner thinks fit for the good of the company going forward doesn't even get close to that.

It makes typesetting easer, pretty genius really! /s

We're going to see a trend of companies using Unicode characters for their logo now aren't we?...

I still will prefer a mix of comic sans and wingdings.

I am not sure you can trademark the Unicode mark though. Doesn’t this preclude trademarks then?

I mean, hugging face exists.

...which leads, of course, to the question of whether, with the application of a suitable sum of money, one can get one's chosen logo added to the unicode standard.

I can't wait to x about this. Y'all re-x me when you see it.

I tried hitting the X button to re-x you but the browser window closed.

Possibly related

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36845492

Also the game: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-COM

I see on the page there are also unicode symbols for roman numerals IX, X, and XI. I can see an argument for having a separate character for roman numeral X as opposed to just using a capital X like a normal person would, but where do they get off calling IX and XI numerals? They are two-character sequences, and adding characters for the combinations sounds like all pain and no gain.

This latest kerfuffle is as silly as the time someone actually got a trademark on π.

https://www.wired.com/2014/05/pi-takedown/

Oh the Accessibility hawks at accounts like MathAbuse (https://twitter.com/MathAbuse) fighting Unicode 'fancy text' are gonna love this

It's strange they think computers don't have the ability to read text just because it looks fancier.

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.

so musk was trolled?

No, Musk is the one doing the trolling.

Just look at the attention he is getting.

If you think Musk is somehow upset about this, you are wrong.

Wow I feel so trolled that he’s lighting more of his money on fire. Buy an extremely well known brand for 44 billion and replace it with something you spend 5 minutes of effort on.

Right, it may look like he's making dumb decisions left and right and doesn't have anyone telling him how stupid he is to get him to stop, but he's really playing 4d chess.

I didn't say any of that.

Can’t find it now, but originally it was reported that Elon got the logo from someone who replied to his tweet and that it was the lid logo for someone’s unsuccessful podcast.

Anyone have any knowledge of how the new CEO and Elons relationship is regarding the business? I'd be curious how the conversation goes with her about this kinda stuff.

I'm assuming it's "I own the company, do this."

Not saying I agree with his ownership style (I certainly don't), but if you become a CEO for a company owned by Musk, and are not expecting him to undermine and interfere, than you are fooling only yourself.

He hired her a couple months ago. He has been public about building the X “everything app” for a while. Presumably she already knew about that when she took the role.

The BBC reports:

> Ms Yaccarino wrote on the platform that the rebrand was an exciting new opportunity.

> "Twitter made one massive impression and changed the way we communicate," she said.

Also on codepoints.net:

https://codepoints.net/U+1D54F

Might want to hide this character from Elon... shh.

A good bandwidth saver then, even for the 'share this' kind of plugins that exist.

The Southern Poverty Law Center will declare this a hate symbol shortly. Mark my words.

This character was added to Unicode in 2001, which notably is after Elon acquired x.com

The character is used by another famous piece of software for what, 40 years?

https://x.org/wiki/

But X windows is dead or dying. Oh, so is Twitter?

I expect that 𝕏11 will survive twitter.

edit: using proper typography.

I hope not. I’m still using 𝕏Compose.

Reports of X11's death have been greatly exaggerated as far as I can see; it's still clinging stubbornly on, and efforts to kill it have tended not to go well.

Wayland is still trying really hard.

X.org doesn’t use that character. But e.g. TeX probably did before Unicode.

It has been used in mathematics for decades, if not centuries, before that.

It was added as a part of the Latin (and also Greek) alphabet in various incarnations for mathematical use.

so it can't be copyrighted.

Logos never could be. You're thinking of trademark.

Some logos can be copyrighted. Most logos however don't meet the threshold of originality. The Copyright Office will reject copyrights for stylized letters (see IBM logo), or logos of simple geometric shapes. With the modern aesthetic for logos to be as simple as possible this means nearly all the logos you see are not copyrighted.

It can be probably be trademarked though.

𝕋𝕎𝕀𝕋𝕋𝔼ℝ

I can't wait for a Twitter vs. Xfinity trademark showdown.

x.com was a company he founded early 1999. He wanted an online bank. Wikipedia page on it is informative.

Wow, this probably changes everything we thought we knew about this company, the product and its CEO.

No, seriously, does he think no one notices that the new X logo still hides the same old Twitter crap?

Why is this a thread and not just a comment on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36845111 ?

i refuse to upvote this whilst its on 314 points...

im not sure why this is of import either. blackboard X, so what?

So Elon can copy write this?

As far as I know, for something like this you can only copyright the specific application. So for example it couldn't be used for social media sites.

it's actually unicode?!

Musk can seem to do no right atm, I see a lot of hate out there with this name change and planned product expansion but I can’t quite understand why. He’s taking an underperforming social network and trying to make it work. It might prove fatal, but it would have died a slow boring death in its old form. Perhaps its just that people don’t like his personality, which shouldn’t come into it.

Fwiw even prior to his defunding moderation it felt like one of the meanest places on the internet, I don’t see much of a change.

It's very hard not to take his personality into it since he chooses to force it in there. However, trying to be a bit dispassionate for a second, I'd say the haphazard nature of the changes are what really gets to people. Especially those who depend on Twitter as a tool, not knowing what it will be called tomorrow, how it will function, which parts will work and which wont, etc. is quite a deal-breaker.

Because he keeps having these late-night binges of bizarre, brand-destroying decision making. Twitter is underperforming as a result of his previous rounds of bizarre, brand- and product-destroying decision making. Twitter wasn't dying until he came along to "fix" it.

Yeah, his personality is plenty objectionable too, but it's mostly the way he's seemingly intentionally running the company into the ground that I object to.

Twitter was doing fine. By taking it private, he saddled it with massive debt its current revenue couldn’t service. And every decision thereafter has been half baked and poorly executed. So by trying to “save” it, he’s killing it much quicker than if it had just been left alone.

> Twitter was doing fine.

It was losing $4 million per day.

That is not at all what looking at their financials say. Twitter was a very profitable company which over hired like crazy in 2021. This could have been solved without gong crazy like Musk did. Just do responsible layoffs.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/delisted/TWTR/twitter/ebi...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/delisted/TWTR/twitter/num...

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.

No article to confirm that the made up thing isnt real? Your point is ridiculous.

Ummm... Twitter is still working, despite the dire predictions.

No matter what the actual number was, it's clear that Twitter was wasting one hell of a lot of money.

Out of curiosity, why shouldn’t his personality come into it?

There’s no moral or ethical basis to not consider his personality when evaluating Twitter, and even if you have one I’m not obligated to share it.

You don’t have to understand things for them to still be valid! To me, he’s an offputting guy doing a bad job, and those two things are valid to consider when thinking of his company according to my moral values. That’s subjective, but it’s clearly a view that many share with me.

He's taken an okay performing social network, laden it with debt, absolutely obliterated its reputation and value by screwing around with it like a coke-addled toddler (with some kind of fascination for fascist-adjacent politics), and now he's destroying a globally-recognised brand to play out a decades-old fantasy that he should've grown out of the first time it blew up in his face.

> He’s taking an underperforming social network and trying to make it work.

Few would argue that it works better now than before

> Perhaps its just that people don’t like his personality, I suppose it's more complicated:

- he promised "freedom of speech" and Twitter has rather become "freedom of hate"

- he is taking constantly controversial political positions, usually favoring dictators, and this doesn't resonate very well in the western world

Maybe people just wish he would have stayed the way he was: a sort of fascinating "Doc Brown" rather than yet another average billionaire pushing political ideas through his wealth and popularity.

> Few would argue that it works better now than before

Maybe in the social circles you stick to, but there are plenty of /other/ people (i.e. more than a "few") that are quite happy that the 80% of employees doing their jobs were let go. [1]

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598822959866683394

Is Matt Taibbi implied to be one of those happy people?

'Matt Taibbi, a journalist who worked on the “Twitter Files” series of articles about old business decisions at Twitter, has said he’ll no longer use the social media platform. Taibbi is apparently frustrated by Twitter’s recent decision to heavily restrict all links and tweets about Substack following that company’s announcement it would be launching Substack Notes, a short form social network and potential competitor to Twitter. Any Twitter user who even tries to retweet a post from Substack is met with a notification, “some actions on this Tweet have been disabled by Twitter,” a move that has angered many users, including Taibbi.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/04/07/twitter-fi...

> Is Matt Taibbi implied to be one of those happy people?

Not specifically. That's why I linked to content from him, and not his profile page.

It is better for favoring free speech over censorship. Dictators don't favor free speech whatsoever. You've been gaslight into believing the opposite. Tyrants censor people with any justification they can get their hands on, including "hate speech".

We accept speech we don't like to avoid this very trap.

Oh, bosh. Don’t be absurd. Elon demonstrably isn’t “favoring free speech over censorship.” He’s just choosing different speech to favor and to censor.

Oddly enough, he tends to favor hate groups and dictators: “Twitter’s compliance with government demands for censorship or surveillance has risen [during Musk’s tenure] to over 80%, from around 50%.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/04/elon-musk-...

https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/amp/rcna81961

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/06/elon-musk-free-speec...

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7zm9q/elon-musk-twitter-naz...

You answered your own questions really with "Musk can seem to do no right atm" - for some of us, it's just incredibly funny to watch the hubris of a self-proclaimed genius cause them to fail so often in such a short space of time. A seemingly endless string of stupid decisions because he's surrounded by boot lickers and sycophants with not one of them willing to put their hand up and tell him he's not a genius.

For me it's not funny so much as shocking, and sad. He had a hand, of some sort, in at least a few great things, and it's upsetting to watch it falling apart. I often think of the quote:

"You either die a hero, or live to see yourself become a villain."

Far too many icons outlive their hero phase, and it's kind of depressing.

Edit: Or rather, the hero phase fails to live long enough to outlive the person.

The reality is that the hero likely never existed.

Reality of not, he was an inspiration to many adults and children for a while there, and it's sad to see that end.

He certainly had his wallet involved with some interesting things but I think it's a stretch to say he had any beneficial hands-on involvement.

He’s produced a lot of value for a lot of people over the years, and many things some of us see every day (like Teslas) are only the way they are/have been successful the way they are because of his influence.

It’s always been more as a promoter and image seller, but he has also been willing to make big calls and take risks others won’t which has allowed them to grow. That is valuable. And he has been hands on in some areas sometimes in ways that have been instrumental in shaping things. For better or worse.

He’s far from perfect. But no one is, and honesty is important.

I suspect the big issue here is something typical of narcissists - he’s gotten older, and he can’t keep up his game convincingly enough anymore to fool a large enough percentage of the public, so he’s downward spiraling. And internally he can feel it, which makes it worse.

It would explain a lot, especially the often bizarre and destructive attacks on anyone who says anything he doesn’t like. The over the top edgy/controversial behavior to get reactions, etc.

Which is a natural state when the one in charge is insecure about their own actual weaknesses.

They’ll attack anyone who tells them the actual truth, and end up surrounded by those who either can’t see the truth (due to incompetence or delusion), or are willing to actively lie about it (manipulators). By process of elimination, if not by active choice.

Here's why this particular choice was foolish:

1) He's going to lose a TON of brand recognition overnight.

2) He seems to have gone from "I'm thinking about doing this" to "We're going live" over the course of a weekend. This is both rushed and more based on reaction than actual thought and research. I don't see any of his customers wanting this.

3) Morale for employees there already seems to be terrible. Having them implement a rebrand over a weekend on a whim makes him seem like a dictator.

4) From a practical perspective the name X is foolish. The word "tweeted" is a verb used every day on the news. Companies would kill to have that level of their product within the culture. Now they will say what? "exed"? No one will say that because the audience won't know what it means and it has the negative connotation of something you've moved away from (ex-husband, ex-girlfriend, etc.).

> Fwiw even prior to his defunding moderation it felt like one of the meanest places on the internet, I don’t see much of a change.

The meanest place on the internet is EJMR, the forum economists use to find job offers. Not joking.

The reason for this is unclear except that it's the most conservative social science.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com