X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm
blog.emojipedia.org
blog.emojipedia.org
In that sense it's perfectly fine if it was a water pistol, a real gun or whatever else as long as it's the same thing everywhere. But the same codepoint showing up as a water pistol to one half of the audience and as a gun to the other seems to be just begging for misunderstandings - and in a charged atmosphere like X no less where this could easily spiral into drama, shitstorms or worse.
It doesn't matter if it wasn't. It was done, and it was done at a time when there was political will for everyone to follow suit and be consistent.
The question is whether it's OK to turn it back. Because there ISN'T the same political will. And other emoji providers will NOT follow X in this.
Having X "go back" because the original change was "unjust" doesn't fix the underlying problem. It creates a new one.
Literally perfect application of the concept of "two wrongs don't make a right"
This is a problem since unicode characters are meant to be unchanging and rendered to the same glyph forever.
Stop destroying standards because they hurt your feelings.
This means that the move back then to change the gun to a water pistol was an extremely bad move, no question here. But moving it back to the original meaning now is just as bad - it will just disrupt in the same way lots of newer texts that assume the glyph is a water pistol.
Doing the stuff differently compared to /the other group/ to know you belong to /this group/ is everybody’s favorite game.
Deliberately changing a language and pressuring other people to adopt certain changes in their vocabulary is something entirely different. That too has been tried often in history, but has usually led to conflict and was part of expressions of power.
Emojis can change their meaning organically too, if people just start using them in a different way. Eggplant emoji being the most obvious example I think.
But pushing an update to change the glyph would be about the most top-down and deliberate way to change its meaning that I can think of.
Chairman Mao enters the chat
Meanings change, jump from one word to another, words take the opposite meaning all the time. Pronunciations change too, letters that are supposed to sound differently suddenly don’t and other way around too.
It used to be a real gun everywhere, until the schoolmarms started chiming in. It is supposed to be one, no matter what the ministry of truth thinks it should be replaced with.
> drama, shitstorms
On X? How will they ever recover.
On the other hand we don't use pictures in the same way, the meaning of the message depends on the exact picture used as part of the "font". The whole thing about flags and skin tones are symptoms of the same problem.
And here the issue is not in font differences (or different pictures of the same thing getting different interpretations): it’s the thing represented that’s actually different.
Many typefaces are have problematic I/l/1 and O/0 characters, and that is material enough that applications avoid those characters entirely to avoid potential confusion.
The problem is deeper than unicode: the fact that any codepoints can be rendered differently from client to client or typeface-to-typeface was always problematic, even back it was mostly ASCII.
But anyway, images should have remained separate things, png or whatever. Fonts rendering is complex enough with complex scripts e.g. Arabic, but that is the domain of fonts/shaping/rendering.
Such a hugely expensive technical mess because people want their stupid color emojis.
With, of course, accessibility for those needing it.
For example, the " " emoji, described by Unicode as "health worker" is called "non-binary doctor" by Apple.
If you send that emoji in a text to somebody, and they're e.g. using accessibility software, wearing AirPods and have notifications read out to them by Siri, or have their phone integrated with CarPlay etc, the message they'll hear is very different from what you actually intended to say.
The point of any glyph at all being allocated a Unicode codepoint, is that the glyph already exists in documents somewhere (either real paper documents, or digital documents in some other legacy encoding); and if Unicode didn't include a codepoint to encode that glyph, then that text wouldn't be able to be faithfully represented in Unicode.
Which means that some ephemeral undocumented proprietary encoding might be used instead (as in “cellphone novels” in late-90s Japan, now permanently committed to the Internet in the form of SJIS encoding + some particular feature-phone’s SJIS pictograph codepage that no modern OS can decode.)
Or worse, that the character and its contribution to the meaning of the document might be lost entirely (as in MSN or ICQ messenger emoticons, where exporting chat logs as HTML would just strip the emoticons out.)
Putting whatever glyphs already exist into Unicode, no matter how rarely, is precisely what makes Unicode uni-code — i.e. an encoding that guarantees lossless archival "transmission into the future" of all texts, such that all texts should be better off transcoded into Unicode. (At least if the intent is to archive their semantic meaning as text, rather than their bytewise representation as data for software-archaeology purposes.)
---
The standard of "if it already has usage, then it must get a Unicode codepoint so that the document can be Unicode-encoded" is all well and good at face value, and worked well as a guideline for the first ~10 versions of the Unicode spec. Until ~2009, pretty much nobody was arguing against codepoint allocations being "warranted."
But then the modern mobile platforms realized that they essentially had a gun they could hold to Unicode’s head — in the sense that any glyph they wanted to invent, they could threaten to release into the wild as proprietary encoding if Unicode doesn’t include it. And because millions of people would be guaranteed to make tweets et al using that new symbol, Unicode is essentially forced to include it. Even though it doesn’t exist yet until that moment.
All the “dumb” emoji—and color emoji in general, and the explosion in variation selectors—came after that. In est, they’re Apple and Google’s fault, not the Unicode Consortium’s.
> Which means that some ephemeral undocumented proprietary encoding might be used instead
I'm not arguing against the need of some standard for representing those, I'm just objecting to the technical decision of incorporating them as code points, because they don't serve the same semantical purpose.
Instead you could have introduced -- for example -- a simple vector graphics format.
The standard says “pistol”, what a pistol looks like is left to the implementer.
You're missing the point. Unicode is descriptive like a dictionary is descriptive: it describes — and thereby locks into place and somewhat formalizes (really: ossifies) — existing usage.
If you prefer, rather than "prescriptive" vs "descriptive", you can pretend I said "proactive" vs "reactive." Unicode as a standard reacts to existing out-of-Unicode usage of glyphs, by defining into existence Unicode code-points to allow the encoding of those glyphs. (Or rather, to allow encoding of any of the equivalence-class-hypersphere of glyph-configuration-space described by the name of the codepoint, as that codepoint. Those particular codepoints have been defined through usage, whether the Unicode Consortium likes it or not.)
But even that's not quite accurate, because, especially with the modern forced assignments by Apple/Google, Unicode in fact is purely describing — documenting — codepoint assignments that the OEMs decided on and implemented unilaterally, ahead of standardization. (I.e., Apple/Google now just allocate new codepoints for emoji and assign them glyphs all on their own — and Unicode then must play catch-up, including those codepoints in the standard only after they're already shipping on real devices and thereby effectively already "locked in" in their meanings.)
> Because they don't serve the same semantical purpose. Instead you could have introduced -- for example -- a simple vector graphics format.
They quite clearly do serve a semantic purpose:
• Screen readers can describe an emoji — and smart ones can even use an emoji at the end of a sentence to add emotional color to their reading of the sentence. This would not be possible if emoji were just vector images.
• LLMs have particular trained associations on what a given arbitrary Unicode codepoint should relate to. It would be prohibitively difficult for them to form the same associations between regular word tokens, and the huge sequence of tokens that collectively represents a vector image.
• Search engines can index emoji just like any other text. No search engine that I know of could embed a vector image in its fulltext index in a useful way.
• If a font doesn't represent an emoji, people can still copy-and-paste the unrepresentable-codepoint-glyph rendering of the codepoint into their OS's character map to get a Unicode-standardized description of the codepoint. This wouldn't be true if emoji were just arbitrary vector images.
Also, if you wanted to oust some glyphs from Unicode in favor of embedded vector images, where would you stop? If U+1F60A "Smiling Face with Smiling Eyes" shouldn't be in Unicode, should U+2660 "Black Spade Suit"? How about U+21F6 "Three Rightwards Arrows", or U+2713 "Check Mark"? U+2766 "Floral Heart" / U+2042 "Asterism"?
If you don't have a heated debate about the meaning of the dot over the poop emoji every year they may find themselves out of a job and that would be too productive.
My first thought exactly. My 2nd thought, glancing at the graphic of like 6 years and 6 companies and the evolution of the emoji.. there's a nontrivial amount of money thrown at all this "work", and once you think about all the meetings and emails and design iterations, the opinion pieces on the result, etc, the frivolous spend for this kind of nonsense is probably in the millions. Not to mention all of us taking a media break while we're on the clock! No real political sentiment even needs to be involved.. all this probably just represents make-work activity by folks looking to justify their continued employment. The political aspect is just the hook, since the bike-shedding after that is guaranteed.
A smiley doesn't need gender, sex, or age, to convey meaning.
An iPhone 1 would display a gun still.
I think that has potential for hilarity. It would certainly soften the impact of a certain group of imbeciles.
Does anyone see what's happened here?
A small group of people made a political decision and force changed the pistol emoji into a water gun. Then... later on, someone else undoes the change and suddenly now they're blamed for waging a political battle!
We see this elsewhere too. Github with master -> main, despite master remaining the default everywhere else and causing endless confusion with examples/tutorials all over the internet. Immigrants -> Migrants, voting laws returning to pre-covid rules (and being likened to Jim Crow on Steroids as a result), etc.
There's a segment of society that's in love with renaming/changing things everyone else was fine with, and then when people try to change things back - they're attacked as radical political warmongers.
Nonetheless, even if we were to believe 100% of the people at Twitter, Facebook, Google, et al decided on this change together, it's still a small group of people and it still is a political decision.
One of the reasons why I hesitate to use emojis is that there isn't enough standardization of what they look like. I've seen texts I've written that include them on other devices and have been pretty dismayed that that even relatively minor visual differences can make a huge difference in the meaning I intended vs the meaning that was actually received.
The water pistol/gun thing is this taken to an extreme. The initial change was bad because it introduced a huge amount of uncertainty in meaning. The change back is bad for exactly the same reason.
That's just like, your opinion man! Some of us view it as the Internet healing.
> Some of us
Who is "us"? I said "fresh anonymous accounts" because there's a problem with such on this website. Certain ideas are way more likely with those.
Nonsensical since my account is not a "fresh anonymous account". Fresh accounts are colored green.
>because there's a problem with such on this website.
What's the problem? Wrongthink?
>Certain ideas are way more likely with those.
"Truth is treason in the empire of lies."
Objective, but deeply flawed. Most people around the world are running code updated past a version released in 2018.
Maybe? I mean, Unicode already explicitly does not encode glyphs, but code points. So point 65 is capital Roman “A”, but Unicode says nothing about how it should be displayed.
Going further, certain code points represent characters which Unicode considers “the same” character in Japanese/Chinese/Korean even though they may be different in meaning, pronunciation, and visual appearance. Thus, you need to know which language is being writing before you can pick the correct glyph to put on the screen.
So, while stupid, it doesn’t seem exactly wrong or unprecedented for X to change their glyph from a squirt gun to a pistol.
The representation itself isn't standardized I think, a lot of emojis don't look very similar across different platforms.
There’s no reality that exists where it was dumb so you shouldn’t care it was changed but it’s dumb so it shouldn’t be changed back because it’s dumb right so it doesn’t matter what it is…
The people who changed it thought it mattered, the people changing it back do too so as dumb as it is, I guess it matters to both these groups, even if it is kinda dumb.
These dumbest of political battlegrounds are entirely the problem caused by the people who demanded the initial change, no one cared about this till someone cared about it.
Depends where your sample is from, if you just did a worldwide the result would surprise you.
And noone voted for it, all companies effectively in charge of these emojis (Google, Apple, etc.) decided for everyone that it was for the best.
What will they change next, who initiated and coordinated that effort, and why, are all important questions.
I'm very much against it. It's the same or worse than altering the text content of a message.
Once you put an emoji symbol out there for a character code and it's agreed upon, it should be immutable.
"There. We tweaked your post a bit. More in line with doubleplusgoodthink now".-
"There. We tweaked your post a bit. Doubleplusgoodthink now".-
"There. You're doubleplusgoodthink now".-
"There. Doubleplusgoodthink".-
"Doubleplusgood".-(But they do their own doubleplusgoodthink very well, methinks ...)
PS. More seriously, this is a concerning and latent issue. Moderation is a "cost" I am sure they'd like to streamline, and AI scales - as opposed to poor, psychologically "breakable" humans now moderating ...
... so I am sure they'll unavoidably come up with something.-
Some were really bad and would change the meaning of a message, things like showing a broken heart instead of a heart.
The only one I can think of that's visibly different now is the melting face. I wonder at what point it too will be changed to match Apple.
But yes, I am against woke culture at it's core, vehemently.
In no way does an emoji encourage armed violence.
Are you against violent video games as well?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_Speech_(painting)#/...
It is also rather unconnected to "woke", at least as far as I understand woke. Woke to me seems to me more about shouting down people than it is about listening to everyone. (So does "anti-woke". I don't think the painting supports either side; it rebukes both sides.)
I'm curious what/how you define "woke culture", because the only definitions of "woke" I've ever heard are basically "thing I don't like" or "the left". Neither of those definitions have helped me understand what you are so vehemently against.
Can you help me understand what woke culture is to you?
This is a genuine question.
Within this context it’s replacing guns with water pistols, systematically and comprehensively, in the name of fighting gun violence.
On the same token, it’s replacing a water pistol emoji with a gun—in the aftermath of an armed assassination attempt on a Presidential candidate (and former President)—on a platform that regularly censors, in the name of free speech.
Performative nonsense designed to appeal to emotions instead of doing something about the implied problem. (Guns and censorship, respectively.)
Thanks! This helps me understand it a bit more. Sort of a synonym for "virtue signalling" it seems?
I genuinely have no idea what that term means anymore.
Note that I am not the one who brought up the term to the conversation. I did want to avoid the labels as there's always someone who comes up and ask you to define the label instead of talking about the issue itself. In this case, censorship.
Of course, but since you said you were vehemently against it, I thought you'd be the better person to give me some perspective and help me learn.
>I did want to avoid the labels as there's always someone who comes up and ask you to define the label instead of talking about the issue itself. In this case, censorship.
I would have found it much clearer if your comment said "I am against censorship at it's core, vehemently", and as an added bonus you wouldn't be annoyed by me asking about it.
But, to be clear, the reason I asked about the label instead of the issue is because I don't understand what issue(s) woke culture represents to you. So trying to talk about those issues would be difficult.
My impression so far is that woke culture is more than just censorship. I'm very anti-censorship, but I've also been called "woke" in passing as an insult, so unfortunately I'm still left a bit confused. Thanks anyways, though!
As for woke - I don't understand why people ask for a definition. A quick search brings up many useful definitions: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Woke
Note how the definition there doesn't match any of the three definitions people gave me here, and none of the three here seem to match each other. Also, as your link says, the definition seems to have changed drastically in the past few years, so I can't even be sure that the link has the most up-to-date definition.
So, I was asking someone who seemed to be very passionate about being "against woke culture", to hear it directly from them. This is a conversational site, I figured it'd be fine, but seeing that my question is now downvoted I guess I need to better learn what conversations and questions are appropriate here.
I'm still new around these parts. Forgive me.
In one sentence, wokeness is aggressively pursuing racial (and other identity-based) conflict above everything else, not caring what else you trample on (including even classic civil rights principles). "Microaggressions" is probably the most distinctively woke concept.
Censoring gun emojis is not woke in that respect, since it doesn't pursue any particular identity conflict (except, maybe, crusading on behalf of anyone with gun-related PTSD?). But the method (forcing people to sanitize their communication) and some aspects of the motivation (hand-wringing about some bits of language, acting like some people have extremely delicate sensibilities, using that to justify censorship) are similar to some prominent manifestations of wokeness and the corporate policies they push. So I can understand why the connection was drawn, though the term isn't quite appropriate.
Usually when I try to ask this question, I just have angry people being angry with me, and I end up more confused. So it's nice to have some legitimate explanations come my way.
Their Woke episode might be worth a listen.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/1ncWO9Aj1kMtQxBsHf0aYg
https://pod.link/1624704966/episode/0b0e2c363a94280fe0ae576b...
"Woke" originally meant that a person has "awoken" to the true nature of society. They see the thing that others do not see! Unfortunately, it seems that that's also the only thing they see, or the only thing they care about. And that thing is racial / identity-group conflict. As I say, they cheerfully sacrifice principles like freedom of speech, meritocracy, proportionality, hard-fought civil rights ideals, etc., when it's inconvenient for the fight they want to pick in the moment. I think that, to a first approximation, when anyone says "Is this going too far?", they get accused of sympathizing with the oppressors and shamed or cast out, so the group goes farther, and we are seeing the results of iterating this process for decades. A peak moment was tearing down a statue of Abraham Lincoln, apparently in the name of anticolonialism.
That's the woke people themselves, a small, aggressive, highly vocal group with outsized influence. (There's also a larger group of relatively normal people with a surface-level understanding of it who go along with most of it; I think if they understood and believed all the details, most of them would recoil.) (Incidentally, most people instinctively understand that aggressively attacking others is bad, but via concepts like "microaggressions" and "privilege", the woke frequently find reasons to think that someone else attacked first.)
Then there's the legal and corporate environment. Civil rights legislation brought laws against discrimination and creating a hostile environment for identity groups in companies. In the absence of mind-reading, a claim of discrimination is difficult to prove or disprove, and a "hostile environment" could be interpreted in many ways. I think that the "game of telephone" chain from the text of the law, to the interpretation of the law (and evidentiary standards) in courts, to lawyers' understanding, to what company lawyers tell management, to what sticks in management's brain and gets implemented, has yielded essentially "If you offend the woke identity groups, then that puts you at significant legal risk, so best appease them. Also it's good to pay them lip service, host Pride events, etc., because that reduces legal risk." Additionally, some portion of management themselves are woke, and some additional portion earnestly believe in civil rights as a cause and tend to take the woke at their word when they claim their policies are the right and proper next steps. And finally, on a personal level, expressing dissent against a woke-aligned policy is, in many cases, perceived to put one's own career at risk (in some cases the lawyers may say it's a liability to keep a person like that; and, having seen cases of this, many people err on the side of caution, creating a "chilling effect").
So you get a lot of corporate policies meant to appease the woke. Some may be the exact policies the woke asked for. Others may be cynical appeasement, and by design they will be difficult to distinguish from the first type. Some policies are invented by well-intentioned people believing in civil rights principles. Some are the outcome of some kind of compromise.
It's not necessarily clear which of these should be called "woke policies", both in theory and in practice. It doesn't help that, whereas you could identify Democrat or Republican policies by looking at official websites, and probably get reasonable consensus on what are "conservative policies" or "progressive policies" based on prominent self-identified conservative figures and institutions, the woke do not call themselves "woke" (with occasional exceptions like "Woke Kindergarten") and object to anyone else calling them that; it's understood to be a pejorative. The woke will tend to call themselves advocates of civil rights or of specific groups' rights, and try to blur any distinctions between the classic civil rights movement which enjoys majority support (things like non-discrimination and gay marriage) and what they're trying to do (things like discriminating in favor of their identity groups and policing pronouns). This serves to make the case that anyone who disagrees with them is a 1950s Jim Crow racist, and anyone who isn't a 1950s Jim Crow racist must agree with them, which is useful for coercing acquiescence and support. It also makes it harder for the rest of us to notice the patterns and call out the damage that the woke have done and are likely to do. But I think we're getting there.
What I mean is that definitely phrases and questions change meaning, a tiny bit, based off of historical understanding of race and gender. On the surface it seems like a wild proposition, but it's really true.
- wow you're so articulate! - your hair looks so clean! - don't you like this kind of music? - you're a better driver than I expected! - you're so nurturing!
To you, or me, innocuous. But people say these things for a reason. I've never heard a white man be told he's articulate, or that his hair looks clean. Do you know what I mean?
These things are racially charged and "othering", regardless of if the perpetrator knows it or intends it. I'd say the vast majority of ANY prejudice is unconscious, meaning people don't know they're it.
Obviously, in a vacuum, an emoji does not do anything at all. Though emojis are used in context to convey intent, just as words are. Would you say words do not encourage armed violence? Sure, the dictionary does not, but when pieced together, narratives can be created that do. That is not to say we should ban words, but lets not kid ourselves and pretend they have no power at all.
Indeed.
The whole reason I value freedom of speech is not a love of certain voices, but because of the power of speech to effect change.
Took me a long time to realise that while all improvements are change, not all change is an improvement. Dictators fear free speech because it has the power to take away their power. That power can also be used, has been used, to take away democracy.
Its the meaning of the ideas being communicated not individual glyphs. A gun emoiji does not neccesarily mean "lets shoot up the place". A water pistol is similar enough to a gun that anyone who has that meaning in mind can easily just use it and be understood. Or they could just use something else with an understood meaning. After all, many emoiji have context specific meanings. An eggplant is not just an eggplant.
Its just downright silly to ban things at this level of abstraction. It wont stop people talking about guns.
also "Tried, but didn’t like doing crime. GTA5 required shooting police officers in the opening scene. Just couldn’t do it." - Elon Musk
And he didn't try to ban GTA, that's his personal opinion of not wanting to commit virtual violence himself.
The sentence "it's time to cut down the tall trees" doesn't seem like it should trigger a genocide, but it did.
If you send a firearm emoji in response to someone asking what they think of the 2020 USA presidential election result, that seems to be a fairly explicit encouragement of armed violence. A water pistol, not so much — likewise either "gun" variant in response to plans for summer holiday sports ideas.
When it comes to tall trees? Well, are you talking to an arborist or are you the RTLM in 1994.
The previous one has now been in use for 6 years, many messages are about to change meaning, this time in potentially quite negative ways.
Follow-up: What's your opinion on the word "woke"? Do you still use the original agreed upon definition from AAVE, or do you prefer the way conservatives have mutated our language? (The question is rhetorical, but I hope you see the point I'm making.)
The gun emoji had existed as a gun before as well for that many years. Nobody cared about rewriting text history on that change either.
I'm still a bit unclear on your position towards the current changes. Your post makes it sound like you oppose changes in general, but your tone makes me think it's specific to the change from 2016. How do you feel about the current changes?
I think the change back is good and we should very strongly push for immutable emoji. The first one was a massive mistake and years of using the squirt gun doesn’t justify it.
Signal, iMessage, X, FaceBook, etc.
This thread is specifically about X so that’s what I mostly am talking about here.
But pretty much every communication medium being used allows you to upload pictures. It doesn’t make any sense to me why you’d remove the emoji and not also try to censor all pictures of guns.
You cannot do that on signal, X, Facebook, etc.
Yeah I… don’t think that’ll be happening. From Twitter, sure, from X?
If you mean a pistol, it should be a pistol.
If you mean a water gun, it should be a water gun.
Having both icons seems perfectly fine.
So I rather like this change: it reverts a Newspeakism back to normal meaning. Also, as another commentator points out, the relevant Unicode symbol definition image is an actual pistol.
anyway, a bit of a molehill to get riled up about. I have a mountain of code to climb. Ta!
Indeed, this is the key point that everybody should be focusing on.
You can use SF Symbols (https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...: “You can use a symbol to convey an object or concept wherever interface icons can appear, such as in navigation bars, toolbars, tab bars, context menus, and within text”). That would not use Apple’s emojis, but wouldn’t require you to create your own versions.
Source? Signal seems to be using the native emojis for reacts, and they don't seem to be having issues.
It wasn't removed, it was augmented.
This is a case of companies rendering 1F52B to something it is specifically not.
This was done on purpose.
1: https://emojipedia.org/beaming-face-with-smiling-eyes#design...
So it makes sense for websites to force the rendering, so that everyone gets the same message.
Ideally, that pistol emoji mess shouldn't have started in the first place. It was clearly intended as a real gun, and variations in rendering shouldn't have impacted the meaning, but they did, and that's how we got there. If they wanted to off the real gun for a water pistol, they should have used a different code point, made keyboards only suggest that code point, and maybe censor the original pistol like they do swear words. No ambiguity.
We are trapped in a meme.
Unless your spoken English isn’t very good, it’s quite clear there is no “s” sound in the second half.
Say “space sex” out loud and yes you’ll hear two distinct ‘s’ sounds. Not at all the same as “space ex”.
Of course it's not the exact same sound, but it's bloody similar and it's a throwaway tongue-in-cheek comment from GP. Are you and the sibling comment robots that don't get word play?
To be clear, I'm willing to agree that it's a funny mispronunciation, but am unwilling to accept that this particular naming was an intentional juvenile joke by Musk. It's widely known he's a fan of the letter X, and I believe that fully explains "SpaceX".
But maybe possible it’s just all about the letter X for him?
Also, to clarify, I don’t dislike the guy. Nor do I dislike his naming. Just pointing out what I thought was the obvious.
fwiw, I don't like Elon and I think this whole thread is kinda distracting to actual points about Elon that don't need Olympic size hurdles to understand.
Edit - and another 10 defending the decision on HackerNews forums
Oh and wait until you hear about the Google Doodle...
Without being the project manager, you're speculating on the amount of focus this had.
It's already making buzz so if it was an hour of work, I'd say the marketing effect alone was worth it.
I'm simply saying you're talking about Twitter right now because of it, and it was a small change.
You know it was if you're an engineer, let's not play dumb.
Not sure why everything relating to X has to be so hostile.
All the people arguing both sides of this, then and now, are motivated by ideology. That includes the parent post you replied to, me, you, Elon, etc.
People often argue over cultural changes. And then there's politics on top of that. And in Elon's case perhaps publicity, also.
In fact, I can't recall a single time I've seen it used in the context of water guns.
People posting "<Skull><Water_Droplets><Water_Gun>" on Twitter/TikTok/whatever are just doing the emoji equivalent of saying "I'm gonna shoot this guy, in Minecraft."
Is it really better that the emoji is technically not an actual pistol? Is that gonna be the thing that stops people from making threats online?
Scroll down in this page for the example I am citing:
[0]:https://blog.emojipedia.org/apple-and-the-gun-emoji/
This really raises an interesting attack vector. Get influential enough at Apple -> push a change that could cause trouble for others given you are the largest entity -> they will be forced to adopt your change.
This should have been picked up by congress because it is some small group (or even one person) affecting the decisions of the entire industry.
Also its pretty fitting that Musk has applied his signature move: Make the change damn the consequences and then re-learn the reason why it was done in the first place when some disaster occurs. It must be nice that he never has to deal with the consequences of his actions.
Whatever happens at twitter, someone on the internet will complain about it.
Just can't win.
If we have older communications that use an emoji, it can retroactively edit the meaning if that emoji renders to a fundamentally different object than it used to, so this kind of change has the side effect of rewriting history unless people take extra care to only use fonts that match the age of the document.
It's already hard enough to communicate clearly and effectively in the modern world without having the rug pulled out from under us with stuff like this.
Various knives are available if you want it, so if anything we should add MORE emojis (gun combining character something else = various types of gun, say).
In fact, it's easier to have one "known bad" emoji to check than having hundreds to look at.
Conversely though, the decision to change it back is probably driven by trolling and attention-seeking more than anything.
1: Page 12 of https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F300.pdf (search for 1F52B)
I'm not saying they're further out of spec. But I disagree with your implication that they are somehow further in spec than a water pistol. Pistol is pistol.
Yes. If I asked you to bring me a gun (or a handgun) I don't think anyone would argue I might have meant a water pistol. A water pistol is a gun-shaped object, or an object that imitates a gun, but it isn't a gun.
If I ask you to bring me a gun, and there is a water gun right next to you and you argue that "I might have meant water pistol" (colloquially: refusing to assess the water gun as a "gun"), I would assume you were ignorant, dishonest, or both.
The same is true of the gun emoji. Hard for me to picture a scenario where I would need to communicate "real gun" but not want to say the words "real gun". And given the ubiquitous (until now) change in the icon, I have empirical evidence that it was an entirely practically appropriate solution. And, again, it was no further out of spec than an M1911.
Personally, I think putting a huge set of pictograms into the Universal Character Set was a mistake and that emojis should be deprecated immediately, and this is the #1 reason why: the meaning of a text should not normally change based on the font used to render it.
Is this any different than for words? "Retarded" used used to be the polite way to convey intellectual disability, until it slowly turned into a pejorative. Same word, different meaning.
One of the advantages of written language is that it's based on a discrete set of symbols that are used to form discrete words. This allows writing to last much longer than many other forms of communication. Emojis are a weird semi-discrete hybrid form of communication, which means they're bound to cause problems as time goes on.
[1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-6347073/People-ou...
(That would be a fun legal hypothetical.)
I've noticed that culture war type conversations have become completely normalized on HN after the COVID pandemic.
These kinds of discussions never change any minds and are just a toxic cesspit of online commentators arguing against each other.
Why hasn't HN considered limiting these kinds of conversations. Almost 2-3 times every week I notice some kind of topic like this arising on HN, and infecting other conversations on the platform.
Furthermore, I have notice significant traction from accounts created post-2020 on these kinds of discussions unlike other discussions on HN.
I also think that as harmless as a change from a pistol to ray gun might seem, it is a signal of how far these companies will go to push one particular ideology onto everyone - its employees, customers, etc. These large tech platforms are too powerful and influential to be allowed that kind of deep and far-reaching influence on our politics and culture, and they should behave neutrally as much as possible.
https://www.unicode.org/emoji/charts/emoji-list.html
#1121
X redesigns Water Pistol "gun" Emoji back to a firearm
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BTW, what is the reason this post is currently [flagged]? I almost (re-)posted it myself (since I've sloppily searched for that "gun emoji" instead of the URL what returned zero results for this week), because I find it interesting especially from the technical and "semiotical" point of view. I see it is somewhat political topic as well, it even might be covered on the TV eventually (?), but I think other HN relevant aspects overweight that.
I’d hate to try and hack a “intercept the text and add an image” type of system when the font rendering system has a trivial way to override individual glyphs already.
Doesn't that mean every font in the list needs to be loaded? And surely in many cases the sets of glyphs overlap and then a bunch of network bandwidth has been wasted?
Anyone can use any emoji they want.
To achieve this users declare emoji's in a known format the browser recognizes inline in text, which includes a content hash of the emoji they wish to use. eg. ":T15PXExNem0xX:"
Browsers use a DHT and local emoji datastore looking to the DHT to fetch any emoji's seen in text but not present locally.
You may submit a picture to your browser to create an emoji, but it must be a 128x128 webp image. The browser calculates the hash, and puts it in your local datastore. You may now use this emoji anywhere.
A few things to think through here:
1. Would be nice to have an non profit come forward and make a nice big server act as a reliable hub to the emoji database. The nice thing is, basically anyone can step forward at any time and provide servers to the network. Anyone can serve the emoji to anyone as they are addressed by their hash.
2. Regarding offensive or hateful emoji's, I think the question "What if this is used to promote hate?" Is a good question to be asking. But try to keep in mind that the system I am outlining is meant to be communication infrastructure, not a platform. Think of it like a different way to write text. This system in and of itself isn't a platform at all, as the only way to discover and use emoji's is to see someone use it somewhere else. You can browse your local datastore, but that's it.
3. What about REALLY hateful or outright illegal content? IPFS is a guiding light here (in more ways than one if people are familiar with the project). Lists can be made of Violating content by third party organizations and browsers could be configured to subscribe to those lists, very similar to the way ad blocking networks work. Apparatus could be constructed from there to support DMCA and abuse reports and distribute block lists. These subscription lists are user configurable, in case those apparatus are captured or abused and users feel the need to revolt.
Likely more issues than this? I don't think there's anything that is insurmountable. But that's the rough outline. Instead of relying on the unicode consortium, take advantage of content hashing distribution networks to create user defined emoji's instead.
I think about a system a lot when stuff like this comes up. Because I ask, what would be the most popular examples in such a database look like? Do we think it would be close to what the unicode consortium laid out?
Guns are guns. Stop trying to pretend water pistols are somehow harmless images.
I mean... it's not exactly a SR9 either, but it's definitely not a 1911 as the twitterrer implied.
None of those vendors have previously depicted the pistol emoji as a contemporary handgun.
It's very strange keeping up with the shifting tides of opinions about these sorts of things.
The whole censorship of the original emoji was incredibly pointless and stupid. Now we have to rehash this all over again and I’ll have to hear about it.
And this time, with Elon behind it, people are going to be even more uppity about whichever position you take. It’s insane to even feel pressured to take a position on a friggin hieroglyph. And both sides will argue that it’s the other side making it political.
No wonder I’m on Prozac.
On the other hand, the IOC just added E-sports to the olympics. No shooter games allowed.
... but more than that, I don't like how they keep playing with those designs all the time.
I had this half year when I though my mother was constantly pissed at me becouse she sent these angry devil robots to me. It turned out it was the default emoji font on my phone and all my friends used text based emojis so I didn't notice.
A real pistol and a water pistol send totally different vibes...
Buddy's mind has wondered off to the hadal zone. Well beyond the point of "no return".
Twitter is just a barely disguised Truth Social now.
“I want Twitter’s gun emoji to look like a real gun instead of a wussy toy!” - Elmo Munk