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Comment by thanhhaimai | Hacker News Reader

One explanation could be: many humans (including me) mistakenly think a seahorse emoji exists. My mind can even construct a picture of how it should look like, despite me also knowing it's very unlikely I've seen one myself.

And those text got into the training set: https://www.reddit.com/r/MandelaEffect/comments/qbvbrm/anyon...

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I mean, its not like emojis were always standardized. It is completely possible that there was a "emoji" or "emoticon" of a seahorse in a messaging application. I wouldn't be so quick to accept that your memory is incorrect.

Slack has a :seahorse: reacji, and is what I was picturing; I frequently try to use emoji that turn out to be reacji-exclusive (or reacji in the wrong workspace that I learn that way aren't Slack defaults) - I wonder if those insisting it exists are thinking of that.

Oh or Snapchat/TikTok/Instagram video/etc.? I think I've seen clips of whichever of those with overlaid stuff like seahorses.

Slack by default doesn’t have that reaction emoji. You are hallucinating :)

Aaah I did exactly what I described in the parenthetical :sweat-smile:

(You're absolutely right!)

Yeah, this seems more plausible to me. False memories and mass delusions are absolutely real, but if this is one, I'd like to know how it started and why it is so specific.

E.g. no one seems to be misremembering a sea cucumber emoji or anglerfish emoji - but there are other alleged emojis such as swordfish or bandit/bank robber, where people have the same reaction:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MandelaEffect/comments/haxgql/can_w...

It would be interesting to see if LLM behavior is also similar. E.g. if you asked about an anglerfish emoji, would they straight-up tell you it doesn't exist, but for swordfish would start to spiral?

Could someone propose U+200D ?

Maybe the easier answer is to change reality to match human and language model memory/expectation.

Even though the context is relatively harmless in this case, "changing the reality to match LLM expectations" is a very dystopian concept

Honestly, it sounds like it's not just LLM expectations but human expectations. And changing a standard to meet that isn't really dystopian IMO.

Seahorse emoji has been proposed before and declined:

https://www.unicode.org/emoji/emoji-proposals-status.html

Would be interesting to read that proposal, as "usage level"[1] and "compatibility with existing systems"[2] are both factors that the emoji working group officially considers for new proposals.

So if the proposal includes one or both of those sections, that could shed some light on possible former usage in "proprietary" software.

Unfortunately, I don't see the actual proposal accessible anywhere.

[1] https://unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html#Selection_Factors_U...

[2] https://unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html#Selection_Factors_C...

Interesting, I sent this comment from a client on a phone, and forgot that the emoji wouldnt show up.

What I wrote was U+1F30A U+200D U+1F40E

This subreddit makes me so uneasy, so many people thinking that they remembered something and won't take "no this never happened" for an answer. Humans hallucinate like LLMs in fact! ;)

Like the Mandela effect.

I meant more the denying reality aspect of the subreddit. There are some users there that go straight up into "someone must have altered the timeline" territory because they insist they are right.

If you are not familiar with Unicode standards, it would be quite reasonable to assume we "used to" have an emoji and it disappeared.

It makes me rather excited! Maybe there are some easy "memory illusion" tricks waiting out there somewhere to be discovered. (I am strongly pessimistic regarding the future of humanity overall, and I think we are all doomed (me, and everyone else). So I think someone playing a memory illusion in a radio would be rather neat, a new fact about us humans, and not something that I'm scared of.)

Or maybe they're right. Not too long ago many messengers and social networks all had their own set of emojis. Some supported even custom ones.

The convergence on Unicode is very recent.

Does your mental image of a seahorse emoji also have the tail curled over itself near the fin tip?

My mental image looks kinda like this: https://media.istockphoto.com/id/588356620/vector/cute-carto...

Except facing left and with a curlier tail. Maybe like this but more redish? https://easydrawingguides.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/how... And a bit less anthropomorphized?

I could _swear_ that I saw this damn seahorse emoji myself... I guess I was also wrong!

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