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Artemis astronaut shares video of Earth ๐ŸŒ setting on the Moon ๐ŸŒ• (i.imgur.com)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/interestingasfuck@lemmy.world
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[โ€“] 12 points 6 months ago (10 children)

I still don't understand this use of emoji.

It's not "I shoved a ๐ŸŒต up my ๐Ÿ†", I could get that, reject alphabet return to pictogram for the sake of compression if nothing else. But no, it's "I shoved a cactus ๐ŸŒต up my dick ๐Ÿ†" which is just...why are we doing this?

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  • [โ€“] 2 points 6 months ago (7 children)

    It's only compressing the message visually (it generally uses more data)

    Also, at least for me, it takes more work to parse the images than words require. I have to like... shift out of reading mode, comprehend the image and then go back to reading.

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  • [โ€“] 2 points 6 months ago (6 children)

    How do emoji use more data? They're one, maybe two unicode characters?

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  • [โ€“] 1 point 6 months ago (5 children)

    And thus more data

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  • [โ€“] 2 points 6 months ago (4 children)

    Than an entire word?

    Take "cactus" for example. Each letter in the word "cactus" is one unicode character, for a total of six. ๐ŸŒต is one unicode character, U+1F335.

    Unicode characters are 4 bytes long, so "cactus" takes 24 bytes to transmit, where "๐ŸŒต" takes 4. Unless something something UTF_8?

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  • [โ€“] 1 point 6 months ago* (1 child)

    You're close, Unicode characters don't imply a number of bytes, it's how they're encoded that does (utf-8 most commonly). Utf-8 can be as little as one byte or as many as four, depending on the specific character. I don't know about emojis but I imagine they're in the four bytes section. Whereas "asdf" is also four bytes in utf-8.

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  • [โ€“] 3 points 6 months ago

    So I just looked it up, the UTF-8 encoding for the cactus emoji is 4 bytes long: 0xF0 0x9F 0x8C 0xB5

    Where the Latin alphabet is in the 1-byte region.

    So it takes 6 bytes to transmit "cactus" in UTF-8, and only 4 to transmit โ€œ๐ŸŒตโ€. So any emoji that replaces 5 or more letters is more efficient. ๐Ÿ† breaks even with "dick" or "cock", more efficient than "penis", more than twice as compact as "eggplant" or "aubergine".

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  • [โ€“] 1 point 6 months ago (1 child)

    Emojis are great when you want to convey tone or emotion that you normally can't do through text alone. I find them especially useful when a sentence as-is sounds a lot colder than you actually mean it to be

    Obviously not the intention of OP and it's definitely excessive IMO but I do also find that they can be useful markers for longer texts. It gets a lot of hate but I find emojis really useful in codebase READMEs since you can quickly scan through and pick out the bits if information you're looking for

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  • [โ€“] 1 point 6 months ago

    Having grown up chatting with friends and hitting on chicks via MSN messenger, I'm aware. "I'm gonna get you for that ๐Ÿ˜ก " and "I'm gonna get you for that ๐Ÿ˜œ " are two different messages.

    I will allege that emoji are badly suited to that task though. First, there are too many emoji. Even just the facial expressions, there are dozens of them. Second, they aren't designed to parse to emotions, they're designed to parse to facial expressions. Many of which are specific to Japanese culture. Third, they're rendered kinda tiny in a lot of fonts. With a font size and screen zoom level set where I can comfortably read text, many emoji are just...yellow circles. Or little blobs of color that I have to bring the screen much closer to my face to make out than the raw text.

    Emoticons did the job better with less. But, entropy ruins all.

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