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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)
  • [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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  • 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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