Uploads from Xah Lee

Currently Playing: Xah Ep754 unicode emoji politics, men women sex race gun

Video Summary (Generated by AI, Edited by Human.) The video is a talk show discussing Unicode, emojis, and their cultural and political implications (0:00). The speaker, Xah Lee, updates his Unicode website using Emacs, demonstrating its search functionalities for Unicode characters (0:45). Key topics covered include: • Unicode Characters and History (1:06): Unicode contains all human writing systems, with emojis being a recent addition (1:16). He touches upon ancient scripts like Egyptian hieroglyphs (1:58) and the vast number of symbols in Unicode. • ASCII Art vs. Unicode Art (8:19): The speaker explains the history of ASCII art from the 1970s-1990s and discusses the technical inaccuracy of calling modern text-based art "ASCII art" when it uses Unicode characters (12:02). He differentiates between creative and "bitmapped" (computer-generated) ASCII art (20:42). • Evolution of Smileys to Emojis (13:36): Smileys, invented in 1982, were the predecessors to emojis (18:40). Emojis themselves were introduced later, around 2006-2008 (14:00). • Emoji Politics and Social Justice (29:20): • Skin Color and Genderless Emojis (29:47): Skin tone modifiers were introduced in 2015 (31:08), followed by genderless and fantasy emojis like mermaids and genies. The speaker criticizes Apple's and Microsoft's rendering of these emojis for promoting a "trans" or "queer" narrative (34:45-39:09), arguing it distorts traditional mythological representations. • Pistol Emoji Controversy (39:27): Apple changed the pistol emoji to a water gun in 2016, which the speaker views as the beginning of the "social justice war year movement" (40:14). Other platforms followed suit, but Elon Musk's Twitter (now X) explicitly reverted it to a handgun in 2024 (40:56), defying the perceived "wokewoke virus" that equates symbols with real harm (41:46). • Microsoft Windows 11 Emoji Design Changes (43:47): Microsoft's Windows 11 (2021) emoji font overhaul made emojis "much worse" (44:00), making them unrecognizable, often depicting characters as "trans" or "on drugs" (44:51-45:58), a decline from the Windows 10 designs. • Emoji for Passwords (48:50): The speaker advises against using emojis for passwords due to typing difficulties and potential for forgetting them (49:10). Notes at http://xahlee.info/talk_show/xah_talk_show_ep754.html If browser says security error, that is because it auto changes URL from HTTP to HTTPS. It's a way to censor 22 million old websites. Remove the S in HTTPS. Or use brave browser or safari.