vogon

colin

@vogon

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vogon
@vogon

a couple ideas for terrible software projects

prompted by an idea from @fauxwren: "emoji IP addresses", where each octet in an IPv4 address is replaced by an emoji from a set of 256 easily distinguishable1 emoji

prompted by considering the nontrivial problems2 3 of automatically generating a set of easily distinguishable emoji: automatically generate a set of easily distinguishable emoji

  1. inspired by the fact that (rightfully) a lot of systems already consider "i" and "j", "o" and "0", etc. to be too visually similar to output in the same encoded string

  2. how do we determine "easily distinguishable"? the first machine-readable implementation you'd think to go for is some measure of pixel distance, but I can't reliably memorize two entries from the dingbats block (e.g. 🙜 and 🙝) but can easily memorize the much more familiar concepts "smiley face" and "face shedding one tear", which have an even smaller pixel distance

  3. how should we weigh the wildly different levels of emoji support on reading platforms into this?

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in reply to @vogon's post:

graham
@graham

For 2, you could probably rely on crowdsourcing (or even your own inputs) by setting up a queue of pairs of emoji and inputs like "different enough" and "too similar"

For 3, older emojis are probably better, but better would be pre-emoji unicode characters

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