Breakbot is a French DJ/producer. His latest music videos (“Be Mine Tonight”, “Baby I’m Yours” and “Another You”) all have great animations.
This is hilarious. I haven’t been in this situation nowadays though. That might be one of the perks of being in a data plane side.
Long long time ago, probably around 2009, I was a Scala boy. I was writing Perl at work, realized that the dynamic nature of the language made changing things too hard, wanted to have a concise language with a big “ecosystem”.
After 10+ years, I still haven’t written Scala at work. Yes. Kotlin is getting popular, but it still haven’t replaced Java. I now think pitching a JVM language is actually harder than pitching a non-JVM language.
First, Java is fine for a lot of people. I was living in a non-enterprise web shop bubble and didn’t realize that at that time. The language is getting slightly concise over time. People have figured out the ways to “deal” with Java, such as Lombok, Immutables, AutoValue and/or Checker Framework.
Second, a JVM language doesn’t have any quantitative benefits over Java. The large-but-fast runtime is the same. The syntax would be nicer but it is qualitative. If you want to have a single executable, use Go. If you cannot tolerate GC but don’t want to use C/C++ yet, use Rust. JVM languages wouldn’t have this sort of “go-to” reasons.
Third, building a new ecosystem with a lot of packages is possible. Rust, Go and Node are “new” around 2009, and have built sufficiently large ecosystems. It takes time though.
@hak, @jmuk and I have chatted about “Nerd Face” emoji on Twitter.
Styled after a stereotypical nerd, with buck teeth a racist caricature historically mocking East Asians. Some feature white-taped glasses, another nerd trope. Smile and glasses vary across platforms.
Emoji was originally designed by Japanese mobile phone careers, and later added to Unicode Standard to handle them in Unicode-centric systems. That’s why Emoji has the Tokyo tower, but not the Eiffel tower. Moai is actually “Moyai”, a small replica of the Moai statues in Tokyo. The gender bias in early Emoji was certainly coming from Japanese culture as well.
However, the nerd face is a bit different. Japanese people would agree that buck teeth is ugly, but wouldn’t see that as nerdy.
So, how do we get the emoji?
Unicode Technical Report #51
Unicode Technical Report (UTR) #51 is about Unicode Emoji. The report mentions the four major sources.
- Zapf Dingbats (z)
- ARIB (a)
- Japanese carriers (j)
- Wingdings & Webdings (w)
And emoji-data.txt explains the sources of all Unicode emojis.
...
1F6F0 ; text ; L2 ; none ; w # V7.0 (🛰) SATELLITE
1F6F3 ; text ; L2 ; none ; w # V7.0 (🛳) PASSENGER SHIP
1F910 ; emoji ; L2 ; secondary ; x # V8.0 (🤐) ZIPPER-MOUTH FACE
1F911 ; emoji ; L2 ; secondary ; x # V8.0 (🤑) MONEY-MOUTH FACE
1F912 ; emoji ; L2 ; secondary ; x # V8.0 (🤒) FACE WITH THERMOMETER
1F913 ; emoji ; L2 ; secondary ; x # V8.0 (🤓) NERD FACE
1F914 ; emoji ; L2 ; secondary ; x # V8.0 (🤔) THINKING FACE
1F915 ; emoji ; L2 ; secondary ; x # V8.0 (🤕) FACE WITH HEAD-BANDAGE
...However Nerd Face emoji is “x”, which means “Other”.
L2/14-174R: Emoji Additions
Then there is another proposal from the authors of the technical report.
This document proposes a set of additional emoji characters for rapid incorporation into Unicode, with background, motivation and selection criteria described in L2/14-172.
This document proposes “NERD FACE” and references AIM and Gmail.
Instant Messengers
The text version of Nerd Face emoji: 8-B is in Nerd Text Emoticons. At least this one source says that the emoticon is “Common”. This site also includes all emoticons in AIM, Yahoo! Instant Messenger, Microsoft Live Messenger, ICQ and Gmail.
Within them, Yahoo! Instant Messenger has :-B as “nerd”, Microsoft Live Messenger has 8-| as “nerd”.
Skype also has 8-| and some other variants as “nerd”, but none of them have B as the buck teeth. I’m unsure whether that is coming from Microsoft acquisition or not.
This year is almost over. A meeting I’ve scheduled today is in January 2021!
I will take two weeks off from December 21st. In Japan, the end of a year and the beginning of the next year are like Thanksgiving and Christmas combined for American people. Companies mostly have official holidays. People go back to their hometowns. We have nice traditional foods. While I won’t go Japan this year, my Japanese brain still needs this moment of isolation and self reflection, even after living in the States for more than six years.
I may or may not do some non-work computer stuff during the off. I want to kick-start some personal projects, but I also think I should have some no screen time.