Comment by marssaxman

Wow a human in 2040, very optimistic take.

It would appear that you know wrong.

Maybe the fashions will have swung against woke by 2040?

> having their literacy degenerate to such an extent that they stop using alphabetic / phonetic writing systems and revert to pictographic or ideographic systems

What about reverting to referencing moving pictures?

Or was this intended to be self-referential and I missed the joke? :)

On the other hand, Korean ditched the ideographic Hanja (Chinese Character) writing system because it was too difficult to learn, in favour of a much simpler phonetic one. In Japan, the classical Kanji Chinese writing system was considered a prestige language and was customarily not taught to ordinary folks; the modern Hiragana script evolved as an easy-to-learn alternative, (initially) used heavily by women who were often not taught Kanji.

Of course, Chinese characters are not pictographic and haven't been for a few thousand years, but they are still largely ideographic.

It's uninformed mimicry. Someone very close to me (I won't name names!) bought one and did it the other day for their business and I was absolutely shocked when I saw their draft video. I asked them what they thought the clip was for.

It's a massive trend all over IG and TikTok these days as there's a lot of mobile-friendly consumer gear that brings your Social Media Content up a fairly large way for fairly low cost. Ironically, the mimicry probably spreads because those that know what they're doing partially or fully conceal it which is by definition less likely to be noticed and therefore imitated by first timers/novices.

The answer is obviously to balance your smiley faces and wrap the entire statement in the smiley face sentiment. ((: Like this :))

Your comment made me realise that there's logic to this (like this :), since in HTML we can:

    <li> do this
    <li> and this

instead of: <li> ... </li>

and <img alt='this'> instead of <img ... />

You might like Lisp, but what you're saying reminds me of the late 00s/early 2010s xHTML2 vs. HTML5 debate :)

Post C++11 you can just do (like this:)), no extra space needed before the last parenthesis.

I tend to rephrase myself so I dont end a statement inside a parenthesis with a smiley.

It's one of those things I think are worth putting some extra effort into, I'm glad to see at least one other person giving it some thought. Thx <3

Synthetic example:

"Вот его, нет, не допустили (сама знаешь, почему)))"

My translation:

"But him - no, they didn't let him in (of course you know why :)"

When I went from texting friends in Russian or Ukrainian back to English, I missed right parentheses as a smiley; one or two - hi), hello)) - to me are like a smile, by ))) and )))) there's some laughing or some other joke going on. Native speakers could weigh in; my native tongue is English.

Use dashes and the problem goes away! Well, you gain the LLM witch-hunt, but heh, no free lunch.

allow me to introduce my friend – turned smiley here he is: ´◡` (quite useful for brackets ´◡`)

you can find him on windows by pressing Win + ; not as fast as typing, but quite faster then typing and then wondering if thats too much brackets or too little

I’ve always been bothered by instances of your first example, and I mostly use “XD” instead of “:)” to sidestep the issue in my own writing.

I have the same problem. I just ditch the smiley face. :)

The relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/541

tbh u can basically do this now lol... no flag needed.

if u want it to sound more real u just gotta tell the bot to write that way. like literally just ask it to throw in some typos or forget to capitalize stuff. or use slang and kinda ramble instead of being all robotic and organized.

https://github.com/ethel-dev/misspell

To me the OP read like a particular dialect of English which is quite common on HN, rather than being incorrect.