This is a special post for quick takes by jam_brand. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
Interesting ending to the latest Veritasium video today. It asks "What if all the world's biggest problems have the same solution?" and spends nearly all its time talking about AlphaFold and how AI is starting to be able to accelerate areas of research by literal decades almost overnight. Superficially this will no doubt sound positive to many people, but then -- with his final words -- he slips in the following: "This sounds like an amazing future... as long as the AI doesn't take over and destroy us all first."
(I thought to append an even gaudier headlining tag, but don't have the heart—if though, by the way, you don't know what's so gaudy about it [and/or already don't reckon you much care about such a gripe] and simultaneously also don't love that I've surreptitiously stolen the focus of your eyeballs for such a matter, well... maybe we're in more agreement than you think! ♥)
A couple things I think I'd enjoy seeing regarding mini-ideogram usage here, though happy to know others' opinions as well:
I'd love if the default text-color was also used as the default for emoji (especially for posts, though maybe shortforms [and/or the approximately-two-tweets-worth of initial characters also visible in mouseover previews, though admittedly that's perhaps too burdensome] since those are visible when scrolling All Posts without an additional click); IANAE, though for at least a subset of emoji it seems this might be accomplished simply by affixing the Unicode combining character U+FE0E VARIATION SELECTOR-15 (VS15) to switch them to their text-representation, though alternatively there are open monochrome fonts that instead cover the full spectrum like the one found here: https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Emoji
Don't get me wrong, although I think I prefer some initial friction for its use, I'm not actually anti-color in general (e.g. I've largely felt ok about the images people have decided to insert within their writings).
Anyway, one last thing (maybe even the most important): as hypocritically-hinted at the outset, I also don't love them in post titles (at least when on display untruncated, anyway), though admit a bit more tolerance when confining such flourishes to personal blogs (which—I confess, yes—this post technically isn't). I agree with a recent commenter from a few days back mentioning such headline usage is usually unpleasantly attention-hijacking, though since their downvote of disapproval was met with much disagreement, I guess the next-best option for trying to maintain a tasteful garden could be actually disimplementing them outright since mere disincentivization seems frowned upon.
Looking back in closing, I think I could've condensed this considerable whinge to a fraction of the footprint given more time (or merely mightier 'moji-mojo, maybe), though with so rarely putting pinkies to keyboard, perhaps you'll excuse the rare semi-ramble indulgence. Sure sure... shortform, schmortform... yet nicely tiny, this isn't (and I try to keep [real] tidy, y'see?), though guess that goes with only minor explication too, so fine... further thoughts, colorfully-embellished or otherwise? 🎤