A Broken Heart

Mostly read like a normal article if you skip over the parts about using agents, which I did.

There could not possibly be a single thing in the world more boring than listening to someone describe using an AI agent. Might as well describe in arduous detail how you use a gas pump or a grocery store checkout.

Maybe off topic, but I couldn't help thinking that "we need to show a heart icon" -> "let's use a heart emoji because it's easy" -> "let's use a specific emoji font for consistency across platforms" -> "let's import it from Google Fonts every time" seems like a problematic developer mindset.

A better heuristic is always keep in mind not only developer efficiency, but also program efficiency. I'm not saying optimize everything, but keep program efficiency in mind at least a little bit. In this case, that would've led the developer to download a tiny SVG or PNG and serve it from the app itself. Which would've avoided the problem in the post, and maybe other problems as well.

> Noto Color Emoji is a Google font that is helpful in that it gives you consistent emoji rendering across platforms.

I’m not sure how that is helpful if users are used to the emoji look of their respective platform.

> And despite being the least-bad approach for web frontends today, the React ecosystem...

As if anyone has seriously tried anything other than the "reactive UI hacked together with callbacks or proxies, with weird XML-like syntax in the JS code" paradigm for the last 10 years.

At this point I just have to conclude that anyone who believes this stuff is good is either too indoctrinated into this workflow or just lacks ability to do even the tiniest amount of cost/benefit analysis.

This is a legitimately fun piece about a bug (or extraordinary levels of inefficiency) in CoreSVG, manifested in massive computational loads to display a single SVG fallback for a colour-specified emoji.

But, isn't the heart emoji red anyways, across basically every font that has emojis? I mean, even with variations. I'm not sure what COLRv1 brings to that table for that scenario. Although maybe the special font is overkill if you really wanted to do something crazy with an emoji or text, and it seems to focus on gradients and the like.

Maybe this is why they humorously blame Claude for getting them to use that font and its affordances in the first place.

The conclusion of "yes, Claude helped fix this, but it also caused it by recommending an emoji font" seems a bit disingenuous to me. Using an emoji font is a good suggestion, it's not like Claude (or anyone) could have known there's an SVG but that will cause this slowness.

... and a broken world.

How infuriating it is to see complexity so spuriously piled up upon an already holy mess.

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