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Always bet on text (2014)

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Re: Always bet on text (2014)

#101

Post by smj-edison »

dwattttt wrote: post #95
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Text is just bytes, and bytes are just text. I assume this is talking about human readable ASCII specifically. Text is human readable writing (not necessarily ASCII). It is most certainly not just any old bytes the way you are saying.

I agree, but binary is exactly the same. You use a different tool to view it, and maybe you don't have that tool, and that's the problem. But it's a matter of having a way to interpret the data; trivially base64 encoding readable text gives you text, and if you can't decode it, it's as meaningless as binary you can't decode. It makes more sense to consider readability or comprehensibility of data in an output format;…

And it's funny to think about how many different incompatible text standards there were for the first 30ish years of computers. Each vendor had their own encoding, and it took until UTF-8 to even agree on text (let alone the legacy of UTF-16). If it took that long to agree on text, I have a bad feeling it'll take even longer to agree on anything else.

I suppose open standards have slowly been winning with opus and AV1, but there's still so many forms of interactions that have proprietary or custom interfaces. It seems like anything that has a stable standard has to be at least 20 years old, lol.

Re: Always bet on text (2014)

#102

Post by awesome_dude »

dwattttt wrote: post #97
awesome_dude wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Audio is horrible (for me) for information transfer - reading (90% of the time) is where it's at Not sure why that is either - because I look at people extolling the virtues of podcasts, saying that they are able to multi task (eg. driving, walking, eat dinner), and still hear the message - which leaves me aghast

Brittany Spears - Hit Me Baby One More Time.mp3 To paraphrase the overused 'ol Sapir-Whorf, if all you think about is information that can be best represented as text, all your examples will be ones text wins at.

Not sure, text wins hands down at sharing the ideas of one person, with many, across space and time.

I can read the thoughts of a philosopher who lived on literally the other side of the world, several thousand years ago.

I'm unsure of, but would love to know, any other medium capable of that

Re: Always bet on text (2014)

#103

Post by makeitdouble »

safety1st wrote: post #52
smj-edison wrote: post #12

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I agree: text is infinitely versatile, indexable, durable, etc. But, after discovering Bret Victor's work[1], and thinking about how I learned piano, I've also started to see a lot of the limitations of text. When I learned piano, I always had a live feedback loop: play a note, and hear how it sounds, and every week I had a teacher coach me. This is a completely diff…

I mean, this very discussion is a case study in the supremacy of text. I skimmed the OP's blog post in thirty seconds and absorbed his key ideas. Your link is to a 54 minute video on an interesting topic which I unfortunately don't have time to watch. While I have no doubt that there are interesting ideas in it, video's inferior to text for communicating ideas efficiently, so most people reading this thread will neve…

I came back here after the video (btw he speak very deliberately, watching it at 1.5 or 2x while digesting the message is fine)

I'd compare it's message to a "warning !" sign. It's there to make you stop and think about our computing space, after that it's up to you to act or not on how you perceive it.

That's totally wishy-washy, so it might not resonate, but after that I went to check more of what dynamicland is doing and sure enough they're doing things that are completely outside of the usual paradigm.

A more recent video explaining the concept in a more practical and down to earth framing: https://youtu.be/PixPSNRDNMU

(here again, reading the transcript won't nearly convey the point. Highly recommend watching it, even sped up if needed)

Re: Always bet on text (2014)

#104

Post by tsimionescu »

inciampati wrote: post #87
godelski wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working in any science should also make this argument clearer. Data as text is hard to read and communicate. Even explanations of results. But graphs? Those are worth a thousand words. They communicate so much so fast. There's also a lot of skill to doing this accurately and well, just as one can say about writing. A whole subfield of computer graphics is dedicated to data visualization because it's so useful. Includ…

It is true that graphs communicate very well. But they do come from text... And in the end we need to be able to describe what we see in them in text.

No, you do not need to, and will not generally be able to, describe everything that a graph conveys in text. Graphs can give you an intuitive understanding of the data that text would not be able to, simply by virtue of using other parts of the brain and requiring less short term memory. If a graph can be replaced with 5 pages of text, that doesn't mean that you get the same information from both - you're likely much more able to keep one image in your short term memory than 5 pages of text.

Re: Always bet on text (2014)

#105

Post by dwattttt »

awesome_dude wrote: post #102
dwattttt wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brittany Spears - Hit Me Baby One More Time.mp3 To paraphrase the overused 'ol Sapir-Whorf, if all you think about is information that can be best represented as text, all your examples will be ones text wins at.

Not sure, text wins hands down at sharing the ideas of one person, with many, across space and time. I can read the thoughts of a philosopher who lived on literally the other side of the world, several thousand years ago. I'm unsure of, but would love to know, any other medium capable of that

And what of histories great artists? You can take a walk through a gallery and see many things people wanted to express, reading the artists textual description of it won't invoke the same ideas in you.

Re: Always bet on text (2014)

#106

Post by begueradj »

>Text is the oldest and most stable communication technology

That's completely false: Images were used for storytelling thousands of years before text (compare for instance the Lascaux paintings which are more than 17 000 years old, the Göbeklitepe sculptures and stone drawings (more than 12 000 years old), or the the more than 15 000 paintings of the City of Sefar (Algeria) which some estimate to date back as far as 20 000 years ago to the earliest text known in human history, Kish Tablet, Mesopotamia, around 3500 years old.

Re: Always bet on text (2014)

#107

Post by makeitdouble »

ryandv wrote: post #62
simonw wrote: post #60

Much as I love text for communication, it's worth knowing that "28% of US adults scored at or below Level 1, 29% at Level 2, and 44% at Level 3 or above" - Literacy in the United States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States Anything below 3 is considered "partially illiterate". I've been thinking about this a lot recently, as someone who cares about technical communication and making technical…

The inverse of this is the wisdom that pearls should not be cast before swine. If you want to increase literacy rates, it's unclear to me how engaging people on an illiterate medium will improve things. Technical topics demand a technical treatment, not 30-second junk food bites of video infotainment that then imbue the ignorant audiences with the semblance or false feeling of understanding, when they actually posses…

Technical knowledge isn't specifically bound to literacy.

A "dumb" example would be IKEA manuals that describe an assembly algorithm, I could imagine a lot of other situations where you want to convey very specific and technical information in a form that doesn't rely on a specific language (especially if languages aren't shared).

Color coding, shape standards etc. also go in that direction. The efficiency is just so big.

Re: Always bet on text (2014)

#109

Post by stevenjgarner »

From an information theory perspective, "Always bet on text" is a plea for symbolic efficiency. It argues that while binary or visual formats might have higher bandwidth, they often have lower meaning-per-bit for the complex, abstract logic that runs civilization. Text is the most entropy-resistant, highly-compressible, and universally-decodable format we have ever invented.
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