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Always bet on text (2014)

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Re: Always bet on text (2014)

#121

Post by inciampati »

tsimionescu wrote: post #104
inciampati wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But a graph, which provides a view at a certain level of resolution, can often be described in a few consise statements. That's why we make them, to get a view we can condense.

Re: Always bet on text (2014)

#122

Post by bmicraft »

tomjakubowski wrote: post #46
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…

Take a problem like untangling a pile of cords. Writing out how to do that in text would be a drag, and reading those directions probably wouldn't be helpful either. But a kid can learn how to untangle just by observation. Physical intuition is an enormous part of our intelligence, and is hard to convey in text: you could read millions of words about how to ride a bike, and you would learn nothing compared to spendin…

I think the bicycle argument doesn't work; you don't learn to ride a bicycle, you train to do it. Knowing how to do it isn't good enough, your conscious brain isn't fast enough to calculate and achieve balance. You need to train your reflexes to keep the balance for you.

Re: Always bet on text (2014)

#123

Post by tim333 »

jumploops wrote: post #71

> Text is the oldest and most stable communication technology Minor nit: complex language (i.e. Zipf’s law) is the oldest and most stable communication technology. Before text, we had oral story telling. It allowed us to communicate one generation’s knowledge to the next, and so on. Arguably this is present elsewhere in the animal kingdom (orcas, elephants, etc.), but human language proves to be the most complex. Sid…

Well, the article had "assuming we treat speech/signing as natural phenomenon" but if you are including biological communication you'd probably have to go with genetic code written in RNA. Nature's way of writing down life's assembly instructions. Four billion years and going strong.

Re: Always bet on text (2014)

#124

Post by astrobe_ »

socketcluster wrote: post #9

I've also become something of a text maximalist. It is the natural meeting point in human-machine communication. The optimal balance of efficiency, flexibility and transparency. You can store everything as a string; base64 for binary, JSON for data, HTML for layout, CSS for styling, SQL for queries... Nothing gets closer to the mythical silver-bullet that developers have been chasing since the birth of the industry.…

> The optimal balance of efficiency, flexibility and transparency.

You know the rule, "pick 2 out of 3". For a CPU, converting "123" would be a pain in the arse if it had one. Oh, and hexadecimal is even worse BTW; octal is the most favorable case (among "common" bases).

Flexibility is a bit of a problem too - I think people generally walked back from Postel's law [1], and text-only protocols are big "customers" of it because of its extreme variability. When you end-up using regexps to filter inputs, your solution became a problem [2] [3]

30% more bandwidth is absolutely huge. I think it is representative of certain developers who have been spoiled with grotesquely overpowered machines and have no idea any idea of the value of bytes, bauds and CPU cycles. HTTP3 switched to binary for even less than that.

The argument that you can make up for text's increased size by compressing base64 is erroneous; one saves bandwidth and processing power on both sides if you can do away without compression. Also, with compressed base64 you've already lost the readability on the wire (or out of the wire since comms are usually encrypted anyway).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle

[2] https://blog.codinghorror.com/regular-expressions-now-you-ha...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReDoS

Re: Always bet on text (2014)

#125

Post by ozim »

socketcluster wrote: post #9

I've also become something of a text maximalist. It is the natural meeting point in human-machine communication. The optimal balance of efficiency, flexibility and transparency. You can store everything as a string; base64 for binary, JSON for data, HTML for layout, CSS for styling, SQL for queries... Nothing gets closer to the mythical silver-bullet that developers have been chasing since the birth of the industry.…

I think you want ZSTD instead of GZIP nowadays.

Re: Always bet on text (2014)

#126

Post by assimpleaspossi »

smj-edison wrote: post #64
dkarl wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the downside, at least near-term, or maybe challenge would be the better word, is that anything richer than text requires a lot more engineering to make it useful. B♭ is text. Most of the applications on your computer, including but not limited to your browser, know how to render B♭ and C♯, and your brain does the rest. Bret Victor's work involves a ton of really challenging heavy lifting. You walk away from…

> You walk away from a Bret Victor presentation inspired, but also intimidated by the work put in, and the work required to do anything similar. When you separate his ideas from the work he puts in to perfect the implementation and presentation, the ideas by themselves don't seem to do much. Amen to that. Even dynamic land has some major issues with GC pauses and performance issues. I do try to put my money where my…

Folk computer looks interesting. I wonder what it is. You'll never find that out by looking at that link.

Re: Always bet on text (2014)

#127

Post by VorpalWay »

inciampati wrote: post #120
godelski wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're reaching. Justifying the answer you want rather than the answer that is. No, graphs do not need come from text. I've frequently hand generated graphs as my means of recording experimental output. This is a common method when high precision is not needed (because your uncertainty level is the size of your markers). But that's true for graphs in general anyways. Importantly, graphs are better at conveyin…

> CAD. Sure, you can do that in text... but it takes much more room to do and magnitudes more time to interpret. Fascinating example for me. I do CAD... using text! My only experience with it is programmatic in openscad. We check the visualization, but only on output of the final product. For me it's dramatically easier to work with. That may be a personal defect but it's also consistent. Underneath the rendering is…

I have tried OpenSCAD, but found it extremely limited and awkward. I much prefer parametric CAD like Fusion 360, OnShape (which I'm currently using) or FreeCAD (which has a really bad UX). And my day job is as a C++/Rust developer, so you would think that I would have good chances to prefer a textual representation.

Part of this might be OpenSCAD specifically. It is CSG based, which is really not ideal, making it hard to add things like chamfers and fillets to your model. Most OpenSCAD models I come across for 3D printing have a crude look probably because this is so hard.

But part of it is just that text for most people just isn't the right representation in this case. (If you look at the relative usage of parametric CAD to textual CAD on sites for 3D models you will see that I'm right. Also, look at what approach commercial packages offer.)

Re: Always bet on text (2014)

#128

Post by xpe »

Ferret7446 wrote: post #31

Text is just bytes, and bytes are just text. I assume this is talking about human readable ASCII specifically. I think the obsession with text comes down to two factors: conflating binary data with closed standards and poor tooling support. Text implies a baseline level of acceptable mediocrity for both. Consider a CSV file will millions of base64 encoded columns and no column labels. That would really not be any fri…

> Maybe a lack of fundamental technical skills is another culprit, but binary files really aren't that scary.

Indeed, there is a galactic civilization centered around binary communication: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bynar

Re: Always bet on text (2014)

#129

Post by upofadown »

crvdgc wrote: post #118

> But let's hit the random button on wikipedia and pick a sentence, see if you can draw a picture to convey it, mm? The inverse is also difficult. Pick a random 15 second movie clip, how to describe it using text without losing much of its essence? Or can one really port a random game into a text version? Can a pilot fly a plane with text-based instrument panel? Text is not a superset of all communication media. They…

Commercial aviation involves mostly textual interaction[1] to determine what the aircraft does, for most of the time. Aviation is rife with plain text, usually upper case for better legibility[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_management_system

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOTAM

Re: Always bet on text (2014)

#130

Post by bavell »

bmicraft wrote: post #122
tomjakubowski wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a problem like untangling a pile of cords. Writing out how to do that in text would be a drag, and reading those directions probably wouldn't be helpful either. But a kid can learn how to untangle just by observation. Physical intuition is an enormous part of our intelligence, and is hard to convey in text: you could read millions of words about how to ride a bike, and you would learn nothing compared to spendin…

I think the bicycle argument doesn't work; you don't learn to ride a bicycle, you train to do it. Knowing how to do it isn't good enough, your conscious brain isn't fast enough to calculate and achieve balance. You need to train your reflexes to keep the balance for you.

... training IS learning.
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