Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Many years ago, in college, I used to volunteer for Recording For The Blind, reading various math texts aloud. I had to verbally describe every illustration in the textbook, including graphs, using a few concise statements. Not perfect, but possible.
Always bet on text (2014)
141–150 of 187 posts
Re: Always bet on text (2014)
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Still, at least it's an option to put base64 inline inside the JSON. With binary, this is not an option and must send it separately in all cases, even small binary... There's nothing special about "text" or binary here. You can absolutely put binary inside other binary; you use a symbol that doesn't appear inside the binary, much like you do for text. You use a divider, like " is for json, and a prearranged way to…
This reminds me that I just learned the other day that .a files are unix archives, which have a textual representation (and if all the bundled files are textual, there's no binary information in the bundle). I thought .a was just for static libraries for the longest time, and had no idea that it was actually an old archive format.
Re: Always bet on text (2014)
#143From 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.
This doesn’t track for me. How can text have lower bandwidth but higher meaning-per-bit? How does that jibe with entropy resistance (in an information theoretic sense)? Text seems worse to me. First of all, binary encodings are a superset of text encodings. But less abstractly, binary enables content-transparent compression and error correction. Like other commenters have pointed out, the downside of binary is needin…
Re: Always bet on text (2014)
#144Excerpts where he explains: "Now this was technically a fault in the application (Word 6.0 for the Macintosh) not the operating system (MacOS 7 point something) and so the initial target of my annoyance was the people who were responsible for Word. But. On the other hand, I could have chosen the "save as text" option in Word and saved all of my documents as simple telegrams, and this problem would not have arisen. Instead I had allowed myself to be seduced by all of those flashy formatting options that hadn't even existed until GUIs had come along to make them practicable. I had gotten into the habit of using them to make my documents look pretty (perhaps prettier than they deserved to look; all of the old documents on those floppies turned out to be more or less crap). Now I was paying the price for that self-indulgence. Technology had moved on and found ways to make my documents look even prettier, and the consequence of it was that all old ugly documents had ceased to exist."
and
"When my Powerbook broke my heart, and when Word stopped recognizing my old files, I jumped to Unix. The obvious alternative to MacOS would have been Windows. I didn't really have anything against Microsoft, or Windows. But it was pretty obvious, now, that old PC operating systems were overreaching, and showing the strain, and, perhaps, were best avoided until they had learned to walk and chew gum at the same time.
The changeover took place on a particular day in the summer of 1995. I had been San Francisco for a couple of weeks, using my PowerBook to work on a document. The document was too big to fit onto a single floppy, and so I hadn't made a backup since leaving home. The PowerBook crashed and wiped out the entire file.
It happened just as I was on my way out the door to visit a company called Electric Communities, which in those days was in Los Altos. I took my PowerBook with me. My friends at Electric Communities were Mac users who had all sorts of utility software for unerasing files and recovering from disk crashes, and I was certain I could get most of the file back.
As it turned out, two different Mac crash recovery utilities were unable to find any trace that my file had ever existed. It was completely and systematically wiped out. We went through that hard disk block by block and found disjointed fragments of countless old, discarded, forgotten files, but none of what I wanted. The metaphor shear was especially brutal that day. It was sort of like watching the girl you've been in love with for ten years get killed in a car wreck, and then attending her autopsy, and learning that underneath the clothes and makeup she was just flesh and blood."
Re: Always bet on text (2014)
#145Earlier 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…
That does not mean that the CAD drawing itself is text. It is an artifact, produced from text. Using your argument you could just as easily argue that all computer code is text, and I don't think that's a useful redefinition of the word "text".
Re: Always bet on text (2014)
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Still, at least it's an option to put base64 inline inside the JSON. With binary, this is not an option and must send it separately in all cases, even small binary... You can still stream the base64 separately and reference it inside the JSON somehow like an attachment. The base64 string is much more versatile.
> Still, at least it's an option to put base64 inline inside the JSON. With binary, this is not an option and must send it separately in all cases, even small binary... There's nothing special about "text" or binary here. You can absolutely put binary inside other binary; you use a symbol that doesn't appear inside the binary, much like you do for text. You use a divider, like " is for json, and a prearranged way to…
Re: Always bet on text (2014)
#147This reads like someone who got really excited about a subject but only ever learned to communicate in breathless "Ford vs. Chevy" kid-argument style.
We all like text here. Stop selling.
Edit: clarifications
Re: Always bet on text (2014)
#148Earlier 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.
Re: Always bet on text (2014)
#149gnabgib points out that this same article has been posted for comment here three other times since it was written. That said, afaict no one has commented any of these times on what I'm about to say, so hopefully this will be new. I'm a linguist, and I've worked in endangered languages and in minority languages (many of which will some day become endangered, in the sense of not having native speakers). The advantage o…
Purely anecdotal, but I hoard a lot of personal documents (shopping receipts, confirmation emails, scans etc.) and for stuff I saved only 10 years ago, the toughest to reopen are the pure text files. You rightly mention Unicode, as before that there was a jungle of formats. I have some in UTF-16, some in SJIS, a ton in EUC, other were already utf-8, many don't have a BOM. I could try each encoding and see what works…
There have been a lot of practical options around in the last three decades for using Unicode. To name just a few: Unicode is around since 1991. UTF-16 was supported in Windows NT in 1993. XML (1998) was specified based on Unicode code points. ...
Re: Always bet on text (2014)
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand, musical notation is text though so how can it be superior to itself?
I think they mean staff notation, not a textual notation like "B♭".