Does anyone have much of a feel for geometry and spatial reasoning in text? I've been trying to think about Euclid's elements - I think you can express some of it with just text, but most of it really only makes sense once you see a picture. Spatial reasoning with 2/3d objects being rotated/flipped/etc seems much harder to me. Any hints/references/papers would be welcome. I'm not an academic, I just get intrigued by ideas now and again!
Always bet on text (2014)
171–180 of 187 posts
Re: Always bet on text (2014)
#172gnabgib 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…
BOM is normally used with UTF-16, not with UTF-8 (both of which, along with UTF-32, are encodings of Unicode).
I've worked with lots of minority languages in academic situations, but I've never run into anything that couldn't be encoded in Unicode. There's a procedure for adding characters (or blocks of characters) for characters or character sets that aren't already included. There are fewer and fewer of those. The main requirement is documentation.
Re: Always bet on text (2014)
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
BOM is normally used with UTF-16, not with UTF-8 (both of which, along with UTF-32, are encodings of Unicode). I've worked with lots of minority languages in academic situations, but I've never run into anything that couldn't be encoded in Unicode. There's a procedure for adding characters (or blocks of characters) for characters or character sets that aren't already included. There are fewer and fewer of those. The…
Thanks!
On adding new characters to Unicode, as for any commitee there will be rejection and cases where going through the whole process is cumbersome/not worth it.
It's more commonly discussed in the CJK circles, it reminded me of the Wikipedia entry (unsurprisingly with no English equivalent)
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:%E8%A1%A8%E7%A4%BA%E...
> minority languages
More archaic that minority, but one language I had in mind was one using color coded strings and knots representation. There are latin alphabet mappings, so as long as we trust the translation record keeping per se works in Unicode, but if one wanted to keep the exact original writing it would obviously not work out in plain text. I imagined it's not an isolated instance, but I'm also way out of my depth on this one
Re: Always bet on text (2014)
#174This reminds me of No boiler plate's video on plain text. I have to agree that the diff-ability and support of version control are one of the best features of plain text.
Re: Always bet on text (2014)
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is that not text? Surely if we consider Arabic to be text (lots of ligatures, grouping, right-to-left notation) then music notes must be, too?
"I cannot read A, and I cannot read B. Therefore, A and B must be identical".
They didn't say that, maybe they can read both Arabic and musical notation.
Re: Always bet on text (2014)
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I cannot read A, and I cannot read B. Therefore, A and B must be identical".
They didn't say that, maybe they can read both Arabic and musical notation.
The replied to comment seemed skeptical to treat musical notation as text. But any reasonable definition of "text" should include musical notation.
Otherwise it would be hard to include other types of obvious text, including completely mainstream ones such as Arabic. They are all strings of symbols intended for humans to read.
Feel free to disagree but I don't understand the argument here, if there is any. Lots of people read both Arabic and musical notation, it's a completely normal thing to do.
Re: Always bet on text (2014)
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
They didn't say that, maybe they can read both Arabic and musical notation.
The replied to comment seemed skeptical to treat musical notation as text. But any reasonable definition of "text" should include musical notation. Otherwise it would be hard to include other types of obvious text, including completely mainstream ones such as Arabic. They are all strings of symbols intended for humans to read. Feel free to disagree but I don't understand the argument here, if there is any. Lots of pe…
I agree with you, I am disagreeing with the one that replied to you.
Re: Always bet on text (2014)
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
They didn't say that, maybe they can read both Arabic and musical notation.
The replied to comment seemed skeptical to treat musical notation as text. But any reasonable definition of "text" should include musical notation. Otherwise it would be hard to include other types of obvious text, including completely mainstream ones such as Arabic. They are all strings of symbols intended for humans to read. Feel free to disagree but I don't understand the argument here, if there is any. Lots of pe…
any reasonable definition of "text" should include musical notation
Then many a dictionary must be unreasonable [0]:
text
1. A discourse or composition on which a note or commentary is written;
the original words of an author, in distinction from a paraphrase, annotation, or commentary.
6. That part of a document (printed or electronic) comprising the words [..]
7. Any communication composed of words
n 1. the words of something written
[0] e.g. http://dict.org/bin/Dict?Form=Dict2&Database=*&Query=text
Re: Always bet on text (2014)
#179I agree 99%. The 1% where something else is better? Youtube videos that show you how to access hidden fasteners on things you want to take apart. Not that I can't get absolutely anything open, but sometimes it's nice to be able to do so with minimal damage.
I wonder if some day there will be a video codec that is essentially a standard distribution of a very precise and extremely fast text-to-video model (like SmartTurboDiffusion-2027 or something). Because surely there are limits to text, but even the example you gave does not seem to me to be beyond the reach of a text description, given a certain level of precision and capability in the model. And we now have faster…
Maybe?
To the extent that that could work, I would imagine that I, personally, would be happy reading the textual description instead of watching the video, and for me, we'd now be even closer to text wins 100% of the time.
In other words, it's not that you _can't_ give excellent descriptions that would obviate the need for video, it's just that people _don't_, even, or perhaps even especially, when they think they do.
If someone writes text that creates a video that shows exactly how to get something apart, then _presumably_ they also watch the video to make sure it works.
So the video becomes a debugging tool for their instructions. Perhaps not as good as watching 100 people do it, but maybe even better in some ways.
So the video codec you describe could be a useful tool to help create more programmers.
https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/08/25/a-very-comprehensi...
Re: Always bet on text (2014)
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
The replied to comment seemed skeptical to treat musical notation as text. But any reasonable definition of "text" should include musical notation. Otherwise it would be hard to include other types of obvious text, including completely mainstream ones such as Arabic. They are all strings of symbols intended for humans to read. Feel free to disagree but I don't understand the argument here, if there is any. Lots of pe…
any reasonable definition of "text" should include musical notation Then many a dictionary must be unreasonable [0]: text 1. A discourse or composition on which a note or commentary is written; the original words of an author, in distinction from a paraphrase, annotation, or commentary. 6. That part of a document (printed or electronic) comprising the words [..] 7. Any communication composed of words n 1. the words o…
Anything that can be turned into a string programmatically is by definition text.