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Always Bet on Text (2014)

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Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#191

Post by serverholic »

wycy wrote: post #170
VoodooJuJu wrote: post #157

The gist of what he's saying is pretty sound, but he should have gone deeper. For a deeper argument on the importance of "text", the written word, exposition - I recommend reading Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death . People here are suggesting that images/video are superior, but there's the cliche, "a picture is worth a thousand words". Well, which thousand words? Do they convey the same thousand words to you as th…

> Words leave nothing to the imagination. Words leave plenty to the imagination too. Interpreting what authors might've meant in books is all we ever did in English classes in school. Interpreting what the founding fathers might've meant in the Constitution is also a fierce public debate.

This is the problem with these constant black and white debates on hacker news. They leave no room for subtly and you end up with people saying dumb shit like "Words leave nothing to the imagination."

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#192

Post by numlock86 »

teknopaul wrote: post #180
numlock86 wrote: post #93

Apples and oranges. The post states that the used Twitter logo PNG is 4000 bytes, while it's only 723. Try to express that logo in text, English language and in all its details with 723 characters, so you are able to reproduce a pixel perfect representation. Not even possible with 4000 characters anyway. Don't bother. Text will be ambiguous, unless you describe every single detail. If the target is to communicate "Tw…

re:Try to express that logo in text "Twitter" carries the same weight

Tell me in 723 characters or less what this "Twitter" looks like so I can make an exact copy of it. Text is ambiguous.

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#193

Post by aembleton »

numlock86 wrote: post #93

Apples and oranges. The post states that the used Twitter logo PNG is 4000 bytes, while it's only 723. Try to express that logo in text, English language and in all its details with 723 characters, so you are able to reproduce a pixel perfect representation. Not even possible with 4000 characters anyway. Don't bother. Text will be ambiguous, unless you describe every single detail. If the target is to communicate "Tw…

The Twitter logo in SVG format is only 687 bytes and can be as large as you like: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9f/Twitter_bird_...

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#194

Post by jimbokun »

sinenomine wrote: post #186

There is a well known fact in the field of psychometrics: human general intelligence g can be modeled as two relatively independent sub-factors: verbal intelligence and spatial intelligence. Other sub-factors, if any, are way more speculative. As a human being, it is quite possible to have verbal intelligence higher than spatial intelligence, and indeed I know some people with verbal tilt and some other people with s…

> The best and brightest in this game of words become lawyers and career politicians, movers and shakers of our world; but are they truly our best, and do they truly imagine the referents of their symbols ?

What would a high spacial intelligence, low verbal intelligence individual thrive as a President, CEO, or other type of leader?

Those jobs revolve around effective communication, and I believe that will always favor high verbal intelligence individuals.

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#195

Post by orra »

aembleton wrote: post #190
falcolas wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The post states that the used Twitter logo PNG is 4000 bytes, while it's only 723. The article was written in 2014. Worth remembering when nitpicking the text of an article.

Do PNG files reduce in size over time?

Not by themselves, but maybe they didn't use an optimiser before. Or used a far better optimiser now. Or tweaked the logo, and now it's more amenable.to optimisation.

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#196

Post by soapdog »

It really depends on what you define as text. Does it involve special notations such as math? Can it involve diagrams?

If all you mean is prose, as writing sentences in whatever native language you speak, then I must respectfully disagree with the OP.

Yes, text is marvelous. I'm an author of multiple books and have a passion for the written word, but there are things for which there are better ways to convey information.

A simple example is electronics. A circuit diagram is not text. It is a graphical representation using a standard notation. It is much easier to understand than spending paragraphs describing which component should connect to which other component.

Unless you decide that "text" should include such special representations. Then the question becomes: where do you draw the line between what you consider text and what is no longer text. In an isometric exploded view of some mechanical device text? Are architecture plans text? Because all those representations are better than the written word to convey their meaning...

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#197

Post by eimrine »

So happy to be on a website w/o any pictures or videos or bright emojis. To tell the truth I have some problems of communication in messengers where everyone considers cool to send animated sticker instead of words.

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#198

Post by mrec »

aembleton wrote: post #193
numlock86 wrote: post #93

Apples and oranges. The post states that the used Twitter logo PNG is 4000 bytes, while it's only 723. Try to express that logo in text, English language and in all its details with 723 characters, so you are able to reproduce a pixel perfect representation. Not even possible with 4000 characters anyway. Don't bother. Text will be ambiguous, unless you describe every single detail. If the target is to communicate "Tw…

The Twitter logo in SVG format is only 687 bytes and can be as large as you like: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9f/Twitter_bird_...

My SVG is extremely rusty, but it doesn't look as if that

     xmlns:v="https://vecta.io/nano"
serves any purpose besides advertising.

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#199

Post by drewzero1 »

numlock86 wrote: post #185
fuzzfactor wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Nothing of this is actually true, period. Could you kindly verify that by repeating your post using something other than what amounts to a text file? If not maybe that's an even truer seal of irony.

> Could you kindly verify that by repeating your post using something other than what amounts to a text file? Could you kindly present me your comment without using all these inferior non-text technologies involved on my side to read it off my screen? That's the irony, if anything.

That sounds like a you problem. This site is one of a dwindling number that work flawlessly with a text-only browser, so if you view it in Links or similar (as I am right now) you can have a pure text experience without any of those pesky non-text technologies getting in the way!

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#200

Post by jimbokun »

ElectricMind wrote: post #30

Actually a single letter is "a picture". So Text is a collection of small pictures. There is no such thing as "Text"- we give a meaning. Otherwise it is bunch of weird arrows and curves - pictures.

> Actually a single letter is "a picture".

It certainly is not.

Think about character recognition software. The point is to take a picture, and map it to a discrete value. The pictures that correspond to "a", for example, have a lot of variation. But the point of writing is to remove the ambiguity inherent in drawing something, and map it to one of a small set of discrete values.

So even before binary encoding systems, or even the printing press, text was a technology for conveying information with less ambiguity than drawing.

One could argue speech is similar. There are a lot of variations of sound corresponding to a phoneme, but language reduces a continuous stream of sound to a discrete sequence of phonemes in our brain, which are then disambiguated into words and sentences conveying concepts.

The whole continuous -> discrete mapping underlies both spoken language and text.

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