This is interesting for a lot of reasons. It’s almost like a compression scheme for text as opposed to an image. The question is, is it lossless or lossy? What is the Shannon entropy for this set of symbols?
Dotsies (2012)
21–30 of 204 posts
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#22This is interesting for a lot of reasons. It’s almost like a compression scheme for text as opposed to an image. The question is, is it lossless or lossy? What is the Shannon entropy for this set of symbols?
It's definitely lossless (it encodes leter-for-letter). However, it has much higher entropy than the latin alphabet.
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#23This looks like the message-from-the-future font on Travellers.
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#24you could "solve" the same "problem" by making font smaller. but its annoying to read. oh whoops, thats what actually matters.
this page is like the purest expression a cerebral cortex thinking its the only thing that exists. i like it though, because it accidentally makes some good points about the human condition. one is that top down designed shit like this (and esperanto) often sucks incredibly hard, and i think the reason is that the "problems" they fix aren't problems at all.
another is that its hilarious to claim to solve a problem by asking someone to first relearn to read. "just spend 1000 hours learning this, then it will be easy!".
another is how easily people seem to oversimplify what is happening when you do something. someone recently told me that an upright bass is just a "dumb guitar" because its tuned the same and has fewer strings. sure, if you reduce the playing of an instrument to the production of a certain pitch, and that alone (even then... no, but i digress...) but of course thats really dumb. as is the case with "dotsies". you've decided that our visual software is agnostic, and we can rework the written word to whatever suits your optimization criteria, which seem to be that you can fit more letters in a small space, and that words have a shape-like gestalt.
even if it were true that these two criteria are paramount, making a thin font of english letters would work way better. but i see no evidence or justification for those criteria being important. its not that you cant improve on things, but how do you know whats really difficult about reading? did you do research? did you study the literature? seems like there are lots of more obvious problems you could try to solve. this is all getting a little ranty, and i risk sounding stupid if it turns out you are coming from a place of knowledge. so if you are, id be curious to know (and why isn't that on the page?)
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#25[flagged]
How easy it would be to "read" Braille visually, like Dotsies? I imagine they are optimized for different uses, no?
Sighted braille teachers can read braille visually, even upside down, so they can read what's coming out of the student's brailler in real time. I had at least one teacher who could do that.
But of course, that's a specialized skill. To judge for yourself how conducive braille is to visual reading, when presented as black on white (or the opposite) instead of raised dots on a page, you can grab a braille font here:
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#26Only hackers would try to reimplement the alphabet. I can't decide whether I should be proud or embarrassed.
Definitely proud. Why embarrassed?
because it can come off as an incredible arrogance borne out of incredible ignorance. it really depends on how the idea is presented though.
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#27Only hackers would try to reimplement the alphabet. I can't decide whether I should be proud or embarrassed.
Definitely proud. Why embarrassed?
Because the hubris of tech people to think something like "hey, trillions of humans have collectively decided over a few thousand years that the latin alphabet hits a pretty good sweet spot in human communication. I bet they didn't consider how readable it is, though. I can do better than all of them," is wearing thin.
This came up in the Robinhood checking thread a few days ago. "Do you really think that you're going to outsmart a financial institution that employs people like you (but smarter) because you happen to be better at math than your facebook friends who studied polysci?" The hubris of people in tech who think they're the only people who notice things is getting really tiresome.
Having said that, I think that's a slippery slope of a stance to take, because it stifles creativity and novel solutions, which history shows often come up when they're not looked for. But I think that's kind of the sentiment of embarrassment they were expressing: "groan, another techie is going to disrupt something that doesn't need disrupting."
Edit: To the people responding to this (and downvoting): this person asked for an explanation for why someone would feel embarrassment at this. I was trying to give what I thought was a reasonable explanation. I don't actually feel embarrassed by this, I was just trying to understand and articulate someone else's feelings on this. I'm sorry if the explanation didn't do it for you.
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#28One advantage of regular letters compared to this is that it's pretty easy to tell that even a fairly mangled A is still an A; a word written in dotsies loses a lot of its legibility as soon as it's not displayed in fairly large pixels across a very clear background. Viewing things at an angle? While it moves by? On a dirty or wet piece of paper? Forget about it. It's a super fun idea, though. I would 100% put this i…
Dotsies is even worse if your eyes are some variant of broken. Nearsighted, cataracts, crosseyed, etc.
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#29I wonder if typography can exist within a writing system like this?
Just wait for the serif version
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#30This is interesting for a lot of reasons. It’s almost like a compression scheme for text as opposed to an image. The question is, is it lossless or lossy? What is the Shannon entropy for this set of symbols?
It's definitely lossless (it encodes leter-for-letter). However, it has much higher entropy than the latin alphabet.
> higher entropy
How so? The entropy looks (dangerously) low to me.