201–210 of 349 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please elaborate how text is most powerful (in which aspect anyway? define powerful) and most effective (surely it isn't or text wouldn't be the prime example for stuff that's good to compress).
He would have to use words for that... Could you help him showing some image of "powerful" and "effective"?
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A letter is not a picture, at least not in the way we generally talk about pictures – it can be graphically manipulated and re-imagined in almost limitless ways and degrees and still perform its function. For most things-that-we-call-pictures, if you even made a relatively small adjustment to it, it would be a different picture.
That really depends on your language system. What you say is true for alphabetic systems, but quite different for logographic (e.g. Chinese) or pictographic systems.
They have more "letters", but the point is still to unambiguously map a drawing of a character to a specific, discrete value.
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 informat…
Source code is text. Emoji are text. Some simple math expressions are text, but more complicated ones involving specialist layout rules are not. Architecture plans, no way.
> "Human rights are moral principles or norms that describe certain standards of human behaviour, and are regularly protected as legal rights in national and international law." image: https://imgur.com/a/8J6yeRe
But if you started from the image, and asked people to generate a sentence from it, you would get a lot of variation from the quoted sentence.
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_...
Sometimes it seems to mean ‘the English language’ or ‘language’ more broadly. Other times it seems to mean ‘strings of ASCII encoded Latin letters’. Sometimes it seems to mean ‘pictures of arrangements of letter like symbols’. In general it just amounts to ‘linear streams of data’.
Sure, if you define text that broadly, it covers a lot of things that are great.
But it’s a definition that’s so broad it defies its own terms. Text, defined that way, encompasses SVG files. Or even base64 encoded PNG files if you want. So that Twitter logo can be unambiguously shared through ‘text’ too. Look - here’s a tweet-sized version: https://twitter.com/bbcmicrobot/status/1237867433064464394?s...
But there’s a weird cultural bias built in to the assertion that all those things are ‘just text’. Sure, for someone who uses a US keyboard to type Latin alphabet characters left to right, base64 encoded binary, svg, or BBC BASIC, is ‘just text’. But that’s not exactly a universal perspective.
In the limit, this amounts to ‘always bet on data transmission and storage’.
A lot of the listed benefits of text are only realizable when the text is coupled with a specific ‘interpreter’ - be that an SVG renderer, a BBC micro, or a human who speaks English.
Doing stuff with text with computers is hard! Lexers, parsers and tokenizers are probably the most common sources of security bugs in history. And if the text is natural language, we still don’t have reliable computer tools for dealing with it - understanding or generating.
So I just guess I don’t really know what the point of this piece is. Data is all there is. Linear streams of data are often a thing. Because of the history of computing, western language character sets and conventions are often used to capture them in the same format as we use for written language.
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> 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!
That's a bit short-minded, don't you think? Or is this some kind of troll meme at this point? Anyway, I don't expect you to have some off-spec working TLS/TCP/IP/ARP/ETH implementation purely based on text, yet alone are connected to the internet via some text-only telegraphy station utilizing those things. Pretty sure your output device (read as: screen) has some sort of analog/digital signaling as well that's not ASCII encoded. There are sure some pesky non-text technologies involved ...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He would have to use words for that... Could you help him showing some image of "powerful" and "effective"?
Think of all the non-text technologies involved right now for me being able to read your strawman.