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Always Bet on Text (2014)

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Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#31

Post by terramex »

Ygg2 wrote: post #6
chordalkeyboard wrote: post #2

> Text is the most efficient communication technology. By orders of magnitude. This blog post is likely to take perhaps 5000 bytes of storage, and could compress down to maybe 2000; by comparison the following 20-pixel-square image of the silhouette of a tweeting bird takes 4000 bytes: Author is really excited about really old information technology. He makes some good points.

It's solid technology to be excited about. For example. Graphical programming languages are nowhere. Closest I had was either VHDL or backed by copious amounts of XML like Xtend. And both of those have a textual Component as well.

> Graphical programming languages are nowhere.

They are super popular in game development. The most popular one is Unreal Engine's "Blueprint". Unity does not include visual scripting, but there are popular plugins on Asset Store, the biggest one is PlayMaker. Unity Technologies themselves plan to release their own, in-engine visual programming tool this year.

Apart from that, visual programming is commonly used for shader programming, video compositing and AI/animations scripting [1].

I am a programmer and like many of my peers I cannot stand those systems, but designers and artists love them. They are widely used everywhere from small indie games up to AAA releases, not only for simple logic but for modelling complex behaviours and flow controls too.

https://blueprintsfromhell.tumblr.com

[1] Example of AI graph form The Division (5:34 - 6:10): https://youtu.be/fZOZ2daE-lA?t=334

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#32

Post by addicted »

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.

One can keep playing this game.

There is no such thing as pictures. It’s just photons that bounce off or are emitted by certain surfaces that fall on our eyes and are then transmitted as electric impulses to our brains which trigger synapses....it’s all just stuff firing in our brains.

It’s pretty obvious what the author of the article means by picture and texts. I don’t think there’s anyone who is not trying to be deliberately obtuse who would have a hard time figuring out what they mean by pictures and text here.

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#33

Post by rbinv »

virgilp wrote: post #8

I would like to add that text, as a thousand-years-old-technology, has always included illustration too. Even in recent/digital text, you have this bird that doesn't take 4k bytes: [edit: unfortunately hackernews doesn't display the unicode character U+1F426] Text is very powerful, but it doesn't need to always work by itself (arguably works best together with other media)

> [edit: unfortunately hackernews doesn't display the unicode character U+1F426]

That got a good chuckle out of me. It actually shows how there's not just "text".

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#34

Post by dspillett »

ALittleLight wrote: post #28
codethief wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add to that that, depending on the emoji font, the emoji will look completely different[0]. So as the sender you have no guarantee that the recipient of your message will actually interpret your emoji as you intended. It really is beyond me why the Unicode consortium thought that putting emojis in a character set would be a good idea. Sure, having a code point in your character set that represents a bird[1] makes sen…

I'm reminded of a story I heard where someone responded to news of a death in the family with what they took to be a crying face, but what the recipients took to be a crying laughing face.

Text can have problems with people guessing what things mean from the situation they first see them (where the meaning is not entirely unambiguous).

I've seen a similar story of someone thinking "lol" meant "lots of love" and used it to end messages regarding the death of a family member.

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#35

Post by dwb »

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.

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.

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#37

Post by janee »

I see text as read optimized, but write expensive and not well suited or efficient for lots of scenarios:

- wood working, absolutely horrible to work from text, which I've done.

- group ideation, as much as I love IM'ing, audio + diagrams personally feels like a more effective way of communication.

- troubleshooting, too many times I've had to text my parents how to troubleshoot their router only to end up calling them and slowly talking them through it.

These are super specific, but I'd still wager audio and video trump text in a significant number of general scenarios that require communication of some kind.

Anything that needs read optimization i.e. this is information that needs to be communicated over and over, text is better. But often that's not a requirement.

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#38

Post by loosetypes »

Context Cute, overly self congratulatory turns of word aside, this had me look up the etymology of text. I hadn’t put it together before, but woven is such a fitting root for the fabric of our thoughts made manifest.

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#39

Post by [deleted] »

Ygg2 wrote: post #6
chordalkeyboard wrote: post #2

> Text is the most efficient communication technology. By orders of magnitude. This blog post is likely to take perhaps 5000 bytes of storage, and could compress down to maybe 2000; by comparison the following 20-pixel-square image of the silhouette of a tweeting bird takes 4000 bytes: Author is really excited about really old information technology. He makes some good points.

It's solid technology to be excited about. For example. Graphical programming languages are nowhere. Closest I had was either VHDL or backed by copious amounts of XML like Xtend. And both of those have a textual Component as well.

[deleted]

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#40

Post by dspillett »

necovek wrote: post #22
hrishi wrote: post #14

Agreed, with a counterpoint: Text is efficient at transmitting data. If I want to describe a concept or an event, text is king. However, media is more efficient at transmitting sentiment. It will take you far more than 4000 bytes of text to transmit the feeling or emotion an icon can convey, when used well. This is why we've (as a species) started using emojis, and why media leans to emotion and sentiment while text…

Emojis evolved from simple text like ":)" or ":/". And for the new set of emojis, half the time I am not sure what the sentiment is being expressed!

Even back when I started, around the ascendency of the WWW when Usenet was still ABigThing™ (though after the start of the Eternal September, I'm not quite that long in the tooth!) there was already confusion with the simple text smilies.

Ignoring the arguments of whether to include the nose (the original form was :-) which I much prefer) on the basic examples, people introduced new combinations faster than I cared to pay attention to so knowing what they meant was not always easy.

It ended up that there were whole dictionary like lists of them in some Usenet groups' FAQ documents.

As soon as you have more than a few of any symbolic representation (text smilies, emoji, gifs/memes[†], ...), it becomes dynamic grammar in its own right and away from the core few it is a mess of people not understanding what you mean either because they don't get your reference or you have used a reference incorrectly (or, if incorrectly is the wrong term, in a manner differing significantly from its common use).

[†] it is less of an issue with meme images/animations as they usually have a text portion making them far less ambiguous, but the issue is still there overall

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