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Always bet on text (2014)

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Re: Always bet on text (2014)

#41

Post by malloryerik »

textnotalwabest wrote: post #18

Text is not the best medium for the following situations: - I want to learn how to climb rock walls - I want to learn how to throw a baseball - I want to learn how to do public speaking - I want to learn how to play piano - I want to make a fire in the woods - I want to understand the emotional impact of war - I want to be involved in my child's life

I agree with all of these except the emotional impact of war where though slower a novel or memoir might work best. Think "All Quiet on the Western Front." At the same time we do want images of the war and time for grounding.

Re: Always bet on text (2014)

#42

Post by seveibar »

This is sort of the premise of all of us electronics-as-code startups. We think that a text-based medium for the representation of circuits is a necessity for AI to be able to create electronics. You can't skip this step and generate schematic images or something. You have to have a human-readable (which also means AI-compatible) text medium. Another confusion: KiCad files are represented in text, so shouldn't AI be able to generate them? No- AI has similar levels of spatial understanding to a human reading these text files. You can't have a ton of XY coordinates or other non-human-friendly components of the text files. Everything will be text-based and human-readable, at least at the first layer of AI-generation for serious applications

Re: Always bet on text (2014)

#43

Post by Dwedit »

Saying that a 20x20 image of a Twitter logo is 4000 bytes is just so wrong.

The image is of a monochrome logo with anti-aliased edges. Due to being a simple filled geometric shape, it could compress well with RLE, ZIP compression, or even predictors. It could even be represented as vector drawing commands (LineTo, CurveTo, etc...).

In a 1-bit-per-pixel format, a 20x20 image ends up as 400 bits (50 bytes).

Re: Always bet on text (2014)

#45

Post by bigstrat2003 »

Ferret7446 wrote: post #31

Text is just bytes, and bytes are just text. I assume this is talking about human readable ASCII specifically. I think the obsession with text comes down to two factors: conflating binary data with closed standards and poor tooling support. Text implies a baseline level of acceptable mediocrity for both. Consider a CSV file will millions of base64 encoded columns and no column labels. That would really not be any fri…

> Text is just bytes, and bytes are just text. I assume this is talking about human readable ASCII specifically.

Text is human readable writing (not necessarily ASCII). It is most certainly not just any old bytes the way you are saying.

Re: Always bet on text (2014)

#46

Post by tomjakubowski »

smj-edison wrote: post #12

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I agree: text is infinitely versatile, indexable, durable, etc. But, after discovering Bret Victor's work[1], and thinking about how I learned piano, I've also started to see a lot of the limitations of text. When I learned piano, I always had a live feedback loop: play a note, and hear how it sounds, and every week I had a teacher coach me. This is a completely diff…

Take a problem like untangling a pile of cords. Writing out how to do that in text would be a drag, and reading those directions probably wouldn't be helpful either. But a kid can learn how to untangle just by observation.

Physical intuition is an enormous part of our intelligence, and is hard to convey in text: you could read millions of words about how to ride a bike, and you would learn nothing compared to spending a few hours trying it out and falling over until it clicks.

Re: Always bet on text (2014)

#47

Post by tomjakubowski »

dkarl wrote: post #22
smj-edison wrote: post #12

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I agree: text is infinitely versatile, indexable, durable, etc. But, after discovering Bret Victor's work[1], and thinking about how I learned piano, I've also started to see a lot of the limitations of text. When I learned piano, I always had a live feedback loop: play a note, and hear how it sounds, and every week I had a teacher coach me. This is a completely diff…

I think the downside, at least near-term, or maybe challenge would be the better word, is that anything richer than text requires a lot more engineering to make it useful. B♭ is text. Most of the applications on your computer, including but not limited to your browser, know how to render B♭ and C♯, and your brain does the rest. Bret Victor's work involves a ton of really challenging heavy lifting. You walk away from…

> B♭ is text.

Yes, but musical notation is far superior to text for conveying the information needed to play a song.

Re: Always bet on text (2014)

#48

Post by stephc_int13 »

Text can be surprisingly immersive and rich, often surpassing the most complex VR experiences.

It is amazing what we can do with a few strings of symbols, thanks to the fact that we all learn to decode them almost for free.

The oldest and most important technology indeed.

Re: Always bet on text (2014)

#49

Post by ivanjermakov »

Another fascinating property of text (as compared to video), it's less temporal-sensitive. It means that it's much easier to skim through and skip sections, kind of like teleporting through time it took to write such text.

Re: Always bet on text (2014)

#50

Post by beej71 »

socketcluster wrote: post #9

I've also become something of a text maximalist. It is the natural meeting point in human-machine communication. The optimal balance of efficiency, flexibility and transparency. You can store everything as a string; base64 for binary, JSON for data, HTML for layout, CSS for styling, SQL for queries... Nothing gets closer to the mythical silver-bullet that developers have been chasing since the birth of the industry.…

I've moved away from DOCish or PDF for storage to text (usually markdown) with Makefiles to build with Typst or whatever. Grep works, git likes it, and I can easily extract it to other formats.

My old 1995 MS thesis was written in Lotus Word Pro and the last I looked, there was nothing to read it. (I could try Wine, perhaps. Or I could quickly OCR it from paper.) Anyway, I wish it were plain text!

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