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Always Bet on Text (2014)

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Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#51

Post by ElectricMind »

addicted wrote: post #32
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 d…

Yes the game. I understand what you mean.

But my intention was question validity of series of claims the author making using full loaded abstract words - " Text is everything" " text is the most powerful, useful, effective communication" . Of course the author should expect to be challenged on meaning of words.

Let's say you looking at some painting painted by a person who wanted "paint" the emotion inside his brain. Not sure you can completely paint the emotions as picture. But author claims is text can completely express the painting or the emotion - that is not true. Can someone write words to describe me - how lemon taste? And I get same feeling on my tongue after reading "text" ?

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#52

Post by KineticLensman »

terramex wrote: post #31
Ygg2 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I am a programmer and like many of my peers I cannot stand those systems

I am also a programmer but I love my graphical shader editor in Octane [0]! It's the perfect interface for defining a graphical data flow. For example, I can implement really complex spatial conditionals by creating a merge node controlled by a greyscale bitmap. E.g. to create a gold thread on a silk material, I can merge existing gold and silk shaders through a bitmap of a lace pattern, itself edited in Photoshop. Just by connecting some nodes.

[0] https://home.otoy.com/render/octane-render/

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#54

Post by pw6hv »

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…

Could you clarify what you mean with media?

According to my understanding a medium is a mean of communication, thus including text. OTOH it seams from your message that these are two complementary objects. Is my understanding correct?

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#55

Post by tedk-42 »

msiyer wrote: post #17

If we agree that a picture is worth 1000 words, then... Given the current state of information technology, I agree that we are most efficient at processing text. However, that can change pretty quickly. Storage mechanisms similar to DNA can make the difference between text and multimedia irrelevant. It will happen because nature already does that.

Pictures are worth a 1000 words, but that comparison holds when a human with context is interpreting the picture.

Our eyes have the ability to input so much information which is what makes pictures valuable.

If you simply need to transmit small/simple data then text is the way to go.

I get what the author is trying to communicate, but it seems a bit arrogant

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#56

Post by kreeben »

cycomanic wrote: post #41

I think the post conflates several quite unrelated concepts under the label text. Also what does he mean by text and information? For example he mentioned the "optical telegraph", which is a semaphore system which used a system of messages which AFAIK were not alphabetic text. Another example if we compare logographic language systems (e.g. Chinese characters, hieroglyphs ...) to alphabetic systems. I guess we can sa…

I agree that the author has mislabeled "text".

What are characters if not pictures? What is text if not a sequence of pictures? What's a picture if not a depiction of a concept?

In a bag-of-words type of model, I see no difference between a word and a painting, no difference between the body of work of van Gogh and the body of work of Kafka. They both use multiple sets of concepts to compose new sets of concepts.

Pictures and text are both programming languages of concepts.

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#57

Post by bmn__ »

rbinv wrote: post #33
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".

It is just text (using Unicode nomenclature). The makers of the HN software deliberately broke the functionality in an obnoxious fashion.

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#58

Post by uryga »

codethief wrote: post #24
necovek wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

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…

> It really is beyond me why the Unicode consortium thought that putting emojis in a character set would be a good idea.

iirc some japanese character sets already had them (introduced by telecoms for text messaging?), so originally they were included for compatibility [i.e. to fulfill Unicode's goal of being able to encode everything]. then people discovered the emoji keyboard on iphones and it got popular

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#59

Post by bmn__ »

codethief wrote: post #24
necovek wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

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…

> why the Unicode consortium thought that putting emojis in a character set would be a good idea.

That puts blame on the wrong organisation. The consortium is to the most part only standardising existing character repertoires. Emojis were popularised by a mobile phone equipment manufacturer as a marketing stunt. http://enwp.org/Emoji#History

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#60

Post by bmitc »

Why are people so afraid of moving forward?

Imagine saying “always bet on punch cards”. Look at any whiteboard in any company or school. It’s filled with text and diagrams. Then watch how someone interacts with a PowerPoint or whiteboard. There is animation and dimensional extension. The way people think and organize and communicate thoughts is multifaceted and multidimensional. It only makes sense that we should be able to work and program in the same way.

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