> "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
Always Bet on Text (2014)
81–90 of 349 posts
Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)
#82Earlier 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.
I agree, but it makes me sad that we've come to see XML as primarily tech for serialization of component models, service payloads, and configs; that is, all the things that XML should not be used for. When actually SGML from which it's derived is all about text editing and using minimal markup to create implicit textual hierarchy.
The funny thing about XML is that it was explicitly conceived to solve problems of representing, translating and transmitting component models and configuration.
The sad thing is that it was abused, horribly, in the early naughts when people tried to take it too far. On the one hand it was rushed out without the proper tooling and you had humans typing raw xml without the right amount of support from intelligent autocomplete coming from schema-aware editors. On the other, you had systems that tried to force XML into roles that are better suited for a programming language (I'm looking at you, ANT). And worst of all, it became the centerpiece of a bunch of tech that people really hated-- remember all that crazy WS-* shit, and "SOAP" (which could have stood for "Complex Object Access Protocol". All this wasn't the "fault" of XML which, IMHO, has rock-solid core concepts. XML got an undeserved bad rep from association to the failure of the things it was used with.
XML still survives, though. The tooling is good. If you type XAML or HTML in the right editors, it's serves the purpose competently and without drama. People aren't going crazy finding new XML based applications anymore. It's just doing it's job. I prefer pure XML for config files even now-- of course I never expect users to see it or type it. XML, at the end of the day, is intended to be manipulated by tools.
I wish I could say the same for yaml and to some extent json. I feel like these things are about to be abused like XML was.
Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)
#83Text is not the oldest - nor easiest to use -, text is a heavy abstraction born somewhat recently in human history. The oldest and easiest is the visual in 3D, then comes the visual in 2D. Those exist since we have eyes. Our brain have dedicated and sizeable infrastructure for that. Children can communicate in 3D (gestures, posture, expressions, objects) and in 2D drawings before learning textural communication with…
Text, in the end, is not more than a 2D agreed representation. It's drawing + rules.
Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)
#84I 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…
Agree. With code in VR it is possible to combine 3D and text for a greater result. The 3D space can be used for architectural abstraction that can be spatially memorized, and the text can be used for detail.
Self-promoting here: my project primitive.io makes it possible to collaboratively review code in VR. We use our tool daily to explain code faster and with greater information retention.
Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)
#85Text is not the oldest - nor easiest to use -, text is a heavy abstraction born somewhat recently in human history. The oldest and easiest is the visual in 3D, then comes the visual in 2D. Those exist since we have eyes. Our brain have dedicated and sizeable infrastructure for that. Children can communicate in 3D (gestures, posture, expressions, objects) and in 2D drawings before learning textural communication with…
That's true. But the oldest isn't necessarily the best; civilization happened at roughly the same time text started becoming widespread, and that doesn't seem like a coincidence. It's also interesting that 3D is so hard to translate into a usable context in computing. VR has felt like a second-class citizen compared to a mouse and keyboard in terms of usability. Not that the two are mutually exclusive – it was nice h…
Please also see primitive.io which is a VR browser for GitHub.
Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)
#86> text is the most powerful, useful, effective communication technology ever, period. On the other hand, many (technical/mathematical) concepts are more effectively explained using diagrams/images. E.g. the very visual approach taken in Mathologer videos [1] makes difficult, esoteric, mathematical ideas accessible to a wider audience. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJ8pnCO0nTY
Also where does text end and diagrams/images start? E.g where does musical notation stand? For an untrained eye it is just a bunch of lines, dots and squiggles but others will read it like text and much more efficiently so than if it were written words. Similarly the example about the Wikipedia text of human rights being supposedly impossible to convey via image. But what does the text convey to you if you don’t spea…
Also, what does it convey if translated into (say) Egyptian hieroglyphs, if you're an ancient Egyptian who can read hieroglyphs...
Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)
#87Agreed, 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!
Additionally, before emojis, we were saying things like :shrug: in IMs and we conveyed the same thing. It was a specific variation of text, which I still imagine emojis to be. I don't think the shrug emoji is more efficient at conveying sentiment than :shrug:
Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)
#88The question is whether these advantages are because text is a better communication medium, or because of the limitations of our technology?
Take using a computer to type a word versus draw a picture: Effectively everyone who uses a computer can type a word, but I'd bet less than 10% could draw a circle.
But put a piece of paper in front of someone and effectively everyone can draw a circle.
This points to there being a limitation in the technology for working with other forms of media, not the effectiveness of the communication medium itself.
This isn't to say that text isn't also a better communication medium, but it is to say, until the technology has improved for communicating with other media, it's difficult to compare without basing the decision on the limitations of the technology.
In other words, most of the perceived advantages of text are really advantages of text being easier to represent digitally (or generally reproduced, e.g., printing press), not advantages of text as a communication medium itself.
Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)
#89Why 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…
I don't think people are afraid of moving forward. Plenty of alternatives have been proposed, and text remains as effective as ever.
The problem with punch cards is that they weren't effective: they were what technology permitted back then. But technology permits many other things besides text nowadays, and text still remains an amazing and effective piece of "technology", in the broadest sense of the term.
Are we communicating, right now, via animation or fancy PowerPoint slides?
Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)
#90Text has the benefit of extensibility and loose datatyping - you can encode all sorts of stuff as text, and with a bit of care, extend the "protocol" (human or machine) in such a way that receivers (current or future) can decode it (with a high degree of precision), even if you hadn't previously agreed on the protocol.
You can of course do this with multimedia or any other encoding, but text is pretty great at on-the-fly extensibility.