[HN Gopher] Always Bet on Text
___________________________________________________________________
Always Bet on Text
Author : asyrafql
Score : 484 points
Date : 2021-02-17 08:23 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (graydon2.dreamwidth.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (graydon2.dreamwidth.org)
| montebicyclelo wrote:
| > 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
| smoe wrote:
| 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 speak English?
| shash wrote:
| Also, what does it convey if translated into (say) Egyptian
| hieroglyphs, if you're an ancient Egyptian who can read
| hieroglyphs...
| mannykannot wrote:
| Hieroglyph writers have to resort to tricks like punning to
| express ideas that are not simple pictures. There's a
| reason why written language became more abstract.
| DanBC wrote:
| Yes. See also Florence Nightingale using rose diagrams to
| illustrate preventable excess deaths to infection during war.
|
| https://www.florence-nightingale.co.uk/coxcomb-diagram-1858/
| hrishi wrote:
| 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 leans to data.
|
| This is an exaggeration, life is almost always a grey area - but
| I hope you get my point.
| nicbou wrote:
| > media is more efficient at transmitting sentiment
|
| I don't agree with that. A photo doesn't contain much
| information about the emotional state of the photographer,
| unlike a few lines in a diary. My travel diaries are much
| richer in sentiment than my travel photos.
|
| To me, emojis are a form of data compression. Common concepts
| are compressed into symbols: happy, sad, car, eggplant with 3
| drops. Emojis are macros. That works as long as you exchange
| common concepts ("I feel sick"), but it falls flat if you need
| to venture beyond that ("My back is itchy"). You couldn't write
| a country's constitution with emojis. At least you shouldn't.
|
| Likewise, a picture only shows what's visible. Travel photos
| don't capture the smell, the temperature, or how you feel after
| staying up all night with a sick stomach. A few words in a
| diary will.
| pw6hv wrote:
| 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?
| necovek wrote:
| 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!
| codethief wrote:
| 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 sense but I really hate that font
| designers now have control over the way I get to express my
| emotions and how others perceive them.
|
| [0]: Sure, ":)" and ":/" also depend on the font but _much_
| less.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26164409
| ajconway wrote:
| Emoji are modern hieroglyphs. It's just an additional means
| of conveying meaning.
|
| > font designers now have control over the way I get to
| express my emotions
|
| This could have been a major issue, but media platforms
| recognized it and have provided their own pictograms for
| years, mostly compatible with each other.
| LocalH wrote:
| They have a valid point, however. What is now widely
| considered to be a "water gun" emoji started out as an
| actual gun, but Apple decided at one point that they were
| going to be "progressive" and changed it to a water gun.
| To me, this upends the entire idea of emoji having a
| stable definition.
| ajconway wrote:
| Words don't have stable definitions either. My point was
| that there is nothing special about emojis any more than
| there is about Chinese characters or Egyptian
| hieroglyphs.
| codethief wrote:
| Sure, but in the case of words, both sender and recipient
| at least agree about the content of the message, even if
| their interpretation is different.
|
| In the case of emojis, both the sender's and the
| recipient's _software_ agree on the message content but
| the actual persons no longer do because the content is
| suddenly being displayed very differently.
| uryga wrote:
| > 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
| bmn__ wrote:
| > 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
| ALittleLight wrote:
| 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.
| dspillett wrote:
| 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.
| codethief wrote:
| The thing is, with emojis the differences introduced by
| font designers can be very subtle. In the GP's case, the
| laughing emoji seemed so much out of place and violated
| social protocol so heavily that I assume the confusion
| was probably cleared up later on.
|
| But what about cases where a font designer changes, say,
| an emoji face with a light, content smile to a shy smile?
| This has the chance to undermine the entire emotional
| content of a message, without sender and recipient ever
| noticing.
|
| For a more concrete example, have a look at
| https://emojipedia.org/beaming-face-with-smiling-eyes/ .
| Is it just me who thinks that the glyphs by Apple and
| WhatsApp show a beaming face with a somewhat sly touch
| whereas most others simply display happiness?
| dspillett wrote:
| The Softbank one looks like someone grinding their teeth
| in frustration to me.
| dspillett wrote:
| Even back when I started, around the ascendency of the WWW
| when Usenet was still ABigThing(tm) (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
| bmitc wrote:
| That's part of the fun of emojis. It's also a counterpoint to
| the original post. There is a lot of information in a
| pictorial emoji, so much so that it can be bent and
| reimagined to many contexts.
| mod wrote:
| 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:
| jameshart wrote:
| "Text is efficient at transmitting data. If I want to describe
| a concept or an event, text is king."
|
| Really? Why are video games so visual, in that case? To update
| you on the situation your character is in, inform you where the
| enemies are, give you feedback on your current health and
| objectives... most video games use a rich graphical system of
| colors and symbols overlaid over a high resolution image of the
| game world...
|
| If text is more efficient at communicating 'events', why aren't
| there 'action text adventures'?
| Karunamon wrote:
| Because games are optimized for immersion and being roughly
| analogous to reality, not for efficiency of describing
| events. That would be the purpose of a news article. Pictures
| are included, but text is the focus.
| phailhaus wrote:
| Hot take: emojis are a type of text, for this very reason. The
| entire unicode standard is what humanity has settled on as
| "text".
| asah wrote:
| Text 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.
| joppy wrote:
| > "Pictures may be worth a thousand words, when there's a picture
| to match what you're trying to say."
|
| The author is saying that because pictures cannot easily capture
| arbitrary sentences, text is better. But the same applies with
| the roles reversed: text cannot capture arbitrary pictures!
| Instead of saying that one is better than the other outright,
| let's move to media (for reading, composing, and programming)
| where the two can be intermingled appropriately, with as little
| friction as possible. We certainly have the technology for it...
| sn41 wrote:
| The article is historically wrong. The oldest known cave murals
| etc. are 44000 years old [1], while cuneiform, heiroglyphics,
| Sumerian, Mesopotamian etc. are only about 3000-4000 years old
| [2]. A strange beautiful example of complex information presented
| visually which was in use until recently, are the Polynesian
| navigation charts [3]. Our primary method of communcation is
| probably visual and/or auditory.
|
| The prominence and seeming economy of text in digital
| communications is probably because data is presented and
| transmitted as a one dimensional sequence of bits.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_painting
|
| [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing#Cuneiform_s...
|
| [3] https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-
| history/pacifi...
| jakubp wrote:
| How much exact meaning can you infer from the murals?
|
| Text is using the visual channel to transmit what language can
| convey, and language can convey generally almost everything we
| try express (likely more accurately and succinctly than
| drawings, gestures or other sounds).
| numlock86 wrote:
| 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 "Twitter logo"
| then sure, just write that. But if you compare 723 bytes of
| "data" with just a few specific information pieces contained
| within that data ... sure, text might be better.
|
| > text is the most powerful, useful, effective communication
| technology ever, period.
|
| Nothing of this is actually true, period.
|
| > I do not post to this blog with the intention of entertaining
| Hacker News Debate Club and I frequently disable comments or
| friend-lock posts in order to avoid this sort of nonsense. I'm
| not interested in further discussion.
|
| Ah yes, the true seal of quality. (sarcasm)
| falcolas wrote:
| > The post states that the used Twitter logo PNG is 4000 bytes,
| while it's only 723.
|
| The article was written in 2014. Worth remembering when
| nitpicking the _text_ of an article.
| aembleton wrote:
| Do PNG files reduce in size over time?
| DarkWiiPlayer wrote:
| I don't know, but if they do, they seem to have a half-life
| of about 2.431184 years. That's interesting news.
| orra wrote:
| Not by themselves, but maybe they didn't use an optimiser
| before. Or used a far better optimiser now. Or tweaked the
| logo, and now it's more amenable.to optimisation.
| kyle-rb wrote:
| The author says in the post that it's a 20x20 image.
| That's only 400 pixels, and 4 bytes per pixel (RGBA)
| would only make it 1600 bytes with _no compression at
| all_.
| orra wrote:
| Then that's quite some impressive, uh, decompression.
| dmingod666 wrote:
| well, svg is text. The jpg/png icon will pixelate when zoomed,
| but svg will retain its quality no matter how much you zoom
| in... :)
| numlock86 wrote:
| > svg is text
|
| Actually I thought about talking about SVG, which would be
| the natural result of taking a text representation of shapes
| ... and then use abbreviations until you are at some expert
| level language (SVG for example), which would then break the
| argument again. You might as well use some binary
| representation then, because most people don't speak fluent
| SVG.
| DarkWiiPlayer wrote:
| Most people don't speak fluid tok pisin either; does that
| make it less of a language?
|
| Also, you'd be surprised by the amount of people that write
| SVG by hand, which I doubt you'll see with PNG anytime
| soon.
| fotad wrote:
| Different SVG engines may show different result, that may not
| acceptable for logo.
| mcherm wrote:
| Can you elaborate?
|
| Outside of bugs, I was under the impression that SVG was
| actually pretty well specified and that (except perhaps for
| pathological examples created intentionally) the rendering
| of an SVG was quite consistent.
|
| What am I not aware of?
| dkersten wrote:
| > svg is text.
|
| If SVG counts as text, then text is just binary. The encoding
| is not important, the final result (an image you see on a
| screen, in the case of SVG) is.
|
| Besides, try reading out the actual SVG source text to
| someone and see if they can tell you what the image you are
| describing is. I dunno about you, but I find thinking in
| terms of paths and strokes to be rather meaningless.
|
| Or another example, do you consider Wavefront .obj files
| text? They're ascii files, but I don't consider a series of
| "v 0.123 0.234 0.345 1.0" as something I would _ever_ read in
| text form and have even the slightest idea of what the final
| 3D model actually is. I have to view it visually. Its
| "technically" text, but its no more useful as text (for a
| human text reader) than if it were binary data. Encoding
| isn't what makes text what it is, so non-text things encoded
| as text aren't _really_ text.
| Valgrim wrote:
| SVG is definitely human-readable. It's just drawing
| instructions, draw a line from there to there, then another
| one from there to there, etc. I can read it to someone over
| the phone with a pen and graph paper, and he can draw it
| exactly like it should be represented, with zero loss of
| quality. It's no different than someone looking at list of
| cash transactions. Numbers are text too.
|
| Of course, to extract meaning from this text (what is it?)
| requires drawing it. But you don't have to, you can just
| name it. You could just say "I'm sending you the stylised
| image of a blue bird, with the instructions on how to draw
| it using the SVG text standard". Or just, more clearly
| even, the following string of characters:
| "twitter_logo.svg"
| danShumway wrote:
| > SVG is definitely human-readable.
|
| No. A path tag with a 500-600 element `d` attribute is
| not human readable. It is not human understandable or
| parsable until it's converted into a visual format.
|
| Ask a blind person whether they think SVG charts are
| accessible on their own without any additional markup or
| alternate explanations or controls. Ask them if they can
| read SVG line charts by stepping through the path
| property. Figuring out how to communicate complicated
| graphs/charts with lots of data without relying on any
| visual medium is a complicated problem that we are still
| trying to solve.
|
| > You could just say "I'm sending you the stylised image
| of a blue bird, with the instructions on how to draw it
| using the SVG text standard". Or just, more clearly even,
| the following string of characters: "twitter_logo.svg"
|
| By that logic, a PNG is also text, because I can do the
| same thing. All images can have alt tags. Even Javascript
| Canvas can have fallback text for when it doesn't render.
| My Twitter png can be transmitted as "twitter_logo.png".
|
| What do people mean when they say text is preferable if
| not that the textual representation is more useful than
| the image representation? If you didn't feel like the SVG
| format was adding any useful information in its rendered
| form, you wouldn't waste the time sending information to
| render it. You would just send the alt text.
|
| > I can read it to someone over the phone with a pen and
| graph paper, and he can draw it exactly like it should be
| represented, with zero loss of quality
|
| Right, and when that person draws it, they will have
| converted it from a textual format into a visual one. I
| can send you the individual pixels of a small raster
| image over the wire in a textual format and you can sit
| down on a piece of grid paper and ink in squares until
| you come up with the final image. At which point you will
| no longer be looking at a piece of text.
|
| To argue that the fact that we can encode a format over a
| UTF-8 stream or physically replicate your computer's
| drawing algorithm makes a thing text seems to me to be a
| misreading of the original article's point. The original
| article is not complimentary of Twitter's SVG, it
| explicitly brings it up as an example of a non-text
| medium.
|
| If you expand the definition of text to include basically
| any storeable information that can be theoretically
| encoded into UTF-8, then sure, I would agree that text in
| that system is tremendously powerful. But that's not a
| useful category to talk about, it's so broad that it
| becomes meaningless.
| dmingod666 wrote:
| Is math that you not understand, really text?
|
| Is human comprehensibility a pre-requisive to be called
| text? What if there was a written language no one
| understood, would that be text? What if someone broke the
| code for it? Would it suddenly become text?
| criddell wrote:
| If SVG is text, then so is StarWars.mpg.b64.
| wvenable wrote:
| Some SVG is very readable and easy to modify. I'm no
| designer but I've opened up SVG files and made
| modifications to get what I want (remove elements, change
| colors, etc).
|
| Not all SVG authoring tools make SVG's easy to read/modify.
| Tools in the 90's used to the same thing with HTML. Are you
| going to argue HTML isn't text?
| aembleton wrote:
| 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_...
| DarkWiiPlayer wrote:
| SVG is XML, which I'd say counts as text.
| duckerude wrote:
| I don't think it counts for the purposes of this blog post.
|
| You can't translate the Wikipedia quote in the article into
| an SVG except by just rendering the bare text.
|
| Checking programmatically that text is about "bird" or
| "Twitter" is very easy. Checking that an SVG is about
| "bird" or "Twitter" is very hard.
|
| It's not even efficient. It conveys the same message as the
| word "Twitter" in a hundred times the size. And it wouldn't
| be less efficient if it were a binary format.
|
| It's _maybe_ more suitable for carving into granite than a
| binary format, but you 'd be better off carving the logo
| itself.
| JoyrexJ9 wrote:
| How far do you take that line of reasoning? Base64 is text?
| imhoguy wrote:
| 00101010010100110101001... is text too, but I agree SVG
| is just machine description, human sees the rendered
| result in that context.
| [deleted]
| whateveracct wrote:
| it's not consumed as text
| mrec wrote:
| My SVG is extremely rusty, but it doesn't look as if that
| xmlns:v="https://vecta.io/nano"
|
| serves any purpose besides advertising.
| boogies wrote:
| It's probably not the only removable part, the icon can be
| 414 bytes: https://github.com/edent/SuperTinyIcons#how-
| small
| admax88q wrote:
| That's a biased comparison. Obviously an image is better at
| communicating an image. By setting the goalposts at "pixel
| perfect recreation" you've already selected a winner.
| [deleted]
| teknopaul wrote:
| re:Try to express that logo in text
|
| "Twitter"
|
| carries the same weight
| numlock86 wrote:
| Tell me in 723 characters or less what this "Twitter" looks
| like so I can make an exact copy of it. Text is ambiguous.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Images are the best way to describe images. Many ideas are
| better expressed in text than anything else we have.
| [deleted]
| doublerabbit wrote:
| HN doesn't render ASCII or ANSI art correctly however both
| methods can serve as representation of Twitter in text and
| graphic less then <700 characters. ,~
| ('v)__ (/ (``/ \__>' hjw ^^
| Twitter
|
| Bird kindly borrowed from:
| https://www.asciiart.eu/animals/birds-land
| numlock86 wrote:
| That does not even remotely represent the Twitter logo,
| though. Shape and color are completely lost information,
| which are essentially the key properties that make the
| Twitter logo the Twitter logo.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Valid point.
| danShumway wrote:
| This isn't text, you're using ASCII symbols as pixels in
| a grid to represent a raster image. This is literally
| just a raster image on an unconventional canvas.
|
| If you treat a uniwidth character grid of characters as
| pixels, you have not converted an image into text, you
| have encoded text into an image. It's no different than
| using extended characters and font colors in a fixed
| width terminal window to make terminal art.
|
| The fact that you use UTF-8 to encode something does not
| mean it will magically work in a screen reader, or that
| it will retain any of the advantages of pure text. I can
| encode any image or video file in a UTF-8 format and send
| it to you. Down this path lies calling _everything_ text.
|
| But if your "text" stops being readable if I disable
| monospace, or it stops working if I change the font, or
| it stops working if I change line wrapping, or it stops
| being communicable as soon as I try to read it out loud
| -- then it's not pure text. Using a UTF-8 character as a
| pixel does not change the fact that you're drawing an
| image out of pixels.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Interesting hypothesis. Thanks.
| [deleted]
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| >Nothing of this is actually true, period.
|
| Could you kindly verify that by repeating your post using
| something other than what amounts to a text file?
|
| If not maybe that's an even truer seal of irony.
| hardlianotion wrote:
| I read from parent's point that what you are trying to
| communicate matters. I take from that, that text works
| sometimes, and sometimes something else is a better form of
| communication.
| numlock86 wrote:
| > 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.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| 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!
| numlock86 wrote:
| > the "text-only browser"-argument
|
| 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 ...
| drewzero1 wrote:
| ~I'm not sure where you're going with this or how
| seriously you're taking it~, but if I have to I will dig
| out a couple of DECwriters and we can continue this
| discussion as a pure ASCII text conversation. (Just as
| soon as I find a null modem cable long enough to reach
| wherever you are.)
|
| Edit: upon some rereading, I get that there was maybe
| more sarcasm in gp comment than I perceived at the time.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| Wasn't that why they called it _hyper-text_?
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| In the USA the USPS usually does not fail to deliver a text
| document, no superior nor inferior technology required.
|
| And they still reach places having no other form of
| comunication.
|
| If it was not a post card, you would need to open the
| envelope please.
|
| If you would like to read that kind of text off your
| screen, you might just need to scan it yourself or find
| someone who can.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| What does the display (or TTS) technology used to read it
| matter in this discussion?
|
| Obviously you need ways to display text in the physical
| world, be it a screen or a piece of handwritten paper. It's
| still text.
| numlock86 wrote:
| > What does the display (or TTS) technology used to read
| it matter in this discussion?
|
| > Obviously you need ways to display text in the physical
| world, be it a screen or a piece of handwritten paper.
| It's still text.
|
| And what about transfer? People keep claiming text is
| superior for transferring information, yet the majority
| my network stack or anything involved with the transport
| isn't text based.
|
| The premise of the whole "text is the best technology"
| argument is based on cherry picking and strawman
| arguments anyway.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| >The premise of the whole "text is the best technology"
| argument is based on cherry picking
|
| I agree with that so naturally cherry-pick the thing
| expected to be the most universal and the last one
| standing.
|
| Aren't everyone else's network stack usually sending
| packets of text when it's a plain text file? Even if it
| is hypertext.
| willtim wrote:
| Plain text is simple, elegant and has open-standards - it
| traces its origins back to telegraph codes that we have been
| using for hundreds of years - and still forms the basis of most
| of the internet now. So I am inclined to agree with the
| statement "text is the most powerful, useful, effective
| communication technology ever, period".
| numlock86 wrote:
| By that same argument/logic you might as well argue cave
| paintings are superior over text. It traces back probably
| over 50000 years and is still universal today and doesn't
| even require understanding of a specific language - and it
| still forms the basis of most of society now. (art, painting,
| photographs, graffiti, ...)
| SubjectToChange wrote:
| Your reply is in text. Would you care to link a set of
| paintings to express your argument instead?
| [deleted]
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| That's the point: take an arbitrary criterion, end up
| with an arbitrary answer.
| mattnewton wrote:
| It's also in ascii, is that superior to all other
| character sets, or an accident of history?
| numlock86 wrote:
| 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).
| woliveirajr wrote:
| He would have to use words for that... Could you help him
| showing some image of "powerful" and "effective"?
| Koshkin wrote:
| Qiang Da De and You Xiao De , respectively? (I can see
| some powerful person in the middle of the first image.)
| msla wrote:
| Right after you provide an image that's as effective as
| the text of the First Amendment.
| numlock86 wrote:
| Think of all the non-text technologies involved right now
| for me being able to read your strawman.
| jshevek wrote:
| Can you explain the strawman you believe the parent is
| presenting? What is the original argument, and what is
| the misrepresentation?
| willtim wrote:
| I am not the source of the original statement, but my own
| interpretation of "powerful" aligns with simplicity and
| flexibility. Plain text has only slightly more structure
| than a stream of bytes, meaning it retains a lot of
| simplicity and flexibility. Yes plain text can be
| inefficient and is overused (a proprietary unpublished
| wire-format does not need to use JSON). However, 50 years
| from now, the only data I feel comfortable knowing I'll be
| able to read is plain text (and possibly also JPEG and a
| few other well-specified and simple binary formats). Many
| binary formats are effectively defined by large complex and
| transient code bases that target particular tool chains and
| APIs. A new binary format needs to justify itself, less so
| plain text.
| [deleted]
| d0mine wrote:
| Compare a book (a few megs) with a picture of the same size.
| What do you think can communicate more info? Do you have a
| single counter-example?
| axaxs wrote:
| There are single pictures you couldn't describe with
| terabytes of text(to a human, that is). Imagine for example
| trying to describe the milky way and northern lights. Yeah
| you could convey their looks in words but nobody is going to
| end up with the correct visual no matter how hard you try.
| Now add in other things, like emotion on people's faces. Some
| things just aren't possible to describe in full.
| d0mine wrote:
| you somehow managed to describe the pictures without
| showing them
| andagainagain wrote:
| The beauty of both mediums is in the compression.
|
| Text is that it's highly compressible while also being highly
| compressed (and lossy) info already. To make text we have to
| filter our own ideas, and then to interpret text we have to
| add a bunch of info back from context.
|
| Pictures have the same tricks up their sleeve. Bitmaps are
| great but inefficient. If we put it through a lossy
| compression, it's a lot better. If we make it semi
| procedurally with a vector file, it's even better. How far
| can we take a compressed procedural file though? Well..
| .kkreiger was about 97 KB, and stores a full 3d shooter. For
| a meg, you could store 100 such full games.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger
|
| Text isn't best in every way. With clever design we can use
| all the same principles that make text efficient, and make
| other types of data more efficient. It is a very good default
| though.
| jameshart wrote:
| This article annoys me whenever it reappears because it just
| isn't clear on what it means by 'text'.
|
| 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.
| submeta wrote:
| I love Emacs and plain text. But claiming that text is everything
| is ignoring the power of images. The brain can immediately grasp
| the meaning of an image, visuals are immediately understood, some
| of the most remarkable things human beings have created is art,
| that is visual imagery.
|
| Just because our current technology is best able to handle and
| deal with text says nothing about the power of sound, images,
| sketches, drawings and handwritten notes.
| frenzyhome wrote:
| Best Diapers for Toddlers with Sensitive Skin in 2021
| https://frenzyhome.com/best-diapers-for-toddlers-with-sensit...
| djhaskin987 wrote:
| Obligatory reference to the Unix Koan "Master Foo Discourses on
| the Graphical User Interface", after reading this post:
|
| > Master Foo said nothing, but pointed at the moon. A nearby dog
| began to bark at the master's hand.
|
| > "I don't understand you!" said the programmer.
|
| http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/gui-programmer....
| msiyer wrote:
| 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.
| tedk-42 wrote:
| 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
| bawolff wrote:
| Storage hasnt really been the bottleneck for a long time. A
| terabyte stores a lot of pictures.
| msiyer wrote:
| I am talking about efficient use of available space. A
| terabyte may store a lot of pictures, but if we can achieve
| the data density of DNA, we may be able to process (store,
| transmit, transform...) far more amount of data far more
| quickly. Then text vs multimedia will become irrelevant.
| hit8run wrote:
| Yet Instagram is flourishing.
| spicyramen wrote:
| It depends, memes, short clips are super effective too.
| bscphil wrote:
| (2014)
| keiferski wrote:
| Photography is about 200 years old. Film (moving images) is about
| 100 years old. The ability to easy create video is about 20 years
| old.
|
| Compare all of that to text, which is at least thousands of years
| old. And then compare text to speech, which is hundreds of
| thousands of years old. Had a way to record and replay audio been
| developed before writing, it's likely that you'd be listening to
| this comment right now, not reading it.
|
| I'd say we're at the extreme beginning of a highly audiovisual
| age. A millennium or two from now, writing "dead" words might
| seem as ancient to our descendants as foot messengers appear to
| us: useful for particular purposes but mostly irrelevant.
|
| On a related note, the concept of logocentrism seems relevant
| here:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logocentrism
| aftbit wrote:
| As usual, context matters. If you're trying to convey complex
| thoughts about abstract matters, then language is the way to do
| it. If you are trying to convey deep emotional states, then a
| photo or video is probably better. You cannot convert the 1st
| amendment into photos, and you cannot convert the Mona Lisa smile
| into words.
|
| Just try to use words to describe either of these photos and see
| how they fall short:
|
| https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2015-10/19/1...
|
| https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2015-10/19/1...
|
| Between recorded voice and written text, I personally prefer
| written language. I like the ability to consume at my own pace,
| go back and re-read tricky bits, and easily search or quote. Plus
| it's much easier to use TTS to convert text to speech than the
| other way around (at the moment). Maybe someday technology will
| remove this boundary but currently that's my stance.
| airstrike wrote:
| Sure, and the author recognizes that. FTA: _" Pictures may be
| worth a thousand words, when there's a picture to match what
| you're trying to say."_
| BeetleB wrote:
| Strong disagree on photos. I find photos to be an _excellent_
| way to convey emotions that didn 't exist. Also very common to
| have multiple people conclude very different things from a
| photo. Very misleading.
|
| I'll also add that well written prose has moved me (and many
| others) emotionally in more powerful ways than any photo ever
| has.
|
| Your Great Depression era photo conveys emotions only because
| of the context around it - context I know primarily because of
| _text_. If I showed this photo to a relative of mine half way
| across the world, they would merely see an ordinary woman with
| two sleepy kids.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| >Also very common to have multiple people conclude very
| different things from a photo.
|
| But that's true for text, too. The US just had a very major
| politicized event where two sides had two wildly different
| conclusions over what one man's words meant. And there's a
| grand legal tradition of taking one specific document and
| interpreting what its words mean and applying it to a
| plethora of situations. There's plenty of people that come to
| wildly different conclusions over what certain amendments do
| or do not mean.
|
| Hell, look at literary analysis! You can give people a book
| like 1984, and some people will say in all confidence that it
| is explicitly anti-socialism, when the author said the
| literal opposite. And that's something with a supposedly
| clear ideological message, to say nothing of works with less
| concrete themes.
| BeetleB wrote:
| The ideological message in 1984 is anything but clear when
| you compare it to what the message would look like had
| George Orwell merely written a _nonfiction_ treatise,
| without resorting to any literary devices.
|
| If you know nothing of Orwell or the historical importance
| of 1984 and you read the book, it certainly wouldn't be
| clear that Orwell was trying to make a point, let alone
| what that point is. Some people would guess it does, others
| would say "It's just a story." Orwell intentionally
| obfuscated his point in choosing the mode of delivery
| (fiction). Indeed, this intentional obfuscation/ambiguity
| by fiction writers is what keeps literature professors
| employed.
|
| The difference is that you can read a work like 1984 and at
| least _know_ it is fiction, and that the message, if any,
| is hidden. Whereas you cannot look at a photo and easily
| tell if it 's documenting what you think it is, no matter
| how much the photographer tries. At best you can see the
| shapes, and to a much lesser extent, things like
| colors/contrast. What the photographer was trying to
| _convey_ is much more open to interpretation than 1984 is.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| Sorry, when I said "clear ideological point" I meant
| "clear that some ideological point was being made", not
| that it was clear what the message was. I thought I made
| that clear by immediately pointing out that people
| disagree on what the point of the story is.
|
| The fact that I'm even having to make this clarification
| is kind of the point of my argument. And that you can
| even argue that it wouldn't be clear that 1984 is trying
| to make a point _is evidence that text is not inherently
| clear_.
|
| Also, I don't know how you can claim that it's easier to
| tell what text is documenting than a picture. It's much
| easier to lie with text.
| chordalkeyboard wrote:
| > 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: <twitter logo>
|
| Author is really excited about really old information technology.
| He makes some good points.
| cpach wrote:
| The Latin script originated in the 7th century BC. Is that old?
| Maybe. But not so old compared to how long our species has
| existed.
| chordalkeyboard wrote:
| Writing itself is a little older, but not much. But writing
| is one of the first information technologies (that we have
| records of ;).
| Ygg2 wrote:
| 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.
| zokier wrote:
| Most programming languages would be better characterized as
| tree structures than text, being only obscured by unclear
| (but no less rigid) syntax.
| goatlover wrote:
| So Lisp? You still type it in as text.
| user-the-name wrote:
| Nearly every language will be processed as an AST, not as
| text.
|
| Text is just a serialisation format for the AST. For some
| reason we still insist on editing the serialisation
| format instead of the actual data representation.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| 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.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| 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.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 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.
|
| HTML isn't XML, though XML was inspired by HTML and HTML
| has an XML serialization.
|
| IIRC, some or all of the versions of XAML aren't,
| strictly, XML either, merely XML-derivedl0
| crispyambulance wrote:
| It's close enough. There are only a limited number
| differences that exist for good reasons.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| > _XML was inspired by HTML_
|
| No. HTML used to be "an application" of SGML. Meaning
| HTML brings a profile for SGML features (formerly, an
| SGML declaration determining things such as allowing tag
| inference and other minimization) plus a DTD grammar.
| Though HTML has also quirks for script/style elements,
| and URLs.
|
| OTOH, XML, like SGML, is a markup meta-language and a
| proper subset of SGML (also with a fixed SGML declaration
| disallowing tag inference and almost all other
| minimization features). XML was introduced by W3C (the
| SGML "extended review board") as the markup meta-language
| for new vocabularies on the web going forward around 1997
| to eventually replace HTML. While that hasn't happened,
| SVG and MathML have been specified using XML.
|
| Details on (my pages) below.
|
| [1]: http://sgmljs.net/blog/blog1701.html (the "TALK"
| slides)
|
| [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy-b4jeJSas
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > > XML was inspired by HTML
|
| > No. HTML used to be "an application" of SGML.
|
| The "No" is wrong. It's true that HTML used to be an SGML
| application, but that doesn't contradict that XML was
| inspired by HTML.
|
| Specifically:
|
| (1) First, HTML was an SGML application.
|
| (2) Then the Web took over, making HTML a _very popular_
| SGML application.
|
| (3) Then, inspired by the design of HTML, but seeking
| broader application without the complexity of
| unconstrained SGML, XML was created.
| mdiesel wrote:
| Text based programming is inherently 1d, so isn't well suited
| for the highly parallelised computing we have today. 2d
| programming would make much more sense.
|
| The issues with graphical languages arethings like being much
| harder diff/merge and version control generally, being
| dependent on IDEs, and severely limited by mouse usage. I
| don't see any of those issues as being impossible to
| overcome, but instead graphical programming is held back by
| always being implemented as a DSL with no attempt to meet the
| requirements of a general purpose language.
| snidane wrote:
| Because graphical programming are just textual programming
| languages which are just overly complex (xml) and coming with
| attached visualization engine for its components. They are
| used only for limited domains such as composing some data
| flows or video node editors, etc. because visualization of
| anything more sophisticated would make one's head explode.
| You could just as well visualize components of AST of Python
| for very little benefit.
|
| The only upside of graphical languages is that because of
| their limited capabilities, they focus on only one
| abstraction layer and that allows you to visualize that layer
| quite cleanly.
|
| You can't program anything more sophisticated or step outside
| of the only abstracrion layer you are allowed to program in.
| Eg. you can't write your custom for loops by dragging and
| dropping boxes and you also cannot orchestrate dags or box
| diagrams using dragging other boxes around.
| uryga wrote:
| > Because graphical programming are just textual
| programming languages which are just overly complex (xml)
|
| i don't think that's fair. i mean, on a computer, you
| _have_ to serialize everything into sequences of bytes. you
| could also encode images into XML: <pixel
| r="255" g="80" b="110" /> <pixel r="11" g="0" b="203"
| /> ...
|
| but i wouldn't say that makes them "textual".
| [deleted]
| xorcist wrote:
| > Graphical programming languages are nowhere
|
| Not nowhere. Labview is/was pretty successful. But not
| generally successful, no.
| smoe wrote:
| Graphical programming languages are fairly popular for
| "scripting" and signal processing in various domains like
| visual effects, sound design, game dev, etc.
|
| Sure you wouldn't want to implement the underlying systems in
| them, but I do think they have their place and are often
| undervalued by developers.
| user-the-name wrote:
| If you think graphical programming languages are nowhere,
| that just means you do not have a very broad exposure to
| programming.
|
| As was already pointed out, graphical languages are massive
| in game design. They are also used in audio processing, in
| scientific and engineering software through labView, and in
| various other places.
|
| They are very popular in fields where we want to open up
| programming to more people than those who call themselves
| "programmers".
| terramex wrote:
| > 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
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > 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/
| naringas wrote:
| the phonetic alphabet is a brilliant invention. made by thousands
| of people over thousands of years.
|
| the least studied 'character' of this alphabet is the most
| imporant, the most critical character in any phonetic alphabet is
| the blank space.
| withoutitphoneticwritingsdoesnotmakesasmuchsesnse.
| dalbasal wrote:
| Case in point: text messaging. Quoting the Spolsky ('Not Just
| Usability', 2004) speaking about "social user interfaces."
|
| _Many humans are less inhibited when they're typing than when
| they are speaking face-to-face. Teenagers are less shy. With
| cellphone text messages, they're more likely to ask each other
| out on dates. That genre of software was so successful socially
| that it's radically improving millions of people's love lives (or
| at least their social calendars). Even though text messaging has
| a ghastly user interface, it became extremely popular with the
| kids. The joke of it is that there's a much better user interface
| built into every cellphone for human to human communication: this
| clever thing called "phone calls."_
|
| It's not just dates. It's "How ru?" & "running 3m late" and such.
| This has advanced to where text messaging is now a distinct
| written dialect, unintelligible to someone from 1993. Meanwhile,
| voice messages and such are more peripheral... even though they
| now work through the same UIs and we all have earpieces in our
| ears anyway. Text _is_ powerful.
|
| That said, text is not always the most powerful media.
| Photos/selfies and such have become a major 1-to-1 communication
| medium too. I often find that a phone conversation way more
| efficient than an email chain.
|
| I also think there are categories of writing that shouldn't be.
| "Number articles" where an article is describing a company's
| financial's, for example. A lot of newspapers try to describe a
| table in essay form. The table would be better. That is still
| text though, in the sense that this article uses the term.
|
| Choosing the most powerful medium or submedium is crucially
| important.
| jbullock35 wrote:
| > Many humans are less inhibited when they're typing than when
| they are speaking face-to-face.
|
| Spolsky was right about this when he wrote that passage in
| 2004.
|
| We should take seriously the idea that the lesser inhibition of
| textual communication has been a drawback on net, at least over
| the last 17 years.
| dalbasal wrote:
| It has been a factor, certainly. Probably both good and bad.
| Spolsky was a pioneer in his concepts of "social user
| interfaces," and that really showed when he did
| stackoverflow.
|
| Lowering inhibitions is a broad statement. You _can_ get more
| detailed. Inhibition is multifaceted, lots of flavours. We
| can be less inhibited about sending a quick "I love you,"
| less inhibited about arguing, being mean, etc.
|
| Over the last 17 years, all this stuff has experienced a
| massive multiplier effect. Both the positives and the
| negatives are multiplied and as culture grows around the
| technology everything gets more complex.
| [deleted]
| jameshart wrote:
| There's a real ' _ceci n 'est pas une pipe_' treachery-of-images
| philosophical trap here, of course.
|
| If text's so darn great, after all, _why do you need to draw a
| picture of it before I can understand it?_
| dxiao wrote:
| Text and more broadly natural language is actually a stunningly
| low-bandwidth form of communication. The reason it works so well
| despite being low-bandwidth is that we humans share an incredible
| amount of shared experience and common knowledge, and so the
| limited amount of information in text can refer to a much wider
| set of knowledge and assumptions and our brains are able to make
| inferences and use context in a remarkable way to fill in the
| blanks.
|
| To take an analogy, think of writing text as analogous to
| compressing data using a Huffman code. Our ideas correspond to
| the initial uncompressed data, natural language text corresponds
| to compressions of those source data, while our brains correspond
| to the Huffman tree that tells you how to decompress. With our
| brains/context we can recover the initial ideas, just like with
| the Huffman tree we can recover the uncompressed data. Without
| the Huffman tree, the compressed data are gibberish.
|
| On the one hand this means that text is really powerful as the
| author says; we can store an incredible amount of information in
| a small amount space, and can reconstruct the source idea the
| text represents efficiently (if with some amount of ambiguity and
| error).
|
| On the other hand text is very far from universal. Anyone who
| sees the Twitter logo sees the exact same thing (interpreting it
| as a bird, of course, requires the prior knowledge of what a bird
| is and looks like). However, anyone who sees a piece of text not
| only needs to understand the language it's written in, but also
| all of the ideas that it refers to. That's why we still have many
| examples of languages and texts that are undecipherable: we've
| lost the context they were originally written in. Even Egyptian
| hieroglyphics were undecipherable until the 1800s when people
| used the Rosetta stone to provide context to decipher it.
|
| Text has further issues as well, chief among them its ambiguity.
| Not only is it easy to under-specify things in text, but it's
| also possible for the same piece of text to mean different things
| at different times and places.
|
| As a culture these issues may be strengths; poetry and literature
| derive strength from this openness to interpretation, and many
| would argue so does law where statutes written centuries ago can
| be adapted to our time. But from a purely data storage and
| transmission perspective, these are clear weaknesses.
| OhHiMarkos wrote:
| I think text is a powerful mean to express ideas, but pictures
| are also. And it comes down to how people think: in text or in
| pictures?
|
| I don't know much about it, but there in a talk, Jordan Peterson
| addressed that there are people who can think in text, in
| pictures or even both. And that trait says a lot about ones
| character.
|
| Interesting stuff
| smusamashah wrote:
| This discussion right here is all text. Imagine if it was
| pictures instead. Imagine representing any of the comments in
| form of a picture. Won't be one picture representing a 1000
| words. May be the another truth is that "a word is worth a 1000
| pictures".
| hliyan wrote:
| What I took away from this is: using combinations of a limited
| set of symbols to convey meaning is durable (as society advances
| or retreats and technology changes). This makes sense because
| human thinking, for the most part, seems to be symbolic (i.e.
| using a smaller, simpler thing to represent a larger more complex
| thing). Text is just one such form.
|
| Drawings, sculptures, JPG files, videos etc. are more precise and
| are better at conveying a specific object or event, but not
| necessarily its meaning.
|
| If I remember correctly, Neal Stephenson's _Anathem_ deals with
| some of these themes.
| tetek wrote:
| The first comment is interesting:
|
| "Send me a link to a news story that turns out to be a video, or
| an audio file, and I'll close it unconsumed: I haven't got that
| kind of time. Send me a transcript: I'll finish reading in half
| the time it would take me to passively sit there while it played,
| and I'll more clearly remember it."
|
| The author is ok with sitting and staring at the article because
| it's faster. What he misses is that it forces you to actually be
| in a position / context where you can read from the screen.
|
| Personally I have been giving a lot of though about balancing how
| I consume content. Text vs audio. Walking / exercising or
| whatever instead of reading.
|
| I don't believe we should optimise on "time to consume" but
| rather "healthiness of consume".
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| >Personally I have been giving a lot of though about balancing
| how I consume content.
|
| Depending on the content I think text can still be a pretty
| good bet. Using a screen reader or assistive features on
| devices can allow you to have an article written in text read
| aloud to you. I've seen lots of setups too where people will
| save articles and have them processed to create audio files
| that they listen to on their runs or whatever.
| tetek wrote:
| I agree. Text-to-speech falls into my category of audio, as
| it frees your eyes.
|
| Actually I've wrote about couple days ago:
| https://audiobased.app/articles/screen-time-and-
| headphones-t...
|
| btw. I would be happy to learn what setups have you seen
| fudged71 wrote:
| The balanced information diet is interesting.
|
| It's frustrating that although so much more content is publicly
| accessible for free today, I find on the whole that information
| density has decreased, probably due to advertising as
| monetization.
|
| I prefer text because I can skim to the important parts and
| jump through links. Audio and Video need better methods for
| this.
|
| If we could summarize information better, in text, audio,
| video, etc. I think the internet would be more useful and
| people would be able to communicate more effectively. We need
| publicly accessible channels of higher information density.
| soapdog wrote:
| 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 information.
|
| A simple example is electronics. A circuit diagram is not text.
| It is a graphical representation using a standard notation. It is
| much easier to understand than spending paragraphs describing
| which component should connect to which other component.
|
| Unless you decide that "text" should include such special
| representations. Then the question becomes: where do you draw the
| line between what you consider text and what is no longer text.
| In an isometric exploded view of some mechanical device text? Are
| architecture plans text? Because all those representations are
| better than the written word to convey their meaning...
| smoe wrote:
| Even if you include things like circuit diagrams as text I
| don't agree that you should always bet on text. Personally I
| think you should always pick text as a default, unless you have
| good reasons to chose something else and use text to elaborate
| on it.
|
| Couple of examples:
|
| - For a musician to convey a musical idea, the arguably most
| straight forward and effective way to do so is just to
| play/sing/record it. Any other means like musical notation,
| textual description, midi etc. require a lot of additional
| knowledge and work on both ends of the communication and come
| with their own drawbacks.
|
| - The Wikipedia text about human rights in the article is a
| great example when written text is better than an image. But
| say I want to describe what the grand canyon looks like.
| Personally, I don't have the writing skills to really do it
| justice. On the other hand my phone has a camera so I can snap
| a couple of pictures that will get the other person a much
| better idea of how it is. In this case text is useful for
| additional information not visible in the image, like why the
| color of the rocks is how they are.
|
| - If I'm living together with someone and want to discuss how
| to pain the walls, a pantone color swatch is going to be much
| more useful than textual description of the colors. Text is
| useful here after the decision to pass on the color code to the
| contractor.
|
| - I reckon for most people it easier to follow instructions on
| how to cut up a chicken when they are in form of a video or
| image slide show over just written words.
|
| I don't think the problem is whether text is better or not, but
| that often the choice of medium is not based on what makes most
| sense for the use case, but other considerations like what will
| yield better conversion numbers.
| mantap wrote:
| I would draw the line like this. Text is anything you can
| represent using Unicode.
|
| 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.
| eat_veggies wrote:
| That's a reasonable but exactly backwards way of looking at
| it. Indeed, Unicode captures a wide range of what we consider
| text, but text is not Unicode. There are languages with
| symbols that Unicode can't represent but they are still text
| -- to claim otherwise is to erase them.
|
| Something closer to a definition of text is parts of their
| _criteria_ for encoding symbols [1] but even that is
| imperfect.
|
| [1] https://www.unicode.org/pending/symbol-guidelines.html
| duckerude wrote:
| Unicode is not quite the right place for the line, I think.
| Cypro-Minoan is text (but not currently part of unicode).
| ASCII art is not text.
|
| Linearity is part of it. Source code and emoji and simple
| math expressions can be seen as a linear stream of
| "characters" (defined loosely), even on a fundamental level.
| An architectural plan could be transliterated into a linear
| form, but that would be a transformation.
|
| Of course then you need to explain why audio doesn't count as
| text. Discreteness? Ease of faithful reproduction?
| pestatije wrote:
| Completely fails to mention speech.
|
| And from the claims it makes ("text is the oldest") it seems
| either forgot about it, or is not even aware such thing exists.
| the_af wrote:
| Speech is not a communication "technology"; unlike writing, it
| didn't have to be "discovered".
| cjohnson318 wrote:
| I think the one weakness of text is context. In 2,000 years, if
| someone finds an inscription reading "Thanks Obama", what will
| they make of it? They'll might know that Obama was a president of
| a country. Without context it would be hard to tell if this was
| 1) genuine sentiment 2) snarky criticism or 3) ironic. Good luck
| with "Covefe" or whatever.
|
| My point is that context matters a lot, and (I assume) that it
| can only be reconstructed through a lot of text.
| fouric wrote:
| The author seems to be arguing that "most general" = "best" -
| because text is the most general communication format, it's the
| best.
|
| This argument is pretty trivially false.
|
| By this logic, the best programming language is assembly, because
| it's the most general. Actually, writing opcodes directly might
| be more general, in case your assembler doesn't have translations
| for some undocumented opcodes. The best editor would be a hex
| editor. The best web browser would be netcat piped into a hex
| editor, as well. The best OS would be no OS at all (because OSes
| impose restrictions in order to make programming easier and
| safer). The best application, for any kind of application, would
| be an interpreter that would allow you to create your own,
| however you wanted.
|
| Engineering is necessarily a tradeoff between generality and
| efficiency. Technology is largely used to make things more
| efficient, and so our tools always impose some constraints on the
| problem/solution space in order to be more efficient than _not_
| using that tool.
|
| A common design pattern is a specialized fast-path and slower
| (but more general) fallback.
|
| In addition, as many others have stated here: "the right tool for
| the right job". Videos, audio, pictures, and interactive tools
| will always be more efficient for certain problems. If your sole
| concern is generality, then yes, by all means, use text. However,
| this will almost never happen; your design space will almost
| always necessitate a tradeoff of generality with efficiency - in
| which case, pure plain text is rarely the solution.
| mjcohen wrote:
| Assembly language is not the most general because and
| particular assembly code can be run on only a few particular
| architectures. It's the higher-level languages that are more
| general.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| It's a good post, and he makes excellent points.
|
| Like any "hard and fast" rule, however, it tends to go a bit
| pear-shaped, when viewed from certain contexts.
|
| As someone that has made the mistake of designing a "pure" iconic
| interface, I can tell you that alternatives to text UI can be
| quite difficult to implement[0].
|
| But a well-designed symbolic UX can be leaps and bounds more
| effective than text.
|
| _In some contexts._
|
| Basically, YMMV.
|
| The main issue with text, is that is assumes that:
|
| 1) Everybody can read, and
|
| B) Everybody is on the same page.
|
| In any given day, I notice written signs everywhere. But the
| really _important_ stuff tends to be done symbolically.
|
| Notably, caution/danger signs and other warnings.
|
| Road signs are almost always text, but the same thing I just
| mentioned, applies to important cautionary road signs. You can
| assume that anyone driving can read (written road test), so why
| use icons?
|
| That's because we can process symbols much more quickly and
| effectively than text. A well-designed icon can be instantly
| recognizable. Take, for example, the classic radiation or
| biohazard icons.
|
| They still need "training" to properly interpret; but nothing
| like the level of education required to simply read (and
| understand) the word "BIOHAZARD."
| [d678][d2357]a @[d2568][d378]
| [d345678][d12347] [d14568][d123678]
| [d45678][d12345678]a @[d12345678][d12378]
| [d12345678][d12345678][d1237]
| [d8][d78][d3678][d3678][d3678][d3678][d78][d7]
| [d4568][d12345678][d12345678] [d124568][d12
| 345678][d12345678][d3578][d1234568][d1234567]qgg][d1234568][d1234
| 567][d2678][d12345678][d12345678][d123457] [d7
| 8][d3678][d235678][d2345678][d12345678][d12345678][d12345678][d12
| 35678][d3678][d78][d7][d8][d78][d3678][d2345678][d12345678][d1234
| 5678][d12345678][d1235678][d235678][d3678][d7] [d68
| ][d2345678][d12345678][d1234567]===[d12345678][d12345678][d123456
| 78][d12345678][d1234567]p][d1234568][d12345678][d12345678][d12345
| 678][d12345678]===[d1234568][d12345678][d1235678][d7]
| [d68][d1234567]fa [d4568][d12345678][d1237]c][d12345678]l
| _[d12345678][d1234567]f[d568][d12345678][d1237]
| @d[d1234568][d37] [d1234567]a
| ^[d12345678][d1235678][d7]
| ;[d12345678][d235678][d235678][d12345678][d2347]
| [d8][d2345678][d12345678]l @[d1234568] [d1237]
| ?[d12345678][d1235678][d378]
| [d12345678][d12345678][d12345678][d12345678]
| [d678][d2345678][d12345678]p [d4568] a @][d1
| 234568][d1238][d12345678][d12345678][d12345678][d12345678][d4567]
| [d12345678]qa @ [d8][d345678][d12345678
| ][d12345678][d12345678][d12345678][d123678][d7]
| "[d368][d78][d78][d8][d78][d678][d35678][d12345678][d12345678]=fd
| =[d12345678][d12345678][d23678][d378][d78] [d78][d67]1
| @cggggc @cggggfa
|
| And, of course, the classic skull tends to convey a message that
| even the uneducated can understand.
|
| I have learned the hard way, not to get too creative, when
| presenting GUI. I've learned to use platform conventions, and ISO
| symbols[1], where possible; even if I am not that thrilled with
| the aesthetics.
|
| [0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/the-road-most-
| travel...
|
| [1] https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/
| teucris wrote:
| Text is using a series of efficient pictures to communicate. I
| liken it to radix-based numbers. I could write 1,749 tallies on a
| piece of paper, or I could write the base-10 number.
|
| I have to learn decimal numbers: my intended audience needs to
| learn decimal numbers. But the resulting efficacy is a
| thousandfold. I think of letters and words like digits, but for
| communicating broader concepts.
|
| So when we lack the symbols or combinations to express something,
| we need a unique picture to do so. Pictures are worth a thousand
| words, but only when a thousand words won't suffice.
| dkersten wrote:
| He uses a mathematical formula as an example of text, with its
| symbols and whatnot. I don't count that as "text", to me, its
| closer to a UML diagram or flowchart than it is to the text I'm
| using to write this comment. If you just conflate _" all things
| represented through glyphs and symbols"_, then I find that too
| broad to be useful.
| eimrine wrote:
| So happy to be on a website w/o any pictures or videos or bright
| emojis. To tell the truth I have some problems of communication
| in messengers where everyone considers cool to send animated
| sticker instead of words.
| yters wrote:
| Text is actually made of a bunch of little pictures. Pictures:
| check and mate!
| doubletgl wrote:
| When breathing, always bet on air..
| janee wrote:
| 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.
| tremon wrote:
| _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._
|
| This is not an inherent problem of text, but a problem of
| synchronous vs asynchronous communication. Round-trip latency
| of a phone call is much shorter than IM. But I'd say that
| speech and text still use the same medium (language), so it's
| not really an argument either way.
| loosetypes wrote:
| Context < Subtext < Plaintext
|
| 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.
| mistersys wrote:
| I do agree text wins when it comes to expressiveness. However,
| that expressiveness comes at a cost, just look how difficult it
| is for beginners to grasp the initial concepts of programming.
|
| I've seen some people pick up this medium very quickly, and
| others struggle for months with little progress. However, almost
| anyone can pickup Sketch or Illustrator for creating UI
| prototypes very quickly.
|
| The expressiveness of text is not always a strength. It's very
| hard to build programming languages without text, but I strongly
| believe we still program too much when building UIs. Excel
| demonstrates that people can quickly pickup a minimal programming
| language for connecting data to UI, I think an Excel-Sketch
| hybrid is where the future lies for building applications in
| particular.
| 4eor0 wrote:
| This feels like an arbitrary perspective.
|
| Text has all the same properties as an image.
|
| It's a composite of elements of varying height, width, and
| meaning to the whole.
|
| Some sentences can be longer, or shorter. One element can be
| overloaded with meaning more than another.
|
| I'm not really sure if there's a point here at all.
| black6 wrote:
| I like how the modern meme can capture an entire gestalt in
| 640x480 px. It's an extremely efficient means of communicating
| amongst people.
| jamilaghasiyev wrote:
| Ludwigstein cried after reading this
| systemvoltage wrote:
| The article is making a weird point and the comments here are
| talking past each other.
|
| Author should be conveying the _unique_ aspects of Textual media
| but also it's shortcomings. Comments here should be discussing
| the benefits and shortcomings of all kinds of media.
|
| Instead both are discussing which one is better - Text or
| something else. A lot of it is mutually exclusive. The Tianamen
| square tank man image is powerful and impossible to encode in
| text with the same effect, and Nabokov's prose is impossible to
| paint a picture of or how we struggle to describe tasting notes.
| Tepix wrote:
| Gopher vs HTTP.
|
| One was only text.
| kizer wrote:
| 4000 bytes? That tweeting bird picture really is worth a thousand
| words ;).
| kizer wrote:
| On a 32 bit machine of course.
| gfodor wrote:
| Concerns about 3D multimedia spaces replacing text makes as much
| sense as worrying about parchment, paper, or rectangle screens
| replacing text. Virtualized spaces are, much like those others,
| merely a transmission medium for text (and other media.) As
| immersive computing arrives (you may not think it is, but I
| assure you, it is) we will be refactoring a lot of these existing
| rectangle screens and other contexts where text is projected via
| physical processes into virtualized ones.
|
| This is why in my 3D virtual space for work, Jel, fully
| collaborative text panels (synchronized via OT) are the primary
| kind of element you create: https://jel.app.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| While agree with the basic premise of the author, I find it
| amusing that I found the black background and font selection
| difficult to read. When I switched to reader view, I was
| experiencing pure text, and it was better for me.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| And somewhere in that discussion, I hear a faint echo of "org-
| mode" being whispered : ) Jokes aside, I often notice, how I am
| more productive, when relying on plain text, than relying on
| "enterprise" wiki systems, which make it impossible to export to
| any useful further processable format (looking at you,
| Confluence). One of my favorite features is, that it is easy to
| put text under version control, so that diffs have a recognizable
| meaning.
| xmprt wrote:
| That's more of a dig at Confluence than it is in favor of text
| only systems. I've heard tons of good things about org-mode but
| Notion is also a pretty good wiki tool despite not being fully
| plain text.
| dgudkov wrote:
| >Text is the oldest and most stable communication technology.
|
| I disagree. Drawing pictures is the oldest communication
| technology. Pictures evolved into text eventually. Characters in
| early texts frequently are just small pictures. Understanding
| pictures is easier than understanding text because of smaller
| cognitive load.
|
| Text helps with 2 things: condensing information and manipulating
| abstractions that don't have an unambiguous visual representation
| (such as hope or price). But it comes at the price of needing to
| learn the alphabet and dictionary and apply them to mentally
| decode what is otherwise just a cryptic drawing.
|
| Text may be more efficient in some cases, but say it's better
| universally is moot. For instance, texts are very bad for
| representing non-linear, concurrent workflows. Pictures are way
| more better in this case.
|
| >Text is the most efficient communication technology.
|
| It heavily depends on _what_ you 're going to communicate. For a
| blog post, text may be better. In other cases, a picture may be
| worth a thousand of words.
|
| The article may have good points, but it's full of poor
| statements.
| seph-reed wrote:
| The day will come when we can _think an image_ and then send it.
| It might change things.
| mdonahoe wrote:
| I'm so glad this post is still around. I cite it a lot when
| discussing creative tools with people who think that visual is
| the only way to go.
|
| Obviously the best computer tools offer both visual and textual
| ways of working. But if you have to pick one, bet on text.
|
| I was about to add a caveat about pure visual tasks, like image
| composition, but advances like DALL-E are starting to put those
| tasks into question as well. If I were making a photo editor
| today, I would bet on text.
| Wolfenstein98k wrote:
| Can someone give me a tl;dr?
|
| (Just kidding. Fantastic article.)
| openlowcode wrote:
| It is interesting to think about it in the context of coding.
|
| There is a strong opinion (which I share) that text coding is
| much more efficient than 'graphical' alternatives due to text
| flexibility and nice features ( easy compare, universal
| medium...)
| hctaw wrote:
| > But let's hit the random button on wikipedia and pick a
| sentence, see if you can draw a picture to convey it, mm?
|
| To be needlessly pedantic, my computer drew the image that
| conveyed this to me.
|
| Less pedantically text is a medium of exchange for language, and
| a lossy one just like spoken word. I think there's a lot of power
| in its flexibility due to that lossiness. It's also one of its
| subtle weaknesses - we can _read_ text from 5,000 years ago, but
| there 's going to be much debate over _understanding_ the text
| because of how much context has been lost to time.
| gverrilla wrote:
| > "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
| adiktheone wrote:
| "Kids playing"
| jimbokun wrote:
| That is a great image conveying this concept.
|
| 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.
| samwestdev wrote:
| Except nobody really reads text anymore. If you want to deliver a
| powerful message pics and vids have the most bang for the byte.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| I think you're vastly underestimating the number of bytes it
| takes for a pic or vid to deliver that bang.
| goatlover wrote:
| Nobody? You're not reading Hacker News posts and comments?
| Nobody is purchasing books anymore? There's no more blog posts
| or news articles? Writers no longer have jobs? Is that why GRR
| Martin can't finish Winds of Winter?
| necovek wrote:
| That's a really surprising sentiment to me.
|
| I _despise_ videos when I want to learn something. Give me a
| nice text (+ pictures if a subject requires it) so I can follow
| at my own pace: slow down, skip or skim as needed.
| cycomanic wrote:
| For me it depends a lot on what I want to learn. For some
| things (e.g. programming) text is much better.
|
| For other things (e.g. repair a part on a bike) text requires
| images, to really be able to quickly grasp what one has to
| do.
|
| Finally, for learning e.g. dance moves I really want a movie
| (or a live instructor).
|
| So like usual "it depends".
| bmitc wrote:
| 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.
| bitL wrote:
| It's academia and some important professions (lawyers,
| accountants) that are primarily audio-textual in their
| perception and those often occupy the most important decision-
| making positions, forcing their mode of operation on everybody
| else, even if 80% of people have a different dominant
| perception mode.
| the_af wrote:
| 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?
| bmitc wrote:
| I don't think hybrid or non-textual methods have really been
| given their due or worked on so much, simply because the
| only-text sentiment is so pervasive.
|
| I'm not proposing punch cards as effective. It was just a
| simple comparative example, which I thought was clear and
| that the rest of my post clarified what I actually meant.
|
| > Are we communicating, right now, via animation or fancy
| PowerPoint slides?
|
| It's ironic you bring this up, because I don't find this
| method particularly effective.
| geraldbauer wrote:
| FYI: I collect bet on text goodies in the Awesome .TXT / Text
| page [1].
|
| Yes, Text, Text, Text - The past, present and future of writing
| (and publishing).
|
| [1] https://github.com/officetxt/awesome-txt
| SPBS wrote:
| Yes, visual diagrams and shapes are sometimes more efficient. But
| the main point is that text is the lowest (and cheapest) form of
| encoding that is still human readable/writeable. Text is always
| there even when other data formats are not feasible. If you can
| adequately represent your ideas in text, you are giving it the
| highest chance of being seen and distributed by other humans. You
| don't need special tools or artistic skills to replicate the
| data, anyone with a pen & paper or keyboard can do it!
| yoz-y wrote:
| And yet I can find toilets easily in any country with a simple
| logo but have to hunt for them if they are spelled out.
|
| Images are wonderful if you don't live in a bubble where
| everybody speaks the same language.
| virgilp wrote:
| 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)
| necovek wrote:
| While I totally agree with the OP, the point to remember is
| that text is a really terse storage as long as you have the
| Unicode mapping already stored to transform the binary
| compressed form to actual pictures of text (vs abstract forms
| or numeric codepoints when simply stored as "textual" bytes).
|
| This does not diminish the value and expressiveness of text,
| but it needs to be said that in 5000 years time we'll need both
| the Unicode specification and those 2-4000 bytes to decipher
| the author's post.
|
| It's just a cost of digital media.
|
| The bigger issue is how do we ensure digital media perseveres
| for so long.
| bawolff wrote:
| I dont think you would. If english is still understood,
| decoding ascii/utf-8 is trivial. Just think of it as a ceaser
| shift cipher with an offset of 64. Very trivial to decode
| with frequency analysis if you know its english. Either you
| understand that 65 represents the abstract concept A, or you
| have no idea what the letter A is. Either way, a picture of
| the letter A is not going to be helpful.
|
| Having english still understood after 5000 years seems much
| harder. But hey, latin is pretty old and we still understand
| that.
| majewsky wrote:
| > in 5000 years time we'll need both the Unicode
| specification and those 2-4000 bytes to decipher the author's
| post.
|
| Nitpick: In all likelihood, an English dictionary would be
| enough. Even if the Unicode spec is lost, the text can
| probably be deciphered by using frequency analysis plus the
| dictionary to associate codepoints with characters.
| rbinv wrote:
| > [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".
| bmn__ wrote:
| It is just text (using Unicode nomenclature). The makers of
| the HN software deliberately broke the functionality in an
| obnoxious fashion.
| yholio wrote:
| They weren't obnoxious, just subscribed to a more
| restricted interpretation of "text" than yourself, and to
| which many people seem to agree.
|
| It's clearly a continuum from 3D objects, to pictures, to
| icons and ideographs, to highly abstract sings representing
| words and ultimately sounds. That fact that some designer
| of character sets decided to put the limit somewhere and
| include a bird icon and not an Obama icon does not
| invalidate other interpretations.
|
| By the way, there is a thing called Emojicon where a
| character for 'Albert Einstein' was proposed as valid
| 'text'.
| zests wrote:
| Here, try this bird:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_Hieroglyphs_(Unicode_...
| cycomanic wrote:
| 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 say both are text, but logographic systems are close
| to pictures as well (pictographic systems even more so) and they
| can convey information in much less characters, at the cost that
| one needs to know a much larger "alphabet".
|
| Similarly if the information we are trying to transmit is
| actually an image, transmitting the actual image is certainly
| much less information than transmitting a description of the
| image. That is also why the comparison with the bird and twitter
| image falls flat. The image conveys a specific image, not the
| generic image of a bird. To describe that specific would need
| many more characters than 4. Similarly if I have a large set of
| numbers, it's much more efficient to store and transmit in binary
| format not as text.
| kreeben wrote:
| 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.
| Horba wrote:
| The medium of your reply contradicts the content.
| kreeben wrote:
| That's a beautiful sentence, especially in this here
| context, but it flew over my head. Would you care to
| expand?
| hjanssen wrote:
| He alludes to the fact that the text you wrote as a
| comment is transmitted as "information" in the form of
| bytes.
|
| But to formulate a counterpoint to this argument and
| support your original comment: The bytes we send via
| cables to transmit text are at a basic level just that:
| bytes. Ones and zeros. What makes these bytes
| understandable information is the fact that we have all
| agreed that a certain sequence of bits is assigned to a
| certain picture: A text symbol. This agreement has been a
| major source of pains and problems throughout the history
| of computing, think all these different text encodings
| and the problems that arise when you try to open a file
| with a different encoding than the one which it was saved
| with: You see a gibberish of symbols that _do not make
| sense_.
|
| Which is why you have a point here: The pc does not care
| what information it transmits, it is only text because we
| have "taught" the pc to display a specific symbol
| (picture) when a certain sequence of bits is encountered.
| upofadown wrote:
| >..."optical telegraph", which is a semaphore system which used
| a system of messages which AFAIK were not alphabetic text.
|
| The pulses of light in an optical fiber are not alphabetic text
| either, but we are not talking about baseband here.
| jcims wrote:
| I wouldn't have thought of this without your comment but i
| don't know if it's related. Media, including text, is sort of
| a cognitive baseband.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Yes but that's unrelated. We can clearly say that digital
| (binary) representation of information has won for encoding
| and the information content is well understood since Shannon.
| However this is not really connected to the current
| discussion, because binary is clearly is not meant for direct
| human "consumption".
|
| I was restricting myself to discuss abstractions that are
| directly used by humans. The messages send in the optical
| telegraph are conveying things more complex than letters
| which I would say is what we associate with text. Now you
| might say that those messages are text, but then we might as
| well say language is the most flexible and efficient way of
| communicating, and that's probably correct, but also
| completely meaningless in this context. That's the issue with
| this posts, it's either so general that is essentially
| meaningless, or so specific that it's clearly wrong in
| general.
| atonalfreerider wrote:
| 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.
| karmakaze wrote:
| Dumb post. It's not a contest. Use whichever is appropriate.
|
| I design systems using both diagrams and text sometimes laid out
| in understood, non-linear patterns. I also enjoy music.
| jimmyvalmer wrote:
| What is that image of Gnus doing there?
| mikeyla85 wrote:
| A picture is worth, like, 100 words
| leephillips wrote:
| The author may have overstated his case, but I hope the designers
| of GUI applications are listening: most of the icons on your menu
| bars mean nothing to me, so your application is hard to use.
| Substitute words.
| yohannparis wrote:
| My biggest pet-peeve is the hamburger icon instead of the world
| 'Menu'. You are saving 10px... for what!?
| kangalioo wrote:
| > For what?!
|
| I can think of several things: - more breath space in the UI
| - easier recognizability - less information overload (four
| character glyphs vs three plain lines) - consistency with
| other applications
|
| And it's not like the hamburger menu symbol is particularly
| obscure.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| In 1995 you needed to save 10px, they're just not as advanced
| any more.
| yosito wrote:
| Something about hammers and nails and using the right tools for
| the job
| mrweasel wrote:
| Indeed, there are situations where you cannot convey your
| message using text.
|
| One of the things I've learn doing e-commerce is that if you
| believe you can just use more text to compensate for short
| comings in you UX you'll be very disappointed.
|
| We had a subscription product, you where informed that you'd be
| sign up for a monthly charge seven times during checkout and
| people still complained. They just saw two prices and click on
| the lowest. No amount of text will fix people who are basically
| on auto-pilot.
| mihaaly wrote:
| Text 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 great effort.
|
| Text is more regular and reliable in certain contexts (not
| always, sometimes a pictogram or others are better), when the
| circumstances are proper for that.
|
| Text has its uses, just like all the other forms, not being
| paramount, not at all!
|
| (I'd also argue about that we could read old texts. Sometimes
| yes, but sometimes we cannot read present ones neither if the
| cultural and knowledge background is inadequate. Which is just
| aggravated by the ages)
| naringas wrote:
| > visual in 3D
|
| I cannot see in visual 3D. If anything I can see in strictly
| bigger than 2D. (a flat 'screen' with a tinge of depth
| perception, which I fear I don't make much use of when I spend
| most of my time in front of a flat 2D computer screen)
| atoav wrote:
| As someone who worked long in the visual field (Film, VFX,
| Graphics, Art) and has a ton of experience with text based
| expression (studied philosophy, programming) in my eyes picture
| based communication certainly _is_ powerful.
|
| However reading pictures is _much_ more subjective than most
| non-arts-educated might tend to realise. We had a weekly class
| where we would discuss scenes and pictures and what it evoked
| in people, what they "read" in it. The one big takeaway I got
| from this, is just _how_ profoundly different a room full of
| people can see very clear pictures. This subjectiveness is even
| worse when you look at gestures and body language of actors -
| what one student saw as strong and self sufficient, the other
| might see as forceful and destructive etc.
|
| Of course we also have codified visual languages (traffic
| signs, warning labels, ...), but they only will work for low
| complexity info ("Warning slippy surface", but not: "Watch out
| the last step of that stairway was built to high and might
| cause you to fall"). The low information density of such
| symbols is great if you want simple messages to be
| understandable by a big number of persons very quickly and with
| little cognitive overhead.
|
| Text can shine when symbols don't suffice, when pictures are to
| vague, when gestures are unclear. Text is easy to create,
| modify and copy and I love it for that. My freelance time as a
| graphic designer convinced me that many people _think_ they can
| communicate visually, while very few actually _can_. A lot of
| people already have issues with getting their message (be it
| text or spoken word) understood in the way they meant it at the
| side of the recipient, with visual language this is likely
| worse.
| kuu wrote:
| Text, in the end, is not more than a 2D agreed representation.
| It's drawing + rules.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| 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 having as
| many giant monitors as you wanted in a 3D space.
|
| What's needed is a 3D web browser, with websites connected with
| portals that you can walk through. I think gather.town is
| surprisingly close to that. http://gather.town/
| atonalfreerider wrote:
| Please also see primitive.io which is a VR browser for
| GitHub.
| powerapple wrote:
| The reason human knowledge develops so fast is the existence of
| text. If we rely on visual in 3D we will be the same as other
| animals. Apparently now we are behaving badly since we are
| consuming videos and pictures rather than text. I believe text
| is superior because of its abstraction, when you read, you are
| creating alongside the author.
| dalbasal wrote:
| Re: history.
|
| I agree on the power of text as a technology, and the role it
| played. China & the Roman Republic/Empire are good examples
| of this.
|
| But.... I think it's worth remembering that we lost something
| as we gained something. We tend to severely underestimate
| oral "technologies." Scholarship existed before writing.
| History, geography, etc. Text spent centuries or millennia as
| a peripheral media. It was mostly used for accounting in
| Mesopotamia & the Levant for thousands if years. Sometimes
| for religious, magical or political reasons. It wasn't a
| major medium for philosophy, storytelling, history or such
| until much later... So writing didn't really play much of a
| "knowledge accumulation" role until pretty late in the game.
|
| I suspect that it developed so slowly because oral traditions
| were hard to beat. They had their own advantages. A song was
| an efficient way to learn history.
|
| An important, if subtle, fact is that mediums are not just
| for communication. They're modes of thought. Text and speech
| will yield different ideas. Mathematics are a huge example.
| Ways of conveying mathematical concepts (eg negative numbers)
| enables us to conceive of mathematical concepts. If you write
| an essay, the ideas/conclusions you will have will be
| different. Even the difference between a scroll and a codex
| (book) can make a big difference. That difference is evident
| if you compare the modern practice of Judaism (scroll
| tradition) to Islam and Christianity (book traditions).
|
| Socrates/Plato give us a nominally dividing line between the
| oral and written approaches. Socrates may have even been
| illiterate, but either way, his main medium was oral. In
| fact, most Greek philosophy came from the "mostly oral"
| period. This is why Plato, Aristotle, (Diogenes?) and others
| of that generation become so important. They're the link.
| They wrote down ideas created by oralists. This is how they
| could be accessed by macedonians, Romans and such.
|
| I wonder if the charming, curious style we associate with the
| likes of Socrates or Diogenes is inherent to oralism. Compare
| them to later, literary philosophers... The literalists are
| far more grim. Senecca comes to mind. Even Aristotle. He's
| not as grim as roman philosophers, but he is a lot more
| serious. The oralists were playful... and greek/roman
| philosophy (imo) declines as writing overtakes oral
| traditions.
|
| Socrates' thoughts " _On the Forgetfulness that Comes with
| Writing_ " are recorded (tellingly) by Plato. It's not
| Plato's best piece, but very relevant to our times. If you
| memorise instead of using text, all your knowledge is inside
| your head. On paper, ideas are lifeless. Living ideas inside
| your head interact with each other, refine, create new ideas.
| When we convey them to one another, we can ask questions,
| read expressions, etc.
|
| We don't just have books, we have the internet and pocket
| computers to access it. Socrates' point applies even more
| now.
|
| One relevant example relevant to our times is "shades of
| uncertainty." Say you read an article about the economy, GDP
| growth, unemployment & such. A lot of that information is
| uncertain, either inherently or at this point in time. There
| may be dissident positions. That's usually lost in text but
| not in conversation.
|
| I definitely think a short conversation about this year's
| economic data is more informative and deep than an article by
| that same economist.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > We tend to severely underestimate oral "technologies."
| Scholarship existed before writing.
|
| This comes up a lot in Bible scholarship.
|
| Many modern people assume the words of Jesus, for example,
| were lost to a game of telephone before being written down
| years later in the form we have today.
|
| But conveying the teachers words with true fidelity to what
| he said was very important to a rabbi's students, and they
| had a culture and techniques to make sure they did this
| with high reliability.
| dalbasal wrote:
| I agree on the principle, but not the example :)
|
| Year 0 in Judea (and Rome, Damascus...) was a pretty
| literate period and literacy was (the story of jesus
| confirms) already a religious requirement... bar mitzva
| or an ancestor of that custom. Bar mitzva translates
| roughly to "eligible to uphold commandments." You need to
| read for that, or so the custom implies.
|
| I'm sure that most of the religious/rabbinical tradition
| was still oral, and that rabbis did a lot of oral
| teaching. But, I think high fidelity oral "technology"
| was already heavily diluted, especially in judaic
| culture. Scriptural worship starts very early. It's hard
| to say when exactly, but it had to have happened while
| hebrew/canaanite was still spoken in the region. Aramaic
| had overtaken hebrew circa 400-500 BC. From that point,
| high fidelity transmission was done with writing.
|
| Also, the multicultural/multilingual/multiregional
| context makes it unlikely that a high fidelity oral
| tradition existed in early christianity. IMO, the new
| testament was almost certainly compiled from earlier
| written sources... and oral telephone. I mean, the new
| testament isn't even in the same language as the sermons.
|
| The same can be said about mishnah/talmud... the jewish
| contemporary to the new testament. Traditionally, it is
| seen as a compilation of jewish oral traditions, received
| at mount sinai and maintained with fidelity for two
| thousand years. Realistically, there were earlier written
| versions of (eg) Rabbi Hillel's teachings available to
| the scribes who compiled the Mishnah.
|
| The traditional reasoning for writing the "oral torah"
| (resulting in talmud/mishna) was that oral traditions
| were dying, and that writing was necessary for fidelity.
| Multiregionalism, multilingualism and such were to
| blame... and the christians would have had even more of
| those problems. Fewer, more dispersed. No institutions.
| No common language. No old traditions. It's _possible_
| that there was a tradition of reciting Jesus ' sermons,
| but that would be kind of culturally out of place. I
| think it's pretty unlikely. If there was, I think the new
| testament would have been compiled in aramaic.
|
| Also... there are quite a few convergences between new
| testament stories and other (broadly termed) rabbinical
| accounts from the period. John the Baptist has his own
| religion, for example, and in their books you get some of
| the same stories, but with John in the Jesus role. I
| suspect there were many others, but have no modern
| adherents.
|
| Judaism of that period aggressively trimmed out any new
| or recent "revelatory" writings. New prophets, new
| conversations directly with god. That's what many of the
| "apocrypha" are. From then on, religious scripture needed
| to be wisdom received from oral traditions, old sages and
| stuff. No revelation.
|
| These, to me, strongly suggests late 2nd temple judaism
| was no better at oral tradition than us. That said, you
| can have conceptual fidelity without having word-by-word
| fidelity. When Jesus paraphrased Hillel, he was reaching
| across 400 years of oral (probably/mostly) tradition.
| Christians doing the same thing 200 years later probably
| had that level of fidelity.
| [deleted]
| salimjjuma wrote:
| So true
| InternetPerson wrote:
| This is an important debate! Only one form of communication can
| be declared "the most powerful, useful, effective communication
| technology ever!!"
| pmarreck wrote:
| This sounds great if you are very literate and well-vocabularied.
|
| Most people in the world are not. Or don't speak English at all,
| another problem with text that you don't find with images.
| sinenomine wrote:
| There is a well known fact in the field of psychometrics: human
| general intelligence _g_ can be modeled as two relatively
| independent sub-factors: verbal intelligence and spatial
| intelligence. Other sub-factors, if any, are way more
| speculative.
|
| As a human being, it is quite possible to have verbal
| intelligence higher than spatial intelligence, and indeed I know
| some people with verbal tilt and some other people with spatial
| tilt. These people tend to think & approach problems differently,
| while having different strengths and weaknesses. Naturally,
| similar people cluster together, and some professions (e.g.
| lawyers, journalists, writers, programmers) are more amenable to
| verbally tilted persons, while other professions (mechanical
| engineering, airplane piloting, architecture) are amenable to
| spatially tilted persons.
|
| Looking around via this lens, discerning cognitive styles
| inherent in design of the human experience is enlightening. One
| can see that our physical and social, educational environments
| and governing institutions are designed with one cognitive style
| in mind at the expense of the other: and this privilege goes to
| verbal cognitive style.
|
| Let me offer a different perspective: to a person with higher
| spatial and weaker verbal cognition, this environment looks
| physically simplistic, tasteless, sometimes outright boring,
| often suffocatingly so. Utilitarian safety & simplicity
| prevailing over beauty and shape-being, denying the inhabitants
| possibilities of space meaningful by itself. Letters, words,
| strings of words are everywhere, starting with high-school where
| the recent historical trend of increasing verbalization of
| curriculum continues, and on to adult life where verbally
| intensive professions pay more and command significantly more
| power (note how in the aforementioned occupation list the second
| one contains less status-worthy & more specialized occupations).
| Limitless possibilities of rendered worlds on megapixel screens
| collapse into a flat-designed abstract hellscape of recursively
| composed words and menus. The brain of the child - a pinnacle of
| neuroplasticity - adapts, as relentless march of critical
| developmental periods continues, unnecessary white matter
| pathways wither away, while economically useful ones are
| potentiated and strengthened for the forthcoming endless
| competition with similar human beings, similarly shaped. The best
| and brightest in this game of words become lawyers and career
| politicians, movers and shakers of our world; but are they truly
| our best, and do they truly _imagine_ the referents of their
| symbols ? Are we led by seeing or blind ?
|
| Much could be said about benefits of verbal thinking, endless
| composability (to some, vacuous, denying interesting constrained
| structure) of syntax & grammar & semantics, and rightly so. Yet
| one wonders, which avenues of thought, of being, both alone and
| together as a people, were not taken. How a civlization of
| prevailing gestalt could look like ? Confronted with this state
| of affairs, one wonders, if "Always betting on text", pedal-to-
| the-metal, more-of-the-same is really going to bring us somewhere
| at all ?
|
| If you, dear reader, have some latent spatial/geometrical
| imagination which was pushed away by economically profitable word
| manipulation engines that grew through you, maybe you too wonder
| about this question.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > The best and brightest in this game of words become lawyers
| and career politicians, movers and shakers of our world; but
| are they truly our best, and do they truly imagine the
| referents of their symbols ?
|
| What would a high spacial intelligence, low verbal intelligence
| individual thrive as a President, CEO, or other type of leader?
|
| Those jobs revolve around effective communication, and I
| believe that will always favor high verbal intelligence
| individuals.
| sinenomine wrote:
| These are not jobs but positions of power; the assumption
| that success in securing them is indication of merit in the
| sense of producing best outcomes for society at large, or
| even this specific firm or department in isolation, amounts
| to just world fallacy borne out of common market delusions.
| In truth, communication-first leaders are only as good as the
| team under their command, that really understands the managed
| domain, is. And since this team is largely replenished by
| people of the same stock, vying for the same position of
| power, they are not very good.
|
| What results from this process of distributed re-
| interpretation of vaguely-worded, likely not very coherent,
| buzzwordy policies is a strangely incoherent and
| characteristically apathetic environment. For an extreme
| example of this pattern, see a typical UN press release and
| its vanishingly small influence on the state of things.
|
| If we ask a hypothetical about the possible outcome of, say,
| very high spatial intelligence nation-state leader, we enter
| wild speculation territory.
|
| I could try: "An object of harmonious art, but in political,
| life-shaping domain. Some precisely specified spacetime
| volume of greatness you'd want to be a part of once you saw a
| glimpse of it, even if you cannot quite put it into words",
| i.e. "A place of participation in a great multi-scale-
| harmonious vision".
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| At the very top, real leaders can sometimes do very well
| using a spokesperson instead of direct communication.
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| The gist of what he's saying is pretty sound, but he should have
| gone deeper. For a deeper argument on the importance of "text",
| the written word, exposition - I recommend reading Postman's
| _Amusing Ourselves to Death_.
|
| People here are suggesting that images/video are superior, but
| there's the cliche, "a picture is worth a thousand words". Well,
| which thousand words? Do they convey the same thousand words to
| you as they do to me?
|
| Words leave nothing to the imagination. This is one of the most
| important traits of good exposition. Its arguments/messages are
| out there, free of the primate dominance gestures, the biases,
| the emotional stimulants, waiting to be vetted for their logical
| soundness.
| hashkb wrote:
| You can teach someone to paint or take photos, with text. You
| can't teach someone to write with paintings, or with text-less
| video.
| darau1 wrote:
| I prefer text simply because I can read the same text faster
| than anyone could dictate it to me. Plus I can CTRL+F through
| text.
| wycy wrote:
| > Words leave nothing to the imagination.
|
| Words leave plenty to the imagination too. Interpreting what
| authors might've meant in books is all we ever did in English
| classes in school. Interpreting what the founding fathers
| might've meant in the Constitution is also a fierce public
| debate.
| serverholic wrote:
| This is the problem with these constant black and white
| debates on hacker news. They leave no room for subtly and you
| end up with people saying dumb shit like "Words leave nothing
| to the imagination."
| kobieyc wrote:
| How is neuralink not being discussed here?
| KMag wrote:
| Side note: the author is Graydon Hoare, creator of the Rust
| programming language.
| necovek wrote:
| That's really interesting, so thanks!
|
| However, I am not sure if that is supposed to affect my opinion
| of his take on text vs other media? (I try not to let
| prejudices like "he's a really smart person" affect me when
| discussing a topic that is very approachable to a wider
| population)
| KMag wrote:
| It hopefully doesn't affect your opinion on his take, but it
| hopefully gives some context related to his background. He's
| got a bunch of experience in very low-level very back-end
| systems, involving a lot of abstract reasoning. I would guess
| people used to a lot of abstract reasoning would tend to be
| partial to plain text and/or mathematical notation.
| ElectricMind wrote:
| 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.
| addicted wrote:
| 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.
| ElectricMind wrote:
| 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" ?
| dwb wrote:
| 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.
| cycomanic wrote:
| 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.
| dwb wrote:
| I don't think they're different enough to refute my point.
| You see Chinese characters in a great variety of
| typographic and handwritten styles, all able to be read by
| fluent people.
| jimbokun wrote:
| It is equally true of the Chinese character system.
|
| They have more "letters", but the point is still to
| unambiguously map a drawing of a character to a specific,
| discrete value.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > Actually a single letter is "a picture".
|
| It certainly is not.
|
| Think about character recognition software. The point is to
| take a picture, and map it to a discrete value. The pictures
| that correspond to "a", for example, have a lot of variation.
| But the point of writing is to remove the ambiguity inherent in
| drawing something, and map it to one of a small set of discrete
| values.
|
| So even before binary encoding systems, or even the printing
| press, text was a technology for conveying information with
| less ambiguity than drawing.
|
| One could argue speech is similar. There are a lot of
| variations of sound corresponding to a phoneme, but language
| reduces a continuous stream of sound to a discrete sequence of
| phonemes in our brain, which are then disambiguated into words
| and sentences conveying concepts.
|
| The whole continuous -> discrete mapping underlies both spoken
| language and text.
| bawolff wrote:
| Alphabetic glyphs and pictures are not the same thing. Glyphs
| are abstractions. Pictures are literal (ironic).
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| There is a saying "a picture is worth a thousand words". The
| brain will recognize a white flurry cat from an image faster than
| from a phrase "white flurry cat".
| kstenerud wrote:
| Yes, there's a reason why the command line and shells are still a
| thing. Text supports a wider range of expression than any other
| medium we've developed thus far (and not for lack of trying!).
| Even Steve Jobs in his never-ending quest for UX minimalism
| couldn't eradicate the keyboard from the iPhone, despite all
| their UI innovations.
|
| Text is also why XML, JSON, and Markdown are a thing.
|
| When you can accomplish your tasks within a constrained range of
| expressivity, you do that (gas & break pedals, steering wheel,
| door handles, etc). But when you need greater expressivity,
| you're probably going to need text.
| shultays wrote:
| Author says text is the oldest and most stable communication
| technology but his example is some pictures on rock.
| robenkleene wrote:
| The 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.
| koonsolo wrote:
| Ah come on, this is not accurate at all.
|
| We have tons of tech now: audio, video, charting, etc.
|
| Circles are pretty easy in powerpoint or any such software.
|
| The tech is obviously here already.
|
| But still, why do people prefer sending chat texts instead of
| calling or video calling? Surely not because of tech.
| jen20 wrote:
| In my case because of the asynchronous nature of text versus
| vide or voice calls. An effective compromise is voice notes
| in modern messenger systems, which preserves asynchrony while
| also allowing the expressiveness of speech.
| LostJourneyman wrote:
| There's an entire dialect of English that has evolved just
| to handle expressiveness in text formats. There's a
| standard and reproducible grammar, and most people (who do
| or have spent any time on the internet in the last 15
| years) use it a second language. Messenger services allow
| the flexibility of asynchronous communication with the
| added benefit of synchronous communication when it's
| important (that's why it's preferred often to email, for
| example).
|
| Voice notes, like email, are fully async and require
| actually listening to someone talk, which changes the
| communication media that you're working in.
|
| Messaging has risen to the prevalence it has because of the
| features it brings to the table, not in spite of them.
| openlowcode wrote:
| Imagine you have to communicate something precise to me and
| I am stuck in a meeting:
|
| - you send me a picture, it may be ambiguous;
|
| - you leave me a voice call, I have to go out of the
| meeting room to listen to it
|
| - you write a message, it just works. If there is info to
| use, I will easily copy your message in any application
| (Excel, Word, SAP...).
|
| Also, text can be stored easily, so I will keep an archive
| of your text, probably far less an archive of your voice
| message or diagram, as they are very heavy.
| sfifs wrote:
| > But still, why do people prefer sending chat texts instead
| of calling or video calling? Surely not because of tech
|
| It turns out that people who are highly fluent in a language
| with a compact alphabet like English prefer sending text
| chats. My Chinese colleagues and friends routinely send many
| more voice chat messages than text because it is much more
| efficient than typing mandarin.
|
| Also in India, I've observed that people fluent in vernacular
| but not in written English primarily send voice chat messages
| - again because the vernacular text input is very inefficient
|
| So interestingly does my daughter who _can_ type English text
| easily but as she always grew up in a world her parents and
| her friends parents had smartphones, she finds it a lot more
| comfortable to send voice chat messages.
|
| The other benefit of chat is asynchronocity. You're not
| forcing the other party to do a context switch and signalling
| that they can get to ot.
| gmueckl wrote:
| No, GP is right, for a simple reason: look at your input
| devices. A keyboard and mouse/touchpad combo is most
| effective at interacting with text. The story would be
| entirely different if the main interface was e.g. a stylus. A
| instant messaging service that sends hand written scribbles
| instead of text follows much more naturally from that.
| koonsolo wrote:
| Some of us are on a desktop computer, all of us are on a
| mobile phone.
|
| You do realize how cumbersome that mobile keyboard is
| right. With a click of a button, you can record audio
| and/or video.
|
| But still, text messages rule them all.
|
| Who sends texts on desktops anyway? A small minority.
| gmueckl wrote:
| No. A lot of people record voice messages, but they need
| to be in an environment providing enough privacy. But
| messengers emphasize text heavily in their UIs - again
| because of keyboards. Keyboard less touch devices are too
| novel an innovation compared to when instant messaging
| was cast into its final form.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > but they need to be in an environment providing enough
| privacy.
|
| Yet another argument in favor of text.
| gmueckl wrote:
| Just an argument against audio and video. With a stylus
| instead of a keyboard you can still scribble amd draw
| naturally. That was my original example.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| This is why fax machines persist in Japan.
| robenkleene wrote:
| Wikipedia's List of codecs page
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_codecs) is a good
| example of the explosion of complexity that arises when
| representing media digitally.
|
| To this day, this complexity is still mostly offloaded to
| users in the form of export settings, and supported playback
| formats. One basic requirement of the technology reaching the
| point good media support is if a user never encounters
| codecs, in either export settings or playback problems.
| koonsolo wrote:
| My kids have no idea what a codec is. Still they record and
| play videos and audio messages all the time.
|
| I don't know in which world or time you are living, it's
| been a long time since I touch anything related to codecs.
| robenkleene wrote:
| This is a fair point, there's a lot you can get away
| without worrying about the complexity today, and that
| amount is certainly steadily growing (which is great!).
|
| But particularly on the creation side, if you say, try
| and combine a vector created in one program with a bitmap
| created in another, you'll likely encounter some issues
| (e.g., color profiles), or taking an animation created in
| one program and overlaying it over a video in another,
| you'll often need to know your codecs. Or exporting a
| video optimized for social media, e.g., videos shared on
| Instagram and Twitter often have heavy compression
| artifacts.
|
| I'm really looking for seamless creation and sharing
| freely combining media from different programs, with the
| same ease as cut, pasting, and editing text. (As well as
| interfaces that are as easy to use as manipulating pen
| and paper with your hands.)
| dkersten wrote:
| > Why do people prefer sending chat texts instead of calling
| or video calling?
|
| This isn't universally true. I (unfortunately, for me, since
| I hate it personally) know plenty of people who prefer voice
| or video calls. I even have people who will reply with voice
| recordings to my text messages.
|
| Many people prefer voice or video.
|
| I prefer text because of two main reasons:
|
| 1. Its asynchronous. I can reply as needed while not being
| disturbed if I happen to be in the middle of something.
|
| 2. Its not real time. That is, I can take my time to form my
| response. I can proof read, edit, clearly form my thoughts
| etc. In a voice/video recording, editing is difficult, in a
| live setting, I'm under more time pressure to finish my
| sentences rather than thinking about them more.
|
| I don't prefer text because of technology reasons, except
| those that make text more asynchronous and easier to proof
| read and edit.
|
| But many people I know or have interacted with hate text and
| prefer voice or video.
| danShumway wrote:
| There's a lot of selectivity happening on this post. Nobody
| here has worked in an office where the management prefer
| video calls instead of Slack messaging? I've seen no
| shortage of people _on HN_ argue that this kind of text-
| based communication is inferior to video calls or screen
| shares when solving tech problems.
|
| It seems pretty obvious to me that text, video, audio, and
| images are good for different things, and that diversity is
| reflected in the ecosystem. There isn't a universal trend
| towards or away from text, not really. People are making
| fewer voice calls, but they're also consuming more content
| on Youtube instead of on blogs. They're also moving a lot
| of their social life onto platforms like TikTok and
| Instagram, which are primarily video/image.
|
| I don't see a universal trend here in either direction. I
| think people are cherry-picking a couple of isolated trends
| or points and making really broad, generalized statements
| that aren't warranted.
|
| The whole idea of picking a "best" medium here is silly
| anyway. It's childish, in the same way that people used to
| argue about whether books, movies, or games were the 'best'
| artistic medium. Different mediums are good for different
| things.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Actually I would argue that people send texts despite it
| often being highly inefficient. It often takes an infuriating
| amount of text messages to agree on something that would only
| take a 2min call. It's just we're so used to sending chats.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| This is why my default is text until a call becomes
| obviously better. "Where do you want to go for dinner?" ten
| messages of hemming and hawing, "Call me when you're free".
| A call forces an interruption on the person, or a game of
| phone tag. Texting can be answered when each person is
| able, and can be used to coordinate the call.
| dkersten wrote:
| This depends on the people involved. I find most of my
| programmer friends prefer text in most circumstances, but
| most people in sales, marketing, accounting, HR and
| management that I've worked with tend to prefer voice,
| video, face to face. As do people in other industries (eg
| my mother loves voice and video and while she does use text
| a lot, mostly to talk to me, often finds it tedious).
| ric2b wrote:
| Chat has other advantages. Lets say you're trying to agree
| on a restaurant for dinner:
|
| - If I'm busy right now I don't need to stop what I'm doing
| to answer the call, or you don't need to try again later.
|
| - Need 2 minutes to look up your schedule and suggest a
| time or find a restaurant? That's fine, I can do something
| else until you reply and you don't feel like you need to
| rush the process.
|
| - 6 hours later I forgot which restaurant we agreed on?
| It's ok, just open the chat, it's right there.
|
| - The chat is searchable, if 2 months later I don't
| remember the restaurant name I can probably find in a few
| seconds by searching some related keywords like "food",
| "restaurant", "dinner", etc.
| thrower123 wrote:
| Don't tell Gimp that it's easy to draw a circle...
| everdrive wrote:
| A circle doesn't usually convey very many ideas, though. Words
| can.
| robenkleene wrote:
| Circles are building blocks of pictures, which can convey
| ideas, just like words are a building blocks of sentences.
| C4stor wrote:
| O O *
| mannykannot wrote:
| It is not plausible that, but for the limitations of
| technology, you could substitute a picture for the argument
| presented in your post.
| robenkleene wrote:
| I don't disagree, I think some ideas are better expressed as
| text others by other forms of media. E.g., that's why we use
| graphs, diagrams, storyboards, flowcharts, etc... in addition
| to text to communicate.
|
| For the record, I came up with this thought, about computers
| and software being optimized for text, by realizing I learned
| the best by reading information presented as a combination of
| text and media (e.g., a textbook with diagrams), but when I
| communicate with a computer, I always just use text, why?
| Well, making media with a computer is a huge PITA, I'm
| assuming because you program the computer itself with text,
| so its entire interface seems optimized for that. (This is
| particularly interesting looking in contrast to smartphones
| and tablets, which are entirely not optimized for text.)
| mannykannot wrote:
| I take your point, as I often sketch things myself to help
| me think, but only pencil-on-paper. I would guess there are
| tools for sketching with a stylus on a tablet, but I have
| never felt a pressing-enough need to push me into checking
| them out.
| scroot wrote:
| Walter Ong said something like (paraphrasing): "If the phrase
| 'a picture is worth a thousand words' is true, then why does
| it need to be a phrase at all?"
| iamcurious wrote:
| Cause that phrase is just 7 words. A picture would have 993
| other unnecessary words.
| derefr wrote:
| > assuming we treat speech/signing as natural phenomenon -- there
| are no human societies without it -- whereas textual capability
| has to be transmitted, taught, acquired
|
| I've been watching videos of pets (dogs, cats) being "button
| trained"--being taught to use (primitive, non-syntactic) language
| by making associations between things/acts/emotional states and
| the pressing of one or another audio-playing buttons that has
| been placed on the floor.
|
| It has very much driven home the point for me, that "spoken
| language" is actually _not_ something inherent and instinctual to
| humans (or to any species); but rather _is_ a technology. It's
| just a technology that's rather simple to _learn_ , if you have
| the right underlying hardware acceleration (e.g. a cerebral
| cortex)--and, crucially, a teacher. For other intelligent
| mammals, apparently the teacher is the only component they're
| missing!
|
| Language is a technology that humans in particular find very
| _intuitive_ --at least at a young age when our brains are
| malleable--but not one we inherently start with. We absorb it
| easily _if_ we're immersed in a society where everybody uses
| language from birth. But in situations where that's not true
| (feral children, some very broken homes) we don't.
|
| In a world where every human being instantly had all entrained
| structure in their neocortex erased, such that we were "reduced"
| to being upright hairless apes with the _capacity_ for language
| but no _knowledge_ of it, I don't think we'd just instantaneously
| come up with the idea of language and begin attempting to develop
| languages to communicate, the way modern people instantly try to
| develop a creole of the languages they _do_ know, when stuck in a
| situation with people who share no common language with them.
|
| The idea to associate concepts with specific mouth-noises--and to
| condition others to use those same mouth-noises for the same
| concepts, to facilitate transmission of thought--might randomly
| arise in a few people, but it'd need to catch on and spread from
| there, just like any other technology. It would either need to be
| observed and copied, or actively taught.
|
| And I hypothesize that that is what happened (pre)historically:
| at some point, there were several memetic "waves" spreading
| increasingly-technologically-advanced (e.g. syntactic,
| expressive) forms of language across human populations with
| brains _already_ structurally amenable to them. Of course, each
| wave would only be a struggle to the generation that pioneered
| it; the next generation, being immersed in that new, more-complex
| language form from birth, would find it similarly intuitive.
|
| (This makes me wonder whether we've yet hit the "limits of
| linguistic expressiveness" for our current brain size, such that
| we'd need to unlimit e.g. average skull diameter at birth to let
| us get any fancier with language; or whether we've still got
| some, ah, "headroom" left.)
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| >"spoken language" is actually not something inherent and
| instinctual to humans
|
| I agree, as you say until you reach the point where newborns
| are already surrounded by it.
|
| >It's just a technology that's rather simple to learn, if you
| have the right underlying hardware acceleration (e.g. a
| cerebral cortex)--and, crucially, a teacher.
|
| No teacher needed whatsoever quite often, but maybe so usually,
| so I can not say crucial.
|
| >And I hypothesize that that is what happened
| (pre)historically: at some point, there were several memetic
| "waves" spreading increasingly-technologically-advanced (e.g.
| syntactic, expressive) forms of language across human
| populations with brains already structurally amenable to them.
| Of course, each wave would only be a struggle to the generation
| that pioneered it; the next generation, being immersed in that
| new, more-complex language form from birth, would find it
| similarly intuitive.
|
| The evolution of more expressive vocalizations might have been
| required along these lines for us to reach where we always
| thought modern man was to begin with.
| aaron695 wrote:
| > We can read texts from five thousand years ago,
|
| What's interesting is pretty much all file formats are still
| readable (The media they are stored on is often not)
|
| If you have the file it should be readable with a program you can
| find on Google.
|
| On topic, No, although the article might be technically correct
| the biggest thing holding back many consumer products is lack of
| ability for non-text.
|
| Signal had massive issues for years because it didn't have emoji.
| Now it's up with the rest. It's so much easier now you can copy a
| photo from Signal.
|
| Like all these apps it needs work, like where's my real gun
| emoji. But they'll get there.
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