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> Are digital assistants really representative signs of cultural harmony and world peace? Hardly. In fact, the logic of binary is inherently polarizing. You can

by tlb 8y ago

> Are digital assistants really representative signs of cultural harmony and world peace? Hardly. In fact, the logic of binary is inherently polarizing. You can either be a 1 or a 0 and you must pick a side. Pro life or pro choice? Trump or Hillary? Democrat or Republican? Amidst the ironclad logic of the syntax of binary code, the ultimate... That's a common argument, but completely flawed. Yes, logic gates are binary. But when a bunch of them are wired up to compute in floating point, there's nothing binary about the external behavior. Binariness depends on the resolution you look at. Individual bits are binary, but floating point registers are an excellent approximation to analog. Individual synapses are binary, but brains are analog. Laser pits on a CD are binary, but the music isn't. The curious thing is, presumably the author has seen video games and heard music on computers. How has it escaped their notice that the outward behavior of these systems is not all-or-nothing? Perhaps it's no more silly than the claims people have made about how the quantum nature of reality makes us all one in a spiritual sense.

mc32 8y ago
Exactly. I like Monty Montgomery from Xiph's explanation video[1] on Sine waves, sampling and digital stairsteps. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM
microcolonel 8y ago
In a genius stroke of irony, the claim that binarization has some inherent effect on things the author implies are "more than binary"... is expressed in good old UTF-8.
- tlb 8y ago
  UTF8 does lose a lot of nuance. Compare a quality handwritten letter like http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/01/your-pal-john-k.html http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/01/your-pal-john-k.html with the transcript (in UTF8) below.
  - lern_too_spel 8y ago
    JPEG captured that nuance nicely. HTML captured the nuance of John K's letters to other kids pretty well, too. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/arianelange/john-kricfalusi-ren-stimpy-underage-sexual-abuse https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/arianelange/john-kricfa...
  - bitwize 8y ago
    This letter takes on new dimensions of horror, in light of recent news that faith wasn't the only thing John was putting in the younger generation of cartoonists. The fact that he was a bitter jerk known for working poorly with others and missing deadlines, who thought only he was the rightful heir to the secrets of cartooning and animation, and who grew increasingly resentful that good work was being produced, on time, by people who weren't influenced by Bob Clampett, Tex Avery, Ralph Bakshi, or himself doesn't help his case. I get that you were linking to the letter only as an example of handwriting, but the story behind the letter has since taken on a much darker turn.
titzer 8y ago
> Laser pits on a CD are binary, but the music isn't. All of our digital media have limited resolution. CD-quality audio may (or may not) have enough resolution to completely fool human hearing. But CD-quality audio is not interactive or three dimensional in the way that a concert hall is; you can't tilt your head to the side or move to a different seat to get a different experience. Instead, you get a pinprick of audio information taken from a single point of view which you cannot manipulate or see through. And that's not even to mention the zillions of studio tricks and digital manipulations of that signal. Because of that limited resolution (e.g. 16-bit PCM on an audio CD), you can't "zoom in" and hear sounds that are much much quieter, both because the SNR gets too bad and the fundamental resolution limitation. The real world has so much potential for "zoom" that it's fundamentally not the same as its digital representation. Buy a microscope and take a look at an insect and then realize the vast majority of our reality which is extremely near to us is actually so small that it is below our unaided senses. Digital representations of it completely truncate and destroy the information below the level chosen. No more zooming. It is fundamentally different in the real world. In the real world, you can zoom deeper than your mind has capacity to process. But yeah, video games are fun. Don't get too sucked in, though. Not real. If you ever do get a chance to look at an insect through a microscope, then you'll realize that the outside world has about 50 orders of magnitude more complexity than a video game.

by tlb 8y ago

mc32 8y ago

Exactly. I like Monty Montgomery from Xiph's explanation video[1] on Sine waves, sampling and digital stairsteps. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM

microcolonel 8y ago

In a genius stroke of irony, the claim that binarization has some inherent effect on things the author implies are "more than binary"... is expressed in good old UTF-8.

tlb 8y ago
UTF8 does lose a lot of nuance. Compare a quality handwritten letter like http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/01/your-pal-john-k.html http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/01/your-pal-john-k.html with the transcript (in UTF8) below.
- lern_too_spel 8y ago
  JPEG captured that nuance nicely. HTML captured the nuance of John K's letters to other kids pretty well, too. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/arianelange/john-kricfalusi-ren-stimpy-underage-sexual-abuse https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/arianelange/john-kricfa...
- bitwize 8y ago
  This letter takes on new dimensions of horror, in light of recent news that faith wasn't the only thing John was putting in the younger generation of cartoonists. The fact that he was a bitter jerk known for working poorly with others and missing deadlines, who thought only he was the rightful heir to the secrets of cartooning and animation, and who grew increasingly resentful that good work was being produced, on time, by people who weren't influenced by Bob Clampett, Tex Avery, Ralph Bakshi, or himself doesn't help his case. I get that you were linking to the letter only as an example of handwriting, but the story behind the letter has since taken on a much darker turn.

titzer 8y ago

> Laser pits on a CD are binary, but the music isn't. All of our digital media have limited resolution. CD-quality audio may (or may not) have enough resolution to completely fool human hearing. But CD-quality audio is not interactive or three dimensional in the way that a concert hall is; you can't tilt your head to the side or move to a different seat to get a different experience. Instead, you get a pinprick of audio information taken from a single point of view which you cannot manipulate or see through. And that's not even to mention the zillions of studio tricks and digital manipulations of that signal. Because of that limited resolution (e.g. 16-bit PCM on an audio CD), you can't "zoom in" and hear sounds that are much much quieter, both because the SNR gets too bad and the fundamental resolution limitation. The real world has so much potential for "zoom" that it's fundamentally not the same as its digital representation. Buy a microscope and take a look at an insect and then realize the vast majority of our reality which is extremely near to us is actually so small that it is below our unaided senses. Digital representations of it completely truncate and destroy the information below the level chosen. No more zooming. It is fundamentally different in the real world. In the real world, you can zoom deeper than your mind has capacity to process. But yeah, video games are fun. Don't get too sucked in, though. Not real. If you ever do get a chance to look at an insect through a microscope, then you'll realize that the outside world has about 50 orders of magnitude more complexity than a video game.