19 ms·

Always Bet on Text (2014)

• kstenerud 6y ago
  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.
• montebicyclelo 6y ago
  > 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJ8pnCO0nTY
  • DanBC 6y ago
    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/ https://www.florence-nightingale.co.uk/coxcomb-diagram-1858/
  • smoe 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      Also, what does it convey if translated into (say) Egyptian hieroglyphs, if you're an ancient Egyptian who can read hieroglyphs...
      • mannykannot 6y ago
        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.
    • Lichtso 6y ago
      > Also where does text end and diagrams/images start? Text is the written form of language. And language is defined as a sequence of symbols. Thus, text is a subset of diagrams. Arbitrary diagrams can be of any topology (e.g. DAGs or even have cycles), however text always is of sequential topology (or a hierarchy as there is an isomorphic mapping to sequences). Basically, if there is a canonical way of reading it out loud, then it has an explicit sequence and is thus text. By that rule it follows that: Musical notation is text as it is strictly sequential (in time) and maybe hierarchical if there are multiple tracks. Most mathematical notations are text, as they are also sequential, even matrices are only a hierarchy of sequences which in turn can be serialized. Chemical / molecular diagrams are not text, they can contain cycles. Same goes for electronic and logic circuit schematics or rail way diagrams found in public transportation. > Similarly the example about the Wikipedia text of human rights being supposedly impossible to convey via image Schematics and diagrams are only use full if / because they are subject to a certain defined visual vocabulary. So if you had a visual vocabulary in that domain then you could express them as a diagram.
  • flukus 6y ago
    On the other, other hand. I find text far superior for creating and editing technical diagrams and images. Give my graphviz over any GUI editor to do the same. In this case the diagrams are good for communication but terrible for expression, I think this distinction is being overlooked by many here.
• hrishi 6y ago
  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.
  • necovek 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26164409
      • ALittleLight 6y ago
        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 6y ago
          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.
• chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  > 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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      Writing itself is a little older, but not much. But writing is one of the first information technologies (that we have records of ;).
  • Ygg2 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      Most programming languages would be better characterized as tree structures than text, being only obscured by unclear (but no less rigid) syntax.
      • goatlover 6y ago
        So Lisp? You still type it in as text.
        • user-the-name 6y ago
• samwestdev 6y ago
  Except nobody really reads text anymore. If you want to deliver a powerful message pics and vids have the most bang for the byte.
  • necovek 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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".
      • necovek 6y ago
        Yeah, it definitely depends for me too, but getting the nuances right from a video wouldn't work for me at all, even in a thing like dancing. Live instructor is an entirely different proposition (you can choose to focus on the bits that you care about, move around to get a better view, etc.). And I can stop them and ask for them to repeat, slow down or split their movement into more granular "part-steps". Videos are simply not that for me. Perhaps with actual 3D videos and improved tooling we might get there (eg. ability to zoom in on an instructor's hips in "infinite" resolution if you are having trouble following that particular bit of their motion). And I mean, you can sure learn from a video, but I just find it harder. Eg. I can go look at dance or basketball moves and try to reconstruct them, but it's usually a couple of core points that need to be taken in to achieve them that are much easier to grasp when broken into fundamentals. However, videos where the gist of the work is on the student, vs on the instructor, are much easier to make, which I believe is part of their popularity!
  • 6y ago
• geraldbauer 6y ago
  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 https://github.com/officetxt/awesome-txt
• virgilp 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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 6y ago
      > 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.
      • 6y ago
• KMag 6y ago
  Side note: the author is Graydon Hoare, creator of the Rust programming language.
  • necovek 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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.
      • necovek 6y ago
        Cool, that's a very interesting observation, so thanks for elaborating! As originally worded, it only sounded like "hey, this dude is famous" (for HN value of famous :-), so I would appreciate the commentary you just shared right off the bat! Thanks again for the clarification!
• msiyer 6y ago
  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.
  • bawolff 6y ago
    Storage hasnt really been the bottleneck for a long time. A terabyte stores a lot of pictures.
    • msiyer 6y ago
      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.
  • tedk-42 6y ago
    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
• bscphil 6y ago
  (2014)
• mistersys 6y ago
  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.
• ElectricMind 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
• doubletgl 6y ago
  When breathing, always bet on air..
• janee 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
  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.
• cycomanic 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      The medium of your reply contradicts the content.
      • kreeben 6y ago
        That's a beautiful sentence, especially in this here context, but it flew over my head. Would you care to expand?
• frenzyhome 6y ago
  Best Diapers for Toddlers with Sensitive Skin in 2021 https://frenzyhome.com/best-diapers-for-toddlers-with-sensitive-skin/ https://frenzyhome.com/best-diapers-for-toddlers-with-sensit...
• bmitc 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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.
      • wmil 6y ago
        > I don’t think hybrid or non-textual methods have really been given their due or worked on so much, The problem is that they really have. Visual thinkers in academia have been aggressively pursuing this in CS PhDs and research since the 80s or even 70s. The results haven't been great. Visual programming works well for some limited cases. Rational Rose, which produces code from UML diagrams, came out in 1994 and has been in continuous development since, has not taken over the world. The big problem is high information density. With text you can go through it in a linear fashion, even if it's very long. Diagrams tend to hit a breaking point where they're too complex to take in. There's no clear place to start. Then suddenly they are worthless.
• mihaaly 6y ago
  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)
  • sillysaurusx 6y ago
    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/ http://gather.town/
    • atonalfreerider 6y ago
      Please also see primitive.io which is a VR browser for GitHub.
  • powerapple 6y ago
    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.
• keiferski 6y ago
  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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logocentrism
• dalbasal 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    > 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 6y ago
      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.
• smusamashah 6y ago
  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".
• pestatije 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    Speech is not a communication "technology"; unlike writing, it didn't have to be "discovered".
• Tepix 6y ago
  Gopher vs HTTP. One was only text.
• gverrilla 6y ago
  > "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 https://imgur.com/a/8J6yeRe
  • jimbokun 6y ago
    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.
  • adiktheone 6y ago
    "Kids playing"
• EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 6y ago
  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".
• joppy 6y ago
  > “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...
• submeta 6y ago
  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.
• jimmyvalmer 6y ago
  What is that image of Gnus doing there?
• VoodooJuJu 6y ago
  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.
  • darau1 6y ago
    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 6y ago
    > 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 6y ago
      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."
  • hashkb 6y ago
    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.
  • andrewflnr 6y ago
    > Words leave nothing to the imagination. If only. Differing interpretations of words are one of the dominant sources of political discord in the US. The things words leave to the imagination are killing people.
• shultays 6y ago
  Author says text is the oldest and most stable communication technology but his example is some pictures on rock.
• dxiao 6y ago
  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.
• 4eor0 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    I like how the modern meme can capture an entire gestalt in 640x480 px. It's an extremely efficient means of communicating amongst people.
• kizer 6y ago
  4000 bytes? That tweeting bird picture really is worth a thousand words ;).
  • kizer 6y ago
    On a 32 bit machine of course.
• robenkleene 6y ago
  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.
  • mannykannot 6y ago
    It is not plausible that, but for the limitations of technology, you could substitute a picture for the argument presented in your post.
    • scroot 6y ago
      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 6y ago
        Cause that phrase is just 7 words. A picture would have 993 other unnecessary words.
        • CRConrad 6y ago
          Never mind the 993, show us a picture that conveys those seven -- and any 993 other unnecessary ones you want. If the seven were true, that should be easy. Heck, I won't hold it against you if there are as many as 1,042 extra words, or as few as 763. But I betcha you can't find one that clearly says what seven little words of text do. Which goes to show that those seven little words are a lie.
• asah 6y ago
  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.
• numlock86 6y ago
  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)
  • willtim 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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).
      • willtim 6y ago
        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.
• ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  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." ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣠⡖⠁⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⢲⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣼⡏⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢹⣧⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣸⣿⠁⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⣿⣇⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣿⣿⡇⠀⢀⣀⣤⣤⣤⣤⣀⡀⠀⢸⣿⣿⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢻⣿⣿⣔⢿⡿⠟⠛⠛⠻⢿⡿⣢⣿⣿⡟⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⣀⣤⣶⣾⣿⣿⣿⣷⣤⣀⡀⢀⣀⣤⣾⣿⣿⣿⣷⣶⣤⡀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⢠⣾⣿⡿⠿⠿⠿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡿⠏⠻⢿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠿⠿⠿⢿⣿⣷⡀⠀⠀ ⠀⢠⡿⠋⠁⠀⠀⢸⣿⡇⠉⠻⣿⠇⠀⠀⠸⣿⡿⠋⢰⣿⡇⠀⠀⠈⠙⢿⡄⠀ ⠀⡿⠁⠀⠀⠀⠀⠘⣿⣷⡀⠀⠰⣿⣶⣶⣿⡎⠀⢀⣾⣿⠇⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⢿⠀ ⠀⡇⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠹⣿⣷⣄⠀⣿⣿⣿⣿⠀⣠⣾⣿⠏⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢸⠀ ⠀⠁⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⠻⢿⢇⣿⣿⣿⣿⡸⣿⠟⠁⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢀⣼⣿⣿⣿⣿⣧⡀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠐⢤⣀⣀⢀⣀⣠⣴⣿⣿⠿⠋⠙⠿⣿⣿⣦⣄⣀⠀⠀⣀⡠⠂⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⠉⠛⠛⠛⠛⠉⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⠉⠛⠛⠛⠛⠋⠁⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ 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-traveled-by/#mistakes https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/the-road-most-travel... [1] https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/ https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/
• dgudkov 6y ago
  >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.
• Wolfenstein98k 6y ago
  Can someone give me a tl;dr? (Just kidding. Fantastic article.)
• openlowcode 6y ago
  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...)
• SPBS 6y ago
  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!
• mikeyla85 6y ago
  A picture is worth, like, 100 words
• aaron695 6y ago
  > 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.
• naringas 6y ago
  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.
• OhHiMarkos 6y ago
  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
• hliyan 6y ago
  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.
• dkersten 6y ago
  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.
• systemvoltage 6y ago
  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.
• mark_l_watson 6y ago
  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.
• leephillips 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    My biggest pet-peeve is the hamburger icon instead of the world 'Menu'. You are saving 10px... for what!?
    • fuzzfactor 6y ago
      In 1995 you needed to save 10px, they're just not as advanced any more.
    • kangalioo 6y ago
      > 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.
    • flukus 6y ago
      In defense of the hamburger menu, it's singular, nearly universal and well understood, I can deal with that just fine. This is very different from rows of icons in something like word where there's a huge array of functionality hidden behind obscure hieroglyphs.
• sn41 6y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_painting [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing#Cuneiform_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing#Cuneiform_s... [3] https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/pacific-apah/micronesia-apah/a/navigation-charts https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/pacifi...
  • jakubp 6y ago
    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).
• karmakaze 6y ago
  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.
• sinenomine 6y ago
  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.
• soapdog 6y ago
  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...
  • mantap 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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 https://www.unicode.org/pending/symbol-guidelines.html
    • duckerude 6y ago
      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?
• eimrine 6y ago
  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.
• jameshart 6y ago
  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=21 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.
• hit8run 6y ago
  Yet Instagram is flourishing.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• mdonahoe 6y ago
  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.
• gfodor 6y ago
  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 https://jel.app.
• yters 6y ago
  Text is actually made of a bunch of little pictures. Pictures: check and mate!
• yosito 6y ago
  Something about hammers and nails and using the right tools for the job
  • mrweasel 6y ago
    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.
• hctaw 6y ago
  > 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.
• InternetPerson 6y ago
  This is an important debate! Only one form of communication can be declared "the most powerful, useful, effective communication technology ever!!"
• derefr 6y ago
  > 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.)
• spicyramen 6y ago
  It depends, memes, short clips are super effective too.
• jameshart 6y ago
  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?
• yoz-y 6y ago
  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.
• tetek 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    >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 6y ago
      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-time/ https://audiobased.app/articles/screen-time-and-headphones-t... btw. I would be happy to learn what setups have you seen
  • fudged71 6y ago
    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.
• aftbit 6y ago
  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/2015-10/19/16/enhanced/webdr02/original-24710-1445285133-9.jpg?downsize=600:*&output-format=auto&output-quality=auto https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2015-10/19/1... https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2015-10/19/17/enhanced/webdr14/original-11949-1445288724-16.jpg?downsize=600:*&output-format=auto&output-quality=auto 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.
  • BeetleB 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      >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.
• cjohnson318 6y ago
  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.
• pmarreck 6y ago
  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.
• teucris 6y ago
  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.
• jamilaghasiyev 6y ago
  Ludwigstein cried after reading this
• zelphirkalt 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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.
  • confluence_perf 6y ago
    Would you be willing to share what type of additional export formats you're looking for, and for what purposes?
• fouric 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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.
    • fouric 6y ago
      Alright, I'll add a caveat: "assembly language is the most general for a particular architecture". > It's the higher-level languages that are more general. This is still false. Rust, for instance, is higher-level than C, while being less general - the borrow-checker constrains you from being able to do certain things. Haskell is even higher-level and even more restrictive. The most general "programming language" is a Turing machine. Not coincidentally, it's also the least useful, and nobody programs in it. This reinforces my point that "more general = more useful" is false.
• kobieyc 6y ago
  How is neuralink not being discussed here?
• seph-reed 6y ago
  The day will come when we can think an image and then send it. It might change things.
• djhaskin987 6y ago
  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.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/gui-programmer....
• trulyme 6y ago
  Nitpick: > It can be translated. It needs to be translated. No such issue with photos.
• l0b0 6y ago
  This looks like a specialization of Tim Berners-Lee's Rule of Least Power[1]: > suggests choosing the least powerful [computer] language suitable for a given purpose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_least_power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_least_power
• beyondCritics 6y ago
  As someone who has produced UML diagrams for a living for some time, this really talks to my soul... Thanks for posting.