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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 "

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?
    - hjanssen 6y ago
      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.
- andrewflnr 6y ago
  If you expand the definitions of text and pictures so they encompass all the same objects, of course you find that their expressiveness is equivalent. At that point, however, your logic is no longer connected to the team world. But since you asked, the special ingredient in text is syntax.
upofadown 6y ago
>..."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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
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.

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?
  - hjanssen 6y ago
    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.
andrewflnr 6y ago
If you expand the definitions of text and pictures so they encompass all the same objects, of course you find that their expressiveness is equivalent. At that point, however, your logic is no longer connected to the team world. But since you asked, the special ingredient in text is syntax.

upofadown 6y ago

>..."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 6y ago
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 6y ago
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 6y ago

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.