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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 depic

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.

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.