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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
by 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 agoPlain 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 agoPlease 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 agoI 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 Yes plain text can be inefficient and is overused (a proprietary unpublished wire-format does not need to use JSON).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.
- woliveirajr 6y agoHe would have to use words for that... Could you help him showing some image of "powerful" and "effective"?
- numlock86 6y agoThink of all the non-text technologies involved right now for me being able to read your strawman.
- jshevek 6y agoCan you explain the strawman you believe the parent is presenting? What is the original argument, and what is the misrepresentation?
- msla 6y agoRight after you provide an image that's as effective as the text of the First Amendment.
- Koshkin 6y ago強大的 and 有效的, respectively? (I can see some powerful person in the middle of the first image.)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- numlock86 6y agoBy that same argument/logic you might as well argue cave paintings are superior over text. It traces back probably over 50000 years and is still universal today and doesn't even require understanding of a specific language - and it still forms the basis of most of society now. (art, painting, photographs, graffiti, ...)
- SubjectToChange 6y agoYour reply is in text. Would you care to link a set of paintings to express your argument instead?
- rhn_mk1 6y agoThat's the point: take an arbitrary criterion, end up with an arbitrary answer.
- mattnewton 6y agoIt’s also in ascii, is that superior to all other character sets, or an accident of history?
- sellyme 6y ago> It’s also in ascii No it isn't: > 10:48:55.380 document.location.href > 10:48:55.384 "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26166797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26166797" > 10:48:57.723 document.characterSet > 10:48:57.726 "UTF-8"
- mattnewton 6y agoIf it was really Unicode I could use an eye roll emoji to reply with a succinct image, instead of all these words to describe my reaction.
- sellyme 6y agoThat's HN filtering your input, nothing to do with the actual encoding. Plenty of non-ASCII symbols show up perfectly fine. For example, '£'.
- fuzzfactor 6y ago>Nothing of this is actually true, period. Could you kindly verify that by repeating your post using something other than what amounts to a text file? If not maybe that's an even truer seal of irony.
- hardlianotion 6y agoI read from parent's point that what you are trying to communicate matters. I take from that, that text works sometimes, and sometimes something else is a better form of communication.
- fuzzfactor 6y agoYes, it does help when you can read between the lines . . .
- numlock86 6y ago> Could you kindly verify that by repeating your post using something other than what amounts to a text file? Could you kindly present me your comment without using all these inferior non-text technologies involved on my side to read it off my screen? That's the irony, if anything.
- drewzero1 6y agoThat sounds like a you problem. This site is one of a dwindling number that work flawlessly with a text-only browser, so if you view it in Links or similar (as I am right now) you can have a pure text experience without any of those pesky non-text technologies getting in the way!
- numlock86 6y ago> the "text-only browser"-argument That's a bit short-minded, don't you think? Or is this some kind of troll meme at this point? Anyway, I don't expect you to have some off-spec working TLS/TCP/IP/ARP/ETH implementation purely based on text, yet alone are connected to the internet via some text-only telegraphy station utilizing those things. Pretty sure your output device (read as: screen) has some sort of analog/digital signaling as well that's not ASCII encoded. There are sure some pesky non-text technologies involved ...
- dmingod666 6y agowell, svg is text. The jpg/png icon will pixelate when zoomed, but svg will retain its quality no matter how much you zoom in... :)
- criddell 6y agoIf SVG is text, then so is StarWars.mpg.b64.
- wvenable 6y agoSome SVG is very readable and easy to modify. I'm no designer but I've opened up SVG files and made modifications to get what I want (remove elements, change colors, etc). Not all SVG authoring tools make SVG's easy to read/modify. Tools in the 90's used to the same thing with HTML. Are you going to argue HTML isn't text?
- criddell 6y ago> Are you going to argue HTML isn't text? Go to google.com and view source. That's text, right?
- dmingod666 6y agoCompression is part of human communication also. Sometimes it's used to keep the communication short, sometime to hide the meaning behind what is said. lol, brb, PFA, W.H.O., IMHO, IANAL, GPA, GTA.. word soup for a different audience..
- wvenable 6y agoSo because google.com is hard to read, HTML is not text?
- numlock86 6y ago> svg is text Actually I thought about talking about SVG, which would be the natural result of taking a text representation of shapes ... and then use abbreviations until you are at some expert level language (SVG for example), which would then break the argument again. You might as well use some binary representation then, because most people don't speak fluent SVG.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- falcolas 6y ago> The post states that the used Twitter logo PNG is 4000 bytes, while it's only 723. The article was written in 2014. Worth remembering when nitpicking the text of an article.
- aembleton 6y agoDo PNG files reduce in size over time?
- orra 6y agoNot by themselves, but maybe they didn't use an optimiser before. Or used a far better optimiser now. Or tweaked the logo, and now it's more amenable.to optimisation.
- DarkWiiPlayer 6y agoI don't know, but if they do, they seem to have a half-life of about 2.431184 years. That's interesting news.
- teknopaul 6y agore:Try to express that logo in text "Twitter" carries the same weight
- numlock86 6y agoTell me in 723 characters or less what this "Twitter" looks like so I can make an exact copy of it. Text is ambiguous.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- doublerabbit 6y agoHN doesn't render ASCII or ANSI art correctly however both methods can serve as representation of Twitter in text and graphic less then <700 characters. ,~ ('v)__ (/ (``/ \__>' hjw ^^ Twitter Bird kindly borrowed from: https://www.asciiart.eu/animals/birds-land https://www.asciiart.eu/animals/birds-land
- numlock86 6y agoThat does not even remotely represent the Twitter logo, though. Shape and color are completely lost information, which are essentially the key properties that make the Twitter logo the Twitter logo.
- doublerabbit 6y agoValid point.
- danShumway 6y agoThis isn't text, you're using ASCII symbols as pixels in a grid to represent a raster image. This is literally just a raster image on an unconventional canvas. If you treat a uniwidth character grid of characters as pixels, you have not converted an image into text, you have encoded text into an image. It's no different than using extended characters and font colors in a fixed width terminal window to make terminal art. The fact that you use UTF-8 to encode something does not mean it will magically work in a screen reader, or that it will retain any of the advantages of pure text. I can encode any image or video file in a UTF-8 format and send it to you. Down this path lies calling everything text. But if your "text" stops being readable if I disable monospace, or it stops working if I change the font, or it stops working if I change line wrapping, or it stops being communicable as soon as I try to read it out loud -- then it's not pure text. Using a UTF-8 character as a pixel does not change the fact that you're drawing an image out of pixels.
- aembleton 6y agoThe Twitter logo in SVG format is only 687 bytes and can be as large as you like: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9f/Twitter_bird_logo_2012.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9f/Twitter_bird_...
- mrec 6y agoMy SVG is extremely rusty, but it doesn't look as if that xmlns:v="https://vecta.io/nano" serves any purpose besides advertising.
- boogies 6y agoIt's probably not the only removable part, the icon can be 414 bytes: https://github.com/edent/SuperTinyIcons#how-small https://github.com/edent/SuperTinyIcons#how-small
- DarkWiiPlayer 6y agoSVG is XML, which I'd say counts as text.
- duckerude 6y agoI don't think it counts for the purposes of this blog post. You can't translate the Wikipedia quote in the article into an SVG except by just rendering the bare text. Checking programmatically that text is about "bird" or "Twitter" is very easy. Checking that an SVG is about "bird" or "Twitter" is very hard. It's not even efficient. It conveys the same message as the word "Twitter" in a hundred times the size. And it wouldn't be less efficient if it were a binary format. It's maybe more suitable for carving into granite than a binary format, but you'd be better off carving the logo itself.
- DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago> Checking programmatically that text is about "bird" or "Twitter" is very easy. Checking that an SVG is about "bird" or "Twitter" is very hard. That depends on what you want: If you know what twitter is, then yes, just saying "twitter" is more efficient than a whole SVG file describing the twitter logo. But if you don't know what twitter is, nor what its logo looks like, SVG is a very efficient way to describe the logo exactly. If you can have it rendered to your screen that's optimal, but if not, you can take it as instructions to redraw the logo yourself and still get an accurate impression of what the twitter logo looks like. I that sense, "twitter" and the SVG of the twitter logo are both text, but they don't have the same meaning. As for the granite, it is indeed one situation where just drawing the plain SVG logo is more effective, but SVG would still be viable. Over telephone, on the other hand, you just can't transmit an image. You can only attempt to describe it, and the more detailed you get with that, the closer you come to just using a code very similar to SVG.
- admax88q 6y agoThat's a biased comparison. Obviously an image is better at communicating an image. By setting the goalposts at "pixel perfect recreation" you've already selected a winner.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- d0mine 6y agoCompare a book (a few megs) with a picture of the same size. What do you think can communicate more info? Do you have a single counter-example?
- andagainagain 6y agoThe beauty of both mediums is in the compression. Text is that it's highly compressible while also being highly compressed (and lossy) info already. To make text we have to filter our own ideas, and then to interpret text we have to add a bunch of info back from context. Pictures have the same tricks up their sleeve. Bitmaps are great but inefficient. If we put it through a lossy compression, it's a lot better. If we make it semi procedurally with a vector file, it's even better. How far can we take a compressed procedural file though? Well.. .kkreiger was about 97 KB, and stores a full 3d shooter. For a meg, you could store 100 such full games. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger Text isn't best in every way. With clever design we can use all the same principles that make text efficient, and make other types of data more efficient. It is a very good default though.
- axaxs 6y agoThere are single pictures you couldn't describe with terabytes of text(to a human, that is). Imagine for example trying to describe the milky way and northern lights. Yeah you could convey their looks in words but nobody is going to end up with the correct visual no matter how hard you try. Now add in other things, like emotion on people's faces. Some things just aren't possible to describe in full.
- d0mine 6y agoyou somehow managed to describe the pictures without showing them