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> A narrow definition will appear less frequently and thus probably have higher informational content. It's why a word "a" has little informational content, but
by Ukv 2y ago
> A narrow definition will appear less frequently and thus probably have higher informational content. It's why a word "a" has little informational content, but a very specific word like "vestibular" has more informational content.
I agree that "vestibular" refers to a more particular concept. I don't see how it follows that "vestibular" is a "more useful" word in the sense that implies we should be redefining other words to be likewise narrow in definition. If anything I'm pretty sure most would consider "a" to be the "more useful" word due to how applicable it is. But, really, language needs words for both narrow and broad concepts.
> Sure, but text format, means a textual format, i.e. uses text [...] Or maybe plaintext.
To my understanding, you suggested using the term "THE text format on Linux" as a replacement for "machine-readable" (as it is currently used). My objection was that those concepts are not the same and, in fact, binary files tend to be machine-readable moreso than text files. I'm confused how stating that text is textual addresses that.
> or more precisely, can be rendered as bytes
Many things (including, say, an 8-bit image) can be rendered as bytes. Would probably say it's instead about whether the data is in a UTF-8/ASCII/etc. encoding.
- Ygg2 2y ago> I agree that "vestibular" refers to a more particular concept. Not just that. A more surprising (i.e. less likely) result carries more information. In the informational theory sense. A word with broad scope will be more used, thus be more frequent in text, and thus, carry less information. > To my understanding, you suggested using the term "THE text format on Linux" as a replacement for "machine-readable" (as it is currently used). My objection was that those concepts are not the same and, in fact, binary files tend to be machine-readable moreso than text files. Ok, you have a point there. But I don't think the author ever compared binary machine only readable formats, either. All the machine-readable formats that he looked into admin were human-readable too. > Many things (including, say, an 8-bit image) can be rendered as bytes. Sorry, I meant to say UTF8/UTF16/ASCII etc. Probably was messing around with UTF8 -> bytes conversion around that time.
- Ukv 2y ago> In the informational theory sense. A word with broad scope will be more used, thus be more frequent in text, and thus, carry less information. A rare word carries more information when it is used, but by nature of being rare is infrequently used (99.99...% of sentences are the unsurprising case of not containing the word). Words that occur frequently typically convey more information in total, and I'd claim that this (opposed to per occurrence) is what it'd make sense to look at when considering redefining a word - among many other factors. More generally - you don't want the language to be unable to (or make it difficult to) convey common, frequently relevant, concepts. > But I don't think the author ever compared binary machine only readable formats, either. All the machine-readable formats that he looked into admin were human-readable too. The only other format the author explicitly names is XML, and it's as an example of a format with "similar virtues" to JSON. The bespoke machine-readable output formats the author is warning against using may very well be non-text formats, particularly with how they "require custom processing that goes well beyond basic grep and awk and other widely available Unix tools".