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Why Prefer Textfiles? (2010)
- orionblastar 9mo agoUnlike Word files, there is no chance of a Macro Virus in them. I sent our family lawyer some documents converted to Text by request.
- hagbard_c 9mo agoNo macro viruses but if your family lawyer uses some LLM-powered thingy in his workflow it might add a new dimension: prompt manipulation/injection attacks. A good spot to hide these would be at about ⅔ distance inside some wall of legalese at the beginning or end of a document since hardly anyone ever reads those.
- akoboldfrying 9mo agoWeeeell... Ya say that, but: Many years ago someone "infected" my computer with a "manual virus": A printed-out sheet of paper placed on top of the computer, telling me to delete all my hard drive's files myself, then photocopy the sheet and put both copies on nearby computers. It was obviously a joke. But in the "modern" agentic era, the same thing in a text file is slightly more realistic as a threat...
- delichon 9mo agoI've known people one-shot by pure text, like Atlas Shrugged, The Communist Manifesto, The Bible, The Qur'an, The Selfish Gene, Godel Escher and Bach, etc. Don't underestimate text.
- ada0000 9mo agoWhat exactly does “one shot” mean here?
- delichon 9mo agoInfected by a packet of ideas that profoundly alters your outlook on life, for good or ill like a mind virus. I've been shot several times, it's thrilling. For me it's always text that does it.
- spankibalt 9mo agoFamous American detective TV show True Detective had the hero annoy his colleague by referring to religion as "language virus that rewrites pathways in the brain" and thereby "dulls critical thinking". In other words, a lot people read shit and it fries their mixers. Obviously, it can also work the other way. Et cetera.
- Izkata 9mo ago"One shot" means it only takes one exposure to have an effect, instead of multiple exposures over time having a cumulative effect.
- 1718627440 9mo agoI definitely have read philosophic articles where I was instantly convinced and found it to bring into words, what I have long thought of. Either something contains a logic error or something is the truth, there is no maybe if I read it enough it will become true. That would just be self-deception.
- anonymous908213 9mo agoA clever quip, but I have to point out that most adherents for a given ideology have never actually read the canonical text of their ideology. The Bible particularly was generally inaccessible to laypeople for a ~1000 year period, who would typically learn everything they knew about it filtered through the preachers of the Church. Even today with easy access, a majority of Christians have not read it.
- 1718627440 9mo agoSo the "employees" of X are untrustworthy, but the collection of circular letters for the "employees" of X is not. This doesn't make any sense. > Even today with easy access, a majority of Christians have not read it. Depending on the denomination, 50% to 100% of the service they do revolves around reading from that book. > preachers of the Church Also what do you understand by "the Church".
- anonymous908213 9mo agoIt should be clear by "a ~1000 year period" that I was talking about history with that sentence, not the present day. For a very long time there was only one Church, the Catholic Church. Any "denominations" were local deviations considered heresy worthy of extermination, and it took the deadliest war in European history (prior to the world wars) for Christians to be able to openly practice beliefs that diverged from the Church. > So the "employees" of X are untrustworthy, but the collection of circular letters for the "employees" of X is not. This doesn't make any sense. I am not saying anything about whether the text of various ideologies is trustworthy or next. I am contending that contrary to the original comment I was replying to, it's not actually text that converts people to most ideologies. For Christianity, people generally adopt it for reasons like: being born into a Christian household/society; societal pressure; a desire for community; having received charitable aid when they needed it most; mid-life crises seeking a purpose in life; reckoning with mortality after a near-death experience or losing a loved one; witnessing something they perceive as miraculous. There are many, many reasons people become Christians, but I have never once heard of someone being converted merely by reading the Bible, and I suspect that such an occurence is exceedingly rare relative to all the other means of adoption.
- HPsquared 9mo agoThe real version of the information hazard in Snow Crash.
- reincarnate0x14 9mo agoComically the use of curl | bash managed to shoehorn them in there, and there were the occasional terminal escape characters that could do funny and sometimes mischievous things. There used to be something of a game of making specific files that would change screen colors or play songs off terminal bells, etc, tailored for specific terminals or command prompt windows. I remember a few short animated sequences using various backspaces and colors that only really worked if you could expect the text to be loaded at specific baud rates or in specific BBS software.
- eviks 9mo agoYou can block macros in Word, so you're only left with unformatted downsides?
- kehvyn 9mo agoIt's always interesting to me that these plaintext sites are flagged as "insecure" and "risky" by modern browsers. I don't have a good solution, but it reminds me of [1] [1](https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2018/08/07/securing-sites-made-them-less-accessible/ https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2018/08/07/securing-sites...)
- vbezhenar 9mo agoThey are insecure, because your ISP can change website responses and text format doesn't protect from that. So basically browser can't guarantee that you're looking at original web server response.
- BobbyTables2 9mo agoInsecure only if HTTP instead of HTTPS. The format being text, html, video, or an executable program has nothing to do with it.
- VladStanimir 9mo agoThis site is being deliver over HTTP instead of HTTPS, that is why it appears as insecure.
- yinyang_in 9mo agoWith checksum & sign nothing can be guaranteed, right ?
- NuclearPM 9mo agoWhy?
- eviks 9mo agoThe poor readability of the site itself is the best case against its core point
- krapp 9mo agoIt rather supports the site's core point, because that point is about plain text files, not HTML and CSS. Plain text is as readable as it is possible to be. Besides, this is exactly the kind of site HN constantly laments the loss of - unique, quirky, basic and rough around the edges.
- eviks 9mo ago> Plain text is as readable as it is possible to be. Which is nonsense, of course, just like this site illustrates. Trivial formatting and layout changes make it more readable. > Besides, this is exactly the kind of site HN constantly laments And this is exactly the beside-the-point response you sometimes encounter on HN. I'm not a representative of the collective HN, so why does it matter that some other people did some lamenting some time ago?
- krapp 9mo agotext files don't have "formatting" or "layout." They're just streams of ASCII characters. HTML is not plaintext.
- eviks 9mo agoThey do, and it's even misapplied in this example - there are weird hard line breaks (an ASCII character) in the wrong places, breaking the supposed "accessibility" of the format. But also, you continue to miss the point - this lacking/bad layout/formatting is precisely the reason not to use plain text
- krapp 9mo ago>But also, you continue to miss the point - this lacking/bad layout/formatting is precisely the reason not to use plain text I don't miss the point, I rather disagree with your opinion. Formatting and layout are properties of the client, and you can display plaintext in any color or font you wish. But the default - plain white background and plain black text with a simple serif or sans-serif font simulating a paper document - is perfectly readable.
- HeavyStorm 9mo agoWhy not: this looks terrible in my browser.
- keyle 9mo agoJust cURL it! j/k not j/k. I'd rather read in my beautiful gpu-powered terminal emulator than a website with bad taste and/or bloated nightmare under the covers.
- edelkas 9mo agoHere's a full up to date dump of the Textfiles archive for those interested: https://mega.nz/file/RMxlCKDa#gWDISvCcx8wv-1P-eflYyFMc6-Ps2kczfSNq82e8YRo https://mega.nz/file/RMxlCKDa#gWDISvCcx8wv-1P-eflYyFMc6-Ps2k... Or if you prefer magnet/ed2k download links: https://pastebin.com/UZNDd564 https://pastebin.com/UZNDd564
- curtisf 9mo agoMy favorite concrete example of this is the textually beautiful "xd" crossword puzzle format. Interesting video story: https://youtu.be/9aHfK8EUIzg https://youtu.be/9aHfK8EUIzg (2016) Data site: https://xd.saul.pw/data https://xd.saul.pw/data
- childintime 9mo agoTurns out text files are a binary format also, with any number of encodings, ever more binary as UTF8 grows, requiring constant updates, hidden by the OS. Text files are just the name for a renderer built in into every OS. So what exactly distinguishes them? The OS knows how to render them? It's just a linear list of characters? The reliance on a fixed font to allow some form of layout or positioning? Good basis for embedded DSL's, like Markdown? Don't forget they are a binary format also. Oh, I just said that. I anticipate the day UTF8 will be a fond memory of a big mistake we made in our youth, that held us back for decades. Don't forget that all of IT is a shit show sprinkled over with dollar paint, much like alchemy was. We don't yet know what the formation in Information is.
- andsoitis 9mo ago> the day UTF8 will be a fond memory of a big mistake we made Alternative that would be better?
- childintime 9mo agoI think that would require a complete rethink of the stack, silver bullet style. AFAIK no one has done so, few have the motivation. Maybe AI can help make it feasible for someone (or a small team) to do it in the not too distant future.
- andsoitis 9mo agoBut what is the “big mistake”, as you put it?
- wodenokoto 9mo agoI actually agree, and kinda wished there was some sort of "binary" alternative to json that every text editor would open and let me edit as easily as json, because at the end of the day, it is no more binary than utf8 encodings with their number of bits, endians and confused line endings.
- koehr 9mo agoFor me this really speaks for intermediate text formats like Markdown, that are easy to read and render, while covering most formatting needs.
- Twey 9mo agoI enjoy the (unironic?) juxtaposition of ‘use plain text files because they are universally understood and will still be accessible in the future’ with ‘stop writing things on paper like it's the 1900s and put everything on computers’.
- textfiles 9mo agoThis is the most "here is a glass of orange juice - argue about it" post about my site I can recall.