I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I agree: text is infinitely versatile, indexable, durable, etc. But, after discovering Bret Victor's work[1], and thinking about how I learned piano, I've also started to see a lot of the limitations of text. When I learned piano, I always had a live feedback loop: play a note, and hear how it sounds, and every week I had a teacher coach me. This is a completely different way to learn a skill, and something that doesn't work well with text.<p>Bret Victor's point is why is this not also the approach we use for other topics, like engineering? There are many people who do not have a strong symbolic intuition, and so being able to tap into their (and our) other intuitions is a very powerful tool to increase efficiency of communication. More and more, I have found myself in this alternate philosophy of education and knowledge transmission. There are certainly limits—and text isn't going anywhere, but I think there's still a lot more to discover and try.<p>[1] <a href="https://dynamicland.org/2014/The_Humane_Representation_of_Thought/" rel="nofollow">https://dynamicland.org/2014/The_Humane_Representation_of_Th...</a>
I think the downside, at least near-term, or maybe <i>challenge</i> would be the better word, is that anything richer than text requires a lot more engineering to make it useful. B♭ is text. Most of the applications on your computer, including but not limited to your browser, know how to render B♭ and C♯, and your brain does the rest.<p>Bret Victor's work involves a ton of really challenging heavy lifting. You walk away from a Bret Victor presentation inspired, but also intimidated by the work put in, and the work required to do anything similar. When you separate his ideas from the work he puts in to perfect the implementation and presentation, the ideas by themselves don't seem to do much.<p>Which doesn't mean they're bad ideas, but it might mean that anybody hoping to get the most out of them should understand the investment that is required to bring them to fruition, and people with less to invest should stick with other approaches.
> You walk away from a Bret Victor presentation inspired, but also intimidated by the work put in, and the work required to do anything similar. When you separate his ideas from the work he puts in to perfect the implementation and presentation, the ideas by themselves don't seem to do much.<p>Amen to that. Even dynamic land has some major issues with GC pauses and performance issues.<p>I do try to put my money where my mouth is, so I've been contributing a lot to folk computer[1], but yeah, there's still a ton of open questions, and it's not as easy as he sometimes makes it look.<p>[1] <a href="https://folk.computer/" rel="nofollow">https://folk.computer/</a>
> B♭ is text.<p>Yes, but musical notation is far superior to text for conveying the information needed to play a song.
I don't understand, musical notation is text though so how can it be superior to itself?
For complex music, sure, but if I'm looking up a folk tune on, say, thesession.org, I personally think a plain-text format like ABC notation is easier to sight-read (since for some instruments, namely the fiddle and mandolin, I mainly learn songs by ear and am rather slow and unpracticed at reading standard notation).
Yes. And I create and manage the musical notation for over 100 songs in text, specifically Lilypond.
Working in any science should also make this argument clearer. Data as text is hard to read and communicate. Even explanations of results. But graphs? Those are worth a thousand words. They communicate so much so fast. There's also a lot of skill to doing this accurately and well, just as one can say about writing. A whole subfield of computer graphics is dedicated to data visualization because it's so useful. Including things like colors. Things people often ignore because it feels so natural and obvious but actually isn't.<p>I think it's naïve to claim there's a singular best method to communicate. Text is great, especially since it is asynchronous. But even the OP works off of bad assumptions that are made about verbal language being natural and not being taught. But there's a simple fact, when near another person we strongly prefer to speak than write. And when we can mix modes we like to. There's an art to all this and I think wanting to have a singular mode is more a desire of simplicity than a desire to be optimal
Take a problem like untangling a pile of cords. Writing out how to do that in text would be a drag, and reading those directions probably wouldn't be helpful either. But a kid can learn how to untangle just by observation.<p>Physical intuition is an enormous part of our intelligence, and is hard to convey in text: you could read millions of words about how to ride a bike, and you would learn nothing compared to spending a few hours trying it out and falling over until it clicks.
I think the bicycle argument doesn't work; you don't learn to ride a bicycle, you train to do it. Knowing how to do it isn't good enough, your conscious brain isn't fast enough to calculate and achieve balance. You need to train your reflexes to keep the balance for you.
I think the obvious thing to do here is to say "Always bet on symbolics".<p>What separates text from images is that text is symbolic while images are visceral or feelings based. In the same way, text comes in short when it comes to the feeling you get when seeing an image. Try to put in to text what you feel when you look at Norman Rockwell's <i>Freedom of Speech</i> or a crappy 0.5MB picture of your daughter taken on an iPhone 3. Hard isn't it? Visual and symbolic are not isomorphic systems.<p>Examples of symbolic systems like text are sheet music and Feynman diagrams. You would be hard pressed if you tried to convey even 2KB of sheet music in a book
I mean, this very discussion is a case study in the supremacy of text. I skimmed the OP's blog post in thirty seconds and absorbed his key ideas. Your link is to a 54 minute video on an interesting topic which I unfortunately don't have time to watch. While I have no doubt that there are interesting ideas in it, video's inferior to text for communicating ideas efficiently, so most people reading this thread will never learn those ideas.<p>Text is certainly not the best at all things and I especially get the idea that in pedagogy you might want other things in a feedback loop. The strength of text however is its versatility, especially in an age where text transformers are going through a renaissance. I think 90%+ of the time you want to default to text, use text as your source of truth, and then other mediums can be brought into play (perhaps as things you transform your text into) as the circumstances warrant.
Actually, you might want to check the video again, it has sections and a full transcript on the right side, precisely to make skimming easy!<p>> video's inferior to text for communicating ideas efficiently<p>Depends on the topic tbh. For example, YouTube has had an absolute explosion of car repair videos, precisely because video format works so well for visual operations. But yes, text is currently the best way to skim/revisit material. That's one reason I find Bret's website so intriguing, since he tries to introduce those navigation affordances into a video medium.<p>> The strength of text however is its versatility, especially in an age where text transformers are going through a renaissance. I think 90%+ of the time you want to default to text, use text as your source of truth, and then other mediums can be brought into play (perhaps as things you transform your text into) as the circumstances warrant.<p>Agree, though not because of text's intrinsic ability, but because its ecosystem stretches thousands of years. It's certainly the most pragmatic choice of 2025. But, I want to see just how far other mediums can go, and I think there's a lot of untapped potential!
I came back here after the video (btw he speak very deliberately, watching it at 1.5 or 2x while digesting the message is fine)<p>I'd compare it's message to a "warning !" sign. It's there to make you stop and think about our computing space, after that it's up to you to act or not on how you perceive it.<p>That's totally wishy-washy, so it might not resonate, but after that I went to check more of what dynamicland is doing and sure enough they're doing things that are completely outside of the usual paradigm.<p>A more recent video explaining the concept in a more practical and down to earth framing: <a href="https://youtu.be/PixPSNRDNMU" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/PixPSNRDNMU</a><p>(here again, reading the transcript won't nearly convey the point. Highly recommend watching it, even sped up if needed)
The fidelity and encoding strength of the "idea" you got the gist of from skimming might be less than the "idea" you receive when you spend the time to watch the 54 minute video
The missing ingredient you mentioned is the coach. You can pay a private math tutor to watch you solve math and engineering problems and give you direction a long the way. Few families do that.
Thank you so much for introducing me to this talk. Changed my way of thinking.
Can you explain what you mean by "This is... something that doesn't work well with text"? Text as opposed to what? If you were to "play" music by typing notes, then you would compare your typed note against the string of correct notes. Of course that sounds a bit silly, and probably not what you meant, so, please elaborate.
I've also become something of a text maximalist. It is the natural meeting point in human-machine communication. The optimal balance of efficiency, flexibility and transparency.<p>You can store everything as a string; base64 for binary, JSON for data, HTML for layout, CSS for styling, SQL for queries... Nothing gets closer to the mythical silver-bullet that developers have been chasing since the birth of the industry.<p>The holy grail of programming has been staring us in the face for decades and yet we still keep inventing new data structures and complex tools to transfer data... All to save like 30% bandwidth; an advantage which is almost fully cancelled out anyway after you GZIP the base64 string which most HTTP servers do automatically anyway.<p>Same story with ProtoBuf. All this complexity is added to make everything binary. For what goal? Did anyone ever ask this question? To save 20% bandwidth, which, again is an advantage lost after GZIP... For the negligible added CPU cost of deserialization, you completely lose human readability.<p>In this industry, there are tools and abstractions which are not given the respect they deserve and the humble string is definitely one of them.
> The optimal balance of efficiency, flexibility and transparency.<p>You know the rule, "pick 2 out of 3". For a CPU, converting "123" would be a pain in the arse if it had one. Oh, and hexadecimal is even worse BTW; octal is the most favorable case (among "common" bases).<p>Flexibility is a bit of a problem too - I think people generally walked back from Postel's law [1], and text-only protocols are big "customers" of it because of its extreme variability. When you end-up using regexps to filter inputs, your solution became a problem [2] [3]<p>30% more bandwidth is absolutely huge. I think it is representative of certain developers who have been spoiled with grotesquely overpowered machines and have no idea any idea of the value of bytes, bauds and CPU cycles. HTTP3 switched to binary for even less than that.<p>The argument that you can make up for text's increased size by compressing base64 is erroneous; one saves bandwidth and processing power on both sides if you can do away without compression. Also, with compressed base64 you've already lost the readability on the wire (or out of the wire since comms are usually encrypted anyway).<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle</a><p>[2] <a href="https://blog.codinghorror.com/regular-expressions-now-you-have-two-problems/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.codinghorror.com/regular-expressions-now-you-ha...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReDoS" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReDoS</a>
> For the negligible added CPU cost of deserialization, you completely lose human readability.<p>You could turn that around & say that, for the negligible human cost of using a tool to read the messages, your entire system becomes slower.<p>After all, as soon as you gzip your JSON, it ceases to be human-readable. Now you have to un-gzip it first. Piping a message through a command to read it is not actually such a big deal.
As someone who's daily job is to move protobuf messages around, I don't think protobuf is a good example to support your point :-)<p>AFAIKT, binary format of a protobuf message is strictly to provide a strong forward/backward compatibility guarantee. If it's not for that, the text proto format and even the jaon format are both versatile, and commonly used as configuration language (i.e. when humans need to interact with the file).
I've moved away from DOCish or PDF for storage to text (usually markdown) with Makefiles to build with Typst or whatever. Grep works, git likes it, and I can easily extract it to other formats.<p>My old 1995 MS thesis was written in Lotus Word Pro and the last I looked, there was nothing to read it. (I could try Wine, perhaps. Or I could quickly OCR it from paper.) Anyway, I wish it were plain text!
I poked this - the 96 installer from Archive didn't play nice with wine. However, dosbox plus win3.11 and some ingmount commands worked just fine. So yes, you could export to plain text or similar.
The text based side of protobuf is not base64 or json. We'd be looking at either CSV or length delimited fields.<p>Many large scale systems are on the same camp as you as their text files flow around their batch processors like crazy, but there's absolutely no flexibility or transparency.<p>Json and or base64 are more targeted as either low volume or high latency systems. Once you hit a scale where optimizing a few bits straight saves a significant amount of money, self labeled fields are just out of question.
Base64 and JSON takes a lot of CPU to decode; this is where Protobuf shines (for example). Bandwidth is one thing, but the most expensive resources are RAM and CPU, and it makes sense to optimize for them by using "binary" protocols.<p>For example, when you gzip a Base64-encoded picture, you end up 1. encoding it in base64 (takes a *lot* of CPU) and then, compressing it (again! jpeg is already compressed).<p>I think what it boils down to is scale; if you are running a small shop and performance is not critical, sure, do everything in HTTP/1.1 if that makes you more productive.
But when numbers start mattering, designing binary protocols from scratch can save a lot of $ in my experience.
Maybe for some kind of multiplayer game which has massive bandwidth and CPU usage requirements and has to be supported by paper-thin advertising profit margins... When tiny performance improvements can mean the difference between profitable and unprofitable, then it might make sense to optimize but this... But for the vast majority of software, the cost of serializing JSON is negligible and not worth thinking about.<p>For example, I've seen a lot of companies obsess over minor stuff like shaving a few bucks off their JSON serialization or using a C binding of some library to squeeze every drop of efficiency out of those technologies... While at the same time letting their software maintenance costs blow out of control... Or paying astronomical cloud compute bills when they could have self-hosted for 1/20th of the price...<p>Also, the word scale is overused. What is discussed here is performance optimization, not scalability. Scalability doesn't care for fixed overhead costs. Scalability is about growth in costs as usage increases and there is no difference in scalability if you use ProtoBuf or JSON.<p>The expression that comes to mind is "Penny-wise, pound-foolish." This effect is absolutely out of control in this industry.
If you deploy on phones, CPU and memory is a major problem. Pick a median Android and lots of websites consisently fail to deliver good experience on it and it's very common to see them bottlenecked on CPU. JSON is massively innefficient, it's foolish think it won't have any effect.
The value of protobuf is not to save a few bytes on the wire. First, it requires a schema which is immensely valuable for large teams, and second, it helps prevent issues with binary skew when your services aren't all deployed at the same millisecond.
I marvel at the constraint and freedom of the string.
shipping base64 in json instead of a multipart POST is very bad for stream-processing. In theory one could stream-process JSON and base64... but only the json keys prior would be available at the point where you need to make decisions about what to do with the data.
Still, at least it's an option to put base64 inline inside the JSON. With binary, this is not an option and must send it separately in all cases, even small binary...<p>You can still stream the base64 separately and reference it inside the JSON somehow like an attachment. The base64 string is much more versatile.
> Still, at least it's an option to put base64 inline inside the JSON. With binary, this is not an option and must send it separately in all cases, even small binary...<p>There's nothing special about "text" or binary here. You can absolutely put binary inside other binary; you use a symbol that doesn't appear inside the binary, much like you do for text.<p>You use a divider, like " is for json, and a prearranged way to avoid that symbol from appearing inside the inner binary (the same approach that works for text works here).<p>What do you think a zip file is? They're not storing compressed binary data as text, I can tell you that.
Binary usually means arbitrary byte sequences so you can't choose a single delimiting character. The usual approaches are storing the length somewhere or picking a sufficiently long random sequence that it's vanishingly unlikely to occur in the payload.
This reminds me that I just learned the other day that .a files are unix archives, which have a textual representation (and if all the bundled files are textual, there's no binary information in the bundle). I thought .a was just for static libraries for the longest time, and had no idea that it was actually an old archive format.
Even with binary, you can store a binary inline inside of another one if it is a structured format with a "raw binary data" type, such as DER. (In my opinion, DER is better in other ways too, and (with my nonstandard key/value list type added) it is a superset of the data model of JSON.)<p>Using base64 means that you must encode and decode it, but binary data directly means that is unnecessary. (This is true whether or not it is compressed (and/or encrypted); if it is compressed then you must decompress it, but that is independent of whether or not you must decode base64.)
I don't get why using a binary protocol doesn't allow handling strings. What's the limitation ?
I think you want ZSTD instead of GZIP nowadays.
Text is just bytes, and bytes are just text. I assume this is talking about human readable ASCII specifically.<p>I think the obsession with text comes down to two factors: conflating binary data with closed standards and poor tooling support. Text implies a baseline level of acceptable mediocrity for both. Consider a CSV file will millions of base64 encoded columns and no column labels. That would really not be any friendlier than a binary file with a openly documented format and suitable editing tool, e.g. sqlite.<p>Maybe a lack of fundamental technical skills is another culprit, but binary files really aren't that scary.
> Text is just bytes, and bytes are just text. I assume this is talking about human readable ASCII specifically.<p>Text is human readable writing (not necessarily ASCII). It is most certainly not just any old bytes the way you are saying.
I agree, but binary is exactly the same. You use a different tool to view it, and maybe you don't have that tool, and that's the problem. But it's a matter of having a way to interpret the data; trivially base64 encoding readable text gives you text, and if you can't decode it, it's as meaningless as binary you can't decode.<p>It makes more sense to consider readability or comprehensibility of data in an output format; text makes sense for many kinds of data, but given a graph, I'd rather view it as a graph than as a readable text version.<p>And if you have a way to losslessly transform data between an efficient binary form, readable text, or some kind of image (or other format), that's the best of all.
And it's funny to think about how many different incompatible text standards there were for the first 30ish years of computers. Each vendor had their own encoding, and it took until UTF-8 to even agree on text (let alone the legacy of UTF-16). If it took that long to agree on text, I have a bad feeling it'll take even longer to agree on anything else.<p>I suppose open standards have slowly been winning with opus and AV1, but there's still so many forms of interactions that have proprietary or custom interfaces. It seems like anything that has a stable standard has to be at least 20 years old, lol.
And machine readable. You can parse csv file more or less easily but try the same with some forgotten software specific binary.
Text is bytes that's accompanied with a major constraint on which sequences of bytes are permitted (a useful compression into principal axes that emerged over thousands of years of language evolution), along with a natural connection to human semantics that is due to universal adoption of the standard (allowing correlations to be modelled).<p>Text is like a complexity funnel (analogous to a tokenizer) that everyone shares. Its utility is derived from its compression and its standardization.<p>If everyone used binary data with their own custom interpretation schema, it might work better for that narrow vertical, but it would not have the same utility for LLMs.
> Maybe a lack of fundamental technical skills is another culprit, but binary files really aren't that scary.<p>Indeed, there is a galactic civilization centered around binary communication: <a href="https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bynar" rel="nofollow">https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bynar</a>
> But let's hit the random button on wikipedia and pick a sentence, see if you can draw a picture to convey it, mm?<p>The inverse is also difficult. Pick a random 15 second movie clip, how to describe it using text without losing much of its essence? Or can one really port a random game into a text version? Can a pilot fly a plane with text-based instrument panel?<p>Text is not a superset of all communication media. They are just different.
Commercial aviation involves mostly textual interaction[1] to determine what the aircraft does, for most of the time. Aviation is rife with plain text, usually upper case for better legibility[2].<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_management_system" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_management_system</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOTAM" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOTAM</a>
This also leads to the unreasonable effectiveness of LLMs. The models are good because they have thousands of years of humans trying to capture every idea as text. Engineering, math, news, literature, and even art/craftmanship. You name it, we wrote it down.<p>Our image models got good when we started making shared image and text embedding spaces. A picture is worth 1000 words, but 1000 words about millions of images are what allowed us to teach computers to see.
> effectiveness of LLMs<p>Is doing dozens of back and forth to explain what we actually want, while the model burns down inordinate amount of processing power at each turn, a model of efficiency or effectiveness ?<p>It might be convenient and allow for exploration, the cost might be worth it in some cases, but I wouldn't call it "effective".
gnabgib points out that this same article has been posted for comment here three other times since it was written. That said, afaict no one has commented any of these times on what I'm about to say, so hopefully this will be new.<p>I'm a linguist, and I've worked in endangered languages and in minority languages (many of which will some day become endangered, in the sense of not having native speakers). The advantage of plain text (Unicode) formats for documenting such languages (as opposed to binary formats like Word used to be, or databases, or even PDFs) is that text formats are the only thing that will stanmd the test of time. The article by Steven Bird and Gary Simons "Seven Dimensions of Portability for Language Documentation and Description" was the seminal paper on this topic, published in 2002. I've given later conference talks on the topic, pointing out that we can still read grammars of Greek and Latin (and Sanskrit) written thousands of years ago. And while the group I led published our grammars in paper form via PDF, we wrote and archived them as XML documents, which (along with JSON) are probably as reproducible a structured format as you can get. I'm hoping that 2000 years from now, someone will find these documents both readable and valuable.<p>There is of course no replacement for some binary format when it comes to audio.<p>(By "binary" format I mean file formats that are not sequential and readily interpretable, whereas text files are interpretable once you know the encoding.)
Purely anecdotal, but I hoard a lot of personal documents (shopping receipts, confirmation emails, scans etc.) and for stuff I saved only 10 years ago, the toughest to reopen are the pure text files.<p>You rightly mention Unicode, as before that there was a jungle of formats. I have some in UTF-16, some in SJIS, a ton in EUC, other were already utf-8, many don't have a BOM. I could try each encoding and see what works for each of the files (except on mobile...it's just a PITA to deal with that on mobile).<p>But in comparison there's a set of file I never had issues opening now and then: PDFs and jpegs. All the files that my scanner produced are still readable absolutely everywhere. Even with slight bitrot they're readable, and with the current OCR processes I could probably put it all back in text if ever needed.<p>If I had to archive more stuff now and can afford the space, I'd go for an image format without hesitation.<p>PS: I'm surprised you don't mention the Unicode character limitations for minority languages or academic use. There will still be characters that either can't be represented, or don't have an exact 1 to 1 match between the code point and the representation.
This is all true, but I think you're too focused on your area. Finding musical notes that we can interpret correctly from an ancient civilization, would that be "text" or "binary"? I think it's a false choice.<p>Similarly, cave paintings express the painting someone intended to make better than a textual description of it.
I don't understand the dichotomy. What's the situation where I'd ever be forced to choose between, say, UTF-8 or Linear Pulse-Code Modulation?<p>This reads like someone who got really excited about a subject but only ever learned to communicate in breathless "Ford vs. Chevy" kid-argument style.<p>We all like text here. Stop selling.<p>Edit: clarifications
(2014) Popular in:<p>2021 (570 points, 339 comments) <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26164001">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26164001</a><p>2015 (156 points, 69 comments) <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10284202">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10284202</a><p>2014 (355 points, 196 comments) <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8451271">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8451271</a>
> Text is the oldest and most stable communication technology<p>Minor nit: complex language (i.e. Zipf’s law) is the oldest and most stable communication technology.<p>Before text, we had oral story telling. It allowed us to communicate one generation’s knowledge to the next, and so on.<p>Arguably this is present elsewhere in the animal kingdom (orcas, elephants, etc.), but human language proves to be the most complex.<p>Side note: one of my favorite examples is from the Gunditjmara (a group of Aboriginal Australians) who recall a volcanic eruption from 30k+ years ago [0].<p>Written language (i.e. text) is unique, in that it allows information to pass across multiple generations, without a man-in-the-middle telephone-like game of storytelling.<p>But both are similar, text requires you to read, in your own voice, the thoughts of another. Storytelling requires you to hear a story, and then communicate it to others.<p>In either case, the person is required to retell the knowledge, either as an internal monologue or as an external broadcast.<p>Always bet on language.<p>[0]<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budj_Bim" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budj_Bim</a>
Well, the article had "assuming we treat speech/signing as natural phenomenon" but if you are including biological communication you'd probably have to go with genetic code written in RNA. Nature's way of writing down life's assembly instructions. Four billion years and going strong.
The example of the Gunditjmara is speculative. There’s no way to verify it. It’s an appealing possibility, but that’s about it.
Reread Story of Your Life again just now, and all it made me want to do is learn Heptapod B and their senagram style of written communication.<p>Reading “Mathematica - A secret world of intuition and curiosity” as well and a part stuck out in a section called The Language Trap. Example author gives is about for a recipe for making banana bread, that if you’re familiar with bananas, it’s obvious that you need to peel them before mashing. Bit of you haven’t seen a banana, you’d have no clue what to do. Does a recipe say peel a banana or should that be ignored? Questions like these are clear coming up more with AI and context, but it’s the same for humans. He ends that section saying most people prefer a video for cooking rather than a recipe.<p>Other quote from him:<p>“The language trap is the belief that naming things is enough to make them exist, and we can dispense with the effort of really imagining them.”
<a href="https://futuretextpublishing.com/" rel="nofollow">https://futuretextpublishing.com/</a> --> books vol 1-5<p>And what comes to original article, there is no "text [systems]" (or there is, like there are "number [systems]", just made up). "Text" like this very thing you are reading is 2D drawing. There are no character glyphs of any kind (latin, logograms etc.) defined by universe*, they are human invented and stored/interpreted at human collective level. Computers don't know anything about text, only "numbers" of some bit width, and with those numbers a system must be created that can map some number representation to some drawing in some method (e.g. with bitmap). Also there is a lot of difference between formal/executable and natural human languages. Anyways, it's not a about some text format/encoding, it's the human/computer defined/interpreted non-linguistical meaning behind it (Wittgenstein).<p>* DNA/RNA can be one such "universal character glyph/string", as the "textual" information is physically constructed and interpreted.
Much as I love text for communication, it's worth knowing that "28% of US adults scored at or below Level 1, 29% at Level 2, and 44% at Level 3 or above" - Literacy in the United States: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States</a><p>Anything below 3 is considered "partially illiterate".<p>I've been thinking about this a lot recently, as someone who cares about technical communication and making technical topics accessible to more people.<p>Maybe wannabe educators like myself should spend more time making content for TikTok or YouTube!
The inverse of this is the wisdom that pearls should not be cast before swine. If you want to increase literacy rates, it's unclear to me how engaging people on an illiterate medium will improve things.<p>Technical topics demand a technical treatment, not 30-second junk food bites of video infotainment that then imbue the ignorant audiences with the semblance or false feeling of understanding, when they actually possess none. This is why we have so many fucking idiots dilating everywhere on topics they haven't a clue on - they probably saw a fucking YouTube video and now consider themselves in possession of a graduate degree in the subject.<p>Rather than try to widely distribute and disseminate knowledge, it would be far more prescient to capitalize on what will soon be a massive information asymmetry and widening intellectual inequality between the reads and the read-nots, accelerated by the production of machine generated, misinformative slop <i>at scale.</i>
Technical knowledge isn't specifically bound to literacy.<p>A "dumb" example would be IKEA manuals that describe an assembly algorithm, I could imagine a lot of other situations where you want to convey very specific and technical information in a form that doesn't rely on a specific language (especially if languages aren't shared).<p>Color coding, shape standards etc. also go in that direction. The efficiency is just so big.
Saying that a 20x20 image of a Twitter logo is 4000 bytes is just so wrong.<p>The image is of a monochrome logo with anti-aliased edges. Due to being a simple filled geometric shape, it could compress well with RLE, ZIP compression, or even predictors. It could even be represented as vector drawing commands (LineTo, CurveTo, etc...).<p>In a 1-bit-per-pixel format, a 20x20 image ends up as 400 bits (50 bytes).
For a computer, text is a binary format like anything else. We have decades of tooling built on handling linear streams of text where we sometimes encode higher dimensional structures in it.<p>But I can't help feel that we try to jam everything into that format because that's what's already ubiquitous. Reminds me of how every hobby OS is a copy of some Unix/Posix system.<p>If we had a more general structured format would we say the opposite?
Related: <a href="https://sive.rs/plaintext" rel="nofollow">https://sive.rs/plaintext</a>
From an information theory perspective, "Always bet on text" is a plea for symbolic efficiency. It argues that while binary or visual formats might have higher bandwidth, they often have lower meaning-per-bit for the complex, abstract logic that runs civilization. Text is the most entropy-resistant, highly-compressible, and universally-decodable format we have ever invented.
This doesn’t track for me. How can text have lower bandwidth but higher meaning-per-bit? How does that jibe with entropy resistance (in an information theoretic sense)?<p>Text seems worse to me. First of all, binary encodings are a superset of text encodings. But less abstractly, binary enables content-transparent compression and error correction.<p>Like other commenters have pointed out, the downside of binary is needing sufficient tooling. Depending on the domain, that can indeed be a downside. But if that critique isn’t relevant for a given context, it’s extremely unlikely that plaintext (ASCII?) is superior.<p>Text seems more like the answer to a plea for lowest common denominator of tooling.
Human-readability is the ultimate error correction for the most expensive link in the system: the human-in-the-loop.<p>The information-theoretic justification is that binary's efficiency assumes a perfectly known codec, but the entropy of time destroys codecs (bit rot/obsolescence). Text sacrifices transmission efficiency for semantic recovery - it remains decodable even when the specific tooling is lost, making it the most robust encoding for long-term information survival.
This is sort of the premise of all of us electronics-as-code startups. We think that a text-based medium for the representation of circuits is a necessity for AI to be able to create electronics. You can't skip this step and generate schematic images or something. You have to have a human-readable (which also means AI-compatible) text medium. Another confusion: KiCad files are represented in text, so shouldn't AI be able to generate them? No- AI has similar levels of spatial understanding to a human reading these text files. You can't have a ton of XY coordinates or other non-human-friendly components of the text files. Everything will be text-based and human-readable, at least at the first layer of AI-generation for serious applications
I agree 99%.<p>The 1% where something else is better?<p>Youtube videos that show you how to access hidden fasteners on things you want to take apart.<p>Not that I can't get absolutely anything open, but sometimes it's nice to be able to do so with minimal damage.
I wonder if some day there will be a video codec that is essentially a standard distribution of a very precise and extremely fast text-to-video model (like SmartTurboDiffusion-2027 or something). Because surely there are limits to text, but even the example you gave does not seem to me to be beyond the reach of a text description, given a certain level of precision and capability in the model. And we now have faster than realtime text to video.
Post from the creator of Rust, 11 years ago. Highly relevant to today.
Text is not the best medium for the following situations:<p>- I want to learn how to climb rock walls<p>- I want to learn how to throw a baseball<p>- I want to learn how to do public speaking<p>- I want to learn how to play piano<p>- I want to make a fire in the woods<p>- I want to understand the emotional impact of war<p>- I want to be involved in my child's life
I agree with all of these except the emotional impact of war where though slower a novel or memoir might work best. Think "All Quiet on the Western Front." At the same time we do want images of the war and time for grounding.
I don’t see the relevance to the topic. I could preface your list with something like “The monkey wrench is not the best tool for the following situations:”. It’s kinda vacuously true in a meaningless way but without expansion adds nothing to a discussion about the relative merits of monkey wrenches versus other similar tools like pliers or vice grips.
Honestly text is pretty good for conveying all of those things, though you'd also need to supplement it with practice in all but the emotional impact of war bit.
Why did you create an account just to post that?<p>In text format no less
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It's easy to be a text maximalist now we're in the LLM era, but I disagree that ideas are a separate, nonphysical realm that cannot otherwise be described.
<a href="https://lucent.substack.com/p/one-map-hypothesis" rel="nofollow">https://lucent.substack.com/p/one-map-hypothesis</a>
I agree. As a simple exercise, look at all software tools that’s GUI only. They become a large walled garden unable to be penetrated by LLM.<p>Tools that are mostly text or have text interfaces? Greatly improved by LLM.<p>So all of those rich multimedia and their players/editors really need to add text representations.
People make fun of it, but I think the fact that Unixey stuff can use tools that have existed since the 70's [1] can be attributed to the fact that they're text based. Every OS has its own philosophy on how to do GUI stuff and as such GUI programs have to do a lot of bullshit to migrate, but every OS can handle text in one form or another.<p>When I first started using Linux I used to make fun of people who were stuck on the command line, but now pretty much everything I do is a command line program (using NeoVim and tmux).<p>[1] Yes, obviously with updates but the point more or less still stands.
Given all the replies here that are within last 10 - 30 mins. I guess I am the only one getting "403 Forbidden" ?
Bet on text for your job or business<p>But would be foolish to live your life through it.<p>Don't confuse the map with the territory.<p>Explore the territory. Not the map.<p>Unless your job requires building or maintaining the map.
I was going to disagree, along the lines of the people bringing up Bret Victor or other modes of communication and learning, but I have long accepted that the written word has been one of the largest boons for learning in human history, so I guess I agree. Still, it'll be an interesting and worthwhile challenge to make a better medium with modern technology.
I just recently intentionally made the decision to keep the equation input in FuzzyGraph (<a href="https://fuzzygraph.com" rel="nofollow">https://fuzzygraph.com</a>) plain text (instead of something like stylized latex like Desmos has) in order to make it easy to copy and paste equations.
This is one of the core reason I've been focused on building small tools for myself using Emacs and the shell (currently ksh on OpenBSD). HTML and the Web is good, but only in its basic form. A lot of stuff fancies themselves being applications and magazines and they are very much unusable.
Text can be surprisingly immersive and rich, often surpassing the most complex VR experiences.<p>It is amazing what we can do with a few strings of symbols, thanks to the fact that we all learn to decode them almost for free.<p>The oldest and most important technology indeed.
I disagree. If your goal involves the cooperation of others one should always bet on lazy.<p>Text will win, unless there is a lower effort option. The lower effort option does not need to be better, just easier.
Nope. Text and media (visual and audio) are not comparable. text is a vehicle and the other sensory content is the payload. Vehicle is different from payload. A vehicle can not represent a payload. When you are describing a scene or sound using text, you are using it text as a vehicle to send the sensory data to someone, via text, in a crude form. Stories recreate the sensory data and feelings.<p>Human sensory system has an evolved processing ability for visual and audio content. A story can give different sensory data and feelings to different receivers. It is a low-fidelity transmission.<p>Try telling someone how an old folk song sounded or how some exotic fruit tasted, or how some wild flower smelled, or how some surreal game scene looked, using only text.
With LLMs, the text format should be more popular than ever, yet we still see people pushing binary protocols like ProtoBuf for a measly 20% bandwidth advantage which is lost after GZIPing the equivalent JSON... Or a 30% CPU advantage on the serialization aspect which becomes like a 1% advantage once you consider the cost of deserialization in the context of everything else that's going on in the system which uses far more CPU.<p>It's almost like some people think human-readability, transparency and maintainability are negatives!
This is one of those irritating articles where one agrees with the gist, but there are serious flaws in the support.
There are societies, even now, that don't have text. Yes, they represent a tiny fraction of 1% of the global population, but they do exist. And the beauty of text is that this level of nuance can be conveyed, a simplistic, inaccurate, broad brush approach is not needed.
Nor is it the oldest form of communication. Having recently started exploring the cave art record, the text informs me that this is at least an upper middle single digit multiple of the age of text.
Yes, a picture paints a thousand words, which can then be interpreted a thousand ways.
Text has the ability to convey precise, accurate, objective information, it does not, as this article demonstrates, necessarily do so.
Always bet on language*
The older I get, the more I appreciate texts (any).<p>Videos, podcasts... I have them transcribed because even though I like listening to music, podcasts are best written for speed of comprehension... (at least for me, I don't know about others).
Audio is horrible (for me) for information transfer - reading (90% of the time) is where it's at<p>Not sure why that is either - because I look at people extolling the virtues of podcasts, saying that they are able to multi task (eg. driving, walking, eat dinner), and still hear the message - which leaves me aghast
Brittany Spears - Hit Me Baby One More Time.mp3<p>To paraphrase the overused 'ol Sapir-Whorf, if all you think about is information that can be best represented as text, all your examples will be ones text wins at.
Not sure, text wins hands down at sharing the ideas of one person, with many, across space and time.<p>I can read the thoughts of a philosopher who lived on literally the other side of the world, several thousand years ago.<p>I'm unsure of, but would love to know, any other medium capable of that
Podcasts are fine for entertainment, great for tuning out people or the traffic. I don’t expect to absorb information quickly, but try reading anything serious on the train when some guy is non-stop on his phone using his outside voice.
Sadly this post can’t be saved to Readwise because it triggers the captcha check
Also, In the Beginning was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson: <a href="https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt" rel="nofollow">https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt</a><p>Excerpts where he explains: "Now this was technically a fault in the application (Word 6.0 for the Macintosh) not the operating system (MacOS 7 point something) and so the initial target of my annoyance was the people who were responsible for Word. But. On the other hand, I could have chosen the "save as text" option in Word and saved all of my documents as simple telegrams, and this problem would not have arisen. Instead I had allowed myself to be seduced by all of those flashy formatting options that hadn't even existed until GUIs had come along to make them practicable. I had gotten into the habit of using them to make my documents look pretty (perhaps prettier than they deserved to look; all of the old documents on those floppies turned out to be more or less crap). Now I was paying the price for that self-indulgence. Technology had moved on and found ways to make my documents look even prettier, and the consequence of it was that all old ugly documents had ceased to exist."<p>and<p>"When my Powerbook broke my heart, and when Word stopped recognizing my old files, I jumped to Unix. The obvious alternative to MacOS would have been Windows. I didn't really have anything against Microsoft, or Windows. But it was pretty obvious, now, that old PC operating systems were overreaching, and showing the strain, and, perhaps, were best avoided until they had learned to walk and chew gum at the same time.<p>The changeover took place on a particular day in the summer of 1995. I had been San Francisco for a couple of weeks, using my PowerBook to work on a document. The document was too big to fit onto a single floppy, and so I hadn't made a backup since leaving home. The PowerBook crashed and wiped out the entire file.<p>It happened just as I was on my way out the door to visit a company called Electric Communities, which in those days was in Los Altos. I took my PowerBook with me. My friends at Electric Communities were Mac users who had all sorts of utility software for unerasing files and recovering from disk crashes, and I was certain I could get most of the file back.<p>As it turned out, two different Mac crash recovery utilities were unable to find any trace that my file had ever existed. It was completely and systematically wiped out. We went through that hard disk block by block and found disjointed fragments of countless old, discarded, forgotten files, but none of what I wanted. The metaphor shear was especially brutal that day. It was sort of like watching the girl you've been in love with for ten years get killed in a car wreck, and then attending her autopsy, and learning that underneath the clothes and makeup she was just flesh and blood."
> But text wins by a mile.<p>white on dark grey with phosphor green around? not really.
Another fascinating property of text (as compared to video), it's less temporal-sensitive. It means that it's much easier to skim through and skip sections, kind of like teleporting through time it took to write such text.
this, my thesis should be more to be text to text instead image to text
The last 2 paragraphs were quite poetic.<p>PS: 2014
there is a surprising number of images used in that post.
>Text is the oldest and most stable communication technology<p>That's completely false: Images were used for storytelling thousands of years before text (compare for instance the Lascaux paintings which are more than 17 000 years old, the
Göbeklitepe sculptures and stone drawings (more than 12 000 years old), or the the more than 15 000 paintings of the City of Sefar (Algeria) which some estimate to date back as far as 20 000 years ago to the earliest text known in human history, Kish Tablet, Mesopotamia, around 3500 years old.
Is it noteworthy that arguments against text by HN commenters are made using text<p>Reminds me of when HN thread comments about articles pertaining to the negative aspects of web advertising refer to the publisher's, e.g. a newspaper website's, use of web advertising, e.g., ad auctions, trackers, etc., as a point of significance<p>Would arguments against text be more convincing if made using something other than text<p>Is it appropriate to use text to make an argument against text. If yes, then why
I agree about text being absolute<p>I TOTALLY disagree on <i>terminal</i> being the best way<p>Even the text tablet shown is using 2D surface in its full ability - we need to strive to bring that as well
Another article on what's wrong with systemd I guess... :-P<p>(for those who didn't catch the joke: binary log file format)
I was surprised to see something was in text today, until I remembered knowing it at some point - the .har format. Looking at simonw's Claude-generated script [1] to investigate AI agent sent emails [2] by extracting .har archives, I saw that it uses base64 for binary and JSON strings for text.<p>It might be a good bet to bet on text, but it feels inefficient a lot of the time, especially in cases like this where all sorts of files are stored in JSON documents.<p>1: <a href="https://gist.github.com/simonw/007c628ceb84d0da0795b57af7b74d7d" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/simonw/007c628ceb84d0da0795b57af7b74...</a><p>2: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/26/slop-acts-of-kindness/" rel="nofollow">https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/26/slop-acts-of-kindness/</a>