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.

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.

Other quote from him:

“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.”

Saying that a 20x20 image of a Twitter logo is 4000 bytes is just so wrong.

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...).

In a 1-bit-per-pixel format, a 20x20 image ends up as 400 bits (50 bytes).

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 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

Related: https://sive.rs/plaintext

I agree 99%.

The 1% where something else is better?

Youtube videos that show you how to access hidden fasteners on things you want to take apart.

Not that I can't get absolutely anything open, but sometimes it's nice to be able to do so with minimal damage.

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.

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.

If we had a more general structured format would we say the opposite?

Post from the creator of Rust, 11 years ago. Highly relevant to today.

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. https://lucent.substack.com/p/one-map-hypothesis

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.

Tools that are mostly text or have text interfaces? Greatly improved by LLM.

So all of those rich multimedia and their players/editors really need to add text representations.