Text can be surprisingly immersive and rich, often surpassing the most complex VR experiences.

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.

The oldest and most important technology indeed.

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.

It's almost like some people think human-readability, transparency and maintainability are negatives!

The older I get, the more I appreciate texts (any).

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).

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.

I disagree. If your goal involves the cooperation of others one should always bet on lazy.

Text will win, unless there is a lower effort option. The lower effort option does not need to be better, just easier.

Bet on text for your job or business

But would be foolish to live your life through it.

Don't confuse the map with the territory.

Explore the territory. Not the map.

Unless your job requires building or maintaining the map.

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.

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.

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.

Sadly this post can’t be saved to Readwise because it triggers the captcha check

> But text wins by a mile.

white on dark grey with phosphor green around? not really.