this, my thesis should be more to be text to text instead image to text

The last 2 paragraphs were quite poetic.

PS: 2014

there is a surprising number of images used in that post.

>Text is the oldest and most stable communication technology

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

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

Would arguments against text be more convincing if made using something other than text

Is it appropriate to use text to make an argument against text. If yes, then why

I agree about text being absolute

I TOTALLY disagree on terminal being the best way

Even the text tablet shown is using 2D surface in its full ability - we need to strive to bring that as well

I was thinking about this last night before bed. People often counter that data visualization in 2D and 3D are more important and that we need a visual programming language.

I completely disagree, if LLMs have taught us anything it's that the semantic space is MASSIVE and has far too many dimensions to visualize. Of course for some specific situations visualizations are great and can give you almost immediate insight, but for truly complex problems the only ability we have as humans that lets humans understand complex relationships is language

Now language can be visual, textual or auditory. But at the end of the day it must be a language. Music notation isn't a language, it's a very simple set of semantics splayed out in a standard way, when people try to increase the semantic density it turns comical, also there is very little contextual relationship between the semantic markings (key affects notes and ties affect notes but key never affects ties). Whereas a programming language can have entire scores a single identifier. Many people have a shared, somewhat lossy understanding of unreal whether they worked with it, played a game with it or whatever, one that can include a lot more than just the code.

Another article on what's wrong with systemd I guess... :-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.

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.

1: https://gist.github.com/simonw/007c628ceb84d0da0795b57af7b74...

2: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/26/slop-acts-of-kindness/