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  smj-edison
  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.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.[1] https://dynamicland.org/2014/The_Humane_Representation_of_Th...
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  socketcluster
  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.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.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.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.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.
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  Ferret7446
  Text is just bytes, and bytes are just text. I assume this is talking about human readable ASCII specifically.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.Maybe a lack of fundamental technical skills is another culprit, but binary files really aren't that scary.
• jumploops
  > Text is the oldest and most stable communication technologyMinor nit: complex language (i.e. Zipf’s law) is the oldest and most stable communication technology.Before text, we had oral story telling. It allowed us to communicate one generation’s knowledge to the next, and so on.Arguably this is present elsewhere in the animal kingdom (orcas, elephants, etc.), but human language proves to be the most complex.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].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.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.In either case, the person is required to retell the knowledge, either as an internal monologue or as an external broadcast.Always bet on language.[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budj_Bim
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  scosman
  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.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.
• gnabgib
  (2014) Popular in:2021 (570 points, 339 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=261640012015 (156 points, 69 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=102842022014 (355 points, 196 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8451271
• jackschultz
  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.”
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  mcswell
  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.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.There is of course no replacement for some binary format when it comes to audio.(By "binary" format I mean file formats that are not sequential and readily interpretable, whereas text files are interpretable once you know the encoding.)
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  simonw
  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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_StatesAnything below 3 is considered "partially illiterate".I've been thinking about this a lot recently, as someone who cares about technical communication and making technical topics accessible to more people.Maybe wannabe educators like myself should spend more time making content for TikTok or YouTube!
• Dwedit
  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).
• seveibar
  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
• zkmon
  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.
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  zephen
  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.
• sweetsocks21
  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?
• jamesgill
  Related: https://sive.rs/plaintext
• Lucent
  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
• jesseduffield
  Post from the creator of Rust, 11 years ago. Highly relevant to today.
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  didip
  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.
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  ksec
  Given all the replies here that are within last 10 - 30 mins. I guess I am the only one getting "403 Forbidden" ?
• vacuity
  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.
• mapontosevenths
  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.
• stephc_int13
  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.
• calebm
  I just recently intentionally made the decision to keep the equation input in FuzzyGraph (https://fuzzygraph.com) plain text (instead of something like stylized latex like Desmos has) in order to make it easy to copy and paste equations.
• skydhash
  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.
• anon
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• ANarrativeApe
  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.
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  textnotalwabest
  Text is not the best medium for the following situations:- I want to learn how to climb rock walls- I want to learn how to throw a baseball- I want to learn how to do public speaking- I want to learn how to play piano- I want to make a fire in the woods- I want to understand the emotional impact of war- I want to be involved in my child's life
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  socketcluster
  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!
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  sixtyj
  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).
• firemelt
  this, my thesis should be more to be text to text instead image to text
• 1vuio0pswjnm7
  Is it noteworthy that arguments against text by HN commenters are made using textReminds 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 significanceWould arguments against text be more convincing if made using something other than textIs it appropriate to use text to make an argument against text. If yes, then why
• znort_
  > But text wins by a mile.white on dark grey with phosphor green around? not really.
• ivanjermakov
  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.
• qntmfred
  there is a surprising number of images used in that post.
• citbl
  The last 2 paragraphs were quite poetic.PS: 2014
• NooneAtAll3
  I agree about text being absoluteI TOTALLY disagree on terminal being the best wayEven the text tablet shown is using 2D surface in its full ability - we need to strive to bring that as well
• benatkin
  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/