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0 pointsdwattttt3mo ago0 comments

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.

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.

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.

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smj-edison3mo ago

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.

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.

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0 pointsdwattttt3mo ago0 comments

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.

0 comments

smj-edison3mo ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse