Comment by jcgl
9 hours ago
This doesn’t track for me. How can text have lower bandwidth but higher meaning-per-bit? How does that jibe with entropy resistance (in an information theoretic sense)?
Text seems worse to me. First of all, binary encodings are a superset of text encodings. But less abstractly, binary enables content-transparent compression and error correction.
Like other commenters have pointed out, the downside of binary is needing sufficient tooling. Depending on the domain, that can indeed be a downside. But if that critique isn’t relevant for a given context, it’s extremely unlikely that plaintext (ASCII?) is superior.
Text seems more like the answer to a plea for lowest common denominator of tooling.
Human-readability is the ultimate error correction for the most expensive link in the system: the human-in-the-loop.
The information-theoretic justification is that binary's efficiency assumes a perfectly known codec, but the entropy of time destroys codecs (bit rot/obsolescence). Text sacrifices transmission efficiency for semantic recovery - it remains decodable even when the specific tooling is lost, making it the most robust encoding for long-term information survival.
Human-readability isn't a feature of ASCII though. It's a feature of any encoding for which the user has sufficient tooling. Sure, that's an easier bar to clear for ASCII than for binary formats in general. But as I said, as long as you have the tooling, binary is no less readable. (Also, many binary formats will store strings as ASCII or UTF-8, so you can use the strings utility or whatever you want against them.)
> the entropy of time destroys codecs (bit rot/obsolescence)
Okay, so you don't mean "entropy" in an information theoretic sense. You're just talking about the decay of time. That's a much more specific claim than your original one, and I grant than that may be true for some use-cases. But you don't need semantic recovery if you don't need to do recovery at all, i.e. if your data format and/or storage medium transparently provide redundancy and/or versioning.