I've always hated the data-ink ratio metric. It's totally invalid.
The proof of this is right there in one of the examples in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.
He shows an example where the axes of a scatter chart are shortened to the range of the data in each direction. This is a data-ink win-win! You get more information (the range of the data, at a glance), and it doesn't matter how little importance that is because you also have less ink!
But of course it actually looks terrible. To think otherwise, you have to be so busy thinking about metrics that you ignore your eyes. The axes no longer overlap in the corner, so the whole thing looks like a soup of visual fragments rather than a single cohesive thing.
Imagine you had several of these on a page side by side. It would be far harder to visually focus on one for a moment, because the fragments of different subfigures would be one big visual soup.
The solution is to put boxes around them (they don't have to be big thick black boxes, just something to visually separate the different things). But of course Tufte hates boxes. They add ink for no information content.
It's just bad science. Or brains don't process black pixels, one at a time, spending mental energy on each one. They see different visual fragments, having been heavily pre-processed by the CNN in our optic nerves before reaching our frontal contexts. The thing you actually need to minimise is visual complexity. Often, adding ink (for no information) helps with that.
Water pumped into a field only to drain back into the soil cannot be equated with "recycled". If the crop wasn't there, would it have been sensible to pump the water there for "recycling" purposes? Are we regularly pumping water into the middle of dry areas for no reason? Of course not. Almost all of that water is being effectively discarded and it's a huge waste, which, no, you do not see at data centres.
Something like 1% of corn grown in the U.S. is used to feed people directly. The majority of it is used to inefficiently make gasoline (via ethanol) or plastic, because farm subsidies make it profitable.
While ethanol requirements are a hand out to corn farmers, it’s false to say the majority goes into gas and plastic, an equal share (~40%) goes to animal feed.
And growing at that scale makes that 1% super affordable as a food source. all these 'we need AI data centers at crazy huge scales' people suddenly don't understand scale when it comes to feeding the brokies.
I never said that. The comment I replied to seemed to imply that water used to grow crops is used very efficiently, or at least as efficiently as water used for data centers. That is clearly not true so I objected. That is all.
Growing food on a scale that makes it affordable to and reduces hunger for the plebes? That's a waste according to AI bros. Good luck with your crime bots, no jobs, no real music, hunger for the masses propganda. Should be a real winner.
I suppose there's the "better type of horse" issue. Maybe the engineering side can come up with something that users wouldn't think to ask for, or whose benefits aren't obvious until it's actually up and running.
Put in a CDATA section and all bets are off. Maybe that is the next benchmark? Parse this XML correctly. Oh, by the way it must be valid, and here is a DTD. Using code is cheating.
Or, you could have a build system that does a 100% out-of-tree build into ./build, and then if the build is broken you delete that one directory. You hardly need git to help you with that.
Get a new job? You can't be that "in charge of" a repo if you can't enforce rules this basic. In fact, I don't understand how you can enforce something as (being polite) unusual as banning .gitignore and yet can't enforce build system hygiene.
I think your comment is more ambiguous than you realise. Who is the "them" at the end of your sentence?
Some would argue that Hamas continues to exist because no one has prosecutes its members.
Some would argue that Hamas exists because no one prosecutes those in the Israeli government (the "them" of the parent comment) who persecute Palestinians in a way that is bound to cultivate terrorism.
The word "pacing" (especially in the phrase "pace yourself") to mean go more slowly (at least initially) didn't originate with Covid. It's been around as long as I remember i.e. at least several decades.
> Secondly, humans having evolved in an oral world are used to much greater exertions and development of their memory (eg: recalling and narrating complex oral epics) which writing (and later computers) greatly weaken
In fairness, that is a rejection of the actual technology, not the surrounding culture.
But the point about culture of questioning is an interesting one I hadn't heard before.
> In fairness, that is a rejection of the actual technology, not the surrounding culture.
Yeah, good point. At a cultural level, this was a change from an Oral world where _knowing_ what to recall, being able to, and being 'witty' about it mattered a great deal; to a Literate world where things could be cited, 'looked up', and compared.
The proof of this is right there in one of the examples in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.
He shows an example where the axes of a scatter chart are shortened to the range of the data in each direction. This is a data-ink win-win! You get more information (the range of the data, at a glance), and it doesn't matter how little importance that is because you also have less ink!
But of course it actually looks terrible. To think otherwise, you have to be so busy thinking about metrics that you ignore your eyes. The axes no longer overlap in the corner, so the whole thing looks like a soup of visual fragments rather than a single cohesive thing.
Imagine you had several of these on a page side by side. It would be far harder to visually focus on one for a moment, because the fragments of different subfigures would be one big visual soup.
The solution is to put boxes around them (they don't have to be big thick black boxes, just something to visually separate the different things). But of course Tufte hates boxes. They add ink for no information content.
It's just bad science. Or brains don't process black pixels, one at a time, spending mental energy on each one. They see different visual fragments, having been heavily pre-processed by the CNN in our optic nerves before reaching our frontal contexts. The thing you actually need to minimise is visual complexity. Often, adding ink (for no information) helps with that.
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