That’s crazy small. So is it fair to say that words are actually the best compression algorithm we have? You can explain complex ideas in just a few hundred words.

Yes, a picture is worth a thousand words, but imagine how much information is in those 17GB of text.

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binary132 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don’t think I would really consider it compression if it’s not very reversible. Whatever people “uncompress” from my words isn’t necessarily what I was imagining or thinking about when I encoded them. I guess it’s more like a symbolic shorthand for meaning which relies on the second party to build their own internal model out of their own (shared public interface, but internal implementation is relatively unique…) symbols.

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tiagod 35 minutes ago | parent [-]

It is compression, but it is lossy. Just like the digital counterparts like mp3 and jpeg, in some cases the final message can contain all the information you need.

	▲	binary132 15 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		But what’s getting reproduced in your head when you read what I’ve written isn’t what’s in my head at all. You have your own entire context, associations, and language.

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_zoltan_ 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

how much?