I once wrote a source code analysis tool that had a feature my colleagues regarded with skepticism. (Because parsers are typically recursive descent.) The idea was to treat a code’s AST as an undirected graph instead of a tree. That way you could find the interesting or relevant bit, and then climb back up to understand surrounding context. It always annoyed me when authors expected me to read in a linear fashion. It’s a part of the appeal of LLMs to me too -- to retrieve knowledge without the opinions of the authors. Computer programs (or manuscripts) should be modular to the extent possible.
From: Friam <[email protected]> on behalf of glen <[email protected]> Date: Monday, January 26, 2026 at 10:34 AM To: [email protected] <[email protected]> Subject: [FRIAM] efficacy? effectiveness? Text is King https://www.experimental-history.com/p/text-is-king <https://www.experimental-history.com/p/text-is-king> The post is good. But I'd argue not great. There's some missing category to which "text" and "books" etc. belong. And the reason "Text is King" despite any decline in "reading" is because that deeper category is the reason it all matters. He starts to get at it when talking about memory and recording, especially "the billionth stream of 'Golden' is exactly the same as the first". I don't really have a name for the category. I've heard it called "effective" in the sense of an "effective procedure". There's FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, & reusable) ... and the "+" in FAIR+, including computable. The oft-abused "algorithmic". Etc. *This* is what keeps me coming back to *things like* text. But I no longer read books, really, wiggling about whatever "read" means. I still buy/download them. And I read parts. But I almost always have to re-slice the thing, reading the parts in a different order, some parts re-read multiple times, others once or never. I'm just no longer willing/able to be a thrall to the writer's design. So his identification of "text" with books seems pretty flawed. Still worth the read ... >8^D -- ¡sıɹƎ ןıɐH ⊥ ɐןןǝdoɹ ǝ uǝןƃ ὅτε oi μὲν ἄλλοι κύνες τοὺς ἐχϑροὺς δάκνουσιν, ἐγὰ δὲ τοὺς φίλους, ἵνα σώσω.
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