Comment

Comment by jephs

Bytes are not raw data.

Vocalizations, hand writing, and keys strokes are raw data.

Bytes are downstream of both those raw communicative performances, and of arbitrary encoding schemes, and of several further layers abstraction. There are byte sequences representing Unicode codepoints that will display different glyphs depending on whether the user's OS and browser are configured like a typical person from mainland China, Taiwan, or Japan.

A single Latin letter is one byte. A single Cyrillic letter that looks identical displayed on the screen and indicates the same underlying phonological value is two bytes. That is not raw.

parent jephs 2 days ago

No comments yet

Be the first to share your thoughts.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton