[topspin]

> The audio "loss" example sounds plausible in passing

Not really. Sure, your debunking is sound, but we really don't need to appeal to Nyquist for this one. Just consider the alternatives; analog media? It begins rotting the moment it's recorded. Some abstract representation? Fine, until you forget how to interpret it. Digitizing is the most robust means we've yet invented to forestall "forgetting;" a technique that enables precise and efficient replication of audio on myriad forms of media now and in the future.

The Unicode case is also naive. Every language suffers change as new speakers/writers and new representations appear; that isn't a feature specific to programming or computing at all. On the other hand, thousands of symbols from hundreds of obscure languages are being permanently preserved for posterity in Unicode; how is this "forgetting?"

[mjg59]

The argument is not that "forgetting" is fundamentally bad - it's that the choice of what to leave out can be meaningful. Han unification removes some amount of distinction between things that are meaningfully different and instead relies on additional metadata to reconstruct that. What are the wider social consequences of that? I don't know, but it's not clear that those involved in making the decision do either.

The fundamental point here is that hacker culture has often made decisions without considering the effect they have on non-hackers (or even hackers of different backgrounds), and as a result those decisions may result in abstractions that "forget" meaningful data. Uncompressed digitisation of audio is a case where it's unlikely that the difference is important in any way, but there are plenty of examples given where it is. The suggestion that having more information can help us make better decisions shouldn't be controversial.

[astrange]

By the way, people seem to think Han unification was forced on CJK users by evil white people from Unicode (there was an article like this in modelviewculture once), but it was contributed by the relevant Asian governments.

And of course China already made much larger changes in real life by creating Simplified Chinese.

[jack9]

> Just consider the alternatives; analog media?

Now you're offtopic altogether, talking about different possible types of potential loss....

> Every language suffers change as new speakers/writers and new representations appear

That was the point (to whit, the whole discussion about transcription was illustrative).

[qb45]

The idea of Han unification doesn't seem right to me. Cyrillic alphabet for example got its own set of codes, even though some letters resemble Latin letters. But, even though those letters look the same, they sometimes sound differently and mean different things.

I suppose somebody came up with this idea back then when they were trying to fit everything into 16 bits.