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Comment by sgarland | Hacker News Reader

This is a stretch:

> Your eye spends a non-zero amount of energy to scan, parse and join multiple characters into a single logical one.

I don’t know how many calories are expended by the brain to perform this, but it has to be near-negligible.

I am _extremely_ used to seeing characters as they are in ASCII, and retraining myself for some infinitesimal savings in visual processing seems like a net negative.

Maybe this is useful if you grew up with them? By all means do whatever you want for your own env.

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I'm pretty sure the eye spends exactly zero Joules on interpretation of visual stimuli.

As for the brain, the brain doesn't see characters at the perceptual level, that it then needs to join at the cognitive level into tokens. At the perceptual level it just sees shapes. Whether it takes more energy to parse != or ≠ is something I don't anyone has ever researched.

You might be surprised to hear that the eye actually does a lot of "preprocessing" for the brain.

Preprocessing is not the same as interpretation, in the same way that a pixel shader is not computer vision.

it does involve energy though, which was the original premis. Now whether total number of joules consumed over <> vs != vs ≠ is the real debate and gonna be hard to study I think...

Everything is quite fuzzy in the brain... The eye already does basic pattern recognition (stripes, contrasts, rings).

One could argue that that is already part of the character detection/interpretation process.

You'd be wrong then, because it's (biomedical) textbook knowledge that quite a bit of processing of visual stimuli happens in the retina.

A roughly fist-sized lump of your brain seems to be responsible for all the vision processing. It is as power-hungry as its size suggests.

Ever wonder why you can't really seem to read properly when you're hungry and tired? That part of your brain is in power-saving mode.

Yeah, I read words all day and don't think my reading would be significantly improved if I started communicating in Chinese and read kanji. I'm sure one language is easier to read than the other but I doubt it is because their symbols are distinct per "word". I suspect that English readers don't read every individual character but rely a lot on word shape and I also suspect that people reading kanji do take some effort parsing particular features of the characters. I doubt there is a major fundamental difference.

> Your eye spends a non-zero amount of energy to scan, parse and join multiple characters into a single logical one.

Is the implication that with FiraCode, the eye will finally spend zero energy on scanning, parsing and joining glyphs? Finally, after all these years, a perpetual motion machine! :-)

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