information

A critique of information theory, and the reason "information" here never means content. Information is not a signal but a structuring activity — something reaching a system and producing a transformation in it; the shortest version of it is: a difference which makes a difference. Which yields a constraint that is also a design specification: absolute predictability is not information, since the signal merely iterates what the receiver already is; absolute unpredictability is not information either, since nothing is integrable. Information lives only in the band where signals are almost predictable — which is the band early stop tries to hold an image inside, and the band that predictive text collapses from the other direction — see Markov to autocomplete.