3 ms·

I remember one of those exchanges, two people waged money about compressing random data so that the data + decompress program would be smaller than the original

• philsnow 6y ago
  When I was a kid I found some compression program on a BBS, that claimed to use "wavelets" to compress even more than was previously thought possible. It turned out it was using a similar trick (but this was in MSDOS, so it was just hiding blocks in unused parts of the disk and storing their addresses in the "compressed" file). I blithely used the tool on some things I had on hand that were taking up too much space, and predictably lost ~all of them. I learned a little bit about information theory that day, and my sneakernet bandwidth was saturated for a while afterwards.
• hinkley 6y ago
  I think I remember that one too, or definitely one like it. That's a cheap trick. You gotta send someone the file, otherwise there's not much of a point.
• fogof 6y ago
  He did not, full story, for the perspective of the metadata guy is here https://www.patrickcraig.co.uk/other/compression.htm https://www.patrickcraig.co.uk/other/compression.htm Excellent computer story, on a par with "We can't send email more than 500 miles" IMO.