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The author, Fabrice Bellard, is well-known for his work on QEMU (among other things), but I'd treat the rest of the posts as "idea sharing" at an early stage. F
by cbhl 3y ago
The author, Fabrice Bellard, is well-known for his work on QEMU (among other things), but I'd treat the rest of the posts as "idea sharing" at an early stage. For example, while BPG (Better Portable Graphics) didn't take off, the core idea (image formats based on video codecs) can be found in WebP (VP8, VP9) and AVIF (AV1) and HEIF (HEVC/H.265).
For this, I'd look at comparable work in the audio codec space, including Lyra (https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.09660 https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.09660) and SoundStream (https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.03312 https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.03312).
For text compression, I think it would be novel if you could get a lossy but semantically equivalent decompression that was resilient to the exact hardware used for inference. I don't think that's what happened here, though, given the requirement for "exact same GPU and model".
- wood_spirit 3y agoFabrice is also well known for creating Ffmpeg and discovering an algorithm for computing digits of PI https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard He has also held the ‘world record’ for data compression since 2019 with nncp http://mattmahoney.net/dc/text.html#1085 http://mattmahoney.net/dc/text.html#1085
- foooorsyth 3y agoHe is simply one of the most important programmers alive today. He should win a Turing award in his lifetime.
- stevefan1999 3y agoI am afraid not. Turing awards are all theorists game, not engineers. He could get in the IEEE hall of fame though, I recommends.
- foooorsyth 3y ago>Turing awards are all theorists game, not engineers Robert Metcalfe just won the award for Ethernet. Go scan through the list of Turing winners again. It is not just awarded to pure theorists. There’s a huge slant to academics who also found (or caused) massive commercial success, especially in recent years. Bellard could get hit by a bus tomorrow and have >the most important video tool ever >the most important emulation tool ever >the best text compression tool ever …on his resume. And with those tools he’s not just wrapping algorithms cooked up by others, but also innovating on fundamental theory. VirtualBox and the Android emulator? That’s QEMU. Every video platform in existence? Thin wrappers to FFmpeg. Seems deserving to me, and certainly seems as or more impactful that many names on that winners list.
- rcme 3y agoDon’t forget about QuickJS!
- IggleSniggle 3y ago"Semantically equivalent decompression" is a very interesting idea, but I take issue with the idea that different words can share semantic equivalence. But I've also been reading a lot of poetry today, so subtle word choice feels important, even though I can recognize it may not be that important...a LLM could easily produce "better" or "worse" text than a human (while being lossy in either case), but then I have questions about the reason for using words in the first place.
- crazygringo 3y agoWow. Lossy text compression is a... horrifying concept.
- throwaway14356 3y agolossy text horror
- Solvency 3y agoWw. Lssy txt cmprsn is hrffyng cncpt. Or is it actly ok.
- crazygringo 3y agoJeez. Text squeezing in the manner of loss is a scary idea.
- midoridensha 3y agoLossy text comparison is a horrifying concept?
- supertrope 3y agoY ur account b lanc is $36 2.17
- fsiefken 3y agoCheck keyscript https://www.reddit.com/r/FastWriting/comments/w7a4k1/keyscript_shorthand/ https://www.reddit.com/r/FastWriting/comments/w7a4k1/keyscri...
- bambax 3y agoBut why? A summary is a form of lossy text compression, and it's extremely useful. That's not what this is but if it can actually produce "semantically equivalent" decompressed text it's fascinating.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]