7 ms·
The Stick of Jan Sloot (2004)
- thomasmg1985 3y agoHi I just see this via Twitter. My name is Tom and I have found JS SDCS inner works and OS in 2021/22. I’m an ‘old school’ abstract artist and got through it by image research. Also my dad is a screenwriter so the tv was present in my upbringing. I have my personal story but it’s not about that. Under NDA I’m willing to share my sources and proof. Two people have validated my findings. One is too busy but has his own way by modern algorithms, one is taking it back to the past from step one. I need help and have a certain sense of urgency, btw I’m not afraid to be under attack. I cannot code, math, engineer or program properly. I do know how art, nature and stories of people work quite well. Thank you for your consideration and seriousness. I do need help to proof it with working samples. It’s one YouTube link away basically : ) and if you get it, it can be quite simple. Ty. Tom, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
- turtleyacht 3y ago(2004)
- mvdwoord 3y agoFascinating story though, possible or not. And there were some demos for investors, including iirc Sony Entertainment, which would have been hard to fake completely. So at worst, this guy was a decent magician.. There is a book on it with lots of details.. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3316995-de-broncode https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3316995-de-broncode
- brnt 3y agoIt doesn't take much magic to convince certain pointy haired bosses.
- zevv 3y agoI have met him in person a lot of times: I worked at a local electronics shop and we used to bring him TVs and radios for repair regularly. He was socially awkward, stubborn, and on more then one occasion he made mistakes with regards to the repairs but did not want to admit fault at any time. From my (rather limited) interactions with him, I'd say he was far from genius, I feel he just got sucked in and had no way out of his network of lies without losing face.
- tgv 3y agoAlmost everybody was skeptical at the time. It was too good to be true.
- karmakaze 3y ago> The whole problem of Pieper's way of thinking (and of every other person who believes that Sloot actually could compress movies with a factor of two million) is that he believes that the key does not need to contain every detail of a movie. Unfortunately, it does. I wonder if one was scammed and bought a Blu-ray with everything, only to find out they got novels rather than movies. After the initial disappointment they might realize well written novels are better than movies and never watch another. How about we get GPT to turn good movies into great books? Like a large inverse prompt engineering problem. Could we then even feed that text as input to make a better, though arbitrarily different movie?
- daveguy 3y ago> How about we get GPT to turn good movies into great books? Like a large inverse prompt engineering problem. GPT has trouble making great sentences, much less great books from a data type completely different from its training. GPT, at the core, is a "likely next word" generator. No great literature came as a process of "likely next word" in a vacuum. Likely next word from complex experiences of a decade and plot designed from those complex experiences, sure. But not the algorithm that GPT is. > Could we then even feed that text as input to make a better, though arbitrarily different movie? Nothing about a feedback loop of mediocrity describes a practical way to improve quality. This concept is as sound as the alien encoding stick and the sloot encoding scheme itself.
- karmakaze 3y agoWhat is the limiting factor though? I could make a bad sketch and get a description of that used to render a better picture right? We currently don't optimize for this as a goal so could get better, no?
- FFP999 3y agoAnd how would you train a fitness function to recognize book goodness? It's inherently subjective.
- RetroTechie 3y ago
- dmbche 3y ago"The Sloot Digital Coding System was an alleged data sharing technique that its inventor claimed could store a complete digital movie file in 8 kilobytes of data — violating Shannon's source coding theorem by many orders of magnitude. The alleged technique was developed in 1995 by Romke Jan Bernhard Sloot (27 August 1945, Groningen – 11 July 1999,[1] Nieuwegein), a Dutch electronics engineer.[2] In 1999, just days before the conclusion of a contract to sell his invention, Sloot died suddenly of a heart attack. The source code was never recovered, and the technique and claim have never been reproduced or verified. " From wikipedia
- adamgordonbell 3y agoI once had an idea for a file transfer system based on digits of pi that sounds the same as this idea. You'd give everybody DVDs of digits of pi (or they could calculate them themselves) , and then transfer files faster by just sending them the offset into pi. At the time I thought it could work with a big enough bank of digits of PI on both sides. If transfer was expensive, and calculating digits was cheap then you could give everyone an infinite supply of digits of pi and have a nearly infinite compression system. I discovered that often the offset into pi is much larger than the data you are sending. Turns out it's an expensive way to sent things. Also, it turns out that this area was already well understood. There are no free lunches with entropy. But it was a fun idea to kick around.
- troupe 3y agoGlad to hear I'm not the only person who tried this. :)
- alfanick 3y agoIt "exists" at https://github.com/philipl/pifs https://github.com/philipl/pifs
- tzs 3y agoAnother potential problem with that approach is that it is possible that not all finite files appear in the digits of pi. It is believed that all appear but it hans't been proven.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- eternityforest 3y agoNeural network encoding seems like the closest thing to that idea that's actually practical.
- thomasmg1985 3y agoYes 100% true.
- tzs 3y agoA little OT: do the information theory based proofs of limits on how effective compression can be also prove that backwards time travel is impossible? If backwards time travel were possible then your "compression algorithm" could simply be deleting the file. To recover the file go back in time to before it was deleted and make a copy. With this you can "compress" giant files down to just a short description of a place and time where the file was on your computer.
- Mattasher 3y agoInteresting idea, but you're not getting any entropy for free by going back in time. If you wanted to map every possible file of a set length to a specific time and location where it's stored, you'd still need, in general, the same number of bits as you would for the file itself, because you'd have to describe that many distinct time/location pairs.
- qingcharles 3y agoBackwards time travel is perfectly possible, but perhaps not in our actual reality, but in a simulation of our universe, which would get you the data you want.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- projektfu 3y agoWeird, I once read about Roel Pieper, completely randomly, in a trade magazine for Unix that I think had very few issues. He had just become head of Unix Systems Laboratories. I don't know why that article stuck with me for so long. I didn't know he was also a professor, I thought he was just an exec. Turns out he was professor of business, not computer science, though his original university education was in CS.
- emmelaich 3y agoYes, it's unclear how much theory he knew. Looks like next to nothing. Aside, I wonder if "Pied Piper" from the Silicon Valley series is a reference to him. Probably not but fun to entertain.
- roywashere 3y agoI also always wondered about that when I watched the show!
- projektfu 3y agoYeah, reading about this that all started to make a lot more sense as a deep joke.
- bsza 3y agoIf the laws and initial state of the universe can be expressed in few enough bits, then all you need to store is a title and a date. Run a simulation of the universe, fast forward to the date the movie was released, use an AI to find a theater playing it, and digitize the tape. It may take longer to run than the current age of the universe, but eventually you’ll get it.
- qingcharles 3y agoI've thought about this a lot over the years. What you're asking is, can we accurately emulate our own universe inside our own universe at greater than 100% speed? If so, it would allow us to build a type of space-time machine where we could visit any location at any time. I don't think it is totally inconceivable. It is definitely possible that there are hacks such as compression that would allow a simulator to run at above 100% speed. It also might not need to be 100% accurate -- we might find that running below that threshold still produces an output that is practically indistinguishable from the real events, yet allows it to run.
- bsza 3y ago> I don't think it is totally inconceivable You could create a kind of "reverse" grandfather paradox by preventing future events predicted by the simulation from happening. Perhaps it could run fine up to the point that it has to simulate itself, then it would slow down to the point of becoming useless.
- Fuzzwah 3y agoBasically the plot of the wonderful TV series "Devs". Well worth the time investment.
- qingcharles 3y agoThank you, I never knew this is what Devs was about. I'm now watching the third episode already!
- 3y ago
- refulgentis 3y agoIsn't this trivially false, way before atoms, Turing machines, and any other drive-by namedrops I missed? Given the notch = (A+B) / 10 You can only recover A + B. You can't recover A or B individually.
- granularity 3y agoI read “attaches all these numbers to each other” to mean concatenation, not addition. Presumably you’d want to encode a “next book” token too. This kind of compression is known as arithmetic coding. It does work.
- sdfsdfsfds 3y agoThe standard theoretical technique for encoding a list of numbers as a single number is Gödel encoding. It can be applied as many times as you like—e.g. to encode a list of lists of numbers, or a list of lists of lists of numbers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del_numbering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del_numbering
- felixhandte 3y agoSure, but Gödel encoding is pretty much purely a theoretical exercise. I'm not sure anyone anywhere has ever practically manipulated Gödel-encoded expressions in a useful way. His original scheme also has the problem that prime factorization is rather computationally challenging--it is after all the basis of the RSA cryptosystem. Whereas Arithmetic encoding is actually practical, extensively used, and a direct analogue to the stick.
- sdfsdfsfds 3y agoI'm aware of arithmetic encoding and it is definitely the most compelling example of encoding arbitrary data with a single number. On the other hand, there is a lot more to arithmetic coding than the ability to encode lists of numbers—all the considerations involving the context of each symbol, which are essential to the process of compression. I just felt that it might be helpful to give an example which didn't implicate all that complex compression apparatus.
- 6510 3y agoInventors are a different animal. One doesn't start with a reasonable theory but one works from the other end, one quite unreasonably starts with what would be wonderful to have. One doesn't test a theory but one ponders how the seemingly impossible might be accomplished which is a problem that can be broken down into more reasonable things until it's impossible component is defined properly so that one may make an often futile attempt to ask the question differently. With few exceptions there are no results. Those not skilled in the art consider that part cheating. This is logical because their line of reasoning seeks to further validate that what they already know, it thus involves an effort to prove something can't be done, or at least not by someone like that, or at least not by that person, or at least not by that method etc etc The cheating in this context would be to study the thing the file represents rather than the representation. A dumb example would be to make a 10 hour movie from a single image that doesn't move. There is no reason for the file to be larger than the original jpg. > I can not only get Orson Welles' Citizen Kane. I can get Citizen Kane in colour! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JI5qy9Zoh_0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JI5qy9Zoh_0 To argue that this was not the method Sloot used is missing the point. The question is: How to do it, not how to imitate someone else. In his demo Sloot was playing 16 full movies simultaneously on a 1995 laptop at any speed. A high end computer had 32 MB memory, 133 MHz cpu, PCI video cards had 4 MB ram, 66 MHz, 560 MB HDD If it was not what he said it was why didn't he just sell what he had? Without the extraordinary claims the demo already requires cartoon physics. He drives the truck into the match box, making an U turn inside doesn't at all seem necessary???
- thomasmg1985 3y agoWhere you’re spot on is that is basically works on the principle of a cartoon. TVs are no computers. They send different signals.
- dang 3y agoRelated. Others? Was This Lost Computer Code Worth Billions? (Jan Sloot Digital Coding) (2020) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36499676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36499676 - June 2023 (2 comments) The Stick of Jan Sloot (2004) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29623524 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29623524 - Dec 2021 (22 comments) Ask HN: What was the secret that Jan Sloot took with him to the grave? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13443135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13443135 - Jan 2017 (4 comments) The Stick of Jan Sloot (2004) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8699058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8699058 - Dec 2014 (18 comments)
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoAt least one of the ideas alluded to in this article is reminiscent of an actual audio "compression" algorithm. SAOL aka "MPEG-4 Structured Audio" https://sound.media.mit.edu/resources/mpeg4/sa-tools.html https://sound.media.mit.edu/resources/mpeg4/sa-tools.html It was a growing idea in the mid-2000s but AFAIK it has gone absolutely nowhere. Essentially, instead of somehow encoding the audio, you encode a description of how to generate the audio.
- jodrellblank 3y agoEncoding a description of how to generate the audio was a growing idea in the 1990s and 1980s... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5kMukDpGlc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5kMukDpGlc https://modarchive.org/ https://modarchive.org/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33273107 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33273107
- b3lvedere 3y agoI remember the weird paranoia news that suddenly seemed to pop up everywhere only days after his death. People told me he was murdered by the big shot movie execs because of his amazing algorithms. It all seemed so strangely exciting. I wish i knew the "exceptional claims need exceptional proof" sentence back then.
- MarkusWandel 3y agoOffhand, this brings to mind the Vocoder. A reasonable facsimile of fluent speech could be be produced just from the bandwidth of a skilled typist operating a keyboard. What's encoded is not the audio - even the best audio codecs need on the order of 4kbits/sec to encode legible speech - but the actual semantics on how voice is produced. Suppose you want to do this for movies. 8 kilobytes doesn't sound like enough, though the script of the movie could easily be compressed to that. But it's posible to imagine a system into which all the skill of the cinematographer, director, script writer, actors, etc. are built, with from 8 kilobytes of instructions could create, perhaps not the original movie, but something comparable. Is this doable? Does some random crank have the remotest chance of pulling this off with the technology of the day? No. But that's likely the line of reasoning employed.