12 ms·

Sloot lives!!! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloot_Digital_Coding_System https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloot_Digital_Coding_System

by walth 3y ago

latexr 3y ago
> 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. What rotten luck, for everyone.
- fouc 3y ago
  > but a key piece of the technology, a compiler stored on a floppy disk,[9] had disappeared and, despite months of searching, was never recovered.[10] spooky
fareesh 3y ago
Killed by a time traveller. That technology led to an apocalyptic period
- MenhirMike 3y ago
  Always remember: If you think the current world is bleak and problematic, ask yourself how many time travelers prevented an even worse situation.
  - explaininjs 3y ago
    Who’s to say we’re living in the corrected branch? Commit fae12 doesn’t benefit from a patch being applied to its great grand parent and the history since then being rebased off of that.
    - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
      Lordy, I hope this is actually a branch in a corrupted filesystem. It doesn’t speak well of time travellers if this is a corrected branch.
  - oneshtein 3y ago
    Physic is not random. If time traveller is here now, then it was here forever, because to be here at time T, it must be here at time T-1 too. Even if we develop a time machine to change Universe at time T, then change will propagate in both T+1 and T-1 directions. Timetravelers are our brothers and sisters.
    - throwaway290 3y ago
      > If time traveller is here now, then it was here forever, because to be here at time T, it must be here at time T-1 too If you believe in non-random deterministic universe then at T-1 (and always since big bang) traveler was already here in the shape of ancestors, just like at some point you existed in your mom and dad and before that in whatever big bang elements etc. No energy is being added or removed in the system
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - yterdy 3y ago
    In my most Hotep-y daydreams, I've sometimes wondered if this is the timeline where a group of scrappy, persecuted white dudes traveled back in time to make sure that Western civilization would become the primary world power (instead of, like, an expansionist ancient China or Egypt or Persia). (inb4 GGS rec)
    - MenhirMike 3y ago
      I would say that this sounds like a great idea for a novel, and then I remembered that Orson Scott Card already wrote Pastwatch :) What's GGS? Only found Guns, Germs, and Steel in that context, is that the one?
      - yterdy 3y ago
        Oh, that's good to know, though I'd love to see someone other than Card take a swing at it. >What's GGS? Only found Guns, Germs, and Steel in that context, is that the one? You got it!
        MenhirMike 3y ago
        Yeah, it's exactly what you would expect someone like Card to write, but if you go into it knowing the views of its author, it almost becomes like a parody of his politics and becomes quite an enjoyable read on "I wonder how many crazy reasons he's going to bring up why Columbus was actually a hero".
jancsika 3y ago
My quick and dirty interpretation after skimming that article: he misrepresented a hashing algo to non-technical people who didn't understand that a) it's a one-way function and b) even if it weren't, multiple inputs can still map to the same hash.
- Nition 3y ago
  There's some more info/speculation on it here: https://www.spronck.net/sloot.html https://www.spronck.net/sloot.html
  - kaetemi 3y ago
    That reads just like they're talking about a generative AI model.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      Not at that point in time.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    > In his prototype, he faked his invention, which is why he refused to let anyone near it, and answered only in mystical vagueness to questions. I was the happy attendant to a demo given to a wealthy friend who was asked to invest (alongside Pieper). I'll let Jan take the secret to his grave but the writer of TFA is spot on, he faked it, but he really did believe that he could make it work. It's a very sad story.
    - anonzzzies 3y ago
      I met him a few times and after his death, I was contacted by a 'friend' (you never know; I just know for sure that he lived around the block from him, as did I at the time in that miserable town) of his who wanted to hire me to figure out the secret. They all thought it was real. But they missed the background to reason about it correctly, like Kolmogorov complexity. I don't think he was really seeing it as faking; he just thought he needed some more time to make it generally applicable, but the idea was basically a re-applied compression; you had 4 files; the original video, the compression exe, the decompression exe and the decompression data file. The compression would apply a (fairly basic) compression algorithm which was more or less of the type 'replace a pattern of x bytes by 1 byte'. That mapping was written to the decompression data file and repeated until the compressed video was very small; however, the decompression data file would be very large (similar, obviously, to the video(s) sizes together). His secret computer had a storage with the decompression data file and the idea was that he would, in time, find the ideal decompression data file (the Golden mapping or some such) that would be small-ish and yet would be able to compress 1000s+ of videos very efficiently. Which indeed would be enough, but it's not possible of course. To be clear; they believed they could ultimately have one few mb data file but with videos of 64kb by re-applying the encoding, hitting of some magic bag of mappings that would be found always repeating in very large files, thus making the compressed file smaller and smaller and smaller. I don't know really how far he really got with this and no-body knows or ever will know. I would wager that IF they (the investors, people the investors hired etc) found that floppy disk, they would make it disappear due to the enormous embarrassment if that would leak out.
treprinum 3y ago
Early version of the middle-out compression algorithm?
pyridines 3y ago
Oh, that's nothing. I present to you a 1 byte program that outputs the complete works of Shakespeare: a The interpreter, written in Rust (for performance), evaluates the command `a` by printing to STDOUT a particular payload included in the runtime.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ogurechny 3y ago
  Following the steps of πfs, BARF, and other great tools…
mvdwoord 3y ago
The book written on this whole saga is a decent read.. not sure if translations are available though. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3316995-de-broncode https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3316995-de-broncode
busfahrer 3y ago
Fascinating, this lead me to this list (or should I say rabbit hole?): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lost_inventions https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lost_inventions
GuB-42 3y ago
Sloot may not work, but the following compression algorithm has been quite effective for fitting entire movies in a few kB. - Pick a bunch of demosceners - Show them a movie - Lock them down for some time in a room with computers. Works best if the room has a big screen, loud sound system, beer, and some junk food - Get the resulting executable
ronsor 3y ago
This just sounds like ML-based compression. Generate a movie from a n-dimension embedding.

Sloot lives!!! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloot_Digital_Coding_System https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloot_Digital_Coding_System

by walth 3y ago

Sloot lives!!! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloot_Digital_Coding_System https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloot_Digital_Coding_System

latexr 3y ago

> 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. What rotten luck, for everyone.

fouc 3y ago
> but a key piece of the technology, a compiler stored on a floppy disk,[9] had disappeared and, despite months of searching, was never recovered.[10] spooky

fareesh 3y ago

Killed by a time traveller. That technology led to an apocalyptic period

MenhirMike 3y ago
Always remember: If you think the current world is bleak and problematic, ask yourself how many time travelers prevented an even worse situation.
- explaininjs 3y ago
  Who’s to say we’re living in the corrected branch? Commit fae12 doesn’t benefit from a patch being applied to its great grand parent and the history since then being rebased off of that.
  - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
    Lordy, I hope this is actually a branch in a corrupted filesystem. It doesn’t speak well of time travellers if this is a corrected branch.
- oneshtein 3y ago
  Physic is not random. If time traveller is here now, then it was here forever, because to be here at time T, it must be here at time T-1 too. Even if we develop a time machine to change Universe at time T, then change will propagate in both T+1 and T-1 directions. Timetravelers are our brothers and sisters.
  - throwaway290 3y ago
    > If time traveller is here now, then it was here forever, because to be here at time T, it must be here at time T-1 too If you believe in non-random deterministic universe then at T-1 (and always since big bang) traveler was already here in the shape of ancestors, just like at some point you existed in your mom and dad and before that in whatever big bang elements etc. No energy is being added or removed in the system
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- yterdy 3y ago
  In my most Hotep-y daydreams, I've sometimes wondered if this is the timeline where a group of scrappy, persecuted white dudes traveled back in time to make sure that Western civilization would become the primary world power (instead of, like, an expansionist ancient China or Egypt or Persia). (inb4 GGS rec)
  - MenhirMike 3y ago
    I would say that this sounds like a great idea for a novel, and then I remembered that Orson Scott Card already wrote Pastwatch :) What's GGS? Only found Guns, Germs, and Steel in that context, is that the one?
    - yterdy 3y ago
      Oh, that's good to know, though I'd love to see someone other than Card take a swing at it. >What's GGS? Only found Guns, Germs, and Steel in that context, is that the one? You got it!
      - MenhirMike 3y ago
        Yeah, it's exactly what you would expect someone like Card to write, but if you go into it knowing the views of its author, it almost becomes like a parody of his politics and becomes quite an enjoyable read on "I wonder how many crazy reasons he's going to bring up why Columbus was actually a hero".

jancsika 3y ago

My quick and dirty interpretation after skimming that article: he misrepresented a hashing algo to non-technical people who didn't understand that a) it's a one-way function and b) even if it weren't, multiple inputs can still map to the same hash.

Nition 3y ago
There's some more info/speculation on it here: https://www.spronck.net/sloot.html https://www.spronck.net/sloot.html
- kaetemi 3y ago
  That reads just like they're talking about a generative AI model.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Not at that point in time.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  > In his prototype, he faked his invention, which is why he refused to let anyone near it, and answered only in mystical vagueness to questions. I was the happy attendant to a demo given to a wealthy friend who was asked to invest (alongside Pieper). I'll let Jan take the secret to his grave but the writer of TFA is spot on, he faked it, but he really did believe that he could make it work. It's a very sad story.
  - anonzzzies 3y ago
    I met him a few times and after his death, I was contacted by a 'friend' (you never know; I just know for sure that he lived around the block from him, as did I at the time in that miserable town) of his who wanted to hire me to figure out the secret. They all thought it was real. But they missed the background to reason about it correctly, like Kolmogorov complexity. I don't think he was really seeing it as faking; he just thought he needed some more time to make it generally applicable, but the idea was basically a re-applied compression; you had 4 files; the original video, the compression exe, the decompression exe and the decompression data file. The compression would apply a (fairly basic) compression algorithm which was more or less of the type 'replace a pattern of x bytes by 1 byte'. That mapping was written to the decompression data file and repeated until the compressed video was very small; however, the decompression data file would be very large (similar, obviously, to the video(s) sizes together). His secret computer had a storage with the decompression data file and the idea was that he would, in time, find the ideal decompression data file (the Golden mapping or some such) that would be small-ish and yet would be able to compress 1000s+ of videos very efficiently. Which indeed would be enough, but it's not possible of course. To be clear; they believed they could ultimately have one few mb data file but with videos of 64kb by re-applying the encoding, hitting of some magic bag of mappings that would be found always repeating in very large files, thus making the compressed file smaller and smaller and smaller. I don't know really how far he really got with this and no-body knows or ever will know. I would wager that IF they (the investors, people the investors hired etc) found that floppy disk, they would make it disappear due to the enormous embarrassment if that would leak out.

treprinum 3y ago

Early version of the middle-out compression algorithm?

pyridines 3y ago

Oh, that's nothing. I present to you a 1 byte program that outputs the complete works of Shakespeare: a The interpreter, written in Rust (for performance), evaluates the command `a` by printing to STDOUT a particular payload included in the runtime.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ogurechny 3y ago
Following the steps of πfs, BARF, and other great tools…

mvdwoord 3y ago

The book written on this whole saga is a decent read.. not sure if translations are available though. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3316995-de-broncode https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3316995-de-broncode

busfahrer 3y ago

Fascinating, this lead me to this list (or should I say rabbit hole?): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lost_inventions https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lost_inventions

GuB-42 3y ago

Sloot may not work, but the following compression algorithm has been quite effective for fitting entire movies in a few kB. - Pick a bunch of demosceners - Show them a movie - Lock them down for some time in a room with computers. Works best if the room has a big screen, loud sound system, beer, and some junk food - Get the resulting executable

ronsor 3y ago

This just sounds like ML-based compression. Generate a movie from a n-dimension embedding.