14 ms·
There are, however, several objectively bad ways. In "Service Model" (a novel that I recommend) a certain collection of fools decides to sort bits by whether i
by __MatrixMan__ 9mo ago
There are, however, several objectively bad ways. In "Service Model" (a novel that I recommend) a certain collection of fools decides to sort bits by whether it's a 1 or a 0, ending up with a long list of 0's followed by a long list of 1's.
- Rygian 9mo agoIn a similar vein, someone decided that everyone should have subdirectories under home named "Pictures", "Videos", "Music", "Documents", …
- lo_zamoyski 9mo agoThat depends on the aim. The purpose of something determines how fitting the means are. Also, let us not confuse "relative" with "not objective". My father is objectively my father, but he is objectively not your father.
- __MatrixMan__ 9mo agoI'm frequently bothered by misuse of "objective" but I stand by it here. In the case of storage, one criterion supersedes all others: can you get the information back out? If you can then there are merits to discuss relative to use case. If you can't then your storage mechanism is broken.
- dsvf 9mo agoIt _does_ open up amazing opportunities for compression though.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- HPsquared 9mo agoThat's fine so long as there's an index!
- __MatrixMan__ 9mo agoPresumably there was at some time, but they put it in long term bit storage also.
- teraflop 9mo agoThere's a similar anecdote in Iain M. Banks' The Player of Games. https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/270578/negotiator-promises-not-to-destroy-conquered-territorys-cultural-heritage-but https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/270578/negotiator-...
- __MatrixMan__ 9mo agoThanks for pointing it out. I'm putting together a database along the lines of https://www.whosampled.com/ https://www.whosampled.com/ except instead of samples in music it's fiction authors either: - revisiting one another's ideas - stumbling across the same idea independently of one other Now I get to add an edge between Tchaikovsky and Banks. It's somewhat unsurprising. Tchaikovsky does this a lot.
- hcs 9mo agoRelated seriously: You can make it more likely to have long runs of the same letters, reversibly, with the Burrows-Wheeler Transform: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burrows%E2%80%93Wheeler_transform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burrows%E2%80%93Wheeler_transf... (No magic, though it still feels like it, BWT is most useful when there's repeated substrings.)