8 ms·
πFS
- tptacek 4mo agohttps://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=store%20data%20in%20digits%20of%20pi&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- Lalabadie 4mo agoLove it! This feels very much in the spirit of Tom7's Harder Drive [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio
- Levitating 4mo agoabsolutely genius
- partsch 4mo agoFinally, someone is doing something about the rising prices of storage!
- bobim 4mo agoThis is disturbing to realize that pi then contains all the past and future knowledge, including when I'll pass away.
- skulk 4mo agothis statement is equivalent to "pi is a normal number." While most real numbers are normal and pi is suspected to be so, it isn't known. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number
- mike_hock 4mo agoSo does every other random infinite sequence of bits. The unintuitive part comes from infinity, not pi. It also doesn't contain all past and future knowledge because it also contains all possible falsehoods about the past and future in a way that's indiscernible from the truth. Encoding information as an offset into a pseudorandom sequence is no more storage efficient than storing the information directly.
- sph 4mo agoAre you aware this is meant as a joke, right?
- LoganDark 4mo agoJokes can be educational too.
- smaudet 4mo agoKeyword is conjectured. Infinities of random sequences exist that can be shown not to contain all data, 0-8 (base 10) is one such random sequence that is trivially proven to never contain 9... There are no known patterns to pi, but, (I am legitimately curious about this), are there any known sequences e.g. of 1 million 0s and a single other digit within the decimal sequence of pi? Given how it (pi) looks, I'm of the strong suspicion is that the answer is "no". But of course, proving that requires that some property of the randomness is provable. Which it does feel as if, given there are different infinities, there are also different randomnesses, hence the conjecture is ill-formed and probably incorrect...
- gowld 4mo agoThe longest consecutive sequence of decimals digits found in pi is a sequence of 13 8s. All other digits have a sequence of length 12. https://bellard.org/pi/pi2700e9/pidigits.html https://bellard.org/pi/pi2700e9/pidigits.html
- nosioptar 4mo agoThe worst part is that it contains Star Wars 4-6 from an alternate timeline where Disney did a reboot casting Chris Pratt as Han Solo. (Fun fact: "Chrispratt" is an ancient Californian word that means "Joel McHale didn't want the role.")
- cadamsdotcom 4mo agoFear not! It’s probably so deep in pi that you’d pass away listening to someone tell you where!
- koolala 4mo agoIt isn't actually proven true.
- OkayPhysicist 4mo agoSo does a calendar, if you you buy them enough years in advance.
- nighthawk454 4mo agoAnd also all the days you don’t, so, by itself not very meaningful. Especially since you can’t tell which one is right in advance. In some sense, so does a calendar
- anthonj 4mo agoSo does a random number generator
- gowld 4mo agoYou need to be more specific in order to make that statement falsifiable.
- thih9 4mo agoIt also contains all possible falsehoods and comes with no way to distinguish what's true from what isn't.
- vadansky 4mo agoBut enough about LLMs
- xp84 4mo agoIf it makes you feel better, consider that it also contains all plausible and implausible falsehoods about your demise as well.
- Yokohiii 4mo agoThe person who starts reading ahead into pi will always gets the freshest numbers. Perfect crypto!
- arialdomartini 4mo agoYou will love reading Jorge Borges The Library of Babel. https://dn760100.eu.archive.org/0/items/TheLibraryOfBabel/babel.pdf https://dn760100.eu.archive.org/0/items/TheLibraryOfBabel/ba...
- teapourer 4mo agoI thought of this as soon as I saw the repo as well.
- layer8 4mo agoIt also contains all past and future fake news, and you don’t know which is which.
- deadbabe 4mo agoA not so distant calendar also has the day you will pass away.
- matheusmoreira 4mo agoAll knowledge already exists. Humans are merely discovering it. All knowledge is information. All information is sequences of bits. All sequences of bits are numbers. All numbers already exist. All files in a computer are sequences of bits. Intellectual work creates files. Intellectual work is number discovery. Humans are interesting number generators. Humans are anti-random number generators.
- RetroTechie 4mo agoWorse - it's also possible to calculate your time of death! That is: assuming enough compute & knowing how many digits to calculate.
- giancarlostoro 4mo agoI... I can't tell if this is an elaborate troll or pure genius. I love it.
- pokstad 4mo agoBoth.
- MisterTea 4mo agoReminds me of: https://www.spronck.net/sloot.html https://www.spronck.net/sloot.html Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloot_Digital_Coding_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloot_Digital_Coding_System
- giancarlostoro 4mo agoNever heard of that one, that's amazing! Love it.
- Levitating 4mo ago> The SDCS is only possible if keys are allowed to become infinite, or the data store is allowed to become infinite (...) This would, of course, make the idea useless. But Pi is infinite. And thus this genius contraption will work as long as we have Moore's law on our side :)
- beng-nl 4mo agoI have very fond memories of reading that book.
- ndiddy 4mo agoI looked into this a bit a while ago, what Sloot did was at least a little novel. Basically the way his encoding scheme actually worked was that it would store each line of video into a database, encode each video frame as a series of line lookups, and then store that encoded frame into another database. Then each video is a series of frame lookups. When you hear accounts of him being able to demo smooth playback of 16 videos at once on late 90s hardware, this is how he did it. Because each frame is a series of line lookups, splitting the screen horizontally 16 times and playing 16 videos at once is not any more taxing than playing a single video fullscreen. Similarly, he was able to fast-forward and rewind smoothly because each frame is individually decoded, it's not like traditional video compression where you have to calculate differences from each keyframe. Playing at 2x speed was not any more taxing than 1x speed. Of course he never would have been able to store a video file in 8KB or whatever, but this meant that (for example) if you had a whole season of a TV show in your database, the opening and ending credits would only be stored once.
- adzm 4mo agoI'm intrigued that π was capitalized to Π presumably automatically in the HN headline.
- cbm-vic-20 4mo agojshell> "πfs".toUpperCase() $1 ==> "ΠFS" Welcome to Node.js v26.3.0. Type ".help" for more information. > "πfs".toUpperCase() 'ΠFS' Python 3.14.5 (main, May 10 2026, 10:21:34) [Clang 21.0.0 (clang-2100.0.123.102)] on darwin Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> "πfs".upper() 'ΠFS' echo 'πfs' | awk '{print toupper($0)}' ΠFS
- noman-land 4mo agoWhy does your Python terminal report May 10th? Today is June 10th.
- hnlmorg 4mo agoThis is probably a dumb question, but do we actually know that pi has an infinite number of decimal digits or are we assuming that it does because we haven’t developed a sufficiently powerful computer to calculate the last digit of pi? I’m guessing this is something that could be formally proven?
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- pixel_popping 4mo agoWell, that should get GPT-5.5 extended thinking going for a few weeks.
- hasteg 4mo agoHere is a one page proof that pi is irrational - https://heuklyd.github.io/papers/pdf/Niven-1947.pdf https://heuklyd.github.io/papers/pdf/Niven-1947.pdf
- stackghost 4mo agoIt's amazing how inscrutable calculus can be when you return to reading it after not doing so for a period of time, much like lisp or forth. I don't think I've actually done an integral or taken a derivative in years. I can see the elegance of that proof but I'll be damned if I can actually follow the mathematics from one step to the next.
- liglam 4mo ago[dead]
- partsch 4mo agoThanks for the PDF. I feel like I understand even less now than I did before.
- hnlmorg 4mo agoThanks for sharing. That’s a nice read. I’m glad I asked :)
- adzm 4mo agoIt is worth noting that as the length of data increases it becomes extremely unlikely that the index and length of the sequence within pi would actually be smaller than the data.
- Aloisius 4mo agoThat seems easy enough to solve. Simply record the index and length in pi of the index and length in pi.
- awesome_dude 4mo agoSee also: Recursion
- glitchc 4mo agoAt what point is the metadata larger than the actual file?
- mike_hock 4mo agoHalf the time it should be larger, right?
- wavemode 4mo agoPart of the joke is that, in this implementation, the metadata is guaranteed to be larger than the file: > Now, we all know that it can take a while to find a long sequence of digits in π, so for practical reasons, we should break the files up into smaller chunks that can be more readily found. > In this implementation, to maximise performance, we consider each individual byte of the file separately, and look it up in π.
- bean469 4mo agoIt almost always will be, except for the extremely rare case of your string being somewhere early in the pi string.
- leephillips 4mo agoWhat a brilliant idea! Of course, of course, it’s not in the repository so I can’t apt-get install it. Debian...always so far behind.
- koolala 4mo agoShort Storage Number - SSN 0x123456789ABCDEF0 use this number as a shorter nibble storage alternative...
- thangalin 4mo agohttps://cs.stackexchange.com/a/53737/1704 https://cs.stackexchange.com/a/53737/1704 > Matches that occur early enough in π to attain significant compression will not be varied. That is, it isn't possible to use π to compress interesting, real-world data because real-word strings are unlikely to arise early.
- Levitating 4mo ago> Since the file is 128 bits long, one would expect this place to be around the 2*128th bit. > Calculate the number of bits to encode that value using log2(938933556), which is ~29.8 Can someone explain these two statements to me?
- thangalin 4mo ago[dead]
- csunoser 4mo agofor > Calculate the number of bits to encode that value using log2(938933556), which is ~29.8 This is roughly same as saying: "If you rewrite 938933556 as a binary number / usize, it will need 30 bits". Sanity check: 1101111111|0110111111|0100110100 (| delimits every 10 bigits). > Since the file is 128 bits long, one would expect this place to be around the 2*128th bit. This statement is a bit more subtle. As a first ord approximation, we can see pi sort of as a RNG. If we write pi (ignore the decimal point), as a binary number, we get: 11011001111111011110010101011110001010101111101101110001001100001... You can... kind of squint and pretend this is a random sequence of 1s and 0s. Now, if you had a file that is 128 bits (so lots of intermingling 0s and 1s), and each next digit of pi is effectively a coin flip. Pretend 1s are heads, and 0s are tails. You basically have to get the exact 128 consecutive coin flips of the same result as your file to get your file back. Imagine now, PI not as a number, but a sequence of experiments of flipping the coin 128 times. - (11011..01000)(10000...00100).... - ^attempt 1 ^attempt 2 You have to try, on expectation, quite a few times to win this game! Now, you could easily get lucky for sure. But on average, your chance of winning per attempt is roughly 0.5^128! So, how many times do you have to try to win this game? Something like 2^128 times - and you have to consider that each attempt uses 128 bits as well. So more like 2^135. But you don't have to start fresh in each attempt, you can see it as like this: - 11011................00100... - ( 128 flips ) - ( another 128 ) - ( ) - ... so on and so on That's where the 2^128 number came from.
- jamwise 4mo agoReminds me of when I tried to use the library of babel as a data compression tool. It led me down a fun rabbit hole and was my first introduction to information theory. The conclusion being that you basically need the same amount of data to represent the address of your data as the data itself, so it's not really effective at compression, just a fun thought experiment. The cool part of this in modern times is that LLMs are basically a form of lossy compression that actually achieves the gist of what these tools fail at. Although it is lossy, and requires a massive substrate. This is related to the idea of AI/LLMs being a form of language compression.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- quirino 4mo ago3Blue1Brown just released a viduo about this Intelligence-Compression connection. https://youtu.be/l6DKRf-fAAM https://youtu.be/l6DKRf-fAAM
- jamwise 4mo agoThe idea was fresh in my mind because I watched this yesterday. Great video, the illustrations and intuition-building of the compressability of information was so good! I'm so grateful for 3Blue1Brown.
- ainch 4mo agoIn some sense, science is the most extreme form of compression - Newtonian mechanics explains an incredible number of phenomena in a few lines of text.
- mdp2021 4mo agoYes. But /lossful/ compression: (scientific, philosophical etc.) laws compress an abstract narration of events into that tiny, hard, fundamental, predictive detail. (Then it depends on your concern: "Aagh, the aunt fell!" // "Oh yes, that'd be Newton")
- charles_f 4mo agoPosted many times before: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com/philipl https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com/philipl My favourite issue being about GDPR compliance https://github.com/philipl/pifs/issues/56 https://github.com/philipl/pifs/issues/56
- aidenn0 4mo agoI vaguely remember an entry to a compression-benchmark that gamed the benchmark by treating the filename as part of the input to the decompression-algorithm, thus beating the metric that only measured the size of the file.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- dang 4mo agoRelated. Others? πfs – A data-free filesystem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36357466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36357466 - June 2023 (107 comments) πfs – A data-free filesystem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28699499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28699499 - Sept 2021 (30 comments) PiFS – The Data-Free Filesystem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26208704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26208704 - Feb 2021 (1 comment) Πfs: Never worry about data again - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21359338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21359338 - Oct 2019 (1 comment) The π Filesystem for FUSE: Store Your Data in π - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19223032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19223032 - Feb 2019 (1 comment) pifs - Avoid disk space usage by saving your files in the digits of Pi - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18687275 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18687275 - Dec 2018 (1 comment) πfs – A data-free filesystem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13869691 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13869691 - March 2017 (105 comments) Πfs: Stores your data in π - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10856108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10856108 - Jan 2016 (1 comment) Πfs: Never worry about data again - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10847693 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10847693 - Jan 2016 (1 comment) File system that stores location of file in Pi - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8018818 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8018818 - July 2014 (98 comments) 100% Compression Using Pi - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6698852 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6698852 - Nov 2013 (32 comments) (Reposts are fine after a year or so; links to past threads are just to satisfy extra-curious readers)
- Levitating 4mo agoHow are you generating these lists
- jwpapi 4mo agoHe’s the mod hero from HN
- gnaritas99 4mo ago[flagged]
- Lapsa 4mo ago[dead]
- j3th9n 4mo agoWhy would anyone need πfs, since you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially on Linux.
- amluto 4mo ago> Why is this thing so slow? It took me five minutes to store a 400 line text file! > Well, this is just an initial prototype, and don't worry, there's always Moore's law! Seriously? They're only storing individual bytes in pi: > In this implementation, to maximise performance, we consider each individual byte of the file separately, and look it up in π. So the whole transformation should be trivially reducible to a 256-element lookup table from source byte to location in pi and a similar table used to convert back the other way. Maybe a fancy formula could be used for the (never actually encountered) case in which a byte is encoded by one of the infinite available noncanonical encodings.
- spchampion2 4mo agoThis is interesting, but I feel like my use cases would better align with a different irrational number. Could I get an option to do this with e instead? /s
- gatestone 4mo agohttps://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1817064/bbp-formula-for-e https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1817064/bbp-formula...
- actusual 4mo agoThis is why I got pi tattooed. It's a tattoo of all tattoos.
- dekhn 4mo agoyes, but can you get a tattoo of all tattoos that do not contain themself?
- mzelling 4mo agoLooked at the repo but it says NOTHING about what value this project offers. I mean, I get that it's "fun" to store information within the digits of pi. But is this just amusement, or is there a value prop for production use here? (Speaking as a math major, by the way. I'm sympathetic to the cause.)
- mherkender 4mo agoIt's a joke.
- tcoff91 4mo agoI think it's pretty clearly for amusement. And it would kind of spoil the amusement if it were to explicitly mention that it's a joke...
- windward 4mo agoIt's a(n IMO weak) argument raised when discussing illegal files/numbers. This project makes clear the counter-argument: the input that gets you the file out of π is a badly compressed version of the file.
- emptyroads 4mo agoReminds me of nsafs, the National Security Agency Filesystem ("free" because the government pays for it) - https://github.com/freedomtools/nsafs https://github.com/freedomtools/nsafs
- dekhn 4mo agoI once interviewed for a company and the interviewer was telling me how he (a vc) funded a project to generate large streams of random numbers; you would select an index at random, share that private key with somebody, and then the subsequent text could be used as a one-time-pad. NSA would be forced to buffer/save the entire stream, which could be generated at GB/sec, if they wanted to decrypt. It didn't seem very practical.
- helterskelter 4mo agoI wonder if we could mess with NSA-style surveillance by having a good chunk of the population streaming lots of random data over the internet. Essentially, Alice piping her /dev/random to Bob's /dev/null over netcat or something. Make a slick looking app that does it 24/7 in the background using excess bandwidth and tell people it sticks it to the NSA. Spy agencies would not only have to store it all in case it was something valuable, but at some point they may try to crack it because it's indistinguishable from encrypted data and waste resources on it. If enough people did it, total web surveillance could become impractical.
- danielmeskin 4mo agoI suspect this would have an effect similar to early internet worms that caused significant strain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melissa_(computer_virus) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melissa_(computer_virus)
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- dekhn 4mo agoThis violates law #27, "do not unnecessarily increase the entropy of the universe"
- anon291 4mo agoIt is actually not proven that the decimal expansion (or any rational base expansion) of pi contains all possible sequences of numbers. It sounds like it intuitively would be since the expansion is infinite, but it is not necessarily true. For example, the number 0.101001... (i.e., decimal formed by concatenating N zeros and then 1 for all N 0 to infinity) is infinite, never-ending, and irrational but does not contain every sequence of numbers.
- nyc_pizzadev 4mo agoJust a heads up, this is writing 16 bits for every 8 bits of input: https://github.com/philipl/pifs/blob/fded8bf7b8f4fc64233e37bf1689fd98371c30dd/src/%CF%80fs.c#L194 https://github.com/philipl/pifs/blob/fded8bf7b8f4fc64233e37b...
- yassi_dev 4mo agoI built something with a similar spirit for Pi day: https://pi.yassi.dev/ https://pi.yassi.dev/
- z3t4 4mo agoSomeone should make a service "where in the pi am I" then you could use it as a short link. Then there will be hardware accelerated pi chips. All computers will come with pi preinstalled.
- woah 4mo agoI've simplified it and made it more flexible 3._1_415926535897932384626433832795_0_288419716939
- chris_sn 4mo agoFunnily enough I’m reading Service Model and just got to the bit in the Library Archive, which has a very similar vibe to this project. Love it
- windward 4mo ago>One of the properties that π is conjectured to have is that it is normal conjectured Glad to see one of my pet points of pedantry come up. No non-constructed irrational number has never been proven to be normal or disjunctive.
- oofbey 4mo agoThat’s a lot of negatives!
- School-Cotton 4mo agoWhat do you mean by "non-constructed" here?
- pocksuppet 4mo agoYou can design a number. Just take all finite digit strings in order of length and numerical order: 0.123456789 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 ... 99 000 001 002 ... 999 0000 0001 ... obviously it contains every finite digit string in base 10. I can't prove the digits are uniformly distributed in every base - you'd have to be more clever but you see the idea.
- School-Cotton 4mo agoBut pi is also "constructed", in the sense that you can write down a constructive definition for it, for example \sqrt{6 \times \sum_{k=1}^\infty \frac{1}{k^2}}. So I suppose maybe OP meant we haven't proven any number to be normal (or not) that is not designed to be normal (or not) ?
- bilsbie 4mo agoI’d guess even the index in pi for my phone number would be more digits than the phone number. So not really a compression scheme.
- RedMagicBox 4mo ago[dead]
- layer8 4mo ago> In this implementation, to maximise performance, we consider each individual byte of the file separately, and look it up in π. Considering each individual bit separately would be even more performant: you only need the indexes 2 and 33, and there is an efficient mapping of those to the bits in storage.
- keithnz 4mo agoisn't this relying on properties that aren't proven about pi? it needs to be disjunctive or normal, and neither of those are proven
- sonixaep 4mo ago[dead]
- dwheeler 4mo agoHorrible. Brilliant. Love it.
- stogot 4mo agoHas there been attempts to prove the conjecture?
- ctan4 4mo agoμῆνιν ἄειδε: Sing, the wrath. Rendering in LaTeX. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48010729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48010729
- liamYC 4mo agoDeveloped a UI with Claude here: https://ljsimpkin.github.io/pi-compress https://ljsimpkin.github.io/pi-compress It really shows how inefficient such a compression would be. Haha nice idea
- keyle 4mo agoNote, this (2012)
- psadri 4mo agoThis is part of the plot in Murakamui's Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.
- RedMagicBox 4mo ago[dead]
- dofcof 4mo agoThis is a classic
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- baalimago 4mo agoThis got me thinking about the "simulation theory": If our universe is simulated, it must be possible to snapshot the entire state for one iteration (however time now is quantized, open question). "... From here, it is a small leap to see that if π contains all possible files, why are we wasting exabytes of space storing those files, when we could just look them up in π!" (from pifs, above) This means that not only does a singular snapshot of our universe exists in pi, but every single one does The information for our entire universe's simulation is stored in pi (and every other number like it)
- foxes 4mo agoA theory is something you can test, model, write proofs, do calculations, eg quantum field theory, group theory. Simulation "theory" isnt a theory its a conjecture. Theres no meat to it.
- Lorin 4mo agoIf we could restore the snapshot from around the year 2000 that'd be great, would like to make some changes.
- gosub100 4mo ago> This means that not only does a singular snapshot of our universe exists in pi, but every single one does The word 'exist' is doing a lot of work here. Could any computer actually find the value in pi? Each computation takes energy, and there is a finite amount of energy in the universe. Does the value 'exist' in pi if it could never be rendered? How much different is that claim from "our simulated universe is a file on gods computer, located just past the edge of the observable universe or 18 inches away in the 4th dimension"? A similar thought experiment I've had is with the lottery. With just a few sheets of paper, there exist a sequence of numbers that would completely shut down both major US lotteries - ossibly even get you arrested - if they contained the winning numbers for the next 50, 20, or even 10 consecutive draws. Think about the consequences. You would win, and win again the next draw, and they would be certain you cheated. Then confiscate your pad, and draw again and win a third time. They would have to shut the contest down because this is "mathematically impossible ". But it's not. Just like your thought experiment, it's "just numbers"
- notatyrannosaur 4mo agoReminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Fnd_in_a_Lbry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Fnd_in_a_Lbry Meta: every single comment seems to start with some variation of "Reminds me of". Had to get mine in.
- golem14 4mo agoThis isn't really going far enough; the readme says - keep the metadata on a piece of paper or whatever. But: The metadata is data too, you can find it ALSO within \pi. So it's \pi all the way down. Not even sure if there an interesting Collatz-like conjecture here.
- markcollins05 4mo agoTechnically π being normal is still unproven. So if the conjecture is false this whole thing falls apart. But that's what makes it a perfect nerd joke.
- adamwright326 4mo agoThe metadata storage problem is the real punchline here. You end up needing more space for the metadata than the original data, so it's a zero-sum joke.
- mkesper 4mo agoOutdated! Should have linked directly to https://github.com/philipl/inferencefs/ https://github.com/philipl/inferencefs/ obviously.
- outadoc 4mo agoReminded me of PortalRunner's latest video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6rkhvdAqHU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6rkhvdAqHU
- amelius 4mo agoI am curious what this means for copyright. I.e. if all music/songs were already encoded in Pi even before the universe started existing.
- amelius 4mo agoInstead of using Pi wouldn't it be better to choose a number for which the conjecture is true? And for which the index is easy to compute?
- vbarrielle 4mo agoThis would be easier using the Champernowne constant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champernowne_constant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champernowne_constant) which is guaranteed to be normal, not just conjectured.
- mohsen1 4mo agoIf you think about it, a piano has all the possible songs in it too!
- X-Ryl669 4mo agoNo it doesn't. Think of the intro of We'll rock you and show me how you perform that on your piano.
- 0x1ceb00da 4mo agoThe design is very human
- torh 4mo agoNo thanks, I have all the files I need right here in /dev/urandom.
- yason 4mo agoWhere do you store the indices? Blockchain!
- utopiah 4mo ago"This file doesn't look like what I remember. Are you sure? It's been a while since you last opened it. Memory is funny like that. The file is fine — maybe take another look with fresh eyes." from https://github.com/philipl/inferencefs/ https://github.com/philipl/inferencefs/ Maybe I do not indeed remember properly. Anyway, back to watching "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" for the first time, I think.
- matneyx 4mo agoThe FAQ just keeps getting creepier...
- insumanth 4mo ago[dead]
- aafaqzahid 4mo ago[dead]
- yamakasi007 4mo ago[flagged]
- sam_goody 4mo agoTheoretically, if we had a GPU so fast it could instantly calculate billions of digits of Pi, and a small hard drive, could this actually be made to work? Cache all the last lookups but otherwise just store the index within pi? And for larger files - split them into chunks of whatever size could be handled? (I mean, I realize this is a joke and can't make sense - but GPUs can be really really fast, and am willing to make a fool of myself by asking.) And if we had a quantum computer that stores all of pi on one qubit, that could make things even faster ;/
- hnbad 4mo agoSo this is how I find out that in Verdana lowercase pi looks exactly like lowercase Cyrillic п (pe), i.e. like an open rectangle rather than a bit curvy.
- jklimosk 4mo agoFascinating. Would this actually work?
- adamwright326 4mo agoPer-byte lookup is the killer. Finding each byte individually in π would take longer than the universe's age.
- markcollins05 4mo agoCopyright defense with 'it's just digits of pi' is the funniest part. If Disney sues you over a few trillion digits that were always there, we've got bigger problems.
- kevinmiller452 4mo agoMoore's Law as the excuse for terrible performance is a classic programmer cop-out. Just wait a few years and your pi lookup will be blazing fast, trust me.