It naturally follows from the compression-as-intelligence school of thought that building general-purpose compression/intelligence is hard. I very much believe

It naturally follows from the compression-as-intelligence school of thought that building general-purpose compression/intelligence is hard. I very much believe in domain-specific intelligence, and correspondingly domain-specific compression. Here's a practical business use case for lossless compression (in-memory analytics), which I have been developing: http://tuulos.github.io/pydata-2014/ http://tuulos.github.io/pydata-2014/ In contrast to general-purpose encoders, this approach is extremely data-intensive, compressing terabytes per chunk.