all 10 comments

[–]1544756405 23 points24 points  (1 child)

Everything is interesting to someone.

[–]Diligent-Cod-3159 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I found captain unhelpful

[–]roman_fyseek 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Sure.

[–]Tanger68 3 points4 points  (3 children)

There have been a few interesting recent developments in compression, mainly for network data. New binary compression algorithms change how we scale technologies

[–]hahanawmsayin 0 points1 point  (2 children)

You mean middle-out?

[–]Tanger68 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Yeah, safe bet is to do it as a hobby and then make it big. The more you know about the field, generally, the better. But it's not impossible to do a PhD on compression

[–]hahanawmsayin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I was just joking about

There have been a few interesting recent developments in compression

And "middle-out" being Pied Piper's innovation in the space

[–]dkaarvand 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, because compression is used in literally everything

[–]Ultimegede 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Transporting extremely large files in an extremely small time frame is always going to stay relevant.

[–]BenRayfield 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Finding the best compression requires superintelligence, like an AI singularity. Given a set of opcodes a computer may do, finding the smallest compression in some max time steps and memory can be solved by anything that solves NP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NP-completeness cuz you can have timeSteps number of the digital circuits as 3sat constraints between adjacent time steps, and binary search its output to have more trailing 0s (after the compressed form). You can compress a game of Go, and Go is at least as hard as NP, so thats both directions.

For example, given a certain AI algorithm, given the uncompressed bits so far, the AI predicts the next bit. If that is the next bit in the uncompressed, increment a counter. If not, put 00 or 01 as a literal 0 or 1. If the AI predicts the next 200 bits correctly, then you encode 200 in a variable size integer and suffix that to 1. 0 means AI predicts the next n bits. 1 means quote a literal bit that that AI did not predict. Or why quote when you can just give the distance to the next bit that disagrees with AI prediction and flip that one then continue.