YSK long noise videos cant effectively be compressed

From the standpoint of loading down Reddit today, yes. But, if we want to talk computer science theory and what one compression algorithms one could build, that’s not really true.

There are two classes of compression – lossless compression and lossy compression.

Lossless compression retains an exact copy of the original data. Compress and then decompress and you get back the original.

So, okay. How can you compress data? I mean, if I have a byte of data, eight 1s or 0s, how can I use less than eight 1s or 0s to store those? For lossless compression, the answer is that you have to have some knowledge of what information it is that you’re storing. If you know that information of a given length N with certain characteristics comes up more-frequently than others, then you can assign a shorter pattern M to represent that pattern and then use the old pattern of length N to represent something else less-common. Lossless compression is just the art of reordering representations of data to more-closely fit the frequency with which they arise: shorter for things that are relatively-more-common.

If you’re wrong about that order, then lossless compression can make the representation of your data larger.

Now, technically the noise in there is actually probably very predictable, because it’s likely based off a pseudorandom number generator (PRNG). That isn’t really “random” – it’s just making numbers that look random from a single number that’s hard to predict. If the PRNG isn’t having more entropy injected into it over time, then all of the noise generated during the session comes down to that one small number. If you were clever and could figure out the seed – a small number, often something like 64 bits, and often seeded off something like the Unix time at the time that the random numbers started being generated, which makes it even more predictable than that – or at least the internal state of the PRNG, maybe 256 bits – you could basically store the content of the whole video in just a few bytes. However, it’s not always easy to determine that original state – in the case of cryptographically secure PRNGs, it’s specifically intended to be impractical.

However, we generally treat pseudorandom noise as if it were actually truly random, rather than just pseudorandom, which means that it’s totally unpredictable, and if that is the case, then you cannot losslessly compress it and make it smaller, not over a sufficient quantity of noise, because you can know nothing about the frequency with which a given pattern arises.

So, depending upon the source of noise used, we might be able to do lossless compression of noise, if pseudorandom noise was used (probably) and if we can figure out what that number is that was used to generate that noise.

Okay, enough about lossless compression. Can we do lossy compression of noise?

And there the answer is…yeah, probably yes.

The way lossy compression works is that we have to know something about what information is actually “important” when we get around to actually using it. That lets us throw out some of the less-important information. What we get back, unlike with lossless compression, is not true to the original, but it’s a lot closer than if we just threw out information without regard for what’s important and what’s not. Lossy compression is often used to compress audio and video.

For a lot of things, there’s a lot of not-very-important information.

Let’s say that we’re looking at a video of noise. Your brain doesn’t care about every exact pixel there. It’s looking for shapes that remain across multiple frames, move together, so it can pick out objects and the like. Your brain just basically sees the noise as one big field of stuff of an approximate color changing at a given rate. None of the specifics of that noise matter. Basically, regardless of what seed was used to generate that noise, pretty much all noise with the given properties (black and white, 1 pixel size, changes every frame, N fps) looks pretty much identical. So a good form of lossy compression in a video codec would be to detect anything that looks like noise – and then just replace it with generated noise using a fixed seed. All noise looks pretty much identical to a human. So you’d get pretty much identical-looking output. As it happens, existing video codecs don’t have a noise detector, but they could.

So video of noise is lossily-compressible.

Now, I will grant that this is unrelated to putting load on Reddit, but, hey, might as well start filling the Fediverse with useful information now.

I’m not actually sure that there is a home on Earth 6000 miles away from a furcon.

googles

https://furrycons.com/calendar/map/

https://www.treehugger.com/most-remote-places-on-earth-4869276

Yeah, nowhere in the Northern Hemisphere is gonna qualify.

If you live on Tristan Da Cunha, the “most remote island on Earth inhabited by humans” in the South Atlantic, you’re ~5,984 mi from SloFluffCon 2023 in Celje, Slovenia, so even that wouldn’t quite do it.

I don’t think that you can count somewhere like the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, because nobody actually permanently lives there.

looks further

Pitcairn Island isn’t even close, only about 3,520 mi from Confuror 2023 in Guadalajara, Mexico.

The rest of the world doesn’t use SMS/RCS/iMessage as much as WhatsApp and the like

SMSes use a standard available to any app. WhatsApp is controlled by a single company.

If you were arguing that XMPP or something like that should be used instead of SMS, okay, that’s one thing, but I have a hard time favoring a walled garden.

They may not want their configuration stored in $HOME, for example:

they’re on a machine that isn’t under their physical control and ~/.config is mounted over the network from their personal machine;

That sounds like it’s a bad way to handle configuration, since among many other problems, it won’t work with the many programs that do have dotfiles in home directory, but even if that happened, you could just symlink it.

they prefer to version control their configuration files using git, with a configuration directory managed over different branches;

I do that. I symlink that config into a git-controlled directory. If OP plans to put his entire ~/.config in git, he is doing things wrong, because some of that needs to be machine-local.

the user simply wants to have a clean and consistent $HOME directory and filesystem

If whatever program you are using to view your home directory cannot hide those files, it is broken, as it does not work with a whole lot of existing software.

less secure,

If your home directory is “not secure”, you’re probably in trouble already.

Like, there are reasons you may not want to put dotfiles in a homedir, but none of the arguments in the article are them.

EDIT: I will ask developers to stop dumping directories and files that don’t start with a dot in people’s home directories, though. I gave up over twenty years ago and put my actual stuff under ~/m just to keep it from being polluted with all the other things that dump non-dotfiles/-dotdirs in a home directory. Looking at my current system, I have:

• A number of directories containing video game saves and configuration. I am pretty sure that these are mostly bad Windows ports or possibly Windows programs under WINE that just dump stuff into a user’s home directory there (not even good on Windows). Some are Windows Steam games.

• WINE apparently has decided that it’s a good idea to default to sticking the Windows home directory and all of its directories in there.

• Apparently some webcam software that I used at one point.

• A few logfiles

we’re going to ringfence all of the Raspberry Pi 5s we sell until at least the end of the year for single-unit sales to individuals, so you get the first bite of the cherry.

I mean, if you have USB, for a non-mobile platform, it doesn’t really matter. It’s not hard to get a USB audio interface.

For cell phones or laptops, I can understand not wanting another thing to plug in, but for something like a Raspberry Pi…shrugs

I thought any EU member can cross inner-EU borders freely?

A citizen of an EU member has the right to freedom of movement of labor in the EU. However, people are required to show identity documents at the border and be checked if the member state is not in the Schengen Area.

Presently, Romania is not in the Schengen Area (and this is, in fact, a very politically-contentious situation in Romania, as the European Commission considers them to have fulfilled the requirements for over a decade, but they have been repeatedly blocked by other member states from entering, most-recently by Austria).

https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/news/vienna-maintains-veto-against-bulgaria-romanias-schengen-accession/

Blasphemy laws being expanded in 2023. Not what I think people would have predicted in, say, 1990.

The way a lot of dot-com startups work, they have high fixed costs – stuff you pay no matter how many users you have, like programmers – and low marginal costs, stuff you pay based on how many users you have.

That means that it’s good to be big, because you can spread those fixed costs over many, many users. One programmer writing software used by five hundred million users can make a lot more money than software used by five users. The resulting effect is called economy of scale.

So the typical model is to take in a lot of investor money, operate at a loss, and lose money while offering a very compelling service to grow the userbase as quickly as possible.

Once you’re big enough, you can spread your costs around many users, so it’s easier to make money. You switch from growing your userbase to making money from it. Because you aren’t trying as hard as possible to draw in new users, the service is probably gonna get worse from a user standpoint.

If money becomes tight, then it’s harder to get investor dollars to operate at a loss with to grow userbase.

My understanding is that due to elevated interest rates in the post-COVID-19 situation, it’s more-costly to get investment money. So that will tend to push companies from the “growth” phase to the “monetization” phase.

That affects a bunch of companies, including Reddit.

My understanding is that there had been an ongoing concern on /r/piracy that they would get shut down at some point, that this had been a concern in the past, and so the other stuff like the API restrictions and the rest of the spez drama was kind of just adding to the big factor pushing people away – that the community could vanish at any time.

The lead mod on /r/piracy also set up a dedicated instance – there was definite commitment – made it clear that he was making the move, and was demodded on /r/piracy, so there were factors creating more inertia.

Those are all factors that did not generally exist for other communities.