PhilipTheBucket

🚢🦜⚓

You can throw some money at artists periodically, some random $10 donation to whatever their fan site or on merch will probably net them more than a lifetime of listening to their stuff on Spotify, since streaming revenues add up to roughly five atoms of currency per stream or so.

If anyone ever tries it, MCA shows up their house with a few of his people.

There’s a dating app, and a social media app, but no “Revolution” app.

Hey I just had a great business idea I would like to tell you about

Honestly it's a strong contender. I would add to that what Gene Sharp calls the "atomization" of society, the destruction of "third places" and community organizations in favor of producer-to-consumer mass media. A lot of the revolutions of the past started in beerhalls and coffee shops. We don't have that. We have Facebook. A lot of people are upset, but we don't feel like it's too much we can do about it, we just feel bad and helpless.

Yes, Lempel-Ziv is incredibly fast in compression. That's because it's a sort of elegant hack from the 1970s that more or less gets lucky in terms of how it can be made to work to compress files. It's very nice. You said "by almost any metric," though, not "by compression speed and literally nothing else." There is a reason web pages default to using gzip instead of zstd for example.

Absolutely no idea what you're on about with >100 MB. I've used bzip2 for all my hard disk backups for about 20 years now, and I think I broke the 100 MB barrier for local storage at some point during that time.

the current state of the art for generic compression by almost any metric

$ ls -lh optimizer*
-rw-r--r-- 1 billy users 76M Oct 19 15:51 optimizer.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 billy users 56M Oct 19 15:51 optimizer.bin.bz2
-rw-r--r-- 1 billy users 60M Oct 19 15:51 optimizer.bin.zstd

I mean apparently not.

(Lempel-Ziv is not the best compression that's currently known by a wide margin. It's very fast and it's nicely elegant but I would expect almost any modern "next gen compression" to be based on Huffman trees at the very core, or else specialized lossy compression. Maybe I am wrong, I'm not super up to speed on this stuff, but zstd is not state of the art, that much I definitely know.)

Of course this is not better at generic compression because that’s not what it’s for.

They specifically offered csv as an example of a thing it can handle, that's why I chose that as one of the tests.

I strongly suspect that it's a bunch of "machine learning" hooey. If your compression is capable at all, it should be able to spend a few bits on categorizing what the "format" type stuff he's talking about is, and then do pretty much equally well as whatever specialized compressor. I won't say it will never be useful for some kind of data that has patterns and regularity that are not immediately obvious unless you spell it out for the compressor (2d images where there are similarities between the same positions on consecutive lines widely separated in the bytestream for example), but my guess is that this is a bunch of hype and garbage.

Just out of curiosity, I downloaded it and did the quickstart to test my assumption. Results I got:

$ ls -lh reads*
-rw-r--r-- 1 billy users  27M Oct 19 15:14 reads.csv
-rw-r--r-- 1 billy users 4.2M Oct 19 15:15 reads.csv.bz2
-rw-r--r-- 1 billy users 6.7M Oct 19 15:16 reads.csv.zl

So yeah I think at least at first look, for general-purpose compression it's trash. IDK. I also tried exactly what it sounds like their use case is, compressing PyTorch models, and it's kinda cool maybe (and certainly faster than bzip2 for those models) but at best it seems like a one-trick pony.

$ ls -lh optimizer*
-rw-r--r-- 1 billy users  76M Oct 19 15:26 optimizer.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 billy users  56M Oct 19 15:27 optimizer.bin.bz2
-rw-r--r-- 1 billy users  53M Oct 19 15:26 optimizer.bin.zl

I feel like maybe building Huffman trees based on general-purpose prediction of what comes next, and teaching that how to grasp what the next bits might turn out to be based on what has come before including traversing different formats or even just skipping backwards in the data by specified amounts, might be a better way than whatever this is doing. But doing way worse than bzip2 for simple textual data even when we give it the "format hint" that it's looking for is a sign of problems to me.

Yeah. It's fine if you just tell him that they're going somewhere special and let that be the surprise and try to keep him distracted from thinking about it too much during the ride. Maybe I'm just soft, but I feel like that "Looks like we're almost home!" is him having anxiety because he knows that something is wrong, but he's not ready to just tell his parents that they are obviously lying and so he doesn't know what to do or say.

Whatever. I mean it's fine, it's in no way traumatic or anything. I'm just saying how I feel like people should be to people who look up to them, as a general rule.

Sort of a joke that getting an “A” in colleges like Harvard and Yale is easier than Boston College or Ruetgers.

I've taken classes at a few different schools including Harvard. This is absolutely not true. You don't really have to be smart to do well at Harvard, although it helps, but you absolutely do have to bust your ass (in a way you do not at other top-tier schools as long you have some familiarity with the subject going into it.)

Completely agree with all of this

I'm not talking just about "heavily needed jobs." I am saying that having an educated populace, one that can tell up from down as far as making sense of the factual world and world events, is incalculably valuable. They can be truck drivers for all I care, but if they can watch Fox News and realize they're being lied to, the whole country will be in a better place.

It'll also be nice if you have people skilled at engineering and things, the "job qualification" part is also important, but the Germany in the 1930s had plenty of people super-skilled at chemistry and engineering, and look where it got them.

Yeah. I was really blessed in terms of my upbringing that my family deeply valued education and taught me what was education and what was a stupid waste of time (which, some but not all of the public school US education I got was) and why the education was a vital human sacred thing. And so when I got to college I really wanted the real education part. It really alarmed me when people would be happy about the easy bullshit classes or upset about the difficult classes. Like bro... why the fuck are you even here? Learn HVAC instead, you'll save some money on loans and you can probably make more than you would as a data analyst or whatever the fuck.