There is a water shortage?

The design is very human

Or use yEnc: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/YEnc

each file is minimum 4kb

(base64.length/max_character) * min_filesize < actual_file_size

For this to pay off

I'd go with a prefix, so it's ls-friendly.

Browse your own machine as if it's under alt.film.binaries but more so

Even better! According to no hiding theorem, you can't destroy information. With black holes you maybe possibly could be able to recover the data as it leaks through the Hawking radiation.
Perfect for long term storage

That's the kind of manager that also tells you that you just lack creativity and vision if you tell them that it's not possible. They also post regularly on LinkedIn

You can give me any file, and I can create a compression algorithm that reduces it to 1 bit. (*)

u can have everthing in a single bit, if the decompressor includes the whole universe

Well he's not wrong. The decompression would be a problem though.

https://xkcd.com/1381/

Send him your work: 1 (or 0 ofc)

That’s precisely when you bet on it.

Just make a file system that maps each file name to 2 files. The 0 file and the 1 file.

Now with just a filename and 1 bit, you can have any file! The file is just 1 bit. It's the filesystems that needs more than that.

It's an interesting question, though. How far CAN you compress? At some point you've extracted every information contained and increased the density to a maximum amount - but what is that density?

Maybe they also believe themselves to be father of computing

that's awesome! I'm just migrating all my data to πfs. finally mathematics is put to a proper use!

Finally someone uses the fact that compute time is so much cheaper than storage!

Breakthrough vibes

Easy, just replace each byte of data with multiple bytes of metadata. I see no problem here

That story is immediately what came to mind.

This was too damn funny for what I expected it to be

Nice stuff.

I got sold on the :

EOF does not consume less space than "5"

because, even though the space taken by the filesystem is the fault of the filesystem, one needs to consider the minimum information requirements of stating starts and ends of files, specially when stuff is split into multiple files.

I would have actually considered the file size information as part of the file size instead (for both the input and the output) because, for a binary file, which can include a string of bits which might match an EOF, causing a falsely ended file, would be a problem. And as such, the contestant didn't go checking for character == EOF, but used the function that truly tells whether the end of file is reached, which would, then be using the file system's file size information.

Since the input file was a 3145728 bytes and the output files would have been smaller than that, I would go with 22 bits to store the file size information. This would be in favour of the contestant as:

1. That would be the minimum (hyh) number of bits required to store the file size, making it as easy as possible for the contestant to make more files
2. You could actually go with 2 bits, if you predefine MiB to be the unit, but that would make it harder for the contestant, because they will be unable to present file sizes less than 1 MiB, and would have to increase the file size information bits

On the other hand, had the contestant decided to break the file between bits (instead at byte ends), instead of bytes (which, from the code, I think they didn't) the file size information would require an additional 3 bits.

Now, using this logic, if I check the result:

From the result claimed by the contestant, there were 44 extra bytes (352 bits) remaining.

+ 22 bits for the input file size information - 22*219 bits for the output file size information because 219 files

so the contestant succeeds by 352 + 22 − (22 × 219) = −4444 bits. In other words, fails by 4444 bits.

Now of course, the output file size information might be representable in a smaller number of bits, but to calculate that, I would require downloading the file (which I am not in the mood for.
And in that case, you would require additional information to tell the file size bits. So;

• 5 bits for the number 22 in the input
• 5 bits for the size of the file size information (I am feeling this won't give significant gains) and rest of the bits as stated in the first 5 bits, as the file size bits
  • you waste bits for every file size requiring more than 16 bits to store the file size information
  • it is possible to get a net gain with this, as qalc says, log(3145728 / 219, 2) = (ln(1048576) − ln(73)) / ln(2) ≈ 13.81017544

But even then, you have 352 + 5 + 22 − (5 + (14 × 219)) = −2692 for the best case scenario in which all output file sizes manage to be under 14 bits of file size informations. More realistically, it would be something around 352 + 5 + 22 − ((5 + 14) × 219) = −3782 because you will the the 5 bits for every file, separately, with the 14 in this case, be a changing value for every file, giving a possibly smaller number.

If instead going with the naive 8 bit EOF that the offerer desired, well, going with 2 consecutive characters instead of a single one, seems doable. As long as you are able to find enough of said 2 characters.
After going on a little google search, I seem to think that in a 3MiB file, there would be either 47 or 383 (depending upon which of my formulae was correct) possible occurrences of the same 2 character combination. Well, you'd need to find the correct combination.

But of course, that's not exactly compression for a binary file, as I said before, as an EOF is not good enough.

I was sort of on Mike Goldman (the challenge giver)'s side until I saw the great point made at the end that the entire challenge was akin to a bar room bet; Goldman had always set it up as a kind of scam from the start and was clearly more than happy to take $100 from anyone who fell for it, and so should have taken responsibility when someone managed to meet the wording of his challenge.

Both people sound obnoxious lol

Nice read, thanks!

What about a hard drive made of network pings?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio

I remember a project where someone booted Linux off of Google Drive. Cursed on many levels.

"Harder Drive"

Store the data in pings that constantly get resent to keep the data in the internet

GmailFS was a thing

I don’t know if it was this one but it might’ve been this one https://github.com/qntm/base65536

per page

I mean, yes. obviously.

If you had 1000 bytes of text on 1 page before, you now have 1byte per page on 1000 pages afterwards

Have a macro that decreases all font size on opening and then increases all again before closing.

Follow me irl for more compression techniques.

You could always diff the XML before and after to see what's causing it.

When you run out of characters, you simply create another 0 byte file to encode the rest.

Check mate, storage manufacturers.

255, generally, because null termination. ZFS does 1023, the argument not being "people should have long filenames" but "unicode exists", ReiserFS 4032, Reiser4 3976. Not that anyone uses Reiser, any more. Also Linux' PATH_MAX of 4096 still applies. Though that's in the end just a POSIX define, I'm not sure whether that limit is actually enforced by open(2)... man page speaks of ENAMETOOLONG but doesn't give a maximum.

It's not like filesystems couldn't support it it's that FS people consider it pointless. ZFS does, in principle, support gigantic file metadata but using it would break use cases like having a separate vdev for your volume's metadata. What's the point of having (effectively) separate index drives when your data drives are empty.

Link?

Ah memories. That was an interesting lesson.