by Logans_Run on 8/20/23, 12:56 PM with 51 comments
by zevv on 8/20/23, 3:00 PM
From my (rather limited) interactions with him, I'd say he was far from genius, I feel he just got sucked in and had no way out of his network of lies without losing face.
by dmbche on 8/20/23, 3:37 PM
From wikipedia
by mvdwoord on 8/20/23, 2:23 PM
There is a book on it with lots of details..
by adamgordonbell on 8/20/23, 4:04 PM
You'd give everybody DVDs of digits of pi (or they could calculate them themselves) , and then transfer files faster by just sending them the offset into pi.
At the time I thought it could work with a big enough bank of digits of PI on both sides. If transfer was expensive, and calculating digits was cheap then you could give everyone an infinite supply of digits of pi and have a nearly infinite compression system.
I discovered that often the offset into pi is much larger than the data you are sending. Turns out it's an expensive way to sent things.
Also, it turns out that this area was already well understood. There are no free lunches with entropy.
But it was a fun idea to kick around.
by tzs on 8/20/23, 5:07 PM
If backwards time travel were possible then your "compression algorithm" could simply be deleting the file. To recover the file go back in time to before it was deleted and make a copy.
With this you can "compress" giant files down to just a short description of a place and time where the file was on your computer.
by projektfu on 8/20/23, 5:51 PM
by dang on 8/20/23, 8:47 PM
Was This Lost Computer Code Worth Billions? (Jan Sloot Digital Coding) (2020) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36499676 - June 2023 (2 comments)
The Stick of Jan Sloot (2004) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29623524 - Dec 2021 (22 comments)
Ask HN: What was the secret that Jan Sloot took with him to the grave? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13443135 - Jan 2017 (4 comments)
The Stick of Jan Sloot (2004) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8699058 - Dec 2014 (18 comments)
by thomasmg1985 on 8/25/23, 11:20 PM
by karmakaze on 8/20/23, 3:34 PM
I wonder if one was scammed and bought a Blu-ray with everything, only to find out they got novels rather than movies. After the initial disappointment they might realize well written novels are better than movies and never watch another.
How about we get GPT to turn good movies into great books? Like a large inverse prompt engineering problem.
Could we then even feed that text as input to make a better, though arbitrarily different movie?
by bsza on 8/20/23, 5:56 PM
by MarkusWandel on 8/21/23, 6:22 PM
What's encoded is not the audio - even the best audio codecs need on the order of 4kbits/sec to encode legible speech - but the actual semantics on how voice is produced.
Suppose you want to do this for movies. 8 kilobytes doesn't sound like enough, though the script of the movie could easily be compressed to that. But it's posible to imagine a system into which all the skill of the cinematographer, director, script writer, actors, etc. are built, with from 8 kilobytes of instructions could create, perhaps not the original movie, but something comparable.
Is this doable? Does some random crank have the remotest chance of pulling this off with the technology of the day? No. But that's likely the line of reasoning employed.
by 6510 on 8/20/23, 8:14 PM
The cheating in this context would be to study the thing the file represents rather than the representation.
A dumb example would be to make a 10 hour movie from a single image that doesn't move. There is no reason for the file to be larger than the original jpg.
> I can not only get Orson Welles' Citizen Kane. I can get Citizen Kane in colour!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JI5qy9Zoh_0
To argue that this was not the method Sloot used is missing the point. The question is: How to do it, not how to imitate someone else.
In his demo Sloot was playing 16 full movies simultaneously on a 1995 laptop at any speed. A high end computer had 32 MB memory, 133 MHz cpu, PCI video cards had 4 MB ram, 66 MHz, 560 MB HDD
If it was not what he said it was why didn't he just sell what he had? Without the extraordinary claims the demo already requires cartoon physics. He drives the truck into the match box, making an U turn inside doesn't at all seem necessary???
by PaulDavisThe1st on 8/20/23, 10:02 PM
https://sound.media.mit.edu/resources/mpeg4/sa-tools.html
It was a growing idea in the mid-2000s but AFAIK it has gone absolutely nowhere. Essentially, instead of somehow encoding the audio, you encode a description of how to generate the audio.
by refulgentis on 8/20/23, 6:31 PM
Given the notch = (A+B) / 10
You can only recover A + B. You can't recover A or B individually.
by b3lvedere on 8/21/23, 7:59 AM
by turtleyacht on 8/20/23, 2:04 PM