If you have a tub full of water and a take a sip, you still have a tub full of water. Therefore only drink in small sips and you will have infinite water.
Water shortage is a scam.
this post was submitted on 11 May 2025
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If you have a water bottle and only drink half of it each time, you will also have infinite π¦
I had a manager once tell me during a casual conversation with complete sincerity that one day with advancements in compression algorithms we could get any file down to a single bit. I really didn't know what to say to that level of absurdity. I just nodded.
Maybe they also believe themselves to be father of computing
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
Well he's not wrong. The decompression would be a problem though.
Yeah with lossy compression the future is today!
You can give me any file, and I can create a compression algorithm that reduces it to 1 bit. (*)
spoiler
(*) No guarantees about the size of the decompression algorithm or its efficacy on other files
Here's a simple command to turn any file into a single b!
echo a > $file_name
u can have everthing in a single bit, if the decompressor includes the whole universe
Send him your work: 1 (or 0 ofc)
Thatβs precisely when you bet on it.
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You want real infinite storage space? Here you go: https://github.com/philipl/pifs
that's awesome! I'm just migrating all my data to Οfs. finally mathematics is put to a proper use!
Finally someone uses the fact that compute time is so much cheaper than storage!
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Good luck with your 256 characters.
When you run out of characters, you simply create another 0 byte file to encode the rest.
Check mate, storage manufacturers.
File name file system! Looks like we broke the universe! Wait, why is my MFT so large?!
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.
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Awesome idea. In base 64 to deal with all the funky characters.
It will be really nice to browse this filesystem...
The design is very human
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It's all fun and games until your computer turns into a black hole because there is too much information in too little of a volume.
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
Can't wait to hear news about a major site leaking user passwords through hawking radiation.
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Broke: file names have a max character length.
Woke: split b64-encoded data into numbered parts and add .part-1..n suffix to each file name.
each file is minimum 4kb
(base64.length/max_character) * min_filesize < actual_file_size
For this to pay off
each file is minimum 4kb
$ touch empty_file
$ ls -l
total 8
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user group 0 may 14 20:13 empty_file
$ wc -c empty_file
0 empty_file
Huh?
Oh, I'm thinking folders aren't I. Doy....
Just use folders instead π
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I remember the first time I ran out of inodes: it was very confusing. You just start getting ENOSPC, but du still says you have half the disk space available.
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Stupid BUT: making the font in LibreOffice bigger saves space. so having 11 is readible but by changing the font size to like 500 it can save some mb per page
I dont know how it works, i just noticed it at some point
Edit: i think it was kb, not mb
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.
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It's like that chip tune webpage where the entire track is encoded in the url.
Reminds me of a project i stumbled upon the other day using various services like Google drive, Dropbox, cloudflare, discord for simultaneous remote storage. The goal was to use whatever service that has data to upload to, to store content there as a Filesystem.
I only remember discord being one of the weird ones where they would use base512 (or higher, I couldn't find the library) to encode the data. The thing with discord, is that you're limited by characters, and so the best way to store data in a compact way is to take advantage of whatever characters that are supported
I remember a project where someone booted Linux off of Google Drive. Cursed on many levels.
Store the data in pings that constantly get resent to keep the data in the internet
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this is actually a joke compression algorithm that compresses your data by one byte by appending it to the filename. (and you can execute it as many time as you want)
Too bad I can't remember the name.
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