π compression algorithms hate this one simple trick!!
this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2023
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This is a joke, right? This feels like a very dumb solution. I don't know much about UTF-8 encoding, but it sounds like Roman characters can be encoded shorter than most or all others because of a shorthand that assumes Roman characters. In that case, why not take that functionality and let a UTF-8 block specify which language makes up most of the text so that you can have that savings almost every time? I don't see why one would want it to be random.
I immediately thought of Leeroy Jenkins in the last sentence.
Pretty certain it's an intentional reference.
You're right, and someone else might be a part of the lucky 10,000 today.
And now we have the obligatory xkcd reference. π
I can't read "what a time to be alive" without hearing Two Minute Papers in my head
hold onto your papers
longer than necessary
It's as long as it needs to be unique
Sure. OK. How about we put the Greek alphabet at the lower code points and the Latin alphabet higher up, and now you might argue that Latin takes up more space than necessary.
Potential counterpoint: "This is stupid. Latin goes in the lower code points, it always has, it always will. Who's putting Greek down there??"
Well, if Greece had invented computing as well as, let's say, democracy that's very likely how things would be.
In that timeline, someone is using exactly the same line on you "[The representation of Latin text in memory i]s as long as it needs to be unique." and you're annoyed because your short letter to Grandma is using far too much space on your hard drive.
Genuine question, how many applications are bottlenecked by the size of text files? I understand your analogy, but even a doubling in size of all your utf-8 encoded files would likely be dwarfed by all the other binary data on your machine, right?
Oh true. I'd be so annoyed because I somehow wrote a whole letter to Grandma in English which she couldn't read.
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