this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
571 points (97.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43831 readers
1141 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That's pretty disingenuous, since most files aren't just random data.
Most real files actually have rather low entropy, even if they look like random junk (e.g., executables), chiefly due to repetition of similar data and sparse values.
Exactly. It's merely our human preference for those types of files that allow them to work at all.
things get weird when we include "all possible states"
It's not a preference; it's simply the state of the system to which we may desire to apply compression.