this post was submitted on 11 May 2025
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[–] MTK@lemmy.world 169 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Aux@feddit.uk 15 points 1 month ago (2 children)

There is a water shortage?

[–] MTK@lemmy.world 22 points 1 month ago
[–] Feyter@programming.dev 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Out of context, but this video showing the amount of freshwater on the planet in perspective was eye opening for me... I see water availability different since.

https://youtu.be/b3_Abb2Vqnc

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[–] wizzim@infosec.pub 115 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Awesome idea. In base 64 to deal with all the funky characters.

It will be really nice to browse this filesystem...

[–] lemon@sh.itjust.works 93 points 1 month ago (3 children)

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.

[–] tetris11@lemmy.ml 16 points 1 month ago (4 children)

each file is minimum 4kb

(base64.length/max_character) * min_filesize < actual_file_size

For this to pay off

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[–] mmddmm@lemm.ee 10 points 1 month ago

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

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[–] Thorry84@feddit.nl 81 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] proti@lemmy.world 42 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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

[–] Klear@lemmy.world 35 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Can't wait to hear news about a major site leaking user passwords through hawking radiation.

i love this comment

[–] mmddmm@lemm.ee 11 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Really-long term storage :)

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[–] kryptonianCodeMonkey@lemmy.world 61 points 1 month ago (13 children)

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.

[–] friendlymessage@feddit.org 29 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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

[–] SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 13 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

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

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

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 9 points 1 month ago

Send him your work: 1 (or 0 ofc)

[–] pressanykeynow@lemmy.world 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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

[–] groet@feddit.org 7 points 1 month ago

Yeah with lossy compression the future is today!

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[–] JamonBear@sh.itjust.works 50 points 1 month ago (5 children)

You want real infinite storage space? Here you go: https://github.com/philipl/pifs

[–] nibbler@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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

[–] needanke@feddit.org 7 points 1 month ago

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

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[–] iknowitwheniseeit@lemmynsfw.com 42 points 1 month ago (7 children)
[–] 4grams@awful.systems 8 points 1 month ago

That story is immediately what came to mind.

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[–] Typewar@infosec.pub 39 points 1 month ago (6 children)

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

[–] astrsk@fedia.io 41 points 1 month ago

What about a hard drive made of network pings?

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

[–] ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 29 points 1 month ago

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

[–] jjagaimo@sh.itjust.works 14 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

"Harder Drive"

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

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[–] Little8Lost@lemmy.world 35 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

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

[–] SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de 18 points 1 month ago

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

[–] Jankatarch@lemmy.world 11 points 1 month ago

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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[–] Honytawk@feddit.nl 32 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Good luck with your 256 characters.

[–] SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 33 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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

Check mate, storage manufacturers.

[–] PieMePlenty@lemmy.world 14 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

File name file system! Looks like we broke the universe! Wait, why is my MFT so large?!

[–] barsoap@lemm.ee 15 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

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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[–] anhkagi@jlai.lu 29 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] badcommandorfilename@lemmy.world 42 points 1 month ago (2 children)
[–] gnutrino@programming.dev 19 points 1 month ago (5 children)

Obligatory "pi hasn't been proved to be normal"

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[–] bstix@feddit.dk 22 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It's like that chip tune webpage where the entire track is encoded in the url.

[–] LemmyFeed@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 1 month ago (2 children)
[–] skisnow@lemmy.ca 9 points 1 month ago

Are you trying to get rickrolled?

[–] tatterdemalion@programming.dev 7 points 1 month ago
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