Data Compression Quotes

Think of ChatGPT as a blurry JPEG of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a JPEG retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is an approximation. But, because the approximation is presented in the form of grammatical text, which ChatGPT excels at creating, it’s usually acceptable. You’re still looking at a blurry JPEG, but the blurriness occurs in a way that doesn’t make the picture as a whole look less sharp.

For the records I've work on over the last 10 years, I get sent the really compressed version and the non-compressed version, and oftentimes you end up going with the more compressed one because it's what people's ears are attuned to. I think the bigger problem is saturation and people being desensitized.

The file is a gzipped tar file. Your browser is playing tricks with you and trying to be smart.

Visualizing information is a form of knowledge compression.

When burned on a CD, the human genome is smaller than Microsoft Office.

Information imposes certain criteria on how it can be stored.

I love computer programmers. They have a very beautiful definition of complexity as 'the capacity to transmit the maximum information with the minimum data'.

Everything is being compressed into tiny tablets. You take a little pill of news every day - 23 minutes - and that's supposed to be enough.

If you could download the entire universe in two minutes, would you?

In a thousand words I can have the Lord's Prayer, the 23rd Psalm, the Hippocratic Oath, a sonnet by Shakespeare, the Preamble to the Constitution, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and almost all of the Boy Scout Oath. Now exactly what picture were you planning to trade for all that?

It gets a little bit troublesome when you have something that's overcompressed that shouldn't be.

I don't program, so I don't belong in Silicon Valley. If I did belong in Silicon Valley, I'd be there creating a revolutionary compression algorithm for billions of dollars.

I'm surprised at some technological development, and the realization that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I think the CD-ROM is the best example of that. The idea of having a whole symphony, or opera, or novel in a little piece of plastic is pretty amazing.

The best mobile phone had the best mathematician. They know how to fit a huge amount of data into a small amount of space. How to do things efficiently, how to do them cleverly.

When you take something extremely broad, then it is not a work of expansion or work of compression. It's hard because you have to decide what to throw out.

The object . . . is to discover methods of condensing information concerning large groups of allied facts into brief and compendious expressions suitable for discussion.

Working in the digital domain, you're using approximations of things; the actual sound wave never enters the equation. You deal with sections of it, and you're able to do so much more by just reducing the information to a finite amount.

Turning something into low resolution data does seem to make it worth less in the modern world.

One of my heroes, almost necessarily from what I'm saying, of course, is Borges, who is a supreme master of doing thing -- being a data bank -- and the beauty of this economy is that he could have written War and Peace in three or four pages; who knows, it might have been a better book.