this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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[โ€“] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 29 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[โ€“] wumpus@latte.isnot.coffee 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Exactly. It's merely our human preference for those types of files that allow them to work at all.

[โ€“] qprimed@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 year ago

things get weird when we include "all possible states"

[โ€“] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

It's not a preference; it's simply the state of the system to which we may desire to apply compression.