this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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Regardless which lossless compression algorithm you prefer, it makes most files bigger.
*where "files" includes all bitstrings of a given length, whether or not they've ever existed
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.