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Without unnecessary brand name dropping, what current technology blows you away? (self.casualconversation)

submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by FourPacketsOfPeanuts to c/[email protected]

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I was listening to the New Year's Day concert by the Vienna philharmonic and wondered who one of the composers was so used a popular song recognition app. (I expected it would make some fuzzy match on the piece and give me the name + composer). To my amazement it did give the name and composer but as played by the Vienna philharmonic in 2005 in the same location. The orchestra does not have the same members as 19 years ago, nor was it the same conductor, so it seemed the piece was matched on the acoustics of the Musikverein where they were playing, which I found astonishing.

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[–] TehBamski 30 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Lossless compression Even after reading how it works, it still seems like magic to me.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Even more magical is the lossless Zstandard ~is~ ~this~ ~a~ ~name~ ~drop?~. It does so much stuff, it's awesome!

hella fast compared to similar-leveled compressors (zoom)
no matter the zstd compression level, decompression takes equal time! (ux!)
zstd can use a user-given dictionary, or train its own on a sample set (wowie)
zstd can be used for live compression (compress and decompress as you read and write, not before or after)
- on ram (install more ram??)
- in filesystems (2.5x your disk??)
- saves CPU by not compressing if it's not worth it (efficiency!!)
use ALL the cores!

So kool. lol

[–] FourPacketsOfPeanuts 2 points 3 days ago

Name dropping's fine lol, I just wanted to discourage obvious spammers away from top level comments

[–] CookieOfFortune 9 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Honestly the lossy compression algorithms are some real magic. The way video can be streamed over wireless networks at all is pretty astonishing and requires many orders of magnitude of compression.

If you ever have time, read up on how JPEG compression works.

[–] FourPacketsOfPeanuts 4 points 4 days ago

Yes, compression has often fascinated me. It was fractal compression (lossy) that got me interested in computation when I was a kid