On the other end of the spectrum, how much more energy has been used by the millions of Android phones uncompressing the app, applying the patch, and re-compressing the data?
Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads
51–60 of 184 posts
Re: Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads
#52I bet switching to LZMA would have saved even more. LZMA beats Brotli nearly every time. zStandard would likely have worked better as well. Brotli is very slow to compress.
Re: Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads
#53So she used a compression algorithm developed by other googlers? So what? Don't get me wrong, I'm sure she did a lot of work for it, but looks like a lot of people would have been able to do that, there is nothing innovative in what she did, right?
I think it is mostly young IT worker recruitment ad, and also a 'Women in technology' angle.
I personally wouldn't be too happy if my modest contributions as novice described as 'massive improvement for millions of our users'.
Re: Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads
#54Re: Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads
#55So she used a compression algorithm developed by other googlers? So what? Don't get me wrong, I'm sure she did a lot of work for it, but looks like a lot of people would have been able to do that, there is nothing innovative in what she did, right?
I think it is mostly young IT worker recruitment ad, and also a 'Women in technology' angle. I personally wouldn't be too happy if my modest contributions as novice described as 'massive improvement for millions of our users'.
How about a modest improvement for millions of users?
Re: Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads
#56Makes you wonder how much they'd save by using Courgette, like the Chrome team does.
Re: Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is strange. They were trying to decrease update sizes by using File-by-File patching, for example, but never decided to use the best applicable compression library until an intern came along?
According to the article Brotli compression was only launched in 2015 and she did the integration work in the summer of 2016. Bearing in mind we don't know how much of an improvement to Brotli was made during the intervening period and what the evaluation and adoption criteria were that actually seems pretty prompt.
This, and I'd see it as probably something that was on the Play team's roadmap that they decided was a project that would be a good fit for a summer intern, and they may have deferred the work by a few months on that basis.
Speaking from my own experience trying to put together good intern projects, it's actually pretty tough to find that magic combination of something that will occupy an entry-level programmer for a summer, and give them a sense of accomplishment, and actually be useful to the team in the long term. In the past I've deferred useful work so that it could be given to an intern.
Re: Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unpaid internships are illegal, if the intern is doing real work for the company. https://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.htm
just want to point out that your link explicitly refutes your statement. They are not illegal and you linked to a test about legality of unpaid internships: > There are some circumstances under which individuals who participate in “for-profit” private sector internships or training programs may do so without compensation.
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Re: Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
2700 GBP a month, plus 1000 GBP housing (for a summer). Because Europe.
She started in Krakow, Poland. 2700 GBP/month is what the prime minister of Poland makes, it's an absurdly high salary for the local market there. I've friends who work as professional C++ programmers there and they make about 1000-1500 GBP/month working for huge corporations.
She worked on something completely different in Krakow, and earned a lot less (about 1000 euro I think). The compression work was in London, where 2700 GBP doesn't go a long way at all. Rent is about 1000 GBP for a room, and 2700 GBP is about 1800 net, so that leaves 800 GBP per month to spend on food, transportation and other expenditures.
I happen to know the person in the article. I was also an intern at Google this summer in Europe.
Re: Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads
#60> her work resulted in saving users an expected 1.5 petabytes (that's 1.5 million gigabytes) of data each day. I'm guessing this is not a measure of data at rest, but data transferred over the network. The couple samples listed on the page ranged from 2.5% improvement to 20.3% (vs. zLib) so I guess they're extrapolating that out to all app downloads and updates across the world. Nicely done. More generally, we've see…
Are you worried at all about their patents stance. I currently I think it says if you litigate with Facebook you lose the license. Otherwise I agree zstd is looking like a very nice improvement in an area where most people think nothing happens. I especially dictionary compression bit.
That's a good point, the downside of using new algorithms is playing by the rules of their patent licenses. In this situation I'm not concerned about litigation with Facebook, but I could foresee other products where that might be an issue.
Aside: anywhere you store compressed data at rest, you need to store (in a header somewhere) the algorithm used to compress that data. If you need to change algorithms down the road--e.g. you do get into a lawsuit with Facebook--you'll need that header to know how to decompress old data vs. new.