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πFS

github.com

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Re: πFS

#111

Post by ainch »

jamwise wrote: post #31

Reminds me of when I tried to use the library of babel as a data compression tool. It led me down a fun rabbit hole and was my first introduction to information theory. The conclusion being that you basically need the same amount of data to represent the address of your data as the data itself, so it's not really effective at compression, just a fun thought experiment. The cool part of this in modern times is that LL…

In some sense, science is the most extreme form of compression - Newtonian mechanics explains an incredible number of phenomena in a few lines of text.

Re: πFS

#112

Post by helterskelter »

dekhn wrote: post #104
emptyroads wrote: post #79

Reminds me of nsafs, the National Security Agency Filesystem ("free" because the government pays for it) - https://github.com/freedomtools/nsafs

I once interviewed for a company and the interviewer was telling me how he (a vc) funded a project to generate large streams of random numbers; you would select an index at random, share that private key with somebody, and then the subsequent text could be used as a one-time-pad. NSA would be forced to buffer/save the entire stream, which could be generated at GB/sec, if they wanted to decrypt. It didn't seem very pr…

I wonder if we could mess with NSA-style surveillance by having a good chunk of the population streaming lots of random data over the internet. Essentially, Alice piping her /dev/random to Bob's /dev/null over netcat or something. Make a slick looking app that does it 24/7 in the background using excess bandwidth and tell people it sticks it to the NSA.

Spy agencies would not only have to store it all in case it was something valuable, but at some point they may try to crack it because it's indistinguishable from encrypted data and waste resources on it. If enough people did it, total web surveillance could become impractical.

Re: πFS

#113

Post by jastr »

adzm wrote: post #12

It is worth noting that as the length of data increases it becomes extremely unlikely that the index and length of the sequence within pi would actually be smaller than the data.

Back in college, I thought I could compress my phone number by telling people its index in pi, but my 7 digit phone number is at an 8 digit index.

I didn’t have the compute to find my 10 digit number with the area code.

Re: πFS

#114

Post by akoboldfrying »

russfink wrote: post #105
mondrian wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The index of your 20 line file is

Unless, in turn, you locate the index itself in pi at a much smaller index. And so on... Find k candidate indices for your data, then locate each of them. If the smallest one is a significantly smaller index space, repeat.

Can't tell if you're in on the joke or not, but for anyone who is genuinely wondering whether this might work: Consider that there are at most 256 different indexes that could be represented by a 1-byte index value, but if you're trying to store 9 bits of data, there are already 512 different possible things it could be that each need to be represented by a different index value, otherwise you won't be able to tell them apart. Those pigeons aren't gonna fit.

Re: πFS

#115

Post by layer8 »

> In this implementation, to maximise performance, we consider each individual byte of the file separately, and look it up in π.

Considering each individual bit separately would be even more performant: you only need the indexes 2 and 33, and there is an efficient mapping of those to the bits in storage.

Re: πFS

#116

Post by danielmeskin »

helterskelter wrote: post #112
dekhn wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once interviewed for a company and the interviewer was telling me how he (a vc) funded a project to generate large streams of random numbers; you would select an index at random, share that private key with somebody, and then the subsequent text could be used as a one-time-pad. NSA would be forced to buffer/save the entire stream, which could be generated at GB/sec, if they wanted to decrypt. It didn't seem very pr…

I wonder if we could mess with NSA-style surveillance by having a good chunk of the population streaming lots of random data over the internet. Essentially, Alice piping her /dev/random to Bob's /dev/null over netcat or something. Make a slick looking app that does it 24/7 in the background using excess bandwidth and tell people it sticks it to the NSA. Spy agencies would not only have to store it all in case it was…

I suspect this would have an effect similar to early internet worms that caused significant strain

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melissa_(computer_virus)

Re: πFS

#117

Post by keithnz »

isn't this relying on properties that aren't proven about pi? it needs to be disjunctive or normal, and neither of those are proven

Re: πFS

#118

Post by layer8 »

bobim wrote: post #6

This is disturbing to realize that pi then contains all the past and future knowledge, including when I'll pass away.

It also contains all past and future fake news, and you don’t know which is which.

Re: πFS

#119

Post by ithkuil »

jamwise wrote: post #31

Reminds me of when I tried to use the library of babel as a data compression tool. It led me down a fun rabbit hole and was my first introduction to information theory. The conclusion being that you basically need the same amount of data to represent the address of your data as the data itself, so it's not really effective at compression, just a fun thought experiment. The cool part of this in modern times is that LL…

You'll find this an interesting watch:

Reinventing Entropy Compression is Intelligence Part 1

3blue1brown https://youtu.be/l6DKRf-fAAM?is=ne73FCJ7ErXhzZ-v

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