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Base 2048

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Re: Base 2048

#11

Post by opencl »

Someone wrote: post #6
losvedir wrote: post #2

Heh, well that's one way to work around the inane Twitter character limit...! My personal Musk dream is that he'll abolish that. If I never have to see tweets of pictures of text or tweets ending in `/n` again, it will be too soon. Though, I sort of remember that Twitter was architected initially in a way that relied on the short tweets and it was a surprisingly complex change to even bump it up the little that they…

Twitter started as “an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group”, and SMS messages are 140 bytes (that may store 160 characters when using a 7-bit encoding such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM_03.38 , but they didn’t go there) I guess bumping the limit up while keeping the ability to interact with all kinds of SMS systems and ancient phones was a challenge, or just required waiting a few…

The 140 byte limit actually didn't last very long, it was 140 Unicode code points since at least a decade ago. You could use 140 CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) characters or 140 emojis, and if it didn't fit in an SMS they just sent a link to the tweet.

Interestingly when they doubled the character limit they also started double counting CJK characters so the limit is still effectively 140 for those languages.

Re: Base 2048

#12

Post by vonwoodson »

That’s 2,598 tweets to transmit a single megabyte.

So, if I wanted to tweet the movie Spaceballs, encoded at 4K UHD (20MB/s), I estimate that I will need to make 20,945,455 tweets.

Twitter limits the posts made by nobodys (like me) to 2,400 tweets per day… so, it is going to take me just under 24 years to complete my task.

I’d better get started.

Re: Base 2048

#13

Post by droidist2 »

evanb wrote: post #5
losvedir wrote: post #2

Heh, well that's one way to work around the inane Twitter character limit...! My personal Musk dream is that he'll abolish that. If I never have to see tweets of pictures of text or tweets ending in `/n` again, it will be too soon. Though, I sort of remember that Twitter was architected initially in a way that relied on the short tweets and it was a surprisingly complex change to even bump it up the little that they…

Twitter’s limit used to be 140 characters. Then it became 280. By simple arithmetic progression the next limit will be…

Knowing Musk he'd totally be down for changing it to 420.

Re: Base 2048

#14

Post by _8j50 »

vonwoodson wrote: post #12

That’s 2,598 tweets to transmit a single megabyte. So, if I wanted to tweet the movie Spaceballs, encoded at 4K UHD (20MB/s), I estimate that I will need to make 20,945,455 tweets. Twitter limits the posts made by nobodys (like me) to 2,400 tweets per day… so, it is going to take me just under 24 years to complete my task. I’d better get started.

Or just transmit a url to the media on some site,ipfs,.onion,etc...

I don't know their use case but I was thinking more for malware command-and-control and red teaming.

Re: Base 2048

#15

Post by rpastuszak »

vonwoodson wrote: post #12

That’s 2,598 tweets to transmit a single megabyte. So, if I wanted to tweet the movie Spaceballs, encoded at 4K UHD (20MB/s), I estimate that I will need to make 20,945,455 tweets. Twitter limits the posts made by nobodys (like me) to 2,400 tweets per day… so, it is going to take me just under 24 years to complete my task. I’d better get started.

You can fit much more in a single tweet!

You can do that with base64 + gzip + (and that’s the important one) _wrapping the content in a url_.

Here’s pong (3.5kb) stored in a single tweet: https://twitter.com/rafalpast/status/1316836397903474688?s=2...

Source: I was bored, curious if I could turn twitter into a CDN

Re: Base 2048

#17

Post by Retr0id »

rpastuszak wrote: post #15
vonwoodson wrote: post #12

That’s 2,598 tweets to transmit a single megabyte. So, if I wanted to tweet the movie Spaceballs, encoded at 4K UHD (20MB/s), I estimate that I will need to make 20,945,455 tweets. Twitter limits the posts made by nobodys (like me) to 2,400 tweets per day… so, it is going to take me just under 24 years to complete my task. I’d better get started.

You can fit much more in a single tweet! You can do that with base64 + gzip + (and that’s the important one) _wrapping the content in a url_. Here’s pong (3.5kb) stored in a single tweet: https://twitter.com/rafalpast/status/1316836397903474688?s=2... Source: I was bored, curious if I could turn twitter into a CDN

You can fit much more into a tweet if you consider image data, too.

Re: Base 2048

#18

Post by lifthrasiir »

opencl wrote: post #11
Someone wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter started as “an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group”, and SMS messages are 140 bytes (that may store 160 characters when using a 7-bit encoding such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM_03.38 , but they didn’t go there) I guess bumping the limit up while keeping the ability to interact with all kinds of SMS systems and ancient phones was a challenge, or just required waiting a few…

The 140 byte limit actually didn't last very long, it was 140 Unicode code points since at least a decade ago. You could use 140 CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) characters or 140 emojis, and if it didn't fit in an SMS they just sent a link to the tweet. Interestingly when they doubled the character limit they also started double counting CJK characters so the limit is still effectively 140 for those languages.

> Interestingly when they doubled the character limit they also started double counting CJK characters so the limit is still effectively 140 for those languages.

CJK languages do tend to be relatively dense when written and counted by their code points.

Re: Base 2048

#20

Post by evanb »

mike_hock wrote: post #10
evanb wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter’s limit used to be 140 characters. Then it became 280. By simple arithmetic progression the next limit will be…

280. Then the next one will be 187 (186.6666...). n[0] = 140 n[k] = 2/k * n[k-1]

That is not an arithmetic progression; I chose my words carefully :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_progression

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