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How are zlib, gzip and zip related?

stackoverflow.com

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Re: How are zlib, gzip and zip related?

#11

Post by Dalewyn »

barrkel wrote: post #7
dcow wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s even more sad is that the SO community has since consequently destroyed SO as the home for this type of info. This post would now be considered off topic as it’s “not a good format for a Q&A site”. You’d never see it happen today. Truly sad.

Thing is, it could only be that way in its early days, when the vanguard of users came to it from word of mouth, from following Joel Spolsky or Coding Horror or their joint podcast. The audience is much bigger now and with the long tail of people, the number willing to put effort into good questions is too low, and on-topicness is a simple quality bar which can improve the signal to noise ratio.

Very broadly, I find the quality/value of a given thing is inversely proportional to how many people are involved.

So with regards to the internet: The 90s and early 00s were great, then the internet became mainstream and it all just became Cable TV 2.0.

Re: How are zlib, gzip and zip related?

#13

Post by twic »

dcow wrote: post #4
melagonster wrote: post #2

For people who first read this: the sweet part is in the comments :)

What’s even more sad is that the SO community has since consequently destroyed SO as the home for this type of info. This post would now be considered off topic as it’s “not a good format for a Q&A site”. You’d never see it happen today. Truly sad.

A rephrasing of this might be on-topic on retrocomputing: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/q/3083/21450

But almost nobody reads that.

Re: How are zlib, gzip and zip related?

#14

Post by zxt_tzx »

dcow wrote: post #4
melagonster wrote: post #2

For people who first read this: the sweet part is in the comments :)

What’s even more sad is that the SO community has since consequently destroyed SO as the home for this type of info. This post would now be considered off topic as it’s “not a good format for a Q&A site”. You’d never see it happen today. Truly sad.

Relatedly, I have seen the graph showing the dip in SO traffic by ~30% if I'm not wrong (and the corresponding hot takes that attribute that to the rise of LLMs).

I know most people are pessimistic that LLMs will lead to SO and the web in general to be overrun by hallucinated content and AI-training-on-AI-ouroboros, but I wonder if it might instead allow for curious people to query an endlessly patient AI assistant about exactly this kind of information. (A custom GPT perhaps?)

Re: How are zlib, gzip and zip related?

#16

Post by dcow »

zxt_tzx wrote: post #14
dcow wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s even more sad is that the SO community has since consequently destroyed SO as the home for this type of info. This post would now be considered off topic as it’s “not a good format for a Q&A site”. You’d never see it happen today. Truly sad.

Relatedly, I have seen the graph showing the dip in SO traffic by ~30% if I'm not wrong (and the corresponding hot takes that attribute that to the rise of LLMs). I know most people are pessimistic that LLMs will lead to SO and the web in general to be overrun by hallucinated content and AI-training-on-AI-ouroboros, but I wonder if it might instead allow for curious people to query an endlessly patient AI assistant a…

GPT info tools will fully replace SO in most dev workflows if it hasn’t already.

Re: How are zlib, gzip and zip related?

#18

Post by demondemidi »

whalesalad wrote: post #9
dustypotato wrote: post #5

Found this hilarious: > This post is packed with so much history and information that I feel like some citations need be added > I am the reference (extracted a part of the conversation)

Reminds me of when I was inadvertently arguing here on HN with the inventor of the actor model about what actors are

That sounds like something I’d do too. If that makes you feel better.

Re: How are zlib, gzip and zip related?

#19

Post by gmgmgmgmgm »

dustypotato wrote: post #5

Found this hilarious: > This post is packed with so much history and information that I feel like some citations need be added > I am the reference (extracted a part of the conversation)

That's disallowed on Wikipedia. There, you must reference some "source". That "source" doesn't need to be reliable or correct, it just needs to be some random website that's not the actual person. First sources are disallowed.

Re: How are zlib, gzip and zip related?

#20

Post by kibwen »

gmgmgmgmgm wrote: post #19
dustypotato wrote: post #5

Found this hilarious: > This post is packed with so much history and information that I feel like some citations need be added > I am the reference (extracted a part of the conversation)

That's disallowed on Wikipedia. There, you must reference some "source". That "source" doesn't need to be reliable or correct, it just needs to be some random website that's not the actual person. First sources are disallowed.

And that's for good reason. Encyclopedias are supposed to be tertiary sources, not primary sources. Having an explicit cited reference makes it easier to judge the veracity of a statement compared to digging through the page history to figure out if a line was added by a person who happens to be an expert.
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