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Can you dumb this down to ELI16 for me? I'm intrigued but am not following.
Imagine you’re trying to encode the topography of a hilly landscape faithfully. If you use 8 bits to represent the height you can have 256 distinct levels, which is reasonably smooth — like a Minecraft map. If you tried to cut this down to just half - 4 bits - then now you would have only 16 levels! This is very ugly, with big blocky staircases instead of nice smooth hills. So what to do to compress this data better?…
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