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πFS

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Re: πFS

#51

Post by programjames »

Levitating wrote: post #48
dang wrote: post #46

Related. Others? πfs – A data-free filesystem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36357466 - June 2023 (107 comments) πfs – A data-free filesystem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28699499 - Sept 2021 (30 comments) PiFS – The Data-Free Filesystem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26208704 - Feb 2021 (1 comment) Πfs: Never worry about data again - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21359338 - Oct 2019…

How are you generating these lists

If you click the website's name to the right of the title, it pulls up all the submissions from the same site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com/philipl

Re: πFS

#52

Post by thih9 »

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 possible falsehoods and comes with no way to distinguish what's true from what isn't.

Re: πFS

#53

Post by jwpapi »

12_throw_away wrote: post #34
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.

yes I believe that's the joke

He’s aware, he just added some curious information.

Re: πFS

#54

Post by j3th9n »

Why would anyone need πfs, since you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially on Linux.

Re: πFS

#55

Post by mondrian »

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.

The index of your 20 line file is

Re: πFS

#56

Post by Levitating »

thangalin wrote: post #25

https://cs.stackexchange.com/a/53737/1704 > Matches that occur early enough in π to attain significant compression will not be varied. That is, it isn't possible to use π to compress interesting, real-world data because real-word strings are unlikely to arise early.

> Since the file is 128 bits long, one would expect this place to be around the 2*128th bit.

> Calculate the number of bits to encode that value using log2(938933556), which is ~29.8

Can someone explain these two statements to me?

Re: πFS

#57

Post by amluto »

> Why is this thing so slow? It took me five minutes to store a 400 line text file!

> Well, this is just an initial prototype, and don't worry, there's always Moore's law!

Seriously? They're only storing individual bytes in pi:

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

So the whole transformation should be trivially reducible to a 256-element lookup table from source byte to location in pi and a similar table used to convert back the other way. Maybe a fancy formula could be used for the (never actually encountered) case in which a byte is encoded by one of the infinite available noncanonical encodings.

Re: πFS

#58

Post by Levitating »

programjames wrote: post #51
Levitating wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you generating these lists

If you click the website's name to the right of the title, it pulls up all the submissions from the same site: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com/philipl

Even then I don't see a direct way to extract a list like this.

Re: πFS

#59

Post by xp84 »

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.

If it makes you feel better, consider that it also contains all plausible and implausible falsehoods about your demise as well.

Re: πFS

#60

Post by danlitt »

noman-land wrote: post #47
cbm-vic-20 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

jshell> "πfs".toUpperCase() $1 ==> "ΠFS" Welcome to Node.js v26.3.0. Type ".help" for more information. > "πfs".toUpperCase() 'ΠFS' Python 3.14.5 (main, May 10 2026, 10:21:34) [Clang 21.0.0 (clang-2100.0.123.102)] on darwin Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> "πfs".upper() 'ΠFS' echo 'πfs' | awk '{print toupper($0)}' ΠFS

Why does your Python terminal report May 10th? Today is June 10th.

Probably daylight savings
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