| ▲ | Dylan16807 7 months ago | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
> This isn't true! If you scrambled the filenames I said "could" because you'd have to either do a limited scramble or hotwire ls to use the right order despite the scrambling. Or sort by date or inode, probably. > The key thing here is that the trick works by storing the information of how the blobs are ordered out-of-band. Yes. That is the key, not the filenames. > In the OP, that out-of-band place to store the blob order is filename. It is, but the actual use of filenames is not a shenanigan, and the blob order could be easily accomplished without any particular filenames. > In your JS example of `[...s].join('5')`, where does the order of [...s] come from? It's not something you can hand-wave away, it's the key thing that makes the trick work. It comes from the process of loading the blobs onto the computer. I'm not trying to hand-wave it, I'm saying it doesn't need filenames or anything resembling filenames. Maybe it came from a tar. Maybe I sent each file in a separate email. All that matters is having an order, and having an order happens by default when you have multiple files. As long as you don't go out of your way to reorder things, the trick works. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | anamexis 7 months ago | parent [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
> It comes from the process of loading the blobs onto the computer. I'm not trying to hand-wave it, I'm saying it doesn't need filenames. Maybe it came from a tar. Maybe I sent each file in a separate email. All that matters is having an order, and having an order happens by default when you have multiple files. As long as you don't go out of your way to reorder things, the trick works. I guess that's where we disagree. I think you don't have an order by default, you need to explicitly define it, and transmit it, and store it somehow. Which is after all, why it's not true compression. When you account for that metadata, the "compressed" data is not smaller than the original. In the OP, the cheat was using filenames to store that data. In a tar file, it's using the tar file metadata to store it. In your email, you're storing the email metadata to keep that ordering. In all cases, order is a key thing that you need to explicitly define, transmit, and store. And in all cases, this metadata takes up more space than is saved by the whole scheme. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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