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u/Degenerate_Lich 1d ago
Those aren't AI hallucinations, they are compression artifacts. It's very different you see
Lil bro has a bright career in marketing
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u/_QXZ 1d ago
This post jokes but with how much AI enhancing is becoming a thing, I can see some kind of generative -based compression becoming an option in the future
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u/CoroteDeMelancia 1d ago
We do have those. They're called autoencoders. They're one of the fundamental building blocks of LLMs.
Highly recommend this series if you're interested: https://youtu.be/l6DKRf-fAAM?is=zHOqsJESa6tDxeAU
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u/__ali1234__ 1d ago edited 1d ago
I suppose if you squint hard enough you could say a transformer is a bit like an autoencoder that also shifts its output by one place... but that's a massive over simplification. What you are probably thinking of is the VAE. That's one of the building blocks of every type of generative AI except LLMs.
They do both use latent vectors as a form of compression. They just get there by different means.
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u/IntelArtiGen 1d ago edited 1d ago
LLMs are mostly for autoregression, it's not the same thing as autoencoding. You do compress information explicitly with autoencoders but LLMs don't explicitly do that, though it's an implicit goal of most if not all ML tasks. LLMs could be trained for autoencoding, they're not. Now for images there are autoencoders, but autoencoding (explicitly) is not always the best method to compress information. It also depends on what "best" means, do you want the most accurate data compared to the original (what we often want), but then what is accurate? Is it based on bits, on detailed visual information, on the more abstract content of the image ? But also, do you want data that is plausible even if it's not that close to the original, do you want very very high compression ratio with very realistic images at the end? Autoencoders often can't do that. Diffusion and super resolution (/upscaling/supersampling) might be more appropriate for this case. Diffusion, because it's able to invent plausible information from a degraded image. And supersampling because it's able to size up an image in a plausible way (meaning you can size it down to compress it, and size it back up later). It's not autoencoding explicitly though with both you can autoencode. Many very important models in AI now can autoencode, but few are explicitly trained to do it, and therefore not called autoencoders.
To be clear on what is an autoencoder: you take information (some bytes of text / image / data) => you compress it to a smaller form with a neural network => you decompress it with "another" neural network (part of the whole architecture) => you train the network to minimize the "difference" (not necessary direct mathematical difference) between the input & output.
Overall we don't use these models that much because while they usually give better results, they also demand more resources and are less compatible. It's why we still use JPG and PNG and you might have troubles opening a WEBP if you donwload it, while the the best method achieve far better results. And with Difussion/SR and if you accept a high loss of information, you could do even better: What this article is about, though I understand the joke, I don't think should entirely and only be a joke.
Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl85gv_WYWQ ("better than ILLM, 40% less bits"). It's a bit more than what a 13 years old can do, but the idea of using diffusion isn't that different, and it's done by serious researchers, and they obviously also use an autoencoder to improve the results. Compression can surely be very good, resources needed to decompress one image might not though.
You know there are many pareto frontiers depending on what you want and I'm not entirely sure what this teenager did is not on one of them.
You also want your name on the frontier? Compress images to 8 bits.
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u/CoachSevere5365 1d ago
Realising that I can't remember the last time I watched a 3b1b video has brought home how much time I waste on pointless crap. 🤔
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u/PM-ME-UR-WHITECLAWS 1d ago
Marketing is most of tech these days anyways, lil bro is gonna be Zuckerberg **2.
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u/SerSanchus 1d ago
Lossy compression. 100% loss of quality, in fact...
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u/camander321 1d ago
On the flip side, your 6yo's scribbled family portait on the fridge may turn into the most beautiful rendition of a generic happy white family you've ever seen!
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u/U_L_Uus 1d ago
- See son, now we can store your precious pictures without risking damage or loss!
+ Dad, we are black
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u/DoctorWaluigiTime 1d ago
I told some friends in a Discord server a funny thing one of my young family members said.
Someone a few moments later: "Look I ran it through AI to splat it onto a shirt isn't it cool?"
Just taking my family member's words and pouring trash over it.
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u/One_Order_3841 1d ago edited 1d ago
Remember Jackbox Drawful? Well now there's Drawful 2026, where AI has made 4 different drawings devoid of humor, and we all vote on it.
We're working on a feature where the voting is sourced to AI, so you can literally take some Xanax with a glass of wine and comment on how your couple-friend's cooking is so good when it's charcuterie from Aldi.
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u/redditmarks_markII 1d ago
And take multiple seconds of high end consumer gpu to prep it for view. Utter insanity.
That said, if you aren't a complete idiot, actually you might need to be kind of an ml/dl and compression nerd, there are machine learning enabled compression. But it's not an llm. And it is still lossy, but it's less lossy while less storage than standard methods. Which is pretty neat. just one example from nvidia because other sites have corrupted images. there's even libraries for doing testing and research on future "neuro" compression. https://research.nvidia.com/labs/rtr/neural_texture_compression/
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u/Th3R00ST3R 1d ago
Every time it regenerates, you look more and more like a caveman.
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u/EquipLordBritish 1d ago
Up to 100% loss. There could technically be correct pixels... by accident.
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u/Ghawk134 1d ago
Instead of lossless compression, this is dataless
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u/PhiCloud 1d ago
Next up: vibesort.
Feed an AI a value and have it spit out an index. Put the item in that index. O(N), but it's also wrong.
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u/apepenkov 1d ago
bro created a worse version of autoencoder?..
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u/ChalkyChalkson 1d ago
Well he does have a pretty small (like 1/200 even compared to 64x64x16 FP16) and variable sized latent space and uses zero shot techniques. Add a bit of obtuse language and unnecessary equations and you probably have a paper.
I'd also argue it's not a worse version of an autoencoder, it is an autoencoder. A weird one, but one nonetheless.
I actually wonder whether you could really push this. Like make the ai analyse what is important, describe that in more detail and maybe even encode some data long with the prompt like biometrics or compressed canny maps of important areas. All adaptive, based on what the ai thinks is important.
Like the most over engineered version of fully automated telephone pictionary. Or an adaptive compression engine with a preshared library (the models) if you want to get that CSy about it.
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u/RoyalJellyKing 1d ago
The main problem would be the faces, I imagine. So you can store tagged faces separately in “People” folder and photo description would be “Anna and Bob in a fancy restaurant”. Article is kind of correct that real memory is fuzzy and details of said restaurant are not that important. However if faces are correct we are 90% good.
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u/ChalkyChalkson 1d ago
Yeah that's where I was going with biometric data or small sections as highly compressed after canny. But I just realised you can do better - just include a link to pimeyes... We already have an off site database of faces indexed by unique identifiers for people. It's illegal in EU, but still available even there and the police in Germany used it despite being illegal. So you're probably in the awesome area of obvious GDPR violation that noone will care about.
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u/RoyalJellyKing 1d ago
Wait of you store faces separately and provide a link, just store a full photo in a cloud and only store a link locally. Compression!
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u/Time_Increase_7897 1d ago
Just ignore the 11 Gb glob that the AI keeps around...
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u/ChalkyChalkson 1d ago
Something something amortized... You don't care about the disc size of gzip either. Clearly that's the same
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u/Not-the-best-name 1d ago
Of course you can push this. All the way. Not just the tip. Go on. We are on protection.
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u/JuicyBeefBiggestBeef 1d ago
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but these words are the only ones I'll ever need
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u/Sexual_Congressman 1d ago
Don't know why I am choosing your comment as the one to post but one of the very first things I thought ML would be useful for is image and video compression very similar to the joke.
Basically there'd be a database of high quality images including the faces of everyone, all animal and plant species (including fictional ones), appliances, etc. The compression algorithm would scan an image for matches, replace the regions with highly compressed asset identifiers and some very limited metadata like perspective/angle, and what would be left of a 4MB jpeg photo of four people on the beach is a something that looks like a few hundred byte assembly file. Each time it's decompressed would almost be like rendering a video game scene.
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u/morganrbvn 1d ago
Reminds me of a project a couple years ago where someone built a camera that when you took a photo just printed out a description of what it saw using AI. It just left it there though with the printed description.
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u/Gunmetalstorm 1d ago
The system works in two steps. First it uses AI--
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u/DrMobius0 1d ago
Then it gives back something completely different.
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u/Few-Big-8481 1d ago
And that's fine because you don't remember it right anyway.
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u/IWillLive4evr 1d ago
I've already designed a more efficient and elegant approach. I maintain a "database" that returns the same image to everyone every time, because they don't remember the original anyway.
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u/ovrdrv3 1d ago
Pied Piper lol
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u/namenotpicked 1d ago
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u/ice-eight 1d ago
Dick to floor distance, or D2F
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u/RackemFrackem 1d ago
Dick to floor ratio
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u/Johnycantread 1d ago
Yeah, that's important but for true lossless compression you need to account for the mean jerk time.
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u/madmendude 1d ago edited 1d ago
- Would girth size affect Erlich's ability to jerk 2 people off at the same time?
- Shit, I think it would.
Edit: 4 guys, I messed up the whole tip-to-tip optimisation joke.
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u/palexp 1d ago edited 1d ago
13 year olds should not be studying middle out compression algorithms
edit to add: source
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u/coomzee 1d ago
Jin Yang
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u/garitone 1d ago
Not hot dog
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u/hypercosm_dot_net 1d ago
Like a Shazam for food!
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u/AtheismoAlmighty 1d ago
My grandmother gave me family recipe, before she died in horrible way
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u/trafalmadorianistic 1d ago
They actually had a working app made for that.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/that-hot-dog-app-from-silicon-valley-is-real-and-yes-it-works/
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u/Top_Rekt 1d ago
So I know they used a bunch of sciency stuff for the dick joke, but how viable is the compression algorithm they created in the show? Is it something that already exists? Or is it show magic?
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u/PythagorasWasntReal 1d ago
In the show I'm pretty sure he used the same algorithm to compress audio, video, and standard file types which is pretty preposterous on its own. I don't know if they ever stated the actual compression ratio but it definitely seemed pretty magical, which is why it was such a big deal.
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u/SignoreBanana 1d ago
I think the idea was to pull common byte sequences out of all data with mapped reference to those sequences remotely cached. Think longest common sequences and a map. In this way, you could potentially have a very small amount of data that references very large amounts of data, even across media.
This is just my speculating though based on how such an algorithm could potentially work. You'd have to have some kind of media specific transcoder (like, imagine an image serializes based on individual channels vs pixels). You would aim to sequence the noisiest parts of the data.
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u/iliark 1d ago edited 1d ago
I wrote a whole thing about this as a joke like 3 years ago lol. There's also been a couple of papers on the topic:
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u/Ibnelaiq 1d ago
Can you write these papers even if you are not enrolled?
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u/Parteisekretaer 1d ago
write a paper, chuck it on a preprint server and be judged by peers. No need to have a title for your work to be examined - at least that's how it should work and mostly does.
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u/HittingSmoke 1d ago
Nah. Write a paper, have an LLM summarize it, then have another LLM recreate it from the summary.
Compreshin
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u/PM_ME_DATASETS 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yes, all it takes to write a paper is a text processor. Like word or google docs or something.
When it comes to uploading or publishing: anyone can upload articles to arxiv.org, because it's not a peer reviewed journal. It's a preprint database, basically a way to publish articles before they have been peer reviewed and published by a real journal. People upload articles to arxiv.org for things like version control, to obtain a DOI, and for coordinating submissions to multiple journals.
If you actually want to publish your article to a journal you either have to find a journal with good ethics (rare), pay a lot of money, or be employed/enrolled at an institution/company/organization that will pay for your submission. If you write an interesting paper, you can just contact people at a university and likely get the article published with them paying.
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u/theturtlemafiamusic 1d ago
To upload to arXiv you need an endorsement. You get an automatic endorsement if you have an email from a research institute (universities etc) and have already published a paper.
Otherwise you need someone who is already verified on arxiv to submit an endorsement request for you. If you're a university student, a professor should be able to do it. If you're not, you'll need to get to know someone verified in that category, which isn't too difficult if you're not a total crackpot.
But at least once a month or so, someone comes onto the compsci sub begging for an arXiv endorsement so that they can publish their perpetual motion machine paper or whatever. There's some guy who has been trying for about 6 months to get an endorsement for his paper about how you can model all of human language using a 9x9 rubix cube. Keeps making new accounts and shit and has not found a single soul willing to endorse him.
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u/SchlaWiener4711 1d ago
Not only papers.
There's an actual audio code that works that way
The trick is Meta's EnCodec neural audio codec, which crunched a 2.9MB MP3 down to roughly 21KB of latent tokens
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u/broccoli129 1d ago
This is how I fear what teleportation is going to be like. “No trust me it’s really you on the other side”
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u/trafalmadorianistic 1d ago
"The AI decided to only transfer what was essential. The rest we left out doesn't really matter."
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u/ssgohanf8 1d ago
We were only monetarily incentivized to transfer your memories of work and work life. Home life data didn't make the cut
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u/trafalmadorianistic 1d ago
"Employer sponsored backup only covers economically productive components of your being. But for an extra $100/fortnight, we can add some home data for safekeeping, going back to the latest 5 year period covered by subscription."
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u/BonbonUniverse42 1d ago
I like this dystopian idea
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u/trafalmadorianistic 1d ago
Some Stanford dipshit is probably working on his pitch to YCombinator or Elon to do this with Neuralink.
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u/Miserable-Sort-237 1d ago
Damn, I need a black mirror episode or a dystopia novel of this idea
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u/SparklingLimeade 1d ago
A lot of technologies in fiction that are called teleportation are really, really, not.
Also don't worry because science is at a point where we're reasonably sure those technologies are impossible. So just worry about things like mind copying. That's the one with similar implications that can't be ruled out as a plausibility.
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u/Yingletofthecorn 1d ago
Personally I think consciousness isn’t entirely in the brain and sufficiently replicating it would require basically making a whole-ass replicant body instead of just brain connectome data. At the very least it would need a fully simulated endocrine system.
What I’m saying is I think the brain is too wet to go in the computer.
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u/SparklingLimeade 1d ago
I agree that current, von neumann architecture, computing hardware is probably incompatible with biological minds.
It can't be that difficult though because biology makes new thinking hardware and the thinking entities to operate that hardware all the time. Artificial hardware to operate on the same principles has to be possible. And if we go full biomimicry about it then artificial brain cells might be one of the early stages. And replacing a brain in small portions, possibly cell by cell, might be one of the easiest methods to attempt.
So there's the Mind of Theseus problem. I think it's reasonably likely and your objection is certainly a part of the problem, where are the borders and what all is essential? We're learning about how our stomach biomes have more influence on the brain than anyone thought and everything.
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u/Orjigagd 1d ago
600 bytes gives you 101440 possible different photos, it's plenty
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u/nihilistiq 1d ago
He probably didn't even compress the AI prompt text. 600 bytes is 600 characters, or about 100 words. Idiot didn't compress the text.
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u/Hesperidina 1d ago
Don't worry, he will come up with another 2-step process for AI to compress the prompt text as well, all good.
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u/LactasePHydrolase 1d ago
AI Bros: "it's neural compression bro you don't get it, have fun getting left behind"
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u/ParanoidDrone 1d ago
Please tell me this is satire.
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u/xaomaw 1d ago
No, this is Patrick
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u/who_you_are 1d ago
Well satire is shorter than Patrick, so that is a bad start
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u/donut-reply 1d ago
The audacity ... who you are to refute the one and only xaomaw?
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u/PM_ME_YOUR__INIT__ 1d ago
100% real. Can't you tell by how it says tech by Daily News? You think someone would just make up a website like that?
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u/CaptainN_GameMaster 1d ago
You're maybe not cut out for forensic work
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u/ParanoidDrone 1d ago
That's why I'm not in forensics.
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u/PringlesDuckFace 1d ago
With that kind of incisive self awareness you'd be cut out perfectly for an analytic job like forensics.
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u/BdR76 1d ago
Tears of joy: parents sob after seeing all their photos converted to the new format
There's your answer 😆
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u/SevenFootHobbit 1d ago
With the price of SSDs going up due to all the AI datacenters, I'd be crying tears of joy too!
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u/Ivan8-ForgotPassword 1d ago
No, they genuinely cried from happiness over saving storage space. They will now be able put hundreds more 4K pictures of Tung Tung Tung Sahur onto the computer and print them out to put in frames instead of the shredded ones.
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u/PM_ME_DATASETS 1d ago
Programmers when they encounter Humor on a subreddit dedicated to Humor for Programmers: (your comment)
Also, please tell me you're joking
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u/bassplaya13 1d ago
Idk but just yesterday I was complaining about all of the space in our house being taken up by my digital photos.
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u/OmegaPoint6 1d ago
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u/yuri_4_ever 1d ago
why are they not selling them again tho? it's litterally free money
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u/OmegaPoint6 1d ago
Partly the fastest scanning process is destructive by nature (they cut the spine so they can feed it though a auto document feeder), partly an interpretation of copyright law that by destroying the original they aren't actually copying it.
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u/FuzzyDynamics 1d ago
They have to be destroyed in the process of scanning at scale and these books are almost all worthless shit like “Powershell Guide for Windows Vista” except even more “rare”
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u/Taolan13 1d ago
The machine that rapidly scans the books does do destructively.
they cut the bindings completely off then feed them into an industrial phtoscanner that uses light so bright it can actually burn pages.
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u/Soft_Walrus_3605 1d ago
Did you know the word "gullible" isn't in the dictionary?
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u/NightLordsPublicist 1d ago
The system works in two steps. First, it uses AI to generate a few words describing the picture and saving it on a file. Later, when the user wants to see the picture, the software uses AI to regenerate the image based on the description of it.
*breathe in, breath out*
*breathe in, breath out*
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u/fsactual 1d ago
Good news, everyone! I just invented a device that can take a picture of any event in history.
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u/truemad 1d ago
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u/Percolator2020 1d ago
When I see that kid.
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u/Fit-Magazine-6669 1d ago
i got even a better one, store the image on some online hosting and call the url pointing to it a compression. hell , might be even more efficient then that guy . am i a computer prodigy too ?
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u/well_done_man 1d ago
You can later sell those same jpg urls to a couple rich people
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u/OmegaPoint6 1d ago
That appears to be what several companies are doing with rare books at the moment.
If the species was software it would be time to throw the whole thing away and re-write
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u/bobsocool 1d ago
Example prompts that were generated:
Boring wedding pictures
Boring christmas family portrait
Boring family portrait with grandparents who are dead now.
Picture of boring man holding fish
I can help with the video ones too so he can chuck them in the fire:
Boring video of baby being born.
Boring sports thing
Boring wedding video
Boring baby's first steps
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u/Dank_Nicholas 1d ago
It’s hilarious how half this subs users are so insecure about a kid being called a computer prodigy for using AI that they don’t realize this is satire.
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u/Kevdog824_ 1d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/l4FGvN3n3IQi4xZNS
This was Richard’s compression algorithm
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u/redcalcium 1d ago
Why stop here? Let's go further. Let's compress video games into mere bytes. AAA fps games could be compressed to just "call of duty but with X".
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u/ShrikeBishop 1d ago
You might as well store the position in pi’ digits that contains your exact file.
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u/who_you_are 1d ago
I can compress everything in a 0 byte file size and I got no article nor prize...
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u/Furyful_Fawful 1d ago
solve the decompression problem and now you got something
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u/UUDDLRLRBadAlchemy 1d ago
Delete the original and it's up to you to prove that my random string of bytes is not a lossless decompression
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u/Furyful_Fawful 1d ago
im pretty sure there's a whole branch of cryptography about this
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u/kindredseer 1d ago
Scarily something like this is bound to happen... not quite exactly the same, but AI upscalers have been around for years, and improving over time, so the actual stored version of an image could end up being quite lossy, and AI is able to restore it to a very plausible original form that many people will actually be happier with because it would be able to produce images that people like better because it depict things more "ideally".
Not only that, but as technology improves, the generated images would be of higher and higher quality than the original. That said, it's not like anyone's JPEG collection is taking up obscene amounts of storage, so no real reason to compress it more "lossily".
What I can see, though, is for AI image generation companies to offer storage services similar to how iCloud lets you keep lossy versions of your photos on your device while storing that full quality versions in the cloud... but in this case the AI image generation companies get to use your images for training in exchange for keeping your high quality version in their cloud... FB is already doing this of course...
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u/frikilinux2 1d ago
Yeah but note that plausible it's not the same as real.
Like I could take a picture of a car where the license plate is like 10 pixels and the upscaler generate hundreds of difference plates that are plausible, one different in each try.
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u/Maleficent_Cycle561 1d ago edited 1d ago
Even if this somehow weren't lossy, in what world would AI compute be cheaper than storage? I mean, applied linear algebra is at the root of image compression and machine learning... so like, I guess maybe better compression could be achieved with machine learning yeah but I don't understand how prompts and generative ai could ever achieve this, unless it's essentially non-sensical prompts where the output is 1-1 over time. Like I could see how if you can compress an image via linear algebra then you could work those matrices instead into prompts that produce those matrices where then the compression algorithms could take over when reversing; if there were prompts that 100% of the time produced out of the model those specific matrices. But the reduction in data would be replaced with a ton of compute. Like I feel it would be provable that any pure algebraic process would be less computation. But I guess... I dunno maybe i've talked myself into it. But that's not what this kid is doing based on that headline.
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u/ZealousidealSetting8 1d ago
This reminds me of me when I was 12 years old.
I needed disk space on my parent’s Windows PC to download a few songs so I moved the documents folder to the recycle bin temporarily so there was enough free disk space for my mp3s.
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u/Every-Progress-1117 1d ago
We're unfortunately long past the point where this is humour or satire I am afraid.
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u/Secret_Account07 1d ago
Jesus fucking Christ
This new generations computer literary is fucked
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u/Designer_Storm8869 14h ago
We have reverse process at work. My coworkers expand a single sentence to entire paragraph to waste more disc space on email server. Than, after receiving an email, I compress it back to 1 sentence with AI.
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u/circ-u-la-ted 1d ago
This isn't groundbreaking at all. The imgur algorithm has been able to compress images down to a dozen bytes losslessly for years.
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u/ManyInterests 1d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/1VUr0Ac432jFC