It reminds me of how viral images are referred to as memes, often by people who are ignorant of the original and fuller meaning of the term as a viral idea (as opposed to and deliberately reminiscent of the view of a gene being a viral biological entity, as in "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins, who coined the term "meme" itself).
Of course, the term "viral" is itself used metaphorically here, and is also used as an analogy to a biological entity. But in this case, I think more people are aware of the existence of viruses than they are of the original meaning of the term "meme", though they might not make the conscious connection between a "viral" idea, video, or image and that of a biological virus or how it spreads "virally".
I actually came here to commend the author for letting me opt out of the nonsense. It may not seem like a big deal for you but the images are distracting to me, require more scrolling in order to reference something that was mentioned previously and do not add anything to your content.
BTW I think your content is great and I imagine you think so to. You commented on the fact that most of the comments were about the GIFs and not the content. I think that should be a not so subtle clue about the value of some lady waving in front of a green screen.
I read 90% of my content in emacs-w3m, in the terminal, where no images load unless I deliberately want them to. It also has the advantage of getting rid of javascript and most page design nonsense, flash, non-text ads, and various "Web 2.0" annoyances.
The result is beautiful, consistently formatted, lightweight, and perfectly readable plain text (fully integrated with my editor/OS, incidentally).
This comes close, but I think there was one where one user talked about how they use Spacemacs (Emacs with Vim style editing), and use Org files[1] to bascially plan their life. Meetings, Calendar events, reminders, notes, TODOs, you name it.
Great book recommendation btw. On Writing Well by William Zissner is a great one too. Less autobiographical (but the Stephen King bio IS great and inspirational - still recommend)
Oh, I forgot to do what I always do when I recommend King's book - skip the autobiography at the beginning :P
Maybe if someone really likes King's works it'd be worth reading, but I didn't find it that interesting. I think perhaps if someone wanted to make a career out of writing, it'd be good to get a perspective on what it took him to "make it." Otherwise, eh.
This is great content! Do you mind if I ask how you made it? Specifically the interactive demo? I've been working myself on a project[1] to explore tools for interactive demos, but so far I've just done one with a toy piece of content.
I found this quite hard to read despite the interesting content, mainly due to the animated gifs inserted throughout the article. It's very hard to focus on a line of text when there's an image darting around on the page. I wonder why the author decided to include them?
The fun images may have seemed like a way to lighten things up, but here they're a distraction from the content.. even as still images, every section break doesn't need a happy monkey or Poison Ivy.
OP here - I'm seeing 50/50 support for the gifs. I'm keepin my gifs. I like the idea of adding, and will probably implement, a toggle for all extraneous gifs. I love that most of the commentary about this article is about the gifs. Gifs.
I wouldn't mind the GIFs if they were A. smaller (most of them take up a good 2/3rds of the height of my viewport at 1600x900) and B. could be paused. They're humorous at first, but then they're distracting as I'm trying to read the stuff around them.
Personally I didn't mind the content of the gifs, it was the fact that they made it difficult to keep track of where you were in the text around them as I tried to read it.
Perhaps some people are less susceptible to this than others.
The pixel art doesn't show up for me in Firefox or Edge. (Looks like they're there, just with a height of 0px?) Also, my motion-sensitive lizard brain thanks you for the gif toggle button.
Unless I mis-read or mis-understood you seem to invert the meaning of compression ratio half way through ?
> (100 / 200) = 0.5. Protip: compression ratios less than 1 are frowned upon.
> Unfortunately, it's not that simple. Say we had an algorithm (let's call it A) that, given any input whatsoever, was capable of achieving a compression ratio of strictly less than 1.
Once you understand RLE, LZ is only one step away --- instead of repetitions of individual characters/bytes/etc., you encode repetitions of longer strings.
But starting with RLE is IMHO definitely a good choice --- far better than Huffman, as a lot of introductory material seems to do. A minimal LZ12/4 (4KB window, 18B max length; an old favourite of the demoscene intro packers) compressor/decompressor pair is literally a few hour's worth of work, and yields surprisingly good compression for its simplicity, much better than simple order-0 Huffman.
I'm probably getting old because I can't stand this new trend of putting useless gifs (or mp4's actually) every two paragraphs in every article on the web. Oh, and of course all of them have autoplay enabled because sole purpose of my laptop's fan is to happily spin at full speed. </random rant>
Any chance you want to do one on compression of a integer time series? How about variable length integers? Such an article would be very appreciated in IoT circles since data (timed voltage values) transfer and storage can get quite expensive for dollars and latency.
The first example (tree represented in Japanese) seemed a bit misleading, because the "alphabet" has not been kept as a constant. Since the Japanese alphabet is much larger, it may be argued that the number of bits actually occupied in storage by "本" and "tree" are about the same. Could someone clarify if this is correct reasoning?
Certainly, and I deliberately didn't get into bytes and encoding until after this - I was trying to get across the softer idea that in terms of space-on-a-page-using-a-pen, you've saved.
I really like the article. One point if like to see: you stepped over the fact that your using palettes without mentioning even though that gets you down from using 3 (or 4) bytes a pixel to 1/4. It's a compression ratio of 8 that your completely ignoring!
I toggled the gifs off since I read the comments before the article. I must say, the article is excellent and you could even share it with a non-technical manager or spouse*
*goes ands talks to wife about compression basics :)
[1] https://i.giphy.com/l0Iy1ZcHArR9aAQta.gif (2.7MB)
[2] https://i.giphy.com/media/l0Iy1ZcHArR9aAQta/giphy.mp4 (307KB)
[3] https://media.giphy.com/media/l1J3OGcUiw8NeXuM0/source.mp4 (146KB) <-- optimized with ffmpeg