πFS

tptacek

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Lalabadie

Love it! This feels very much in the spirit of Tom7's Harder Drive [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio

Levitating

absolutely genius

partsch

Finally, someone is doing something about the rising prices of storage!

bobim

This is disturbing to realize that pi then contains all the past and future knowledge, including when I'll pass away.

giancarlostoro

I... I can't tell if this is an elaborate troll or pure genius. I love it.

MisterTea

Reminds me of: https://www.spronck.net/sloot.html Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloot_Digital_Coding_System

adzm

I'm intrigued that π was capitalized to Π presumably automatically in the HN headline.

hnlmorg

This is probably a dumb question, but do we actually know that pi has an infinite number of decimal digits or are we assuming that it does because we haven’t developed a sufficiently powerful computer to calculate the last digit of pi? I’m guessing this is something that could be formally proven?

adzm

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.

glitchc

At what point is the metadata larger than the actual file?

leephillips

What a brilliant idea! Of course, of course, it’s not in the repository so I can’t apt-get install it. Debian...always so far behind.

koolala

Short Storage Number - SSN 0x123456789ABCDEF0 use this number as a shorter nibble storage alternative...

thangalin

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.

jamwise

Reminds me of when I tried to use the library of babel as a data compression tool. It led me down a fun rabbit hole and was my first introduction to information theory. The conclusion being that you basically need the same amount of data to represent the address of your data as the data itself, so it's not really effective at compression, just a fun thought experiment. The cool part of this in modern times is that LLMs are basically a form of lossy compression that actually achieves the gist of what these tools fail at. Although it is lossy, and requires a massive substrate. This is related to the idea of AI/LLMs being a form of language compression.

charles_f

Posted many times before: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com/philipl My favourite issue being about GDPR compliance https://github.com/philipl/pifs/issues/56

aidenn0

I vaguely remember an entry to a compression-benchmark that gamed the benchmark by treating the filename as part of the input to the decompression-algorithm, thus beating the metric that only measured the size of the file.

dang

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 (1 comment) The π Filesystem for FUSE: Store Your Data in π - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19223032 - Feb 2019 (1 comment) pifs - Avoid disk space usage by saving your files in the digits of Pi - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18687275 - Dec 2018 (1 comment) πfs – A data-free filesystem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13869691 - March 2017 (105 comments) Πfs: Stores your data in π - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10856108 - Jan 2016 (1 comment) Πfs: Never worry about data again - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10847693 - Jan 2016 (1 comment) File system that stores location of file in Pi - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8018818 - July 2014 (98 comments) 100% Compression Using Pi - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6698852 - Nov 2013 (32 comments) (Reposts are fine after a year or so; links to past threads are just to satisfy extra-curious readers)

j3th9n

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

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.