• Hello Hotel@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Another thing to add to that, computer text is amazingly dense. An audio file of me saying just the first word takes up more bytes than this whole comment. Each english ascii charicter is a byte, each non-english char is 1 to 3 bytes.

    “another” as wav file

    • msage@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      Audio can and usually is compressed quite well. When it’s just human voice, you can be very aggressive with losing specific parts of data.

      Videos however aren’t as simple - unless you go with very short ones, which YouTube doesn’t.

      • kautau@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        1 year ago

        Right, and as much as some proclaim “the blockchain” as some magical solve, having media live on a constantly redundant computationally expensive system helps nobody, except maybe those shilling tokens for those platforms before they bow out and pauses convert their magical tokens into real currency to buy other shit.

        For example it’s amazing how Ethereum was meant to be this “world computer” where applications could live, computation and revenue were shared, etc. but every application that lives on Ethereum is basically about moving cryptocurrency around for more profit or shilling NFTs.

        Computation is expensive. Storage is expensive. Something like the fediverse is great because it decentralizes those things. But it doesn’t change the fact that hard drives cost money, bandwidth costs money, computation costs money. We should all support ad blocking. But we should also all support the financial obligations of the fediverse where we can help.