Zamicol

Can't fix problems in a project? Increase the scope to make more problems elsewhere. Soon tentacles emerge, everything has problems, and your project doesn't look as relatively bad.

Comment · 1 year ago

It doesn't, and the problems have only become more problematic over time, but it's the least bad hypothesis that's broadly accepted. I suspect a generational succession is required for new paradigms to be contemplated.

There are many researchers proposing simpler, novel, and testable solutions that seem to go unnoticed. For example, I'm a fan of Alexandre Deur's work. He has some simple and elegant solutions that I've never seen discussed even though they appear "obvious". For example, from 21 years ago: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.05905

That paper is suggesting that one of the reasons why galaxies are spinning faster than some calculations expect is because they're failing to account for the gravitational lensing of gravity itself, which bends gravity down towards the disk.

Comment · 1 year ago

Bingo.

Comment · 1 year ago

On this exact issue my work did extensive testing and researching various standards.

Although we found browsers were out of alignment with standards on all sorts of matters, we found broad compatibility with upper case. (Of course, meaning everything before the path. The interpretation of the path is delegated to the server which may or may not be case sensitive, up until octothorpe, #, which is then solely interpreted by the browser.)

Comment · 1 year ago

> Base45 does not use all 45 characters

Huh? I don't necessarily care about an exact "base45", I care about QR code alphanumeric, which just so happens to be a (generic) base 45 character set. For QR code, two characters are encoded into 11 bits.

>in every slot.

I've worked with the QR code standards pretty seriously and I am unfamiliar with the term "slots" being used by the standards. This is why I suspect your referring specifically to RFC base45 (although the term isn't used there either), which QR code doesn't care about. I also don't care about RFC Base 45 and would prefer to use a more bit space efficient method, such as using the iterative divide by radix method, which I also call "natural base conversion".

> base45 takes 32 source bits For QR code alphanumeric, 6 characters use 33 bits, not 32. way to calculate efficiency

The way we calculate this, for example, 2025/2048, we've termed "bit space efficiency". I'm not sure how commonly adopted this term is used in the rest of the industry. On the matter, I thought I had read "the iterative divide by radix algorithm" in industry, but after searching it turns out to be a term novel to our work.

This is also similar to the way Shannon originally calculated entropy and appears to be a fundamental representation of information. Of course log is useful, but it often results in partial bits or rounding, 5.5 in the case of alphanumeric, which is somewhat absurd considering that the bit is the quantum of information, again as shown by Shannon. There is no such thing as a partial bit that can be communicated, since information is fundamental to communication, so the fractional representation we've found to be more informative and easier to work with.

Granted, in all of this, when I have done the math (and I done a lot of math on this particular issue) there appeared to be some very extreme edge cases at the end result of the QR code where some arbitrary data encoded into QR numeric was slightly more efficient than alphanumeric, but overall alphanumeric was more efficient almost all the time. There are other considerations, like padding and escaping, that makes exact calculation more difficult than it's worth. I just needed to "most of the time" calculation and that's where I stopped.

For more detail of my work, my BASE45 predates the RFC by 2 years in 2019, then I published a base 45 alphabet, BASE45, by March 1, 2020, a whole year before the RFC. A patent including BASE45 was submitted June 22, 2021: https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa...

Matter of fact, because of the issues and confusion surrounding base conversion, I wrote this tool in 2019:

https://convert.zamicol.com

It is the first arbitrary base conversion tool on the web. It also was essential for our work with QR code and other base conversion issues.

Comment · 1 year ago

The big lesson from 1936 Turing:

Anything can run DOOM...

...as long as it's Turing complete.