I shipped gni-compression to npm two days ago. One of the first questions I got (from myself, running benchmarks at midnight): does it work on anything other than chat data? Short answer: not yet. Long answer: I found out exactly why, and it led me somewhere more interesting than I expected. After the npm launch I ran GN against Silesia — the standard general text compression benchmark suite. Dick
Try this. Find a photo on your phone that you love. Now squint, or zoom out until it's the size of a stamp. It's still the same photo. You can still tell what's in it. But something about it has gone a little flat — the part that made you take it in the first place has quietly walked out of the room. Most of us would describe what just happened with a shrug: "it's just smaller." But the truth is m