[The_Colonel]

Archiving over a long period of time might be a use case.

I often wonder, how much of the data currently in circulation will be lost at some point? HDD/SSD last a couple of years. Most of the data in the cloud will be copied over, but some will be lost. If you extrapolate to a 1000, 1 000 000 years, how much will remain? Will something survive the civilization collapse? I guess most people don't care, but some will ...

One way to make data mediums last longer is to make them lower density, and for that such super-low bitrate could be useful.

[meindnoch]

No. Historical archives shouldn't use overly clever compression algorithms. Remember the JBIG2 fiasco. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JBIG2#Character_substitution_e...

[lifthrasiir]

Not only the JBIG2 fiasco was not an inherent flaw of JBIG2 itself, but any historical archive would want to use a bounded error model for any lossy compression algorithm anyway. We don't exactly know how much error is tolerable for given content, but we know that some error is definitely tolerable for most contents, and its upper bound can be used to specify the safe and reasonable compression level. Once that constraint has been met, the choice of algorithm is no longer relevant.

[The_Colonel]

If you use simple encoding (e.g. uncompressed bitmap), your archival capacity will be extremely limited, esp. if you use low-density medium (optimized for longevity). There's an obvious trade-off between encoding complexity and how much can you archive.

One approach would be to have a layered strategy - simple (but inefficient) encoding for an initial set of data, accompanied by a bootstrap for the next level which would unlock access to a much larger collection of efficiently stored data.

[kibwen]

The only data that survives a civilization-level collapse is that which requires as little decoding as possible; in other words, plaintext. Future archaeologists aren't going to have a working copy of your GAN-based audio decoder. Translate your data into text (in as many major languages as possible), carve it into stone, and stuff it in a cave in the desert.

[dheera]

I would worry more about future archaeologists not being able to access e.g. Nvidia and TSMC engineering secrets than their ability to decode my cat pictures and shitty piano practice.