It can only do the impressive numbers after you give it a schema for the data, and the data has to be structured in a way that follows a rigid schema, so it’s not magic.

OpenZL compresses data into a self-describing wire format, any configuration of which can be decompressed by a universal decoder. OpenZL’s design enables rapid development of tailored compressors with minimal code; its universal decoder eliminates deployment lag; and its investment in a well-vetted standard component library minimizes security risks.

The freedom afforded by OpenZL’s graph model is a double-edged sword: the capability it offers comes at the cost of a combinatorial explosion of choices that must be made—namely which components to use and how to compose and configure them. There is no one-size-fits-all compressor

Webassembly for compression or something, but it’s made by the zstd people so maybe it will turn out to be magic eventually.

On one hand the x2.06 ratio for the SAO data is extremely good, zpaq and paq8px are 50x and 10000x slower at encoding and decoding and still can’t even reach that ratio (I didn’t try even more extreme compression, paq8px -8 already took 20 minutes).

On the other hand,

enwik: A Case Study Where OpenZL Performs Poorly

We present this case study to show that OpenZL is not a magic bullet for all use cases. The shortcomings are twofold. First, the standard codec library can achieve good results for many datasets, but is not currently optimized for human text. Second, English text is a highly compressible format for which domain- specific transformations are especially useful. xwrt combines multiple such transformations to achieve its results. With this in mind, we are optimistic that porting text-specific codecs and text parsing will improve the performance of OpenZL compressors in this domain.

Oh you did! Indeed, you have to complete the human campaign all the way through (to the point that you get an epilogue) to even be able to start the 2nd largest storyline after the human things.

Endless sky follows the old and storied tradition where 90% of the game’s content is locked behind speaking to a specific random NPC near the starting town, and not giving any hints at all that you’re going the wrong way. You probably fell victim to that.

Some agent may do 100 queries for 1 user question, but a single scraper bot will do 100 queries every single second of every single day, and costs less to run than the LLM.

The free tier of IGDB has a rate limit of 4 requests per second and they will block you if you try to download the entire database, so this may be a dead end anyway.

Found a 4 megabyte dump that seems promising though it’s from 2018 so outdated.

https://gist.github.com/LeWawan/5858a9e7bef0f3dc4a79ac8bc1e3380c

Another one, a 68MB 3 year old “dataset” for AI training that seems related to IGDB.

https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/anudeepvanjavakam/igdb-api-data/data

The simplest fix is a delay between an update being pushed and the update being deployed everywhere. Several orgs are scanning all popular dependencies for supply chain attacks and they usually catch them quickly, just not quickly enough when there is no delay.

Protecting microsoft from the year of the linux desktop is the intended meaning.

But is it better than ncurses?

Fossil fuel waste. You know, carbon dioxide and air pollution.

Inspect element, surely? See for yourself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadkill#Eating_roadkill

He does have the authority to send whoever operates it a letter asking them to pretty please shut it down. Unlike with regular people however, the chance the recommendation will be followed is zero.

The incredible thing is this is actually the result of an explicit design decision.

The compiler accepts most GCC flags. Unrecognized flags (e.g., architecture- specific -m flags, unknown -f flags) are silently ignored so ccc can serve as a drop-in GCC replacement in build systems.

They’re so committed to vibing that they’d prefer if the compiler just does random shit to make it easier to shove it haphazardly into a build pipeline.

Cryptography is hard and programmers are notoriously really really really bad at it.

early 1980s - Mark V. Shaney

2015 - r/subredditsimulator

2025 - AI independently sends the creator of Mark V. Shaney a sloptastic “thank you” email, who is not very happy about it

2026 - moltbook

maybe they were looking for extra special characters like 🁄 or ⶸ. Who am I kidding, RFC 1738 tells us that literally everything is unsafe and you know, we need to prepare for the inevitable occasion when the password somehow ends up inside an URL.

The characters “<” and “>” are unsafe because they are used as the delimiters around URLs in free text;
the quote mark (“”") is used to delimit URLs in some systems.
The character “#” is unsafe
The character “%” is unsafe

It ends up with

Thus, only alphanumerics, the special characters
$ - _ . + ! * ’ ( ) ,
are safe

Were you hoping for expedition 33?

They said “a single” face so probably not the strikeface.

It’s been maintained for over 10 years by now so it shouldn’t be going anywhere.

deleted by creator

Saying it before something that is not disrespectful would be redundant at best and very confusing at worst.

“With all due respect, how’s the weather today?”
“I’m not racist but I prefer tea over coffee.”
“I’m not a pedophile but I think terminator 3 is a bad movie.”