Soatok Dreamseeker@soatok@furry.engineer
Codecs are a font of insanity.
See: previous threads about base-58-btc and timing side-channels. https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:qfqibtrg2k7r2p345p4pbgpi/post/3m4ygfrrxlk2q
But also, a lot of Iota's problems were their obsession with ternary logic (as if "binary" is somehow inferior), except you need your implementations of base-2 and base-3 to be isomorphic in order for the outputs of cryptographic functions to be meaningful.
But hackers have done crazy and stupid things with codecs.
For example: have you ever heard of base-1 encoding? You might think, "But you can't logically go smaller than binary!"
Not true. Just repeat the number 1 until the string length is isomorphic to the number you're trying to represent.
I never said it was fast :P
Joe Vinegar@joe_vinegar@mastodon.bida.im
@soatok@furry.engineer I always found "unary" code as opposed to (or in analogy with) "binary" kind of a misnomer.
you still need two symbols, the "1" and the "absence of 1" or a terminator, or a synchronization marker, to tell where there is a 1 and where there is none. so it's just a specific variable-length numerical representation with a binary alphabet. Even the tally is still a binary code (in which you use an arbitrary number of consecutive "empty spaces" to represent "0").
In general unary codes just use "0" for the second symbol.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unary_numeral_system
