miniblog.

Is writing a perfectly space efficient data format comparable to hand writing assembly today? Today's generic compression algorithms are excellent.

Over the last 15 years, ~50% of improvement in chess engines is due to smarter programming, not better hardware: https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/76cwz4/15_years_of_chess_engine_development/ What other domains are like this? Lossy audio/image compression is definitely better today. There must be others situations.

Great introduction to the AV1 video codec, inter/intra frame compression, and exploiting correlations to save bytes: https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/av1/demo1.shtml The Xiph posts are always good with great explanatory diagrams/sample pictures.