this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2024
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.

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22 qr-codes can store the same amount of data as the Commodore 64's RAM. (reddthat.com)
submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 months ago (2 children)

And the Commodore 64 can't decode them. Even if you fed it an algorithm that could decode them, you'd be out the memory of the algorithm.

All sounds fun on paper, but I enjoy storing terabytes of data on the Internet Archive, and sticking that to a QR code, just for fun.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

Bullshit, it could decode them just fine it would just take a while. It would only need a source of storage like a tape or floppy drive.

Back then and now we have our computers often do tasks which process more data than we have ram available. It's not a hard problem to solve and we even solved it back then.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

You are right, QR codes are very easy to decode if you have them raw, even the C64 should do it in a few seconds, maybe a minute for one of those 22 giant ones. The hard part is image processing when decoding a camera picture - and that can be done on the C64 too if it has enough time and some external memory (or disks for virtual memory). People have even emulated a 32-bit RISC processor on the poor thing, and made it boot Linux.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

Of course. But a fun (actual) showerthought nonetheless. As I remembered it earlier today, a qr-code (version 40) can hold about 3000 bytes.

Version 40: 177x177 modules, can hold up to 7,089 numeric characters, 4,296 alphanumeric characters, 2,953 bytes of data, or 1,817 kanji characters.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

Indeed!

I actually encoded a 256 byte DOS assembly demo (not written by me) into a self decoding plain text batch file, and then for the hell of it encoded that into a QR code.

Again, disclaimer, I didn't write the original code, but it was fun to convert into a QR code.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=LSAJTQiQ0DA