The download is 153MB, compressed... didn't even bother to wait for it to finish once I saw the size.
The brotli comparison is IMHO slightly misleading. Yes, it "embeds a dictionary to optimize the compression of small messages", but that dictionary is a few orders of magnitude smaller than the embedded "dictionary" which is the LLM in ts_sms.
There's a reason the Hutter Prize (and the demoscene) counts the whole data necessary to reproduce its output. In other words, ts_sms took around 18 bytes + ~152MB while brotli took around 70 bytes + ~128KB (approximately size of its dictionary and decompressor.)
For example, antirez mentioned LoRa in the earlier thread - that's a cheap, license-free radio, which achieves a large range at the expense of low rate (250 bit/sec). That's 30 bytes/second, not including framing overhead and retransmission.
If you wanted to build a communication system out of those, this compression method would be great. You'd have LORA device that connects to a regular cell phone and provides connectivity, and all the compression/decompression and UI happens on the cell phone. 150MB is nothing for modern phones, but you'd see a real improvement in message speed.
You can compress arbitrarily many messages with it, and the dictionary remains 153MB. Why it's worth pointing out that brotli already uses a dictionary is that otherwise it would be generating the dictionary as it compressed, meaning that short messages would be pessimized. So brotli is in some sense the state of the art for short messages.
The brotli comparison is IMHO slightly misleading. Yes, it "embeds a dictionary to optimize the compression of small messages", but that dictionary is a few orders of magnitude smaller than the embedded "dictionary" which is the LLM in ts_sms.
There's a reason the Hutter Prize (and the demoscene) counts the whole data necessary to reproduce its output. In other words, ts_sms took around 18 bytes + ~152MB while brotli took around 70 bytes + ~128KB (approximately size of its dictionary and decompressor.)