Not Only Does It Convert Back Losslessly, It Also Has The Noise Removed

Submission 4,550

About

Not Only Does It Convert Back Losslessly, It Also Has The Noise Removed refers to memes and jokes about X (Twitter) user @lookoutitsbbear a.k.a. moderate rock's attempt at cracking Neuralink's "Compression Challenge," issued on 18th May, 2024. Despite complaints from computer scientists who deemed Neuralink's data to be "too noisy" to compress accurately, moderate rock claimed to have found a way to compress a file in a manner that "not only" converts it "back losslessly," but also "has the noise removed." Since it is difficult to distinguish data from noise in files this large, jokes about @lookoutitsbbear's claim began making the rounds in May 2024.

Origin

On May 18th, 2024, Elon Musk's Neuralink Twitter / X^[1] account posted an open entry "Compression Challenge" asking people to try their hand at compressing "one hour of raw electrode recordings from a Neuralink implant."

However, the challenge appeared to be asking people to losslessly compress extremely noisey files to 1/200th their original size (seen below, left).

According to various internet users versed in computer science, such as @felix_red_panda on X^[2] this task is nearly impossible (seen below, right).

While some internet users interpreted the challenge as Neuralink employees' attempt to convince that compressing such noisey data losslessly is impossible,^[3] other users tried to find a theoretical maximum compression size for the data.

On May 27th, 2024, X^[4] (formerly Twitter) user @lookoutitsbbear a.k.a. moderate rock replied to a tweet, claiming to have compressed a file down to 47 KB, adding, "not only does it convert back losslessly it also has the noise removed." The user went on to defend his claim in the replies to his post, saying that noise isn't data, and he can distinguish the two from "experience."

The user went on to post a thread defending his compression, saying that the noise in the data stems from the way it was recorded and stored by Neuralink hardware, and that the challenge is set up for failure if taken at face value.^[5]

Spread

Various other X (formerly Twitter) users began sharing memes and jokes about @lookoutitsbbear a.k.a. moderate rock's claim, making jokes about how "lossless" conversion is possible if one just disregards noise. On May 27th, 2024, X^[6]^[7] users @erntha and @jothwip posted jokes about @lookoutitsbbear a.k.a. moderate rock's post, gathering over 40,000 and 11,000 likes respectively (seen below, right).

Also on May 27th, X^[8] user @ziegenhainy reposted @lookoutitsbbear alongside an image of a colorful pixelated square, and an all red square, gathering over 14,000 likes in three days (seen below, left).

On May 29th, X^[9] user @colin_fraser posted an image of the botched restoration of the painting "Ecce Homo" alongside @lookoutitsbbear's catchphrase, gathering over 30,000 likes in a day (seen below, right).