Metacompression

What if the real gain wasn’t at the byte level?

I have always been fascinated by compression algorithms — I was 15 when I “invented” Run Length Encoding (before learning it had been discovered more than 20 years before I was born).
I marveled at the visual simplicity of Huffman coding, at the cleverness of Lempel-Ziv which dynamically builds its dictionary.

These algorithms are powerful, and it is no coincidence that they are continuously improved and combined to produce ever more powerful new algorithms: Brotli, zstd.