Re:Music industry is suing youtube-dl hosters
by _Nat_ on Saturday January 15, 2022 @03:49AM
(#29944908)
We can come up with [encoding-conventions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_number_format ) where any particular bit-string could map to any number. If we assert that decoding to a number under an encoding implies equivalence, then we'd have to say that all numbers are equal to each-other.
It's easy enough to avoid such absurdities by recognizing that data's just data; that, to get stuff like numbers, text, images, etc., we need to decode the data.
I don't see how it's a misconception. All data is a sequence of bits. All sequences of bits are numbers expressed in base 2. How could I be wrong here?
> you can't skip the need to decode data as a number because there're different ways to do it
> if we assume that all data should be read as unsigned binary-integers, are they big-endian or little-endian?
To me this just means all data could be represented as multiple numbers. Mentally, I visualize binary sequences as big endian. It's totally possible that there is another number that represents the same data but with different endianness.
> Or, say a computer has unordered-storage for stuff like bags
There must be at least one number that represents it, that much is certain. I'm just not particularly sure how complex that number is because when I made this argument what I had in mind was discrete self-contained files.
I don't think I understand these other possibilities well enough to comment at the moment.
> It might be more helpful to see binary-sequences as trivially decode-able as unsigned-binary-integers, rather than actually being unsigned-binary-integers.
I don't see the distinction. If you can decode data as an integer, it must be equivalent to that integer.