> "Suppose you have some strange coin - you've tossed it 10 times, and every time it lands on heads. How would you describe this information to someone? You wouldn't say HHHHHHHHH. You would just say "10 tosses, all heads" - bam! You've just compressed some data! Easy. I saved you hours of mindfuck lectures."
Ahh, my favorite kind of technical walkthrough. Love it
It's not really wrong, and not really an "oversimplification" as the parent article calls it. It's just a bad example, and it seems confused about the audience it's trying to reach. Either they already understand compression, and it's superfluous, or they don't and it's just confusing.
A computer example might explain that it takes less storage to store "10H" (i.e. the integer 10 followed by the character H), than it is to store 10 H characters in a sequence.
You wouldn’t and shouldn’t. There are only nine “H” in there!
Don't for get the HTML and other plain text that is sent/received.