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Comment by bilsbie | Hacker News Reader

The patents should be nearly expired by now.

Patents on fractal compression and related techniques are all expired now. There might still be people who remember how to use them. Do we see any use of it, now?

IMO compression was a lot more important when we had modems and disk sizes measured in megabytes or single digit gigabytes. Once you have "good enough" compression then you solve most issues and in many areas where there used to be compression they've been increasingly removing it. Compression causes latency after all and some of the biggest impediments to processing speed now is latency.

So unlike before, compression has stopped being a primary driving factor in the engineering of many types of devices and types of software.

Raw data compression was once an attractive application, but the method is more general. That said, streaming services still pay a great deal for bandwidth and storage in edge nodes. Cell- and keyframe-oriented video compression are reaching their limit.

We are still interested in feature extraction and scene composition, which both benefit from more compact representation.

To compete with hardware-assisted decoding in display hardware, fractal rendering would probably need to be coded to run in Vulkan.

fractal compression was always a scam.

A quick patent search shows that we still have a nontrivial amount of time on them.

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