Comment by benchloftbrunch
18 days ago
The other problem is that (if we take literally the absurd proposal of computing "every possible block" up front) you're not actually saving any space by doing this, since your "pointers" would be the same size as the blocks they point to.
If you don't do _actually_ every single block then you have Huffman Coding [1].
I imagine if you have a good idea of the data incoming you could probably do a similar encoding scheme where you use 7 bits to point to a ~512 bit blob and the 8th bit means the next 512 couldn't be compressed.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huffman_coding