(Note: To understand this writeup, it is helpful to know what hexidecimal is and that in many contexts it is denoted by a preceeding '0x')

While idly chatting over ICQ with a friend, she scoffed at something I said. Her scoff was "fff". I, taking broad liberties with a popular suffix, said "fffn't", and she didn't understand, asking "fffn't?".

I was feeling snarky, so I said "assuming `n't` means logical negation, and fff means 0x0...0fff we can interpret this statement as 0xf...f000". She, being equally snarky, and loads less geeky, simply said "f00... is you". Not wanting to let her get the best of me, I countered with "0x50d0ff".For those of you who aren't fluent in leet speak, that reads "sod off".

I fancied myself quite the joker, and inquired "would it be funny if i only insulted people in hexidecimal?" She, acting as the voice of truth, informed me that
"h.. yes. but no.
it would ultimately end up insulting yourself"
.

Ever the snarky one, I replied "0x0bf1051e". She, even though she was quite practiced at leetspeek, could not interpret it. So I spelled it out for her: "obviously"

Then it hit me. 0x0bf105le is a plain 32-bit word, meaning it needs only 4 bytes in memory. "Obviously", on the other hand, needs 9.

The internet is known as a spawning pool for obscure and difficult to decypher acronyms. This is nothing new. But I have never before seen a system which is, with practice, human readable (and writeable) in a form which can be converted directly to digital storage. Granted, the gains are small compared to real compression, and it may even be considered lossy, but it does provide interesting food for thought on the direction of leet speek

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