system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How is it that you can compress TBs of data into small easy to move zip files? Shouldn't the data take up the same amount of memory all the time?

I don't get how you can make data take up less space even though it is the same amount of information.
gpt
Imagine you had a file which consisted of a 4TB long string of "1s". You could compress that file into the following line:

"This file consists of a 4TB long string of 1s"

Basically compressing a 4TB file into something under 50bytes.

It's a silly example, of course, but the idea is that compression algorithms look for repetitions and redundancies to do their magic - and a lot of other sophisticated stuff too of course.