I shipped gni-compression to npm two days ago. One of the first questions I got (from myself, running benchmarks at midnight): does it work on anything other than chat data?

Short answer: not yet. Long answer: I found out exactly why, and it led me somewhere more interesting than I expected.

The Benchmark That Told the Truth

After the npm launch I ran GN against Silesia — the standard general text compression benchmark suite. Dickens, Webster, XML logs, binaries. Here's what came back:

GN loses. Not slightly — brotli-6 is 10–30% better on general text depending on the corpus. Gzip-6 beats it too.

The obvious question is why. GN beats brotli on chat data by ~2% consistently across 12 measurements.…