this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2026
88 points (92.3% liked)

Programmer Humor

32231 readers
684 users here now

Welcome to Programmer Humor!

This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!

For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.

Rules

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Gabor_Transform@programming.dev 1 points 2 hours ago

When I first saw this, I thought it was obviously a toy to learn something and as an excuse use an LLM. I wasn't sure if the use of an LLM was serious or not (e.g. did the originator know the limitations); however, I did take it seriously for the sake of argument after one of the other comments talked about compression.

I decided that I actually like this project quite a bit as an example to introduce information theory to students. What the compression comment gets wrong imo is that compression is about taking an instantiation of information, reducing it to a minimum set of measurable units of infirmation (i.e. bits) to recreate that instantiation.

What this would aim to do, assuming it works (or rather what a competent human could do) is reduce the instantiation to a set of information that can recreate an instantiation of said information (changing the problem into a non-unique inversion problem) to recreate functionality but not an exact duplicate of the input. To the degree that the description converges on one result then one would end up with the exact same input; however, as human language is notoriously verbose and imprecise this would not compress anything.

Kudos.