Programmer Humor

Trying to find it funny, but in 2026 it's way too close to the bone and just makes me sad.

Amateur. I can compress entire seasons of a TV series to a few bytes. All I have to do is type its title in Netflix and then BAM, gigabytes of video come out.

Lmfao "tears of joy"

I've read that the Trump administration is hiring him to archive all of the Epstein files using that format.

This is so sad, Chat GPT generate me an email responding to this article

On a similar note, I saw a story a bit back of someone saving input tokens by feeding the bot an image of a wall of text rather than the text itself and having it read the image via OCR.

Satire and reality are too hard too distinguish these days.

Lossless -> lossy -> mindless.

Could have just stored those in PiFS https://github.com/philipl/pifs

a typical jpeg of 20 Mb

Uh what. Literally should be the highest fucking possible quality from a $10K camera if it's that big. My raw images aren't even that big usually.

brilliant satire that critiques all of magazine journalism.

i love going to [insert publication here] and reading another article about 'so and so is ready for their next chapter in life.' the so and so always an uninteresting, overly wealthy fuckwit that hasn't accomplished anything other than going to college and having a wealthy parent.

Throw some angel investment cash at this guy already!

The sad thing is that this has been possible for decades using convolutional autoencoders, but with LLMs we forgot that AI architectures other than transformers still exist.

git-llmfs for JPEG, I kind of wish this was real just to laugh at users

I suppose they weren't worth a 1000 words after all

Here is another one, no compression:

• read image
• send a prompt "regenerate image, here is pixel-by-pixel description"
• enjoy the result

(sarcasm)

All fun and games until you post a story about how clumsy your dad was and now all your photos are updated to show him as just a giant thumb...with thumbs for arms, and legs, and hands and feet, and fingers and toes. Just all thumbs, all the way down. Like tripping on acid with Rita Repulsa.

I compress my meals by putting them into a blender to liquify them before consumption!

It's humorous, but last I checked, the best general-purpose compressors with the highest levels of compression---even lossless, which is probably not what most people think of when they think of neural nets---are neural net based.

Neural net-based compressors are computationally expensive, which is why we don't normally use them for most day-to-day tasks, but they really can produce really small outputs.

I'm going to take the text of the US Constitution and stick it in a text file.

$ wget https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5/pg5.txt
$ stat -c %s pg5.txt 
48326

Okay, so 48326 bytes.

Let's do lzo. You'd expect a limited amount of compression

LZO is "fast" compression, usually only used where compression speed is really important, like where you want to be compressing stuff that's going to be decompressed once and your bottleneck is throughput to disk:

$ lzop <pg5.txt >pg5.txt.lzo 
$ stat -c %s pg5.txt.lzo
24843

Okay, how about gzip? That's Deflate, an older, but pretty-widely-used general-purpose compression algorithm.

$ gzip <pg5.txt >pg5.txt.gz
$ stat -c %s pg5.txt.gz
16660

Okay, what about LZMA? That's a newer, more-CPU-intensive thing that's probably a good general-purpose choice that'll generally give better compression ratios. It's the kind of thing that I'd probably use in a lot of cases. (Personally, these days, I tend to use pixz, which provides both indexed access for tarballs and parallel compression and decompression, which is important for modern processors.)

$ xz <pg5.txt >pg5.txt.xz
$ stat -c %s pg5.txt.xz 
15488

Okay, now PAQ, a neural-net-based compressor:

$ zpaq a pg5.txt.zpaq a pg5.txt -method 5
$ stat -c %s pg5.txt.zpaq 
13063

I know this is a joke but honestly if an engineer figured out how to make a Jpeg 600 bytes it would be impressive (obviously don't destroy the original even if all worked right.)

Well actually....

https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-025-01033-7

Lossless compression by LLM

He discovered alt text.

The fuuuucking annoying part is that these weight trained models would be perfect for translation models, compression, etc. An llm is already kind of a really efficient lossy compressor but you could actually make it lossless and an actual compressor if used properly. But instead people are literally telling llms to translate instead of training models that are for translating. The technology isnt the problem itself, its the industry and capitalism.

This is satire right? Right? Lmao.