Here's a hint, STOP MINIFYING CODE! gzip over transport is enough.
OpenAI is good at unminifying code
81–90 of 321 posts
Re: OpenAI is good at unminifying code
#82JS minification is fairly mechanical and comparably simple, so the inversion should be relatively easy. It would be of course tedious enough to be manually done in general, but transformations themselves are fairly limited so it is possible to read them only with some notes to track mangled identifiers. A more general unminification or unobfuscation still seems to be an open problem. I wrote handful of programs that…
> JS minification is fairly mechanical and comparably simple, so the inversion should be relatively easy. Just because a task is simple doesn't mean its inverse need be. Examples: - multiplication / prime factorization - deriving / integrating - remembering the past / predicting the future Code unobfuscation is clearly one of those difficult inverse problems, as it can be easily exacerbated by any of the following pr…
Of course, it is not generalizable! In my experience though, most minifiers do only the following:
- Whitespace removal, which is trivially invertible.
- Comment removal, which we never expect to recover via unminification.
- Renaming to shorter names, which is tedious to track but still mechanical. And most minifiers have little understanding of underlying types anyway, so they are usually very conservative and rarely reuse the same mangled identifier for multiple uses. (Google Closure Compiler is a significant counterexample here, but it is also known to be much slower.)
- Constant folding and inlining, which is annoying but can be still tracked. Again, most minifiers are limited in their reasoning to do extensive constant folding and inlining.
- Language-specific transformations, like turning `a; b; c;` into `a, b, c;` and `if (a) b;` into `a && b;` whenever possible. They will be hard to understand if you don't know in advance, but there aren't too many of them anyway.
As a result, minified code still remains comparably human-readable with some note taking and perseverance. And since these transformations are mostly local, I would expect LLMs can pick them up by their own as well.
(But why? Because I do inspect such programs fairly regularly, for example for comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39066262)
Re: OpenAI is good at unminifying code
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Possible that this is the mistake. However, I don't think I miscopied the original code. https://reactive.network/assets/index-8b4ef4ac.js If you look for `oahkbdpqwmZO0QLCJUYXzcvunxrjft` in the output, you should see that those characters appear exactly like that. Maybe an issue with encoding of the script file?
Most definitely; if I use "View >> Repair Text Encoding" in Firefox, it shows the block characters. But I have to admit, it's strange that Firefox does not choose UTF-8 by default in this case.
Yes, turns out I was the one who made the mistake.
I updated the article to reflect the mistake.
> Update (2024-08-29): Initially, I thought that the LLM didn’t replicate the logic accurately because the output was missing a few characters visible in the original component (e.g., ). However, a user on HN forum pointed out that it was likely a copy-paste error.
>
> Upon further investigation, I discovered that the original code contains different characters than what I pasted into ChatGPT. This appears to be an encoding issue, as I was able to get the correct characters after downloading the script. After updating the code to use the correct characters, the output is now identical to the original component.
>
> I apologize, GPT-4, for mistakenly accusing you of making mistakes.
Re: OpenAI is good at unminifying code
#84An interesting use-case of this capability is refactoring, which, for me, ChatGPT has been unmistakably good at. It's amazing how I can throw garbage code I wrote at ChatGPT, ask it to refactor, and get clean code that I can use without worrying if it's going to work or not, because in 99% of cases it works without breaking anything.
Re: OpenAI is good at unminifying code
#85JS minification is fairly mechanical and comparably simple, so the inversion should be relatively easy. It would be of course tedious enough to be manually done in general, but transformations themselves are fairly limited so it is possible to read them only with some notes to track mangled identifiers. A more general unminification or unobfuscation still seems to be an open problem. I wrote handful of programs that…
Random try (the first one) with Claude 3.5 Sonnet: https://claude.site/artifacts/246c1b1a-3088-447a-a526-b1e716... I'm not on PC so it's not tested.
That's much better in that most of the original code remains present and comments are not that far off, but its understanding of global variables are utterly wrong (to be expected though, as many of them serve multiple purposes).
Re: OpenAI is good at unminifying code
#86This post basically says that I don't need to document my code anymore. No more comments, they can be generated automatically. Hurray!
what if the comment doesn't match what you intended to write?
Maybe it's better for the comment to match the code you wrote, not the code you intended to write.
Re: OpenAI is good at unminifying code
#87This post basically says that I don't need to document my code anymore. No more comments, they can be generated automatically. Hurray!
Unfortunately the comments that could be generated are exactly the ones that should never be written. You want the comment to explain why, the information missing from the code.
This is something I always disagreed with. In my experience, I rather read a short comment explaining what is the purpose of a block of code, than trying to decipher it. Yes, code "should speak for itself", but reading a comment is almost always faster than reading blocks of code.
And then there is also documentation (if you include it in what you define as comment). I much rather go through a website, with a search function, example, description, made with some docgen tool, than having to go through a library or programming language source code every time I need to remember how to do X, or if object B has implement function Y ...
Re: OpenAI is good at unminifying code
#88I can see some ways to use this and easily check that the LLM is not hallucinating parts of it, because you can ask the LLM to unminify (or deobfuscate) some component, then request unit tests to be written by the LLM, then humanly check that the unit tests are meaningful and that they don't miss things on the unminified code, then run the tests on the original minified version to confirm the LLM's work, maybe set up some mutation testing if it is relevant.
Re: OpenAI is good at unminifying code
#89Should the title say ChatGPT or gpt-4 (the model) instead of OpenAI (the company)?
There is a certain justice in the use of OpenAI as a name for their product, given that OpenAI has turned the generic technical GPT name into a brand.
Re: OpenAI is good at unminifying code
#90An interesting use-case of this capability is refactoring, which, for me, ChatGPT has been unmistakably good at. It's amazing how I can throw garbage code I wrote at ChatGPT, ask it to refactor, and get clean code that I can use without worrying if it's going to work or not, because in 99% of cases it works without breaking anything.
What language(s), out of interest?