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Rars: a Rust RAR implementation, mostly written by LLMs

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Re: Rars: a Rust RAR implementation, mostly written by LLMs

#81
post #29

> "For the last 15 months or so my hobby has been shouting at Claude" How can you shout at Claude when it’s 1) foobaring, bamblabooing and fghrtawing all the time without telling you what’s going on 2) when it finally interacts, it’s asking for a permission you told it 30 seconds ago "yes and do not ever ask me again until heat death of the Universe" 3) and after all of that, it just spits out: "you’re out of tokens,…

The proper way to work with Claude or Codex is, IMO, to load up the context with a discussion about what you're doing and why. You go back and forth, pushing back on its opinions and shaping the context until the tokens are ready to flow into the right shape. Every angle you miss is an opportunity for them to slop out all over the place, and, until Codex was mature, the longer you ran the task for, the more it'd spread out and lose shape.

Re-shaping the context sometimes involves severe pressures like "wtf is this ugly crap?" or "did I just spot you laying a turd in my codebase again?" and other strong forms of disapproval, mixed with "hmm not sure I like the sound of that"s, to "yea that's much better" to pull it back in the other direction.

The trick is to shape the flow before the tide comes in and you end up like King Canute

Re: Rars: a Rust RAR implementation, mostly written by LLMs

#84
post #83

First, isn't RAR compression algorithm proprietary somehow? Second, why compress to RAR if you can compress to 7z?

One thing it has built in that other algorithms don't is optional redundancy so it can recover data from a damaged archive

Re: Rars: a Rust RAR implementation, mostly written by LLMs

#86

Kudos, this is a really cool project (even if it might be AI generated), I have starred the repo, (3rd starrer here) One thing I have been curious at is are there any ways to stop a rar compression mid way and then continue it later? Like suppose I have a compression happening for a large file, then would there be a possibility with this project to shut down the computer mid compression and continue it after starting…

Thanks! I guess you could save the state to a file on SIGINT, flush what's been written and pick it back up again if the state file exists when you restart, and use the CRCs of the files to abort if things have changed. I don't fancy doing that for so many versions of RAR, but it would be a cool feature to add it to an `xz` fork. I like the idea.

Thanks it would still be interesting to see this added to xz but supposing the fact that LLM's were able to create the rars project, I suppose it might not be that difficult to add that to rar format eventually. Starting to do it from xz might make the most sense if you like the idea right though.

Another idea for rar format that I have which I would love to hear your opinion on is that there are sometimes multiple .part01 .part02 .part03 and so on

I have found that when you try to unrar it, it requires all the files at the particular.

It would be really beneficial imo if it was possible to have the ability if there was some ability to somehow just unrar .part01 without requiring all the contents of .part02,03 etc.

but from my very limited understanding, you also need some (I think last contents) of all files for the de-compression to work.

Would it be possible to do something of this endeavour so that you don't require all the parts themselves but just something of a patch of an end, I am not sure about compression algorithms if that might be possible though but it felt like something which was a bit possible albeit hard/difficult to do with rar format.

I would be curious to hear your opinions on it, and thanks for responding and I would be really interested in seeing the xz fork that you mentioned!

Re: Rars: a Rust RAR implementation, mostly written by LLMs

#87
post #83

First, isn't RAR compression algorithm proprietary somehow? Second, why compress to RAR if you can compress to 7z?

One thing it has built in that other algorithms don't is optional redundancy so it can recover data from a damaged archive

wow, yeah I remember even using it (when moving files on floppy). I'm all for it then, however I wonder if this won't be sued down.

Re: Rars: a Rust RAR implementation, mostly written by LLMs

#88
Neat. FYI your “home” links are broke. And here are 150,000 more unique RAR files if you need to test if your compressor produces the same byte-for-byte output if you unrar and then re-rar these: https://discmaster.textfiles.com/search?format=rar&dedup=ded...

Re: Rars: a Rust RAR implementation, mostly written by LLMs

#89

Neat. FYI your “home” links are broke. And here are 150,000 more unique RAR files if you need to test if your compressor produces the same byte-for-byte output if you unrar and then re-rar these: https://discmaster.textfiles.com/search?format=rar&dedup=ded...

Knowing how compressors work, even official rar may produce an archive with different hash, even within the minor updates.
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