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> This is moving goalposts as it has little to do with my original premise. Your original comment was (replying to one) about “decompilation” of binaries. You
by willy_k 2y ago
> This is moving goalposts as it has little to do with my original premise.
Your original comment was (replying to one) about “decompilation” of binaries. You seem to be talking about some fantasy perfect decompilation that gets variable names too, but no such decompilation tool or human-employable method does this, and I would argue that variable names aren’t information so much as they’re implicit context - proper code implies certain variable names (stylistic differences notwithstanding) and vice versa.
- soulofmischief 2y agoMy original comment, in full text: > Some transformations irrecoverably lose information. A recontextualization engine such as an LLM might be able to "recover" some information by comparing it to other code in its training set, but it's still a guess and not all code will have representation in the training set. It is a completely generalized statement about lossy transformations, aka transformations that aren't reversible with a 1 to 1 map. It says nothing in particular about decompilation, or getting variable names. > I would argue that variable names aren’t information so much as they’re implicit context You are free to argue what you want, but that doesn't change reality--variable names are information about the original state before it was irreversibly transformed. Is the information important to you and your current task? Who knows. But my original comment is absolutely correct.