Hilariously, "os as g" adds one more byte than it saves, since os is only used 4 times but the alias takes 5 extra bytes to save 4. And "socket as s" comes out

Hilariously, "os as g" adds one more byte than it saves, since os is only used 4 times but the alias takes 5 extra bytes to save 4. And "socket as s" comes out even. If you wanted real savings, you'd use "d=bytes.fromhex" instead of defining a function -- 17 bytes!! And d('00') -> b'\0' for -2 bytes. We could easily get the byte count down further by using base64.b85decode instead of bytes.fromhex (-70 or so), but ultimately we're optimizing a meaningless metric, as you mention.