Comment by socalgal2

2 days ago

I love these but I wish they'd disallow the eval thing. I also which they'd added more shortcuts. Like IIRC they have `s` for `Math.sign` but so if they're going to shorten things they could have gone much further. `globalCompositeOperation` etc...

You have to keep in mind that for anything like this, the platform has to exist before the ways to game the rules are thought up. To change things after the platform is up and running makes it a moving target and for something like this a fixed target is intrinsically part of the appeal.

Dwitter used the definition of what Twitter at the time used. The solution of https://beta.dwitter.net/ mitigates the lack of accessibility of the encoding, while keeping the fixed target at the same time introducing a new practical target.

The Math.sin css color encoder were concessions to practicality, there has been much discussion as to whether a Dwitter 2 should simply include additional characters required to the same preconfig and let people do it themselves, and let them use the characters for something else if they can think of something.

I'd like something like this just to see how creative people get in doing that. How small can you make a bit of JavaScript that copies every static method of Math to window?

and creativity is the goal here. No matter how people stretch the system, it can't be denied they have been doing so creatively.

You have to fix the scoring. Blacklisting eval is whack-a-mole forever. If you switch the scoring to use bytes of UTF-8 encoded text, that pretty much aligns everything. There might still be some use for packing data in string literals, but wholesale source code packing would probably mostly stop.

I've been on dwitter.net for many years, and I'm fine with eval. The rules are the rules (or lack of rules).

  • Yea, because no one has ever changed any rules. Every sport has changed rules, lots of games have chagned rules. It's kind of irrelevant. Removing eval and adding new shortcuts would just start a new era of creativity.