It might be that GZIP isn’t actually a good format with which to try to compress this data. I would think a compression algorithm that expects a rather large 8 byte character space wouldn’t be very suitable for a 4-bit space
I got a little nerd sniped by this. I wrote a program that takes an input (/usr/share/dict/words on Debian 12, specifically), and compresses it with gzip and Zstandard, and also expands its binary representation (by replacing each 1 bit with A and each 0 bit with B) and compresses that. The result is:
gzip expgz zstd expzstd original
263120 421278 252449 389004 985084
So unlike in the article, expansion + compression is at least better than the original. The ratios are (smaller # better; the opposite of how most compression algorithms advertise their performance, but what the original article used): 0.27, 0.42, 0.25, 0.39. gzip and Zstandard aren't a lot different in either case. Whatever patterns that the Javascript weirdifier uses is less obvious to compression algorithms in general than just bitwise substitution.
