Love it! It's entirely inapplicable and useless to me but it embodies the spirit of Show HN and what the spirit of programming in the 80s and 90s was.

I have a use for this: A somewhat portable one-liner to go in my waybar/sway/i3 configs!

As always with these admirable hacks, I feel compelled to point out these are not really ELF executables but just small files you can trick the x86_64 Linux kernel into loading.

I mean they're very clever and legit and kudos to the people who develop these exploits, but they're not ELF.

301 bytes! The base64 one-liner install is a nice flex. Accepting an infinite loop when energy_full doesn't exist is peak code golf, perfectly reasonable when every byte counts. Is there a writeup on the assembly somewhere?

It doesn't even look like particularly optimised Asm (could immediately spot a few savings, despite how horrible GAS syntax is to read...), but is definitely not "compiler slop"[1] either, which shows just how inefficient the majority of programs actually are. Of course even the ELF header takes up a significant amount of space, but this reminds me of how PC magazines would print short listings of utilities like this, often a few dozen up to a few hundred bytes at most --- in DOS .COM format, which is headerless and thus pure machine instructions.

[1] In the late 80s and early 90s, the battle between those writing handwritten Asm and those using compiled HLLs has many similarities to AI-generated vs non-AI code today.

Love this kind of tiny, over‑engineered hack—totally impractical, but pure Show HN energy.