No, they're just storing pieces of pi.
Use the stick as long term storage for your code.
(Fortunately, pi compression is not particularly amenable to one of the other basic "tricks" of fake compression algorithms, which is failing to count filenames or other metadata as part of the compressed data set, if you use them in the decompression algorithm. Pi "compression" is, in practice, a much better data expansion algorithm than a decompression algorithm. So you don't generally have to deal with having to explain how they've still failed even though their file sizes seem smaller.)
This should be the standard answer, along with some probing questions like:
- "So if you can always compress data, what happens when you compress the compressed data over and over? Surely you see this can't always work or everything could be compressed down to 1 bit?"
- "Do you realize that there are 2^N strings with N bits, but fewer strings with less than N bits? Surely you don't think you can always represent N bits in fewer than N bits?" (i.e. something along the lines of the pigeonhole principle)
If that doesn't convince them or they're unwilling to think through those fundamental questions or the implementation, it's a hopeless case that is best left alone.