I've been having a silent panic attack for the last 3 days, and I don't really have anyone to talk to that would understand my concern.
I run a small pro audio company, we make guitar pedals and audio effects mostly. My current key objective is building up a processor similar to the Eventide H90, that would compete on having top-notch algorithms for reverb, delay, chorus etc. we already have single-effect pedals on the market that are very successful.
In the past 72 hours I have ONE-SHOT decompiled 3 of my main competitors products, including the Strymon Big Sky. I just... have their award winning algorithms now. Like, I could in theory just stick them in a box and resell them. It took one prompt and 3 hours for opus 5.5 to work that out.
The lexicon 224 then got added. While Claude was prepping It found someone else had already done the same thing 1 weeks earlier and dumped the result on GitHub, so it just stole that code and saved some time. It took all of 20 minutes to do the entire Ursa Major product range.
And yes, I've tested them all - and they all sound phenomenal. I specifically asked Claude to first build an emulator and execute the original firmware/ROM so I could be certain it wasn't just making "something similar" but actually executing the same code. Then I asked it to convert it into a self contained c++ library and compare the result to the emulator.
The problem is, everyone can now do this to my products as well. Basically, anyone with a Claude subscription can now rip of any best-in-class algorithm from any competitor. While I'm not going to do that, I know there are 30 Chinese companies that happily would.
The moat of hardware effects processors has just vanished.
I'm guessing the Lexicon was mine: https://github.com/joelanders/reflecticon-224
It was a fun project because it predates DSP chips by a couple years (1978). So there's an 8080 host driving some DSP boards made out of 7400 series chips.
Bio of the designer with a photo of him prototyping it: https://www.davidgriesinger.com/biographies/
I haven't written it up yet, that part is still hard :)
I paid someone on Upwork to trace the schematics into KiCad. Had LLM agents turn those into Verilog models. Lots of little mistakes had to be found and fixed at this point, it took months...
It seems like agents are a lot better at transcribing and grokking schematics now compared to 6 months ago, so it might be much easier now.
Agree that consequences for the future seem depressing...
Speaking as a hardware engineer, the moat did not vanish. You have simply assumed you were on the right side of the moat this whole time when in reality you dug half a trench and threw a glass of water in it.
If your firmware is open for someone to reverse engineer now, it has always been open. The real moat is firmware security, encryption, secure locked down hardware. Nobody, not even LLMs, can reverse your firmware if they can't obtain a cleartext copy of it.
You must use microcontrollers with security features, encrypted firmware, secure key stores. If you don't, you never had a moat in the first place. Your only security is the belief that it's too much effort to reverse your product. Security through obscurity is the moat that has vanished and everyone has been screaming for decades that this is not secure by any stretch of the imagination.
Reverse engineering of audio effects can be done completely independently of the hardware that generates it.
What if the audio effect is:
Take an audio stream, apply STT, interpret the result as an algorithm, run the algorithm, take its output, apply TTS, then send that audio stream to the output.
Sounds like it would be susceptible to how they’d reverse engineer LLMs using distillation.
The several seconds of latency would be fun.
I think you are torturing the analogy.
A moat isn’t a perfect defense. It’s a delay tactic that keeps the enemy from coming right up to your wall and climbing it or breaking it down. While you defend your moat, you whittle down the attackers so even when they do cross it they can be more easily defeated.
Moats and high walls became obsolete when canon fire became common.
Claude isn’t just a faster way to cross the moat, it’s gunpowder, and with it the rules have fundamentally changed.
Firmware security is useless if your product can be bought tested and reverse engineered through multiple trials. So long as you have something that can be understood and used by humans, you have something that can be reverse engineered.
Having the code accessible makes it easier, but just having both input and output is sufficient.
> Moats and high walls became obsolete when canon fire became common.
Moats and high walls, sure. But to this day, the absolute best way to stop any attacker is to dig a trench (most minus water) and to build low parapets, primarily of dirt, sand, barbed wire and ideally some anti tank stuff.
The moat never really went away.
How does your moat do against a B-52?
You may be missing the point, unsure if purposefully or not, but you can't just rent B-52 for $250 a month.
Can't help but feel that AI is the killing of the golden goose. We thought it would kill jobs, but it may just end up killing entire industries.
Intellectual property incentivized many and laid many golden eggs, but why would someone toil to create a new algorithm to solve a problem if someone else is just going to steal it in hours?
But who knows, maybe imploding the software industry is a good thing. I may lose my house in the process, but I think we could all get back to touching a little more grass.
it will also help with the environment by stopping a lot of forced obsolescence for no reason (apple rolls out a new OS every year, then magically wacom stops supporting perfectly working tablets in their new driver versions)
> why would someone toil to create a new algorithm to solve a problem if someone else is just going to steal it in hours
When that happens it shouldn't be forgotten that people (broadly speaking) chose this. AI proponents lit intellectual property on fire out of self-interest.
The technology is powerful enough that it was bound to happen regardless. If it didn't happen here in the US, it would have happened somewhere that IP laws aren't respected.
That's an age-old rationalization for everything.
I never said it was justified, just observed that it would happen and is happening, regardless of what "AI proponents" want to happen. IP law, like many laws regarding business practices, have and always had varying regulatory environments around the world when countries find it advantageous for their economies to have those environments.
Regardless of whether or not we agree with it, adherence to our idea of IP law is not something the whole world agrees upon, even before LLMs.
> That's an age-old rationalization for everything.
Sometimes they're actually true.
Repeatedly tell people climate change is a serious problem for over half a century -> hand wringing.
Make solar panels cheap -> renewables become 99.2% of net new electricity generation in the US.
You need something that looks like the second one.
I don't think that's the rebuttal you think it is.
GP's argument is usually used in the sense of "if I hadn't done it, someone else would, so I might as well do it and the end result will be the same, except then I'll reap the rewards".
It's a crap justification for doing something unethical. But in many cases, even the unethical ones, it's also true, and I think in this case it is too. If the US had magically shut down every AI lab on day one, and banned all AI research, that wouldn't have stopped this train. Probably would have slowed it down, but not enough to really matter.
> but why would someone toil to create a new algorithm to solve a problem if someone else is just going to steal it in hours?
I think it goes deeper than that, in that the AI era will eventually force us to rethink how we value each other. It used to be economic scarcity: I provide a service that very few people can provide, therefore I make a lot of money (supply and demand.) Now we're moving to a place where most anybody can do anything, so our value system needs to evolve, as well. Instead of valuing scarcity, perhaps we should value personal creativity and self-expression. Kind of like paying money for a concert, or for someone's personal painting, even though you can listen online, or you can just have AI generate the same painting. It comes more from wanting to support people than to supply scarcity-based demand.
I think this idea makes many peoples' eyes roll, but IMO that's a testament to where we are today as a society. Most interactions get reduced to just business transactions without the humanity in it, and that's where our problems come from.
That's a nice vision but if AI and robots end up replacing most jobs then we're first going to suffer a total collapse in living standards across the world, until we replace capitalism at least. When the economy no longer relies on labour people won't have anything to trade in exchange for basic necessities.
You only have to look at the current situation in China to see that the problem is not capitalism, or communism, at least not by itself:
https://www.wsj.com/world/china-economy-gen-z-f9058941
https://www.economist.com/china/2019/11/14/homelessness-has-...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Si2zT-wCs3c
We all know that "real" communist societies like North Korea are worse, much, much worse. In fact within China how bad this is varies enormously. If you're in a "rope village" somewhere deep inland, having the finest house in the entire city is arguably worse than homelessness in Beijing, but the party won't let you leave except as homeless, because you're allocated a "Household" (Hukou) and you aren't allowed to leave.
And, of course, half the problem is the very structure of the communist party itself: local officials hide the problem, because if they don't, they'll be purged or at the very least won't see promotions, ever. Which means that the police will be using violence to hide the problem rather than fix it.
AI can provide incredible wealth, or immeasurable misery, in both capitalist and communist societies. That is not what makes the difference, that is just how political parties like to frame themselves and so the argument why you should choose "left" or "right".
Capitalism and private home ownership can certainly provide housing, but if you go too far or not far enough in private ownership and "protecting capital" they won't. And communism can certainly fix homelessness (the Soviets did, for example), except nowadays they just won't.
AI will provide more tools for people with capital, which primarily will be the government. Whether that solves, say, homelessness is a choice, in either system.
You missed the point and went on a tangent about random countries today.
I don't claim to have a solution for what comes after but it is certain that capitalism will collapse if we ever see significant job loss due to AI and robotics.
> if AI and robots end up replacing most jobs
The only way AI and robots end up replacing most jobs is if they can do them for less money than people can. Which in turn means that those things become less expensive, since that's the thing causing suppliers to do it.
So there are really three possibilities here. First, we get robots that can e.g. build houses and housing scarcity goes down, so now you don't need to make much money to afford rent. Second, robots still can't build housing, so then you get a job building housing and have a job. Or third, robots still can't build housing but we have a bunch of rent-seeking incumbents that won't allow you to get a job doing that either, because they're trying to keep rents high or artificially limit the supply of trade labor.
It's the third one that really screws you and is the one that we need to prevent.
I don’t want a house built by people who are just trying to get a paycheck because they got laid off from their cushy office jobs.
This was a huge problem before AI due to Amazon and global internet marketplaces. Why spend R&D dollars developing an amazing product when Chinese knockoffs will show up 6 months later? I wonder how many great consumer products don't exist because there's no way to recoup your R&D costs and develop a healthy market.
Imagine if there were no intellectual protections for pharmaceuticals. The government would have to take over R&D.
Intellectual property is terrible for society on the whole.
You could just as easily argue "why are 200 companies burning through people and natural resources to come up with the exact same thing and then marketing it as different" as you can say "why would anyone create anything without the ability to making oodles of money by restricting imitation".
Just stop this nonsense. Intellectual property is good. Free open source is not good. Anything that is free while take a lot of effort is essentially killing potential jobs. Wake up.
In a society rich enough to be able to provide for everyone (which it is) and where food and housing are abundant (which they should be), then things being free isn't bad because you aren't worried about making money to live.
You are the one who needs to wake up from the assumption that the only way to live is to hoard your intellectual products instead of imagining a society where you can stop having to compete on that level.
Not only that, rent seeking destroys jobs as a result of artificial scarcity and hoarding.
You pay $1000 to a monopolist instead of $100 to a small business and then having the other $900 to spend on whatever you want, like patronizing 9 other small businesses and actually getting something more for your money. The $900 in monopoly rent goes to Wall St instead of Main St and is used to e.g. bid up housing costs so people can't afford to buy a house.
The incumbents lobby for restrictive zoning or professional licensing gatekeeping to keep those rents high, which means fewer jobs doing construction.
It doesn't help you for huge corporations to get more of your money.
> but why would someone toil to create a new algorithm to solve a problem if someone else is just going to steal it in hours?
The same reason I have open sourced every line of code I have written in the last several years, even new inventions. Because it is good for society, and good for my reputation to show what I am capable of which has been very good for my career.
Better to be the one to open source it before someone else does.
The only business model left is convenience tax. Save people time and they give you money.
IDK about the grass, bro, I've mostly just seen a lot of pavement since I lost my SWE job
Patents will become the norm with AI. Of course the average joe will not be able to afford it.
Intellectual property has rarely ever been "the golden goose", despite the anecdotes of the few Henry Fords that exist.
Throughout history, the golden goose has typically been owning capital, and having market reach (see: advertising, the silk road).
No matter how amazing your IP is, if you can't produce it at economically viable scales, and if you can't put it in front of people who will buy it, then you have nothing. So venture capital comes along, buys you out, and takes all your future profits in exchange for the "risk".
On the other side of the coin, there's open source software developers, PhD's publishing papers for free, and your local musicians that like to play at events just for funsies.
I mean, imagine the kind of world we'd live in if medicine were focused strictly on profitable moats instead of open research, and... oh. Right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin
> but why would someone toil to create a new algorithm to solve a problem if someone else is just going to steal it in hours?
same reason I spent my entire career so far writing open-source code that anyone can copy ? (it's GPL, but imagine 100% companies actually caring about that). Ideas can't be owned.
I hope your post history doesn't link back to your company or real identity because you probably violated some TOS and I'm not sure it's smart to name your competitors and openly admit you're thinking about repackaging the code you just stole from them.
I don't care either way but depending on where you live this might get you in trouble
Indeed. I'd like to remind everyone that with LLMs it's increasingly simple to build quite a good profile of someone just from their social media posts.
But that’s a good thing. Instead of someone being able to just lock the knowledge away, now we can all have it. And that means we can make better things.
It sucks if you’re a rent seeker, but I’m enjoying this post-IP world. I don’t care who reads my source code anymore, code is disposable. It’s expertise that matters now.
The problem is that many of us seek employment from rent seekers. It's all great in theory, but not fun in the in-between times if you're trying to pay your own rent and find placement and nobody wants to bring anyone new on board because they can't find ways to make it profitable.
> It's all great in theory, but not fun in the in-between times if you're trying to pay your own rent.
To add to this, the Second Industrial Revolution started in 1870 and the 40 hour workweek became common starting around 1920. That's basically a lifetime.
If an asset doesn't exist to hold value, how do you "protect" expertise? How do you differentiate it? How do you justify investment if someone else will steal anything of value you create?
For a short while, it's great, but in the long run, it makes it difficult to financially invest in building software with either time or money.
> Instead of someone being able to just lock the knowledge away, now we can all have it
Uhh I think you're missing a tiny 3 trillion dollar detail. I understand though, something that small and inconsequential is easy to overlook.
> It sucks if you’re a rent seeker, but I’m enjoying this post-IP world
Oh yes, this new world is terrible for rent seekers. It's like the kum-bah-yah free software world Stallman might have imagined. Information wants to be free and all. Can't stop the signal. Very counterculture. Like the Adobe clone apps.
Except for the closed SOTA model weights, out of reach hardware, and the resulting $200 subscription rent now paid readily both by anybody trying to create something new, and anybody who wants to rip it off. That particular flavor of rent seeking is booming.
I myself am a "rent-seeker" in an alternative sense of "I seek a way to pay for my own continued shelter via my creative output" and it definitely seems like it's gonna suck for me.
It's fantastic for the rent seeking AI providers. They can squeeze users any which way the want and if anyone so much as utters a peep of complaint, they can be banned for life without recourse.
Everybody's moats have all vanished. It's getting to the point credentialism is people's only remaining leverage: only reason many people still have jobs is they have some professional credential that the AIs legally can't have. Doctors, lawyers, engineers whose signatures matter and who are liable for whatever happens. And even in those cases it's only a matter of time really.
Compute is the only true moat. Ownership of high performance computers will be the deciding factor in the future. Haves and have-nots will be determined by this.
Then you will compete on different things, i guess. For audio hardware, the physicality and experience of using it is important. Have better knobs, better usability, and the best algorithms!
Also, I guess with agents it should be possible to explore new algorithms more efficiently. You may discover something cool! And yes, anyone can copy it, but you will still have first mover advantage. Also, in music tech brands matter a lot. People love getting stuff from small “artisan” companies.
Do you think Chinese manufactures can't clone the hardware? Do you think they can't provide a premium product/experience? They most certainly can and do.
Just be different. Just create a brand. Oh if only it were that easy!
Boss still exists and sells pedals even though Behringer has made a $30 (more in the USA now thanks to tariffs) clone of virtually all of their guitar pedals. One of those clones (as opposed to the original) even being the best selling pedal ever.
Don't worry, you'll be making hardware pedals with webassembly and remote attestation soon enough, and we'll be back to the status quo.
Why don’t you do as much of this as possible for the next six months and make the best product you can.
It sounds like it will go faster if you use coding agents.
Anyone copying you will have to do the same.
Perhaps spend a month with your agent making it harder for other agents to reverse engineer?
That really must be scary. I'd hope at least in the world of music/audiophilia (where gold plates hdmi cables rule) you could focus on the upper ends of the market? Even if the sound is similar you hopefully will have an audience that appreciated the fit and finish and high quality components. Surely will be a challenge but when I see teardowns from China they almost always cheap out with paper caps and such. And while it may be exhausting perhaps you can turn it to your favor (where IP permits) to increase your product range? Godspeed though!
It'll be kind of nice that DSP guitar pedals will be cloneable like old-school analog guitar pedals.
I guess patents are becoming more important now ... :(
They never weren't important. What's important now is being prepared to act on them, which is expensive.
One solution is to encrypt the firmware and keep the decryption keys on the hardware side, preferably in something that’s tamper resistant.
It’s not ideal. It has serious drawbacks. It makes development and updates a PITA. But it does make it much harder to decompile your firmware.
Even so, if you can manage to get a agent into the loop of "change variable > inspect results > do change > repeat", you can replicate everything from server-side game servers to audio effects, as long as you manage to get the data into a format they can either "visually" inspect, or inspect by data. For audio, I've had success replicating synth sounds and effects by giving them MIDI access to analog hardware, spectrograms and a suite of other unix tools.
The tricky part is figuring out the workflow, once that's in place, you can encrypt the protocol itself as much as you want, the output (audio, video, JSON, whatever) has to go somewhere, and that can be captured and replicated.
Or just ask Claude what is the best way to protect your IP. It should know its capabilities.
I wouldn't be surprised if the next version of Opus or whatever Anthropic has just eliminates these capabilities. I mean, we got DMCA shoved down our throats. What's stopping them from doing something similar again, I mean, we have a 70 or 70+ year copyright laws now, lol!
A lot of the security features on microcontrollers are poorly implemented. Here's an example where someone recovered the encryption key on a consumer device with encrypted firmware: https://garyodernichts.blogspot.com/2024/10/looking-into-nin... . The microcontroller supports firmware encryption with a 128-bit AES key, which gets written to 4 32-bit write-only registers. Because it's split up like this, it's possible to find 1/4 of the key by writing every possible value to one of the registers and checking that the output matches, before repeating with the other 3 registers. This means that the number of possible combinations to check is reduced from (2^128) to (4*(2^32)), which can be brute forced in a few hours.
I agree it’s not great, and finding an MCU that does this well is challenging. But that may just become a hardware design constraint going forward.
It’s not clear to me what else one can do to protect this kind of IP if you want or need to do the processing on-device.
The Chinese were already hacking your firmware if it was worth hacking at all. The only thing that's changed is that now you can, too. What's not to like?
Before the Singularity: build good products, offer them at a fair price and support them well, succeed at business.
After the Singularity: build good products, offer them at a fair price and support them well, succeed at business.
Already for some years. You can now buy decent metal (enclosure) guitar pedal stompboxes for 5 USD… who can produce for that? The only thing that counts is ideas.
No product is now safe. Everything from photoshop to office suite to harvey are being reverse engineered.
Out of curiosity, did you just use vanilla Claude Code with Opus 5.5, or did you use this: https://github.com/morluto/rea?
everybody cloned stuff before. You keep your clients because you offer more than the lowest available price: the human touch (support, design, quality, problem solving)
LLMs only appear to do that, if they do it effectively is because you can.
You should talk to a lawyer. And not post something like this publicly
Imagine if your comment is part of Exhibit A in a lawsuit.
Maths are just maths again!
Enough with patents, NDAs and trade secrets.
Seems "information wants to be free" wins yet again. To bad we don't have any strong political leaders in the world that could run on such platform, I guess in 2-3 decades the tide will start turning the other way again.
I wonder what the downstream effects of that will be. I imagine we may see some big lawsuits soon, meant to scare off the RE trend.
I don't really think software was ever the moat with these kinds of products? The moat with hardware products has always been access to electrical engineering talent and access to cheap assembly/manufacturing. And marketing. And the $$ in your pocket to fund all the above without having sales yet.
I have written probably a dozen software synthesizers over the last 20 years, for fun, never profit. I would have preferred those to be hardware products. But I lack all of the above. As do most.
I have worked in several embedded companies. The software that runs on them was often considered to be the least important part of the expense chain despite involving the most amount of total work hours.
The only solution is reputation and selling to the public domain, instead of to individuals:
if people like your stuff, you'll have a reputation because of what you made in the past, then you can offer to release your next project to the public domain if some crowdfunding goal is met.
Man this thread is jam packed with sociopaths who don't feel empathy.
That sucks that your business and mental well-being are threatened by AI. It's a scary time for everyone. I hope you figure it out.
From "Simulate cassette tape audio profiles using FFmpeg" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49062870 :
> Neural Amp Modeler (is open source)
> JUCE on embedded, Rust DSP
> A board of guitar pedals with IDK one USB-A and a USB-C adapter with OSC and MIDI support; USB MIDI trololo pedals
There are multiple products like this on Amazon+Shopify w/ linked inventory now
This is interesting. I don't know if this is just cope, but it makes me think of how the schematics of a Soldano SLO100 are readily available. A true feat of engineering. Anyone could build one because the information is out there. Why don't they?
I know that it's much easier to get JLC to make a board and then flash some stolen firmware on it than it is to build a tube amplifier, but musicians are weird creatures.
All I know is, I would rather be in the before times.
bro, music people are buying switches - like layer 2 switches - for better audio quality.
you're confusing musicians with "audiophiles"