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.
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.
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.
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!
Oh man, I did fall into that rabbit hole.
I took my old mp3 player Onn-x5 and just finished a custom firmware for it.
Explore and reverse engineer it just from connecting it to my computer.
Instead of targeting extremely ancient hardware that almost no-one uses, what if you got Claude to reverse engineer useful closed source hardware and software?
Both Apple and Nvidia are the most hostile and have the most locked-down heavy hardware and software and now Claude can reverse engineer and build a driver to get Nvidia GPUs working on Intel Macs [0] and it can unlock the ability to pair an Apple watch with Android phones. [1]
Now it makes even more sense to target reverse engineering CUDA, Nvidia firmware blobs and Apple software to finally make them run better on Linux without waiting for those vendors to fix their bugs or deliberately slowing their own hardware down.
Not that simple but yes, even as a decades long "macOSX" fan I would love to see the Mac finally unshackled. Maybe Apple hardware could become a bit more like the Apple II era again after all? Asahi fully reverse engineered down to the Metal... it would be a dream.
Because, frankly, older hardware is just much simpler and also has much more widely available information about it. It’s just easier. Not that you can’t try, but it’s going to be harder.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
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
bro, music people are buying switches - like layer 2 switches - for better audio quality.
Someone please do "smart" TVs. You have the chance to remove ads and botnets ("residential proxies") from millions of devices.
I’m doing headphones … the cheapish Chinese white box ones….
I was hoping someone would do color printers inkjet and laser.
Oh man, I did fall into that rabbit hole. I took my old mp3 player Onn-x5 and just finished a custom firmware for it. Explore and reverse engineer it just from connecting it to my computer.
How timely, I just now pointed Claude at my work laptops MIPI driver and told it to figure it out.
Instead of targeting extremely ancient hardware that almost no-one uses, what if you got Claude to reverse engineer useful closed source hardware and software?
Both Apple and Nvidia are the most hostile and have the most locked-down heavy hardware and software and now Claude can reverse engineer and build a driver to get Nvidia GPUs working on Intel Macs [0] and it can unlock the ability to pair an Apple watch with Android phones. [1]
Now it makes even more sense to target reverse engineering CUDA, Nvidia firmware blobs and Apple software to finally make them run better on Linux without waiting for those vendors to fix their bugs or deliberately slowing their own hardware down.
No more excuses.
[0] https://github.com/nullmoth/nvidia-macos-driver
[1] https://www.androidauthority.com/apple-watch-companion-pair-...
Not that simple but yes, even as a decades long "macOSX" fan I would love to see the Mac finally unshackled. Maybe Apple hardware could become a bit more like the Apple II era again after all? Asahi fully reverse engineered down to the Metal... it would be a dream.
Because, frankly, older hardware is just much simpler and also has much more widely available information about it. It’s just easier. Not that you can’t try, but it’s going to be harder.