and then i realized that ALL of the software (which i collected from defunct websites and archived on github) related to it was ancient and after a while of getting tired of using WINE every single time i decided i wanted a cross platform modern equivalent that did everything that several of these different programs did (plus break out some stuff that was now potentially possible with modern computer)
i thought it would be extremely hard because the computer to synth communication is pretty much only via sysex commands (of which the actual wave file encoding protocol was undocumented)
Claude walked me through examining the some of the original software in GHIDRA, and I had a working demo that night.....now im just playing with adding new features to it.
> widespread, cheap AI makes it easier for the average person to learn how things around them work, if they are so inclined.
The example with the synth is excellent. Today that kind of work demands somebody knowledgeable operate the AI harness. In short order, the AI may very well come up with the solution of looking online for example programs to decompile without the user even understanding what that means.
The Terrestrial Federation is at war with Deneb, and the war is conducted by long-range weapons controlled by computers which are expensive and hard to replace. Myron Aub, a low grade Technician, discovers how to reverse-engineer the principles of pencil-and-paper arithmetic by studying the workings of ancient computers which were programmed by human beings, before bootstrapping became the norm—a development which is later dubbed "Graphitics"." [1]
I don't see an AI-as-explainer future where expertise isn't sacrificed en masse.
Capitalism rarely supports a currently economically unproductive alternative for future good reasons.
The recent AI tech layoffs are a warning sign that corporate leaders will happily shoot their company's (and the future's) expertise to pad next quarter's financials and trust in 90% correct, but much cheaper, AI.
I started digging a few times, but, I prefer the "magic".
Hopefully, there will never be a time when at least some folks are not reading books such as:
- On startup processing begins at a known address, and you put the bootloader code over there. Hardware engineers can guarantee this for you.
- Every time you execute an assembly instruction, the program counter either explicitly jumps to a new location or else it just increments by 1. Hardware people can also make this happen as easily as implementing an adder.
Don't get me wrong, there are LOTS of layers between the hardware and most "useful" programs any of us will ever write. But all of them are pretty understandable. They're often not very complicated, just tedious.
Doesn't the one explain the other ? It may be turtles all the way down, but at some point there's a fundamental turtle - be it LEA or CMP ?
They will be exposed to this technology throughout childhood as their brains develop and they will develop unique ways to work with it we don't entirely understand just like GenY with cell phones and GenX with home computers. I think you deeply underestimate how adaptable we are as a species, but if you consider that we've been running the same OS and Bios as a species for the past ~40K years, perhaps you might be more optimistic?
Probably a lesson in there somewhere.
A lot of people in the industry have vested interests in this not being discussed openly so you don't hear too much about it, but the implications are huge.
E.g. a synth has a public key embedded. To change settings, you upload them to the vendor, who blesses them with their private key.
Hacking such a synth requires either jailbreaking the synth, or the vendor losing their key . Both can be mitigated with tamper resistant hardware.
We're well ahead on this path already, I assume AI will accellerate it. This is very bad news for the right to repair.
I wanted to be able to decrypt the files on The Complete New Yorker magazine DVDs. The old software was WinXP only, and crashed by the time you turned to page 3 or 4. It walked me through using Ghidra on the relevant dll, mapped out how it was using Blowfish, what the credentials were that it was passing, and re-implemented all of that in a python script.
Now all the files are in plain pdf.
Right now, it's helping me write an extension to the mkv specification for embedded scripts and modify VLC to be conformant, so I can watch Black Mirror Bandersnatch. Already have a buggy implementation, about 3 days in.
I've also had it add BEP 46 mutable torrent functionality to Transmission (and to some extent, to the WebTorrent library).
These are all well beyond my abilities to do casually, and probably beyond my ability to do even if I spent the next 18 months doing nothing by grinding away at it.
I only replied because I thought it curious that Claude apparently favors Ghidra.
If you want the Rolling Stone or Playboy archives decrypted, ReconSuave on github has tools to do those. I got tired of waiting for him to do The New Yorker though.
I’ve definitely kicked myself a few times for not posting about them sooner, but the fear of pissing off CondeNast tempered my willingness to show off
https://gist.github.com/NoMoreNicksLeft/d3a4a59c7b4de0cdef1e...
I'll have a more proper github repo at some point, but there are bugs I was working through. Some issues are bloated up ridiculously... a 9mb djvu file shouldn't become a 110mb pdf. Most issues will work well though. Hope it helps.
Don't get me wrong, I think AI can do some surprising things, but with stuff like this, often it just stole the code and the steps without attribution, it didn't figure it out.
There'll probably be a blog post detailing exactly how to do this somewhere and Claude just copied the steps and code.
And worse, Google search would have found it 10 years ago, but Google search today would claim there are no results?
I think incredibly specific stuff like this often won't pass the 'did Claude just steal this?' test when you dig into it.
One piece of gear, Claude found a hidden and highly useful diagnostic screen. This took a few iterations too. It found the existence of it based on just running “strings” against the firmware image but needed a few rounds of me going “I tried what you suggested but this is what happened instead”. Searching Google, DuckDuckGo, and GitHub for any of the strings that were on that screen or any of the named constants associated with that screen in reverse engineered source led to exactly zero hits.
More entertaining, Claude and I together also nailed down the source of a PTP synchronization bug in a piece of equipment a few months ago using the main UI .exe (written in pascal, of course), an ARM Linux image from the real-time controller in the box, and some pcaps from it interacting with other devices. The vendor released a patch a few days ago, without me having reported the bug.
One day a few years ago my dad came by and was admiring it (it was a QS8) and asked to borrow it so he could play piano again.
I, of course, said sure, but was feeling a little salty about it inside, because I wanted it to play, that's why I had it all set up.
Anyway, about a year went by and I asked him about it to see if he was done with it.
He said "oh that thing? I gave that away, was just taking up space"
-.-
[0] https://mforney.org/blog/2026-05-28-patching-my-guitar-amps-... [1] https://schwung.dev
Claude needs good variable names a lot less than humans do, so renaming/typedefing doesn't seem to be as necessary.
I have an DigiTech GNX3000 effects pedal board - a digital modeling "workstation" that needs the aged Windows native software or Gdigi to make the most of.
At best, the experience with gdigi was passable; raw access to the patches and controls, the ability to control it from the laptop, etc.
In an hour or so, I had a functionally superior webmidi version up and running in Vercel using their v0 code. It kicked off a wave of subscriptions and referral chasing.
I made it a template - because there are so many gnx3k users out there: https://v0.app/templates/digitech-gnx3000-sysex-tool-GC5LzXA...