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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31957 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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I've posted about this idea before, but it's still relevant: someone should create a code-to-book encoder/decoder. Imagine if you had the following Python code:

def bubbleSort(arr):

    n = len(arr)

    for i in range(n-1):

        for j in range(n-i-1):

            if arr[j] > arr[j + 1]:

                arr[j], arr[j + 1] = arr[j + 1], arr[j]

You could rewrite it in a human-readable, deterministic and rigorous way as something like:

Create a new function named "bubbleSort" which has "arr" as a parameter.

Within that, assign the variable "n" to the value returned by the function "len" when it is passed "arr" as an argument.

Make a for loop with index "i" and the iterable returned by "range" when it is passed "n-1" as an argument.

Within that, make a for loop with index "j" and the iterable returned by "range" when it is passed "n-i-1" as an argument.

Within that, make a check testing the truth of the following statement:

the "j"th index of sequence "arr" is greater than the "j+1"th index of the sequence "arr"

If the previous statement is true, assign the variables "j"th index of sequence "arr", and "j+1"th index of the sequence "arr" to the value of the "j+1"th index of sequence "arr" and the "j"th index of the sequence "arr", respectively.

This concludes the if check initiated three paragraphs ago, the for loop initiated four paragraphs ago, the for loop initiated five paragraphs ago, and the function definition initiated seven paragraphs ago.

You could then publish it in .epub format and (hopefully) gain First Amendment protections because it's human-readable instructions. Someone else could download it and pass it to a program that knows "Create a new function named" translates to "def" and all the rest.

I think similar trick was already used to bypass US export limitations for strong cryptography

Export control bypass was done with printouts for long code and a t-shirt for short.

DVD decryption was the code that was most memorably made human readable and published in song form. It's weird that I can't find the song on YouTube, though. I presume that's just because it is (and I am...) too old, but I wonder if DVD manufacturers are actually still trying to fight that lost battle.

I think this argument gets more fuzzy as AI like ChatGPT gets better at writing code from English text. (I asked ChatGPT to do exactly as written above and attached the output as an img here). As it Chat-bots like this get better, the clever hacks as you call them will get much more intertwined with general sit down and read coding books. Cause a simple translation into the Chat-bot will generate you the code you want to see.

/images/1670737778046671.webp

Here's a very trivial and absolutely unclear case: literate programming.

Consider the style of Jupyter notebook in which one produces a document, intended for human consumption (i.e. full of explanatory markdown cells) but which also has executable code cells.

If you publish the notebook under the belief that people will execute it, then you would not be protected. Intent doesn't really care about how direct or indirect you make the implementation; all that changes is the difficulty of proving it.

There's no bright line here at all. Give the right programmer a bunch of machine code (just hex numbers), and they can read it and tell you what it does. Perhaps laboriously, but the same is true of Ancient Greek.

Literate programming is also executable.

Take any jupyter notebook, click "restart run all" and it re-executes the code cells.

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