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Ask HN: Fable hacked my piano, can I release the results?

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Re: Ask HN: Fable hacked my piano, can I release the results?

#131

Post by wombatpm »

Doohickey-d wrote: post #32
Giefo6ah wrote: post #15

If you live in the USA, the "decoy notes" may be considered an "effective technical measure" from the "Digital Millennium Copyright Act". If you live in Europe, this restriction may be considered "gatekeeping" and exempted by the Digital Markets Act. Don't bring attention to yourself by asking for permission. Publish your codec, and if the company cares about this they will send a cease and desist. If you want the wo…

If you don't want to be responsible for it, another way is to just publish it anonymously: make a GitHub that isn't attached to your real name etc, perhaps using a one-off disposable email address, and put it there. Then you don't have to think about what the lawyers think. Worst case it'll get taken down, but by that point it'll likely be popular enough that there'll be plenty of copies. [Pirate flag emoji here]

Why bother publishing the code? Anyone with LLM access can recreate it. Instead write up your findings on how it works. Publish that in a blog, submit it to Wikipedia and Reddit. Player piano did security through obscurity. Now make it less obscure.

Re: Ask HN: Fable hacked my piano, can I release the results?

#133

Post by RRRA »

I'm currently toying with a similar process which I think falls under the interoperability exemption:

- Get an apk online, you haven't accepted a EULA.

- Run jadx to get some code to work with

- Ask Claude to extract the protocol specification cleanly for a Bluetooth device with capabilities etc.

- Use Claude to implement a version as a TUI/CLI in go, rust, whatever.

I get to use a device I own with a local Bluetooth connection from my machine, maybe Home Assistant. I do not contact any online services (there are none anyway in that case).

Since it's to avoid getting locked in with proprietary OS, it's a clean room reversing through a spec and an LLM produced a non copyrightable output... Can I just release this however I want? Probably a basic MIT or CC0, whatever...

Re: Ask HN: Fable hacked my piano, can I release the results?

#135

Post by jmpman »

reilly3000 wrote: post #33

Gymnopedie No 1 was one of the pieces I learned as a primary school student as a mediocre and undedicated pianist. The reverse engineering is impressive and generally useful, but really learning that piece all the way through could be even more rewarding, then you can use 10 fingers and two feet to make it sound like YOUR ultimate version, not just your words. Perhaps Claude truly nailed it in your taste and you want…

The funny thing is - I'm virtually tone deaf and can't play the piano. It's my wife's piano, but when we bought it, I had the player system installed, so I could get some enjoyment out of it.

Re: Ask HN: Fable hacked my piano, can I release the results?

#136

Post by orangecat »

kbcool wrote: post #114
doawoo wrote: post #70

Did you really need to ask a massive LLM and burn tokens on this?? A few minutes of googling has revealed a huge amount of this information just laying out in the open, and, a whole tool to author your own files that someone sells as independent software! ( https://www.kinura.net/mid2pianocd/ )

Yes. How else could the LLM even begin to do what it did otherwise. Not a criticism of you, just a place for a rant but I still find it incredible when people think they're doing something novel when really they're just reassembling existing work. What really reinforced this for me was that I recently vibe coded a home assistant addon that, as it turns out, there was a github project that did almost the same thing. T…

How else could the LLM even begin to do what it did otherwise.

Are we really still having the "LLMs can only regurgitate what was in their training data" argument? Where did the counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture come from?

Re: Ask HN: Fable hacked my piano, can I release the results?

#138

Post by jmpman »

doawoo wrote: post #70

Did you really need to ask a massive LLM and burn tokens on this?? A few minutes of googling has revealed a huge amount of this information just laying out in the open, and, a whole tool to author your own files that someone sells as independent software! ( https://www.kinura.net/mid2pianocd/ )

I'd found this code as well, and in a previous chat, Fable pointed me to it but first, I have a $100/month Claude subscription, and typically just barely run out every week, so I throw tokens at just about anything. Second, I'd come across that code, but it's windows software, not open source. Third, the encoder isn't anything exciting, and not really a concern except that the Fable version offers the ability to include the decoy notes. Finally, I literally just wrote "Yes, please write that encoder" when fable asked if I want it to "Bigger picture: since the Prodigy plays this format over Bluetooth, an encoder that writes your own MIDI into the right channel this way is probably the missing link for the MP3-to-piano project. I can build a test file if you want to try it."

Re: Ask HN: Fable hacked my piano, can I release the results?

#139

Post by Hizonner »

If it's legal, you can do it. Figuring out whether it's legal is a giant error-prone jurisdiction-dependent pain in the ass.

Even if it were illegal, you could have done it by releasing anonymously (on edit, and reworking the code to remove Fable's fingerprints)... if you hadn't first blown it by publicly posted a traceable question.

Re: Ask HN: Fable hacked my piano, can I release the results?

#140

Post by jmpman »

kbcool wrote: post #114
doawoo wrote: post #70

Did you really need to ask a massive LLM and burn tokens on this?? A few minutes of googling has revealed a huge amount of this information just laying out in the open, and, a whole tool to author your own files that someone sells as independent software! ( https://www.kinura.net/mid2pianocd/ )

Yes. How else could the LLM even begin to do what it did otherwise. Not a criticism of you, just a place for a rant but I still find it incredible when people think they're doing something novel when really they're just reassembling existing work. What really reinforced this for me was that I recently vibe coded a home assistant addon that, as it turns out, there was a github project that did almost the same thing. T…

I had performed a quick GitHub search and not found any code. It certainly didn't have these decoy notes documented on its own. It only found them because I provided it a known Erik Satie piece, which has a specific number of notes, and it dug in to figure out what the excess notes were.
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