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Comment by pen2l | Hacker News Reader

Created a few years ago by Jean-Marc Valin of xiph/mozilla (who by the way is also the author of Opus codec among other things): https://gitlab.xiph.org/xiph/rnnoise/

Overview of RNNoise from the horse's mouth is here: https://jmvalin.ca/demo/rnnoise/

Used as a Wasm module! In some ways the web is becoming more opaque. Is this the future then, a hodgepodge of binaries doing things behind the scenes? Though in this case it happens to be OSS, and it may well be a moot point -- backend is already a blackbox to the enduser, now parts of frontend are blackboxes. The practical implication is probably just that some measure of customizability is gone.

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Is this a troll comment? Yes, wasm works based on a compiled binary, just like any other program written in a compiled language in the past 50 years. You try to suggest that everyday users of the web are just going into the js sources of webpages and understand whats going on. With the plethora of libraries, frameworks and static optimization used in todays websites, normal people can't really dissect the inner workings of a website just by looking at the code. That's why we have tools like request analyzers etc which all would still work with compiled libraries.

Compiled code has existed for half a century and we know how to work with it.

Suggesting that the web is doomed because people of the future prefer rust instead of javascript is beyond any rationale.

They didn't suggest the web is doomed, just that more aspects of it are opaque. I don't think they're talking about every day users of the web either, but rather nascent developers.

The early web was a great equalizer. Anybody could study a little html, download an ftp manager, jump through a few procedural hoops and have a web page. After some studying and trial and error they could even build an interactive site.[1]

It's easy to miss all the potential of wasm when that's what you remember of the web. To me the amazing thing is that browsers will still work with the methods described above[2] but we're on the cusp of being able to do almost everything a full application environment can do.

That said, even though there will be plenty of OSS wasm tech, it'll still be more opaque to those of us who don't do compiled languages. It'll be a lot tougher to just fork the code and do something more creative with it.

[1] PHP used to stand for "Personal Home Page" and, as one of its founders put it, was created so that "any idtiot" could make an interactive site.

[2] https://t.mkws.sh/58bytes/

Are modern-day "no code" tools like Webflow not an acceptable equivalent?

We already lost any semblence of building from scratch in the mid-2000s with the emergence of gargantuan HTML templates and Wordpress/Drupal/PHPbb deployments with plugins and themes.

This is a direct result of people being held to higher standards and thus spending a lot more effort overriding the compositional and behaviour defaults of the user agent.

The modern-day iteration just optimizes for scaling up to tens of thousands of concurrent end-users on anemic hardware.

We have to accept the fact that personal webpages gave way to social network profile pages. This didn't happen overnight and there is zero demand for a hand-crafted presence on the web anymore.

No, an environment for writing new code is not any kind of equivalent for the ability to reverse-engineer existing code. Firebug and its clones are a much closer equivalent than anything like WebFLow.

Build from scratch is out of favor, but not necessarily that far off. Folks like Github & Youtube have very simple bottom-up webcomponent systems they use, rather than top doen frameworks. Existing concerns about bundling might be met by bundled http exchamges (webpackage).

I dont think "no code" is an aid. If anything it's pushing in the opposite direction: rather than a transparent approachable web medium, it suggests we need hyperadvanced tools that we really wont understand or have control over to synthesize web code. It's a simpler user experience, but a push away from notepad.exe webdev.

I wouldnt rush to make any conclusions about who or what has won, as a settled fact & case for all time. We havent had good ways to run online systems ourselves, versus hosted for us, and there's still lightyears to go but we're doing good things & finally maturing well. We're only a couple years into ActivityPub as an interchange format & growing many of the caoabilities & tools & systems, around all mimds of use cases, that will make throwong together a fair, interactabke competitive offering possoble. Social media has had huge huge investmemt poured into it, but we are in decent preteen years of growing up & owning the libre equivalents. We can assess demamd only after there is a visualizable state people can imagine; just having an isolated blog is not the equivalent to the well connected social media site, but these capabilities slowly arise. Follow the alpha geeks; this currently long phase will not be forever.

JavaScript minifiers to obfuscate the code have been around pretty much since the language got popular, so that version of the web's been gone since about when Myspace lost to Facebook. Places like Glitch.com is trying to bring that back though.

Sure “everyday users” aren’t clicking “View Source”, but that’s not really what the issue is about.

When I was a kid, every piece of software I used was pre-compiled, and therefore opaque. This made it difficult for me to figure out how people made certain things, and after a while I lost interest in programming.

When I got back into it later, one thing that made a huge difference was being able to see how various cool JS sites were built. The ability to “View Source” like that was revolutionary, and also allowed me to build some early fun projects, like a Cookie Clicker “AI” that could play the game automatically by calling the functions I could see in the game’s source.

I’m far from the only person with experiences like these. Yes, there was programming before View Source and there will be programming after. And for those of us with the right tools or reverse engineering skills, View Source isn’t particularly relevant. What we’re losing is a pipeline that helped people become/stay interested in programming, which makes it likely that future programmers who would’ve followed a path like mine will do something else instead.

On the other hand, it's never been as easy to contribute to OSS projects as it is now. Github has severely lowered the requirements compared to earlier settings where you had to get an e-mail client, configure it in just the right way, etc. You have live coding youtubers, there are discord communities for all types of technology, and knowledge about programming and technology is extremely available through Google, way more than it was 20 years ago. I think young people still have tons of opportunities to start out.

Today's JavaScript "View source" is 90% useless because of Webpack et al. The original program is effectively compiled into obscure and obfuscated lowest-common-denominator JS.

You're really not going to "view source" and understand anything when all the JS I ship is minified and uglified. Nowadays, JS is simply another compile target.

...I still dissect website code, thank you very much. Basically have to do it just to figure out quirks I'm constantly running into.

I feel like I have about as much chance reading disassembled wasm as I would have reading unminified javascript so I don't think it changes much.

(You could technically turn the wasm to JS and unminify that too, which I doubt is much harder/easier to decipher as the same thing written in JS and minified/unminified.)

I don't think it makes much of a difference whether you can read the code because even if you can read the javascript, it's automatic so it can be different on the next request. If we want to be able to trust the web, we have to get rid of the automatic download and execution of arbitrary script code.

I think we’ve been lulled into some false sense of expectation that the web exists as a place for “open source code” to be run. As if the fact that you can view the source of any page is any purveyor of that.

If that’s your definition of transparency, then perhaps learning to read assembly would give you the same comfort. In fact, there’s a lot more binaries distributed with symbols intact than unminified JS.

Or, to put it another way, if you could right click -> view disassembly of any binary on your computer, how would that be any different than today’s web?

What a weird take.

How else would we have implemented this? WASM has facilitated introducing these technologies into web applications, it literally wasn’t possible before.

Thanks to emscripten it wasn’t even that hard to get rnnoise working on WASM: https://github.com/jitsi/rnnoise-wasm

I concede WASM does open the possibility of adding opaque stuff to web apps but IMHO the benefits outweigh the drawbacks at this point.

Oh no you're absolutely right, my general frustration was ill-placed for this thread. Wasm is no doubt the right and only way to have done this.

Short of reproducible builds, you can't even check that what you're being served is, in fact, the OSS version.

Arent wasm modules still sandboxed? Reverse enginering binaries should have around same complexity than reverse enginering uglify js, not sure how they are more opaque

You probably have a point but I'm thinking unuglified js code (http://www.nice2predict.org/) is not as impenetrable as code from reverse engineered wasm binaries? The element of plausible deniability is more potent though for the nefarious actor on the other side in the case of wasm binaries.

Wasm is about distribution of binaries, not about open source. Those are two different subjects.

When I install a program on my debian machine with apt-get, I also get binaries. But this doesn't mean that it is opaque right?

Just wait until all your ads are wasm blobs! Wheeeeeeee!

Most JavaScript these days is basically compiled binary. Rarely is it very human readable.

If you have human-readable JS, you either didn't write much or you forgot to minify it.

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