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Yes, obfuscation was always a matter of cost: how much money do you need to break the protection? LLM just decreased that amount by a lot.

(Yes ok, RSA4096 is technically a matter of cost, you just need an infinite amount of money)

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The cool thing about cryptographic security is that it's an asymmetric amount of cost for both parties - to encode is cheap, to break is many orders of magnitude harder, unlike obfuscation where the difficulty is approximately symmetrical.

All security is always a matter of cost. Clown theater starts once you lose track of it, and start doing security for security's sake.

RE obfuscation and nation states - nation states have finite budgets too, both in terms of resources and attention. They can crack any system at any time, but they can't afford to crack all of the systems all of the time.

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