The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch (positiveblue.substack.com)

Just curious. I can see how anyone may confuse coding with programming. And coding is related to cryptography through information theory. But what makes you think of cryptography when you hear coding? How does that confusion arise?

vmilner · 57m ago

Secret code E.g. The Enigma code.

goku12 · 17m ago

Hmm.. I see what you mean. But I'm not able to relate to it personally. Whenever I hear enigma, the next word that comes to mind is 'cipher', not 'code'. The second word is 'algorithm' and still not 'code'. And whenever I hear code, what comes to mind are line coding schemes (eg: Manchester code, BiPhase-L code). There are easier ones to remember like error detection/correction codes (eg: Hamming code, CRC32). But I still think of line codes for some odd reason.

The problem with information theory is that it's very easy to get things mixed up hopelessly, unless you decide in advance what each term means. There are too many similar concepts with similar names.

zero-sharp · 1h ago

interesting topic, but essential for who?

devonbleak · 1h ago

Essential as in "the essence of" not as in "necessary".

rTX5CMRXIfFG · 1h ago

Programmers who can or want to work in lower levels of abstraction I suppose

goku12 · 42m ago

It looks like you are thinking about programming and its abstractions. As somebody already pointed out, this isn't that type of coding. This is coding from information theory - source coding, channel coding, decoding, etc.

A lot of modern coding does involve programming. But it is more concerned with storage and transmission of information. Like how to reduce the symbols (in info theory parlance) required for representing information (by eliminating information redundancy), how to increase the error recovery capability of a message (by adding some information redundancy), etc. Applications include transmission encoding/decoding dats (eg: DVB-S, Trellis code), error detection and correction (eg: CRC32, FEC), lossless compression (eg: RLE, LZW), lossy compression (most audio and video formats), etc.

As you may have already figured out, it's applications are in digital communication systems, file and wire formats for various types of data, data storage systems and filesystems, compression algorithms, as part of cryptographic protocols and data formats, various types of codecs, etc.

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Essential Coding Theory [pdf]

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