Thread

1. torben-friis · 1790026444 · focus · HN ↗

   Here's my constant question:

   Everyone's going so fast that they keep hitting walls. Review, CI, product asking for things, whatever.

   Why have we not seen an improvements in products?

   While every post and thread feels like a 90's wall street office, the new android and iphone ship with fewer features than usual. No indie guys come up with a linux-sized alternative OS. Switch 2 remains unhacked. Windows takes 3 seconds to show the right click menu.

   Is everyone just running full speed in circles or something?

   1. lukevp · 1790038713 · focus · HN ↗

      PS5 emulation has gone from barely working to running Dark Souls at 10+ FPS with virtually no graphical glitches… in 6 weeks. If you’re not familiar with normal emulator development time, this is… quite extraordinary. There have been insane progress on decompilations and many other things in the emulator space.

      Everyone’s trying to figure out how to convert this speed to product features at scale, but enterprises are like container ships. Lots of might but slow to turn. The littler companies can actually take advantage of this and produce higher quality products at much faster speed. I think you’re expecting too much in the short term and too little in the long term. AI-native companies are gonna eat everyone’s lunch, once they figure out how to actually do it reliably.

      1. decompgoldenage · 1790044473 · focus · HN ↗

         Also, in 12 months, we went from seeing game dissassembly and decompilations projects be slow and annoying, to suddenly having enough mapower where people are taking the liberty to CHOOSE which decompilations to support. DK64's release was 80% anti-AI marketing, not because they were strictly anti-AI, but because they were telling the OTHER decompilation to fuck off and learn some goddamned standards. Completely unthinkable before.

         There was a video by a layperson 2 years ago where they wanted to know the mechanics of some elusive pokemon pinball spawns where there was a whole bunch of missinformation about it online. The people behind that project had the correct addresses but they were completely unlabeled and the layman had to essentially figure out and do some of the work themselves to sort it out and figure it out. Nowadays that would never happen. An LLM will just do it for you within the day.

         1. Eufrat · 1790065709 · focus · HN ↗

            The fact that this is an account with a username specifically focused on this specific concern that was created 5 hours ago is real weird/suspicious.

            Also, are these even actual decompiles? Sure, playing Wheel of Fortune with a LLM model that at some undetermined point spits out what seems to be a working example is sorta useful, but also…how exactly do you debug this nonsense? Don’t tell me we’ll just have the LLM thrash around a bunch again. What I’m asking is does anyone understand what is going on here other than “lol, it works, shut up”?

            1. charcircuit · 1790066347 · focus · HN ↗

               LLMs work great at decompilation, I'm not sure what you are trying to suggest. Outside of game compilation disassembly is useful for debugging various crashes in 3p code where you don't have the source. And yes LLMs do the debugging here.

               1. Eufrat · 1790067596 · focus · HN ↗

                  I’m suggesting that having a model wander around stochastically is not necessarily a great way to gain any insight or understanding. LLMs do not think, they cannot really debug anything. Attaching intelligence or intent to them is a non sequitur, it’s not happening. A cloud that looks like a toaster does not imply anything beyond the human obsession with pattern matching, why do we keep doing this with LLMs? They can randomly wander around and sometimes produce useful output.

                  I don’t doubt they help by randomly permuting around in a way that people cannot do at scale, but I question the economics of this approach and I think it needs to be used judiciously. Sometimes you just have to do that especially like you said, when you do not have the source or the code is intentionally obfuscated, this can be useful, but a lot of people seem like they’re just vibe coding crap and blowing money on tokens until they get a useful result and I have no idea what the value of that is.

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