alt Hacker News> Now they're going to be hit with a flood of half-decent decomps effortlessly generated by anyone with a $200/mo AI subscription, which become half-decent PC ports, which get modding support grafted on. It kinda just... totally eliminates that as a hobby entirely.
It really depends on your perspective of what the point of the hobby is. Were decomps/recomps a hobby because people wanted to make sure their old games could run on modern hardware and be extended with mods etc., or were they a hobby because people enjoyed the actual process of using Ghidra and reverse engineering by hand, and the decompiled game was just a side effect?
Personally I think it's awesome that PC98 Touhou games are getting recomps. Being able to play the series natively on modern hardware, and all hardware for the foreseeable future, is great and preserves the legacy of the series. I understand that for anyone who enjoys the actual act of reverse engineering it feels like cheating, though.
I think people will get over it. Music is a good example. Drum VSTs and piano VSTs are going to sound way better than you unless you're a 99th percentile musician playing on a 99th percentile physical instrument. But people still play the piano and drums, because it's fun. Same idea; the existence of AI doesn't stop people who love the act of reverse engineering from doing it.
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> Were decomps/recomps a hobby because people wanted to make sure their old games could run on modern hardware and be extended with mods etc., or were they a hobby because people enjoyed the actual process of using Ghidra and reverse engineering by hand, and the decompiled game was just a side effect?
It’s interesting to dwell on what ‘we’ appreciated before versus what we appreciate now. Since LLMs lowered the bar, it feels like raw human effort has come to be held in higher esteem.
Are we going to re-evaluate what we were impressed with in the past based on that new metric? For example, will accomplishments by experienced engineers be devalued in comparison to accomplishments by outsiders? Will the software engineering equivalent of ‘folk’ or ‘outsider’ art become more valued? There will be a natural instinct to distrust outsider contributions because, well, how did they get so good?
Are some metrics of human effort going to be de rigueur going forward?
I think you misunderstand the OP, the issue isn't the work if AI can do it we should still pool together and not waste tokens on the same problem 10-100x times because 100 people are doing the same thing in parallel.
Since it's not educational as it used to be, if you built your own version of n64 emulator number 10143 you got something out of it you learnt some interesting stuff, learnt software development, hardware etc.
Now we are literally all just taking a magic machine pouring money on one end getting half baked output the other but no progress is being made on money is being wasted. Since even if 1 person had built it everyone would have had access already.
This is the same wave of slop coding/vibemaxxing we had a few months ago where everyone was building product X for the 1 million-th time without any actual progress being made.
Math has a similar problem now, before if 1000 people tried to solve a problem they all grew from that experience, the LLM is not growing/learning anything from this effort.
All we are doing is burning resources for our pleasure, I say that as someone who has now written his own compiler, vcs and browser stack, with vibe coding, though largely I would claim I have used and tried to read the code, clean it up, to learn from it where different things break.
But even this feels absurd waste of resource imagine all of us collectively burning 200$ per month plans which assuming a at cost pricing we are all burning 200$ of electricity each month to do what exactly? Some folks are on their 10th subscription that means most people are burning 1000-2000$ of ultra cheap energy generally sourced from a mix of gas/oil turbines burning away at big data centers these days.
We could all solve it by making a site.. cough github.. and not duplicating work.. cough..
But somehow because it's easy no one seems to care.
I am hardly against software progress, and if AI gets better we will have better software (because most people write horrible software most of the time) so I am happy about it, to an extent that I can be, with my profession feeling somewhat challenged.
But given I have always worked as a fixer of broken stuff it's very much also feels fine to me. Either way I am very much against these 200-500 dollar plans that allow you to burn hundreds of dollars of energy for little productive gain duplicating the same work 100th time.
I am sure software developer using 100-200$ plans just for work can get more out of it. And it's probably making up for the effort they would have put in their work otherwise.
> It really depends on your perspective of what the point of the hobby is. Were decomps/recomps a hobby because people wanted to make sure their old games could run on modern hardware and be extended with mods etc., or were they a hobby because people enjoyed the actual process of using Ghidra and reverse engineering by hand, and the decompiled game was just a side effect?
I think your question would make sense if these were the only two reasons. Someone who just wants to make sure their old games can run would see these tools as a good thing. People who just enjoy reverse engineering by hand wouldn't care this exists, or maybe even, a helpful tutor.
So perhaps then, the sentiment being as negative as it is, is revealing something about the hobby: that many participants, considered the metagame of being the first to do it, to be "smart enough" to have figured it out, the "street cred" if you were, is what they are lamenting, but they just either lack the words, or aren't being honest with themselves.