I have softened very VERY slightly on AI code. If it can identify genuine issues than that is fine. It is when folks just trust it blindly and just send 50 commits without understanding a thing or even remotely testing it, that is just crazy. But then on the flip side, yeah all the other issues probably aren’t worth it.

It is complicated at times but then things like this always are. The most successful evil always has some claim to virtue.

Alas, occasionally you have to walk with the devil to achieve some good. One just has to weigh up if it is worth it.

I once asked Stallman about how he used to build and run GNU tools before having the Linux kernel. He was using a proprietary Minix system as a means to get work done until there was a better alternative. I mean running a proprietary system is one thing, burning through the amazon with 100 quintillion tokens is very different.

There are folks in the occult space that think LLM’s are possessed by evil spirits. Yeah, I know, make of that what you will.

BUT, when I see folks at the top and the way they talk about this stuff, my rational mind kind of wavers and you see people who are just completely and totally absorbed with these things. Maybe them occult folks are on to something. 🙃

Scary to see, it is like alzheimer’s disease in how it eats away at the persons autonomy below but unlike that disease, it still maintains enough cognition for them to be functional in society. For better or worse.

I use Trisquel, one of the FSF approved distros. So far it seems to have held up well against a lot of the less inviting changes in the Linux space, but it is based on Ubuntu. I do wonder how much longer it will hold up until I end up making the jump to a BSD system. Not the fault of the developers, just that the flow of the base system is too strong to fight against forever.

GTA6 is a console exclusive so far, there might be a PC version in a year or two but for now, we have no idea.

But with the hype around its release and the growing use of LLMs to decompile games to be ported to the PC, this has become the high ground. One of the biggest game launches in years of a golden franchise and the PC is cut out get again. But now the people have just enough tools to take it into their own hands.

This is a two stage thing. They need to hack a current PS5/Xbox so they can grab the game image, then have to do the work of a quick port to the PC. Easy to say but difficult to do. A few years back it would have been near impossible but now even with local LLM models you can get agents do a lot of grunt work and make this possible.

There was always a race for clout in the cracking scene since the 1980s of who could get the latest games cracked, they had the change to slap their name and logo on the launcher. Nowadays it isnt just cracking for the same machine, it is liberating it from the host platform. It also kinda makes it open source… So very illegal but that has never stopped people in the past.

I’m not saying it will happen, but there is a highly motivated bunch of people that want to make it happen.

The analogy of the moon landing is simple. Many people tend to see it as a scientific thing when it was entirely geopolitical. The moon landing was the USs way of saying, we are better than the USSR, it was also saying “If we can put a man on the moon, we can put a nuke anywhere”. It was a huge paradigm shift in the world powers.

GTA6 being liberated by the people would be saying “Hey you can no longer confine us to your platforms!”. It was be a huge shift in the way they would have to treat customers, it could be a good thing long term.

Credit to Sharma, she seems to be pushing to get stuff out the door quick. For better or worse.

AAA costs too much to produce and rarely makes its money back. Indie is flooded with vibe coded Unity crap. The middle is lost in the sea with all of the above. Wouldn’t be surprised if there is a bit of a reset in the coming years, especially after the rumored $1200-$1800 project helix pricing.

Never underestimate Microsoft’s ability to ruin something good. They won’t shut down but by the time it ends up being sold off it will be a shadow of its former self.

It was thought that the reason Nintendo went after Switch emulators so hard was because the OS/security under the hood of S2 was so similar to S1 that it would make for an easy path toward emulation. Now that we have the first game rips out, looks like there was some truth to that.

A lot of it can also just being having control of the stuff you purchase. If you have a copy of the game that you control, they cannot take it away from you and you have the ability to emulate it to beyond the restrictions of the original hardware.

I think early next year there is going to be a cultural moment in gaming that will be to big to ignore. That being the first team that manages to rip and recompile GTA6 to the PC. It will be the gaming equivalent of before and after the moon landing.

It was dying even before emulation/decomps. The amount of Ps5 exclusives after 6 years (in two weeks) is grim at best.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:PlayStation_5-only_games

As Gaben said “Piracy is a service problem”. Unfortunately for Nintendo, if they won’t the people will. I am not a fan of most AI stuff but the whole LLM powered de/recompilation thing this year has been wild to see. I don’t think it has dawned on Nintendo and Sony yet that their castle walls are being torn down and their hardware exclusivity isn’t going to hold like it has in the past.

I see that Microsoft is trying to please the hoards with Xbox labs but it feels like desperation rather than acceptance.