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Comment by lukevp | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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”?

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.

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.

You must be new here. Lurkers posting under an apt username then disappearing is a feature, not a bug. He doesn't need to argue with anyone online - he said his piece and we're free to take it or leave it.

Usually, green username are a sign of "leave it", I'll agree. But this one seems very informative.

I mean, do you understand the systems you work on? Down to the ISA? The transistors? The electrons?

The stack gets taller and more complex, as it ever as. People who understand one part of the stack in great depth rarely understand the entire stack. Those who understand its full shape don’t have complete depth at any one part. This is how computing has worked for a few decades at least.

You don’t have to shut up, you’re free to dive in and learn. But you’ll have to balance breadth and depth like the rest of us.

I think most people with even a bachelor's in anything STEM know it down to the transistors. That's also been true for decades. Every time I hear this line of argument I cringe. Computers aren't that deep compared to other engineering topics.

> Every time I hear this line of argument I cringe.

Because it’s the same kind of fatuous logic that intelligent design proponents use. This thing is so complex so we can’t possible understand it. Therefore, it’s magic.

People specialize for sure, but it’s not like the average person can’t figure this stuff out with some motivation.

I really, really don’t think so.

Before you get to transistors you need to understand memory types (heap, stack, etc). You need virtualization, interrupts, and threading. You need CPU vs GPU, character encoding, and memory mapping. At least ipv4 and layers 1-3 of OSI. And much more.

Do you really think anyone with a bachelors in STEM has all that, or are you saying full stack knowledge is satisfied by knowing a high level language plus the fact that transistors switch passing or blocking current based on a signal?

It'll do it for you within the day because it's stealing from all those other projects. Eventually there'll be nothing left to steal from.

To further this point, I’ve picked up the torch and got Switch2 controllers working in Dolphin and Cemu

Wind Waker in 4K w/official Bluetooth GameCube controller

(Nintendo went out of their way to invent a new protocol so that it didn’t “just work” like OG switch controllers)

> AI-native companies are gonna eat everyone’s lunch, once they figure out how to actually do it reliably.

Couldn't you say this about any company? What isn't just a matter of "figuring it out"?

Why can't they use AI to crack this nut? :D

> If you’re not familiar with normal emulator development time...

Emulators have historically been a shitshow until someone figures out missing pieces here and there. By their nature, that tide lifts all ships. It has very little to do with using AI. I'd argue the real reason emulators aren't what they used to be is the hardware is more complex now and the scene is no longer attracting the most talented devs. Video games used to be on the cutting edge and carried a lot more cultural weight. It's pretty underwhelming to get cred for working on lame x86 hardware that plays yet another franchise reboot.

Also, almost everything comes to PC now except Nintendo, so there's even less incentive.

I did the same thing with a old multiplayer game called Wulfram, we got it online and a mostly working server (most of the game logic was server side with no surviving code or binary) with the help of AI, Mostly opus and astra. https://wulfram3.com is our efforts in this.

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