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Comment by slopinthebag | Hacker News Reader

seeing what has been happening in the game modding communitiy, with people reverse engineering full rust rewrites of games like modern warfare 2 [1][2], or reverse engineering mashups with cod, minecraft, and skate 3 [3][4][5], the only defence against reverse-engineering literally all software will be to serve it from the cloud, and even that will not be enough. these people aren't even programmers, claude code just downloads ghidra and builds this stuff.

the future of software is oss. unless governments lock down access to these tools to prevent this kind of reverse engineering. which is a horrible future to envision.

[1] https://github.com/vladtrc/iw4L

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UbADrcEW5w

[3] https://github.com/chasmlol/2010-rust-rewrite-mashup

[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/bevy/comments/1wuu7bx/are_you_seein...

[5] https://www.reddit.com/r/bevy/comments/1wuag9d/skate_3_was_r...

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I saw someone say that we're going to go back to a situation like the 70s where software is technically copyrightable but there's no reason to bother. Maybe Stallman's dream will finally come true.

that would be the absolute dream imo. true ownership of the code running on your system.

It isn't true ownership if you depend on an LLM you don't own to modify the code in ways you don't understand. That's just proprietary software with extra steps.

That's a pretty high bar.

By that standard, couldn't I say you don't truly own open source software like Chromium or OpenSSL because very few are capable of understanding the codebase well enough to implement changes?

That's always been the bar for FOSS, we've just failed as a community at education because we became elitist and decided the muggles didn't actually deserve to understand anything. The end goal of the free software movement should be that everyone has that understanding, that code literacy should be as essential as reading and math. But yes, in short, you don't truly own code you don't understand. Simply having the code available is better than not, but a freedom you can't exercise really isn't a freedom, and all of the freedoms of free software presuppose the ability to comprehend software.

And there's a difference between few being capable of implementing changes, and anyone. In a world where most or all code is written and edited by LLMs, and CS courses are focused on how to prompt LLMs and no longer on fundamentals, the opportunities for humans to learn programming will all but vanish. And this assumes LLMs will even expose code at all. They may simply emit precompiled applications in the future. If humans remain in the loop even when LLMs are used then this becomes less of a problem. But the culture around LLMs converges on vibe-coding - as little direct human understanding or effort as possible. As such it converges on sacrificing freedom for convenience.

Doesn't that seem exaggerated when clearly people are gaining the freedom to modify any software easily and quickly?

Last week, I've seen videos of people merging video games like Super Mario and Minecraft to create absurd new games that previously you wouldn't imagine anyone implementing because the cost/effort was prohibitive.

>Doesn't that seem exaggerated when clearly people are gaining the freedom to modify any software easily and quickly?

No, because they aren't modifying the software, a proprietary service is modifying the software. The freedom belongs to the company owning the LLM, not the person using it. If the freedom belonged to the person using it, then they would be able to exercise that freedom without an LLM. As they cannot, they did not in any way gain freedom by using the LLM.

If you think remixing games using an LLM is cool, I don't want to take that from you. It just isn't FOSS. The wholesale contempt that so many AI users have for human coding demonstrates that it's an entirely different culture with different ethics and different goals.

> The wholesale contempt that so many AI users have for human coding demonstrates that it's an entirely different culture with different ethics and different goals

Personally I enjoyed building apps before AI, and have been doing so professionally for 10 years.

With AI it's much more fun for me since productivity is way up.

It's not that I have contempt for human coding, I just know from my own experience and hard work that using AI is much more productive.

People online constantly make comments where they insult my expertise and the quality of what I am building. Surely you can see how this could quickly lead to a heated discussion.

Who is going to write that software if there is no reward.

To make sure that AI never uses your work (source code or binaries) for training, I see two possible solutions:

- the software would run only on your own server and clients will access it remotely through an interface

- you will sell the software together with the hardware and a proprietary operating system, which does not allow anyone to get the ones and zeros of your software

So, the only way to prevent GTA6 being "decompiled" and "forked" by AI models is to run it remotely (with a video interface), or sell it together with a proprietary console :D

most oss is written with the expectation of no financial reward. there is more to life than money.

not to mention there are alternative revenue sources anyways.

>most oss is written with the expectation of no financial reward.

Most open source software is written by corporations which have a complimentary motive. Think hardware manufacturers writing drivers because it makes their products more saleable or Google writing Go because they needed a systems programming language.

I think GTA6 will be the real test for how capable these agents are. Some of these mods use well-known emulation methods, and some of these binaries have probably been ingested by the LLM numerous times.

I don't mean to discredit LLM capabilities, it's just that these examples are heavily favored by what's already documented online.

yeah for sure, and more modern games will probably be more difficult as well. but even so, games feel like one of the harder things to reverse engineer compared to most business software. yes there is the backend component, but that's mostly just crud.

I'm currently working on OpenBFME[0] and I can assure you, enough LLM power guessing at the code in the binaries is enough to get the code for anything

[0] https://github.com/Open-BFME/

love to see it

btw this is the actual solution, not that whole stop killing games movement. not regulation.

It doesn't stop the need for the other things.

there is no need for regulation here (which comes with both known and unknown second and third-order effects) since we can use llms to preserve games

Wine-style PS5 emulation has advanced far enough that I would bet money on there being a pirated GTA6 PC release based on the PS5 version available within six months.

Six months is a long time! I was honestly prepared to see more aggressive timelines when I wrote this comment :)

LLMs have changed the obstacle of doing something from (time, attention, expertise) to (time, attention, tokens).

I don't see what's unique about GTA6. It's just larger in scope if you wanted to decompile or greenfield a custom engine.

But at the end of the day you'll be able to unpack the assets yourself and immediately have the worldmap running in a browser in Three.js. And once you're there, you can vibe-code any game you want on top of it.

At the very least, it will be a binary that hasn't yet been consumed by the LLM, so it's an interesting test!

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