I'll also ask the AI to reverse engineer the LattePanda Mu BIOS later since I want to use the Mu on my handheld cyberdeck project. Nearly out of usage for the week, sadly. Wish Tibo would push his reset button yet again.

None of the Switch emulators Nintendo took down had such issues, they all required supplying your own keys.

Nintendo takes them down anyway because they can, and because they have enough money that no individual can fight them on it. Their takedowns have no real legal standing, and there's no reason why they couldn't do the same for every other emulator, other than them simply not wanting to.

[right hand emoji] "their political stance"... "they should keep them to themselves"

Their comment still stands; whether it's machine code or "original assembly code" that shipped on the disk it falls under "clean room" reversing and by extension implementation.

Emulators constantly run into games that don't run because of specific hardware nuances that may or may not have been intentionally used (Ex. relying on exact cycle counts, reading uninitialized memory, changing values while they're used, etc.).

Vibe-decomped projects are also… a different result.

A matching hand-decompile is useful in itself, but it also serves as a proxy for how well you understand the project; how good are the function and variable names, are the structures good, do you understand the entire flow. There are plenty of LLM-decompiles out there that just match but still every variable name is “unk14”, where every flow is total spaghetti instead of going back to something closer to what a human would have written, or even tons of __asm__ statements. The match stopped being a high-quality proxy metric for the quality of the project as a whole. (There are also LLM-assisted decompiles that are high-quality, but then usually with significant human input. And of course, you can try to ask the agent to clean up the resulting mess after you're done matching, assuming you have any tokens left.)

Of course, if you just want the binary back and collect Internet points, you don't care about any of this. But decompilation projects are often made for either a) understanding the game better (for speedruns, TASes, or just general explanation), or b) modifying it. And for both, it is much nicer to have source that is closer to the original.

Meanwhile so many westerners see LLMs as "stealing IP", it becomes a bit paradoxical where the lines get drawn.

I strongly disagree with this notion from even a conceptual (much less legal) level; the point of compilation is not to erase the algorithms the programmer implemented, just to optimize and implement them.

> You can compile a decomp into the same binary, but that's only to prove functional equivalence.

This is like saying that a translated book is only "functionally" identical to the original; there's a lot of precedent in copyright law for this not being the case, and I don't think any argument revolving around the transformativeness of the compilation process would fly at all.

In fact, the goal of most decomp not to produce the same binary, that’s just used as a validation.

You might be right. I'm a better programmer than most, but I'm nowhere near as good as I could be, and there is still so much I could learn and improve upon. But back when I was saying that "AI is better than most programmers", ~6 months ago, I figured people at my level were still somewhat safe, as the average programmer, even working professionally, is a shockingly low bar. Do not judge the entire profession by Hackernews posters; most of us are in the upper quartile or so.

These days, for small to medium-sized tasks, frontier LLMs are consistently well within that upper quartile. People at my level have a lot to be concerned about, as most of our day-to-day can be automated away. Sure, there's need for judgement and architectural discipline, but in most shops that's done by the people we used to make fun of in the 2000s, who sit in design review meetings and produce box-and-arrow diagrams, not code. Those are now the real bringers of value to a software development company or division.

At a bare minimum, it is irresponsible to ship code that has any sort of security requirement without using AI. Frontier models are able to discover zero days in minutes that would have taken months with human investigators, and if you're not auditing and red-teaming your own code with AI, someone else will use AI to pop it.

You are just not working to a professional standard in 2026 if you're not using AI.

Isn't the current system setup around the idea that the company gets the rights, and in return the workers get a basically risk-free salary? Wouldn’t your proposal undo that, so then workers took on the risk of whether they got paid, based on whether the game ends up being profitable?

I uh... I might have burst out laughing. Sorry, but do you really, seriously, believe the machine so fantastic that it is widely called "slop", produces amazing quality outputs?

You are setting the bar way to high. We use LLM's for our coding and its most definitely our code and work. How would it be any different than a collogue writing code that you review and commit?

I was a pretty nerdy kid even then, and I saw graphing calculator as 'portable computer' in 1993! So, of course I wanted one.

When our teachers found about them, they banned the use of graphing calculators, some teachers going so far as to only allowing 'four-bangers' (a basic one) for classes lower than Trig (I never got to Calc in high school).

Funny, but your statement reminded me of what one of math teachers used to say: "If you use a graphing calculator, you aren't doing math." It seems really quaint today.

Not your handwriting, not your work!

Downloading a bunch of open source libraries and putting together some project with a bunch of glue code also requires little thinking, but before AI no one really said that was "cognitive surrender". People even got pats on the back... for using other people's work to build something.

There’s a reason why the top comments of HN blog posts whine about articles that are clearly written by AI. I use AI constantly as a coding agent, but I care deeply about the authenticity of the words I write intended for other human beings to be my own.

Think about the act of writing with a pen.

Now think about what a typewriter does in that context.

Now think about what an LLM does in that context.

Can you reason about how those are vastly different tools within the context of writing or communication, so much so that the comparison doesn't actually make any sense?

Hint: it has nothing to do with determinism. It has to do with the nature of the work itself and the role of the person doing it.

As an aside, this whole exchange really is just a perfect encapsulation of the outcome-focused versus process-focused individual.

The outcome-focused person sees words in a document and whether an LLM produced them or a human typed them is a distinction without a difference.

The process-focused person is utterly baffled that anyone could think those are in any way equivalent.

I only see that construction used condescendingly.