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Comment by AlexAplin | Hacker News Reader

>the mere knowledge that a solution exists "contaminates" efforts by both humans and AI to find alternate routes to the problem that reveal additional insights

This really expresses the heartburn you see across all fields, not exclusive to careerism. I certainly have friends in decomp and fan translation spaces that have been demotivated by the current rash of efforts happening there.

The rush to be "first" has always been over-celebrated, but it would be nice to believe there's a way to get beyond that thinking.

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This has already been the case in AI/ML and computer vision papers via flag planting papers. Have an idea, super quickly publish a hasty work based on it that doest actually work, methodological and eval issues, engineering terrible, slow, bad results etc. But it was the first so now your concurrent work that was much better evaluated, better implemented, etc is suddenly worthless and unpublishable.

> decomp

This I don't understand, seems like an obvious thing to automate, especially for byte-matching?

Byte-matching has been a side-effect of gaining an understanding of how the software works. With this you are skipping the understanding and you will not get people like Kaze Emanuar on YouTube who have dedicated a lot of time to building upon this understanding to create something better.

I don't think it's motivating to solve a black box by having AI generate another black box if what you want is to understand how the thing worked.

> Byte-matching has been a side-effect of gaining an understanding of how the software works.

No? Decomp sources are often full of comments that claim that there's no clear reason as to why something is done a certain way or straight up full of question marks. Byte matching often is a result of bruteforcing a solution rather than understanding the original idea behind the code.

If your goal was to do something for the games you love and understand them on a deeper level, then just handing that off to an LLM doesn't really give you the same sense of accomplishment.

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