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Comment by nekusar | Hacker News Reader

"Local copy of Qwen-3.8, you have your own machine. I'm putting a windows game binary in your home directory. Decompile the game and rewrite in Rust. Appropriately document source code and make full testing framework. Make sure any plugins are compatible with the original game. If there are any protections or preventions like DRM, exclude those features."

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You seem to be approaching this from the perspective of “I want to play this game” when there is more value to the original source code than simply being able to run something similar.

This is how every commercial software being a DRM + remote attestation cloud only package begins, one day there will be a perfect ratio trap!

I am not sure how long this stays a joke

People are literally doing it right now since about a month ago, and the industries are losing their minds. Most notably some guy just decompiled all the Adobe products, made them free to use and without bullshit, and published them under the name ArtCraft. There've also been successful "port this Mario game to a Skyrim mod", "port this PS5 game to run on PC", and so on.

In the upcoming lawsuit, Adobe is either about to destroy the AI industry by collecting massive damages, or Anthropic is about to destroy the software industry by effectively making software non-copyrightable. There's no other outcome.

And making your software SaaS won't help because the AI tools can infer a server-side implementation based on enough examples of behaviour.

From what I've gathered, and I'm still feeling like I'm missing something, most people don't seem to be doing that. They seem to pass the binary in, say to decompile it, and out the other side is something that looks similar but not exact. https://youtu.be/qFEuYUfauNY .

On the recent WAN show LTT said they tried the recent Photoshop clones and they were buggy, feature missing messes. If they were truly reverse engineer decompiles (minus needing a subscription) they would work just as well. But they don't so they're not.

the adobe suite clones are vibe coded clean room implementations, decompiles on the other hand should compile 1:1 to the existing software, and we have ways to verify that's the case. recompiles from my understanding of the term are somewhere inbetween.

AFAIK ArtCraft is not a decompilation and more like some kind of dodgy re-implementation that barely works.

That's the view you hear from doomers - the view you hear from boosters is that it's basically Adobe quality. I haven't tried it so I don't know which is actually true.

I also heard a lot of people rave about Affinity and all kinds of Lightroom alternatives, but so far I found it all terribly disappointing and am back to CS5 and Lightroom 4 (because I own those on disc)… There is a lot of useless hype around.

No chance the AI industry gets destroyed. China wouldn't care if Adobe somehow sued and won (so really it would just be America destroying its economy), and this point nvidia could buy Adobe and shut it down mid lawsuit just to make it go away.

> There's no other outcome.

Wow, what an interesting binary when 80% of all cases end in settlement.

Meh I don't think Adobe has anything there. AI is just a tool. Are they going to sue Microsoft and Dell just because those two were involved in the laptop used to instruct the agent to do the thing?

Are they gonna sue the user's power company because they supplied power for a nefarious activity without making the human agree to use it for innocent purposes only?

With the right harness, it's doable today. Obviously quality will be what you end up actually spending time manually testing and what surfaces when testing this, because agents won't be able to even get 80% there without strict hand-holding. But with the right individual driving the right harness, definitely doable.

Its not a joke right now.

I've reverse engineered multiple proprietary things around the house thanks to a local Qwen-3.8 running under Strata and Hermes.

Some have been USB, some have been BT, and some were android binaries. I explain what's going on, how they should work, investigate, and write compatibility layers or hack the binaries to do my thing.

And right now, we're seeing flagship consoles getting emulators and compatibility layers to run the games on computers. And those are machine assisted as well.

Just go look at how bad Sony fucked up with 'no ownership of PS5 games' heh. Everybody's attacking and downloading and pirating PS5. LLM tooling makes it not just doable, but actually easy.

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