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Comment by the_voice | Hacker News Reader

I'm with you, I wouldn't have expected this a year ago. While it's been awesome for the hacker ethos, I worry that it might be too much too quickly. Commercial software will push to online-only business models to protect their IP from decomplication. For legacy/retro software, this couldn't be better.

One angle I don't see anyone talking about (perhaps because I'm mistaken) is that this is terrible news for Nvidia. AMD also makes great hardware, but their software is often seen as holding them back. A successful open-source CUDA port/decomp could devastate the AI pecking order.

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I don't think commercial software will survive something like this. There’s no reason to subscribe to any software when there are open-source alternatives for everything. The only way to make money with software in the future is by selling additional services that require computing power. For example, if Adobe and Microsoft were to make their software open source, they could still continue to make money through AI subscriptions. The software itself will no longer have any monetary value.

>but their software is often seen as holding them back. A successful open-source CUDA port/decomp could devastate the AI pecking order.

This hypothesis is pretty outdated after the past two years. Vulkan and ROCm are pretty good, and some users do buy R9700 PROs and 7900s for local inference. But the improvement didn't result in everyone trading in their 5080s for 9070s or 7900s because, as it turns out, the hardware isn't actually much better with equal software.

Server components won't do. The model for protecting their IP will be streaming games. Maybe AI would be able to produce the game just from a video, but unless the video includes every single aspect of the game, that would be a lossy process.

It’s not technically or financially viable. AAA games are already too expensive to create, and this increases the complexity by an order of magnitude. And that’s before the latency problems that make the game less fun, and therefore more likely to bomb.

I bet they would be able to figure out a lot through game guides over the years, but not sure how popular those are. I play a lot of search action games and still look things up a lot.

I’d get decompiling whilst the tokens heavily subsidised. Adobe should be pretty scared.

I wouldn't waste so many resources and time by every remotely interesting thing (down to whatever someone may remember their older brother playing when they were young) being "made" from scratch by 50 different people, who usually don't communicate with and often don't even reference each other. "Oh hi guys, so I happened to have made this thing..." is kinda getting old.

> Commercial software will push to online-only business models to protect their IP from decomplication.

uhm.. My dude, AI can make entire apps from just a couple English sentences, it'll handle cloning an entire online-only app it can see (and sniff)

And frankly, who even feels sorry for Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Google etc?

They made trillions of dollars and looked down on their users for decades. Google is still anal about dark mode if you're not signed in. YouTube still hinders iOS's picture-in-picture feature. Facebook still doesn't have iPad-native versions of their apps. There's so much shit in apps with billions of users that hasn't been fixed for years.

Fuck them.

And they will keep making money hand over fist, while anyone who worked however one long on something can have it snatched up within 5 minutes of them releasing it to the world. And then 10 more people clone that. We could enter some kind of dark age where people are more likely to try to keep even their ideas secret. If nobody gets any recognition, and putting in the work for others to clone it is just being a sucker, then people will stop doing that. And companies will simply yweigh what they invest into vs. what they can defend/attack with lawyers, or patent, or whatever. And then Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and others can ooze over the space where there was society and community, even more so than they already did in the last quarter century.

> Google is still anal about dark mode if you're not signed in. YouTube still hinders iOS's picture-in-picture feature. Facebook still doesn't have iPad-native versions of their apps. There's so much shit in apps with billions of users that hasn't been fixed for years.

They're not selling apps, alternative apps do nothing to them. Sure they hate it, just like Twitter hates xcancel, but they could give them amnesty and servers instead and still would never be meaningfully harmed by a mere viewing tool of their data.

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