easyThrowaway

> AI allows players to have decompiled and in turn ports of games to new platforms, enhanced versions of the game, etc.

We're ten years too early to do what you're suggesting. You need a really, really good understanding of the decompiled codebase and the original game and platform to port or implement new features.

You can't really ask "Claude, make Ocarina Of Time Widescreen" and expect it to work.

It's sad that the community isn't exactly doing their best to separate developers using AI to debug poorly understood quirks and bugs of their emulation projects from those screaming "computah! Decompile me a Super Smash Bros".

MAME is doing some amazing reverse engineering work on some more recent arcade boards by using AI[1] that would've taken decades to do so by hand, and it's being conflated with some rando committing to github the result of 5 hours of Claude stirring over the Golden Eye N64 rom and then publishing on twitter "Done, here's my Patreon link, please and thank you".

[1]https://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/2026-working-with-what-we-hav...

But if you bring everyone down with you, You don't have to pay anything to anyone.

It's not like Donald Trump didn't use this exact strategy already when he had to get out of debt from his private ventures.

> My impression was that PS2 emulation was already solved,

Far from it. PCSX2 is extremely solid for casual playing, but it takes a lot of shortcuts (especially when enabling upscaling and other enhancements) that differences both in gameplay and visuals in games like Gran Turismo and Ace Combat are extremely evident, more so when framebuffer and/or shader-like effects are applied.

Mind you it's not a game-breaking experience, but I feel it's differently enough to be considered closer to playing a port rather than an emulated version of the game.

The PS2 is unfortunately too alien of an architecture to expect BSNES-style accuracy AND an acceptable framerate.

If you spend that much money on ads you should be a Google Ad partner, and you usually get to have a dedicated, on-call support agent directly from Google.

We had a similar situation arise once (big marketing agency in EU), up to that day I've never had heard anyone screaming so loud at someone than my boss to whatever poor soul was assigned to us by Google.

I'm still wondering who's the target audience for something like Gutenberg.

- A bastardized version of React whose state is stored in...HTML comments and WordPress shortcodes. It's extremely brittle and even simply updating an article can put its content into an unrecoverable state.

- Some components are done in javascript client side, some are done PHP server side, there's virtually no clear idea when to use which.

- It's incredibly developer hostile compared to basically any existing WordPress Visual Builder. We're at version 23.9 and it still breaks its API and behavior to the point of forcing full component rewrites (see the changes between Blocks v2 and v3 in WordPress 7.0)

- Its full editor capabilities are basic at best. The default components are incredibly shallow, and to get even a somewhat decent layout you're at the mercy of third-party developers, by that point you could've avoided many issues going straight to Elementor or WP Bakery.

- It's incredibly confusing for the end-users! The default behavior of the editing tools is to appear only when a block is selected, which is kinda difficult when the blocks themselves are invisible. Also, the "everything is a component" approach means that every paragraph, every list, every heading is a standalone gutenberg component with his own properties that could affect every other block on the page. Writing something requires constantly going back and forth from the "Component Tree" view just to make sure there's no empty components floating somewhere disrupting the page when viewed on a tablet.

It's...truly the worst of every possible worlds, and much of its issues are blatantly self-inflicted. I genuinely can't think of any reason to use it compared to any other alternative.

From what I've seen around it will be a WordPress website still, running some at-best-once-updated version of Divi/Elementor/WpBakery, built using their equally terrible new AI tools.

Complicated psyop? It's called "Personas" and a few of my coworkers wrote a few of them just this morning.

You simply promote or finance marketing materials (blog posts, podcasts, youtube videos) with a clear idea of the kind of people you want to reach, and if your "Persona" (that is, ideal customer or evangelist) model is accurate enough, they will talk endlessly about your product for free without having to directly connect with them.

The see it as a useful tool to better...manage the population. As many have observed already, this is just another page taken verbatim from project 2025 and applied by the current US government. "Culling the herd" phase.

That document has become the most accurate predictor of USgov future policies.

Paypal is somewhat common in Italy for lunch-money amounts, a few local alternatives are available (sumUp and Satispay mainly) but for anything more than 100€ everybody uses SEPA transfers.

I wonder how did they even know about A/I.

To give a bit of context, A/I has always been closer to a conceptual group than an active hacking organization. Think Luther Blisset[1], or for a more US-centric community, the Yes-Men group[2].

Like, if they said "We're indicating Red Brigades as a terrorist group" at least it would be... understandable. But all in all Banksy has probably pulled way riskier political stunts than those guys in the past.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luther_Blissett_(pseudonym) [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yes_Men

Yep. The CRUD-ish part of CS is gonna end up like the typewriter pools from the '60s. Claude code is already way better than most subcontractors I've worked with, and without any weird interpersonal or contractual issues usually associated with whatever sketchy agreements their employers have with my employers.

I can see the ground crumbling in a linear fashion, moving straight towards my direction. In a sense, I've already made peace with that. I know what my skill ceiling is.

I'm decent enough to work on an ecommerce, customer portal or whatever. I'm also fully aware I'm never going to be able to write a kernel module, improve some low level loop in a database runtime in C, or do some sophisticated data analytics or fluid simulation modeling.

My time as developer is nigh. I won't really miss it one bit, to be honest.

Honestly I've been thinking about moving into hospitality, tourism or any other field where AI as zero chance of being able to make a serious dent. At least until robots will be able to give an interactive guided of a museum or a national park.

I remember one of the original developers explaining in a blog post that MMX support came right before the original release and was added just for Dolby Surround, unfortunately can't find it anywhere.

The remaining references available regarding this factoid are incredibly ancient, too:

- https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.misc/c/MRF...

- https://www.mobygames.com/game/644/pod/user-review/2384353/

No idea if any additional support was added in one of the subsequent releases.

Ironically P.o.d. didn't really use MMX at all except for Dolby Surround decoding[1].

[1]https://retromediahub.com/index.php/Pod:_Planet_of_Death

Between GIMP releases we saw entire graphics pipelines, conventions and workflows come and go. We had the Affinity suite, Canva, Paint.net, Clip Paint Studio, Sketch, various attempts from Adobe at expanding beyond the Photoshop ecosystem (Anyone remembers XD?), probably something else I’m missing right now. Now we’re in the age of Figma, with its own UI and quirks.

At this point it’s probably easier to accept that the GIMP UI is simply what GIMP developers want it to be.

True, it doesn’t make a lick of sense, but the same could be said about Turbotax, Jira, SAP… or God may have mercy on your soul, Avid Pro Tools.

It is what it is. It’s not like there are no alternatives anymore.

The type of problem also makes a massive difference.

- Writing my tiny hobby gameboy emulator? Heck, Why I'd let Claude take away the fun part of implementing new features and then see Super Mario Land start and run step by step?

- Debugging why a legacy Wordpress store with more than 50 active plugins is returning an error 500 just to some random customers? Claude can 100% take the wheel, I'm good.

The issue with current day "nerd culture" is that it's extremely self-referential. There's no space for anything outside of extremely codified artistic norms and genres. Techno-feudalistic art for a techno-feudalistic age.

We had artists like Sun Ra, Antonioni or Joffè who when asked about their artistic inspirations they would tell you it came from a photograph, from the sound of a specific tree in a park, the way a couple of unknowns they met everyday would talk to each other. If nowadays anyone, director or musician or artist, said anything like that he would be immediately labeled as a pretentious asshole.

All of that has been replaced in favor of an extremely rigid canon made out of permutations of themes found in marvel and dc comics, zombie books, Amblin-like '80s movies, anything strictly fantasy related from J. R. R. Tolkien (seriously, has anyone ever read anything not LoR related from this guy?) and a few other anime and scifi works.

The "whatever" part, in strict terms, would be information. Jury is still out whether that is a fundamental component of the universe or not: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/is-information-fundame...

And then what? You get a lame duck, then (if you're really lucky) a 4 year dems gov where they basically do basically nothing expect try to clean (or bury) the most outrageous cases of corruption and then once the MAGAs get elected again you're back at the beginning?

It won't happen for the intrisc nature of (current-gen, at least) AI of being forced within the limits of their training, which deprives the artist of intent - that is, specifically the ability of questioning in some way what came before him.

The point of art isn't "I made it pretty so it has value now", it's "This is how I see the world, am I the only one who feels this way?".

And yes, this is valid even for absolute jerks who couldn't care less about that the other people were thinking at the time, Like Lou Reed for example. The questions in his music were rhetorical and directed at himself in that case. Unfortunately, as Pablo Picasso said, for this computers (or AIs, in this case) are useless. They can only give you answers.

If the experience of some relatives of mine who left during the '90s is still valid, much of the defence, tech and real estate economy in Israel is basically UK and US based, with much of the actual leadership holding dual passports.

It's influential the same way Monaco, The Cayman Islands or Bahrain are.

The most interesting part is that IIRC they shipped the entire Windows 3.11 memory allocator to make it work.

I have very little understanding on how allocation works at OS level, but I'm surprised there are no wrappers like dgVoodoo or dxWrapper specifically for this kind of issues. There are quite a bunch of old Windows games (Need for Speed 1-4 for a start) that refuse to run on modern OSes due to rather...bold memory management strategies.

The most controversial part is probably that something like jqwik could be a dependency you're not even aware of. You could be asking your agent to fully analyze a project to isolate a bug and in the right situation that would probably trigger the exploit.

Are they counting “frontalieri” towards that cap?

No? Funny how that works, isn’t?

Mark my words: they will keep growing until they collapse, and once that happens, they will use their reach and contacts with the Italian government to ask to be bailed out out of debt. It’s not a matter of “if”, but “when”.

It’s a well known strategy that has been applied by several Italian companies, FIAT (now Stellantis) first and foremost.

My Nokia 5800 express could connect to a VPN and run a bridged internet connection over Bluetooth in 2008. I clearly remember using it in Switzerland around 2010 to pay for a tramway using a QR code.

Sure, UI was way worse compared to UIKit but in term of features Symbian phones were light-years beyond the iPhone at least until the iPhone 4.

He's missing the last step:

Somehow around the 2010s we all decided that everything in the web had to become "reactive" and "asynchronous" - which is a fancy way of saying things can theoretically happen at any time but realistically if you try to make it happen in ways that don't resemble the previous serial approach you get weird race conditions - and instead of making sure this was implemented in HTML now we have to write another web browser on top of our web browser in javascript, using a thing called shadow DOM.

Also somehow now you have to understand how the internet works at protocol level unless you want way worse performance than that page written in Dreamweaver 20 years ago.

But this is fine because this is the way big companies run things, which we all know they always make the correct decisions like giving their AI full access to their login and password recovery process.

Because once shit hits the fan, those responsible for destroying the ecosystem will take a one-way flight for a fully air-conditioned bunkerized apartment lot in Dubai with any Epstein island-level luxury you can think of and fuck the consequences for everyone else, that's why.

They also offer substantial discounts if you attend their seminars. I was able to buy Live Standard for roughly 150€ a few years ago.

I hope before I die we finally prove that the human brain has no peculiar qualia but it is an entirely deterministic, albeit extremely sophisticated, machine. And by touching the right triggers, even the worst human being can become a saint.

That would finally force us to rethink how we see the morality of "virtuosity", punishment and our justice system.