Although I love the new era of LLM assisted reverse engineering, it really breaks my heart how much it negatively affect veterans in their area of passion.
I know this is no consolation, but passions often have no recognition or monetary reward.
Personally I will keep doing things I love. For instance, I didn't stop studying and playing chess when it was obvious that my career would be in engineering and I would never be a pro, or when computers became clearly much stronger than humans, which happened while I was already playing chess somewhat seriously.
I intend to keep rawdogging my stuff, especially the stuff I do for myself. It's more of a personal drama when it simply rug-pulls somebody's livelihood all of a sudden. This is not a new phenomenon, but it's happening at a remarkable rate right now. I wonder if this time around there will be enough people that they won't be dismissed as losers against progress.
I'm an experienced reverser, and have been doing it for decades, but I think it's great that LLMs have brought this power to everyone and the old gatekeepers are being made irrelevant. IMHO the ones who are complaining about it were always just seeking fame and fortune, not freedom and user empowerment. Like I said in another comment recently, I don't think Stallman ever anticipated this development, and that his focus on "open source" was always misguided.
Incidentally I've also been writing Z80 and x86 Asm for roughly as long, and saw the complaints about "compiler slop" (we didn't call it that) at the time. I could probably still beat one if I wanted to, but clearly "close enough is good enough" and there's so much useful software which would not have been created if compilers couldn't exist and everyone still had to write machine code using a hexpad.
You can outcode the compiler but ofc that's not a way to go with tens of thousands of instructions and so on. LLMs are just much faster in writing code, just like compilers are much faster at assembling all the functions.
And yes, in a roundabout way, this is Stallman's dream fulfilled to the tip with his printer driver ;)
Many of these people wanted a project to run and gatekeep the people "not worthy enough" to hack on it or to use it. That's changing now, everyone can prompt together a bunch of crap. Fun fact I think I've got like... probably more than ten people into C++ programming simply by helping them prompt AI on how to get started, then they've picked up actual skills along the way. Note, they weren't any kind of programmers before because code is scary, but with a much lower barrier of entry, many more people can do stuff. It's amazing to see.
The flip side is when you see someone who has never interacted with a community before come in and drop a big announcement written in Claudish about some new port they just released (with a ko-fi link already set up of course), you kinda feel like they're the ones chasing fame and fortune.
In the modding community I'm most active in, counter-strike, I have seen someone come in and literally ask if there was money in it and if not what game would be best to make mods for to make some money.
People should really read the whole thing (well at least the last chapter) because it's not as simple as "vibe coders made meg go away".
The writer equally hates ZUN, vibe coders, and AI haters (Bluesky crowd)
And if not then the TLDR is basically: ZUN made the games for japanese people. Western people wanted to play the games. Reverse engineers came along but they relied on community funding. Now the community is taken apart by vibe coders but the same community is not willing to fund manual labor. Also the community is still paying for ZUN which enforces the status quo of not bothering with english releases.
To add some further context, all the Touhou games have been playable by Westerners for years due to fan translation patches. Even for the PC-98 games, the community has made preconfigured emulators packaged with all the games pre-patched to English so it's easy to play them without any technical knowledge. The reverse engineering project is orthogonal to this and is mainly intended to document the games' behavior as well as make them easier to mod. Having the source code available would make it possible to port the games to modern platforms, but they are pixel art 2D shooters so from a gameplay perspective there's not much of a benefit over playing them in an emulator.
This idea is very common among the community. I paid for the games baaaack in the day (I even have a disk signed by ZUN himself) because shumps are my favorite genre and when Touhou 6-7 came out there was a huge drought. The games were good, I never particularly cared about the characters but the gameplay was solid and interesting, with good scoring mechanics and some spectacle despite ZUN's terribad art skills.
This was a huge hot take apparently and members of the community hated everyone who obtained (and played) the games legally. You'd get bullied relentlessly for it. And I don't mean "guys you gotta buy the games to support the artist" or any form of moralizing, just mentioning you purchased the games got you unreasonable amounts of anger. Even friends from Japan who bought extra stuff like the music CDs and stuff made them so angry that my friends got banned from the IRC channel and forums. I left after that because that was unsustainable, people were only there to discuss fanfics of the characters and porn.
I still like the games, but the community at large is disgusting and hate people who actually play the games. Triple so if they are purchased. This guy is the perfect representation of that attitude.
I wanted to be sympathetic to someone watching their hobby and source of income disappear, but I'm finding it quite difficult to do so when they're this smarmy and unpleasant. I would not want to involve this person in any of my endeavours, either.
This work is/was a community endeavour, and if you're unpleasant, people will route around you. My sympathy ends because this isn't just an AI problem, it's an interpersonal problem.
I've been following this project off and on for a while, frankly this post is bizarre. It seems like he'd been burning out for a while and AI was the last straw. He goes over how he doesn't like the Touhou games, he doesn't like the Touhou characters, and he doesn't like the Touhou community. His motivation for working on the project seems to some combination of be wanting to seen as a pillar of the community (which he has no respect for), and the financial incentive because his decompilation work is funded by donors who choose what he works on.
There's one part where he goes over how he felt scorned because a remake of a different Touhou game that he wasn't decompiling came out, and people in the Western Touhou community worked on it, but nobody told him about it despite all the work he'd put into classic Touhou games. There's a different part where he's complaining about how some FreeBSD user submitted a PR to fix his Seihou port to build on FreeBSD since the niche build system he uses doesn't have good support for *BSD. He spends a paragraph ranting about how he would never support FreeBSD, then the next paragraph is about how he would have loved to get it working on FreeBSD if the person went about asking for the feature the "correct way", then he says he'd rather quit programming entirely than support FreeBSD on desktop.
I think he saw the project as an obligation that he couldn't get rid of rather than something he did out of love or passion. There's a section at the end where he goes over how his life will improve now that he doesn't have to work on the project. Notably, throughout the post he calls out by name various people in the Touhou community that he doesn't like, but he never calls out any of the vibecoders.
I'm all here for testimonials about the harms AI hype brings to niche communities, but the messenger's idiosyncracies here tell a different story than the headline.
Bellyaching about a benign-if-mildly-presumptuous BSD request by making a point to complain abou C++ Modules support, of all things, doesn't demonstrate a less-narrow perspective on the part of the maintainer.
Also, comparing AI skepticism to GamerGate really reveals a mind forever locked in decades-old grievances.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 31.5 ms ] threadPersonally I will keep doing things I love. For instance, I didn't stop studying and playing chess when it was obvious that my career would be in engineering and I would never be a pro, or when computers became clearly much stronger than humans, which happened while I was already playing chess somewhat seriously.
I intend to keep rawdogging my stuff, especially the stuff I do for myself. It's more of a personal drama when it simply rug-pulls somebody's livelihood all of a sudden. This is not a new phenomenon, but it's happening at a remarkable rate right now. I wonder if this time around there will be enough people that they won't be dismissed as losers against progress.
Incidentally I've also been writing Z80 and x86 Asm for roughly as long, and saw the complaints about "compiler slop" (we didn't call it that) at the time. I could probably still beat one if I wanted to, but clearly "close enough is good enough" and there's so much useful software which would not have been created if compilers couldn't exist and everyone still had to write machine code using a hexpad.
You can outcode the compiler but ofc that's not a way to go with tens of thousands of instructions and so on. LLMs are just much faster in writing code, just like compilers are much faster at assembling all the functions.
And yes, in a roundabout way, this is Stallman's dream fulfilled to the tip with his printer driver ;)
Many of these people wanted a project to run and gatekeep the people "not worthy enough" to hack on it or to use it. That's changing now, everyone can prompt together a bunch of crap. Fun fact I think I've got like... probably more than ten people into C++ programming simply by helping them prompt AI on how to get started, then they've picked up actual skills along the way. Note, they weren't any kind of programmers before because code is scary, but with a much lower barrier of entry, many more people can do stuff. It's amazing to see.
In the modding community I'm most active in, counter-strike, I have seen someone come in and literally ask if there was money in it and if not what game would be best to make mods for to make some money.
As I said before [1] we are all Lee Sedol.
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-50573071
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49505141
The writer equally hates ZUN, vibe coders, and AI haters (Bluesky crowd)
And if not then the TLDR is basically: ZUN made the games for japanese people. Western people wanted to play the games. Reverse engineers came along but they relied on community funding. Now the community is taken apart by vibe coders but the same community is not willing to fund manual labor. Also the community is still paying for ZUN which enforces the status quo of not bothering with english releases.
This was a huge hot take apparently and members of the community hated everyone who obtained (and played) the games legally. You'd get bullied relentlessly for it. And I don't mean "guys you gotta buy the games to support the artist" or any form of moralizing, just mentioning you purchased the games got you unreasonable amounts of anger. Even friends from Japan who bought extra stuff like the music CDs and stuff made them so angry that my friends got banned from the IRC channel and forums. I left after that because that was unsustainable, people were only there to discuss fanfics of the characters and porn.
I still like the games, but the community at large is disgusting and hate people who actually play the games. Triple so if they are purchased. This guy is the perfect representation of that attitude.
An anti-recommendation of this sort is all I needed:
>I wanted to be sympathetic [...], but I'm finding it quite difficult to do so when they're this smarmy and unpleasant.
That's one way to boast that your morality, sympathy, and sense of justice are primarily guided by how pleasant the people involved are.
>I would not want to involve this person in any of my endeavours, either.
Nobody asked.
"I wanted to be sympathetic to the burn victim, but it's hard to do so because I don't like her, and I totally wouldn't date her either"
If you have something to express besides moral superiority, say so.
There's one part where he goes over how he felt scorned because a remake of a different Touhou game that he wasn't decompiling came out, and people in the Western Touhou community worked on it, but nobody told him about it despite all the work he'd put into classic Touhou games. There's a different part where he's complaining about how some FreeBSD user submitted a PR to fix his Seihou port to build on FreeBSD since the niche build system he uses doesn't have good support for *BSD. He spends a paragraph ranting about how he would never support FreeBSD, then the next paragraph is about how he would have loved to get it working on FreeBSD if the person went about asking for the feature the "correct way", then he says he'd rather quit programming entirely than support FreeBSD on desktop.
I think he saw the project as an obligation that he couldn't get rid of rather than something he did out of love or passion. There's a section at the end where he goes over how his life will improve now that he doesn't have to work on the project. Notably, throughout the post he calls out by name various people in the Touhou community that he doesn't like, but he never calls out any of the vibecoders.
Bellyaching about a benign-if-mildly-presumptuous BSD request by making a point to complain abou C++ Modules support, of all things, doesn't demonstrate a less-narrow perspective on the part of the maintainer.
Also, comparing AI skepticism to GamerGate really reveals a mind forever locked in decades-old grievances.