← Back to context

Comment by hannasanarion

5 hours ago

Is principle the only valid reason to want to do something? Why is it unacceptable that people be motivated to do things because they want the results?

The actual physical reality of the status quo of reverse engineering and recompiling is that the vast majority of stuff never gets the treatment because they aren't lucky enough to catch the attention of one of the few magical individuals with extreme skill and dedication willing to spend worth hundreds or thousands of hours of their time on them. The consequence is rot.

The status quo is thousands of pieces of software, including but not limited to video games, are lost every year, with no feasible way to recreate the systems and conditions that are needed to run them, and no way to update and repair them to be able to run again.

An estimated 88% of PS2 games are already lost forever. There are thousands of people in the world right now who have in their possession the last copies of digital media with no way to play them and nowhere near enough skill to crack and preserve them themselves.

The alternative to REA isn't hand-made free-range organic recomps, it's nothing.

6 comments

hannasanarion

Reply
csnover  2 hours ago

> Is principle the only valid reason to want to do something? Why is it unacceptable that people be motivated to do things because they want the results?

No, not at all. I myself am not a “the means is the end” kind of person. If I just wanted to puzzle out solutions with nothing to show for it, I’d do the crossword. But, in my experience, caring only about results leads to myopic short-term solutions that create bigger long-term problems. For instance, if you’re in pain, I can “cure” that by shooting you in the head. A quick positive result for getting rid of the pain—but at what cost? For thinking work, AI seems to be shaping up to be a lot closer to a bullet than an analgesic.

All I was saying is that human motivation does not exist in a single dichotomy, and that ecosystems that develop around mutual effort create benefits beyond the mutual goal. You can’t get all those benefits without humans doing the work, but there’s no extrinsic motivation for humans to do the work, so very few will bother, and the ecosystem dies. (I hope it wasn’t ‘load-bearing’.)

Anyway, the benefit of reconstructed source code is not even about preservation, it is in enhancing the user experience beyond mere preservation. We’ve been preserving software using emulation alone just fine for quite some time. If you are actually worried about preservation, you might consider how much the Wayback Machine is getting blocked these days because of AI scrapers. Or how an AI agent might apologetically wipe out some irreplaceable archive. Or how nobody in the future will probably be able to care about preservation much as the one-two punch of climate change and AI descend on us. It’s always those damned long-term consequences from short-term thinking, you know?

unleaded  4 hours ago

>An estimated 88% of PS2 games are already lost forever.

This is certainly not true. Where did you read this?

also, emulators exist, it's not recomps or nothing.