Comment by simias

Hotpatching binaries used to be common. It's less so in the modern age but mainly because we moved software to higher levels of abstractions, virtual machines and interpreters, and also because rebuilding even a massive project from source is achievable on commodity hardware. You can still see various hotpatching schemes being developed, for instance to allow partial recompile of the sources while developping.

If in 2080 we can retrain Opus 129.5 directly on dev machines from scratch in <2h, I doubt many will bother messing with the weights directly.