Comment by genldd
16 hours ago
Is this.. The right approach? Who decides what gets to be reverse engineered and what doesn't? I don't have a solution to offer, but I bristle at the idea of one indistry deciding which other industries suffer the negative externalities of their product, while others they decide are spared.
> Who decides what gets to be reverse engineered and what doesn't?
whoever owns the hardware
currently running 2x DGX Sparks and never thought to use a commercial model again
Curious about your setup if you don’t mind elaborating a bit for us? What models are you using and how do you find they compare? The 128gb model costs less than one months salary for a medium level engineer here, they look quite attractive.
A month and a half salary after tax here. That is still particularly expensive, and besides its sinking money into a steeply depreciating asset.
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i've been running DeepSeekV4 flash but looking at the other models being suggested around, best part is switching to test has 0 cost :)
i felt like commercials LLMs were "good enough" for my needs about 2-3 generations ago, so this clicked into my work/life needs perfectly
i got them right before they went up in price, but honestly, for the ability to know that i wont have my thinking "questioned"... priceless
Best model on 2xSpark currently is GLM 5.3 flash ... but really does require 2x Spark. 25 to 60 tok/s with MTP.
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> whoever owns the hardware
Yes and this is why self-hosting is more important than ever. The issue with LLMs is the cost of hardware if you want something close to the frontier. But there is no excuse not to host your own files, email, media center, etc.
Email is, given the issues with connectivity, something you can justifiably make someone else's problem.
There's no reason not to have your own domain though. I've been using Migadu and the amount of flexibility that gives you is ridiculous. The only downside is the lack of push notifications, but if your email is so important that you can't wait for a refresh then I can't help.
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same as self-hosting email/webservers though, you dont need world-class hardware for personal projects. frontier models may be more capable but a smaller model can just as easily work through a project you break down for it
This about the risk of getting sued by parties with deep pockets. Antrophic is close to an IPO so that is definitely not the kind of attention they want.
There are no content owners that have close to as deep of pockets as the big AI companies
The money we are talking about.. A lot of these rights holders have more than enough cash on hand to bring a suite and potentially destroy Anthropic/OpenAI with the right case.
> This about the risk of getting sued by parties with deep pockets.
They are also probably intentionally trying to create differentiation between their models and open models to strengthen the regulatory capture case of having the government ban open model use.
Can't put the cat back in the tube
I can see your point, but on the other hand it seems like the only alternatives are a blanket ban on reverse engineering or a blanket allowance. I probably don't have to make the case for the value of reverse engineering here, so the question is to what degree it can be abused and if they have the responsibility to stop it. I would argue companies do have an obligation to consider and mitigate abuse of their product, especially frontier technologies. Probably the best outcome will be some kind of balance of judgment by the company.
A blanked allowance would be the answer. Claude is just a tool, after all. Neither Ghidra nor IDA tells me what I'm allowed to decompile and what I'm not. If someone then uses it to create something whose distribution would constitute a copyright infringement, that is the responsibility of the person who did so, not the software manufacturer.
Several AI companies are getting sued for what their products allow users to do, as was Google for what YouTube allowed its users to do.
YouTube is probably an instructive example here: they can refuse to host certain content on their servers, and this is Anthropic refusing to have the AI on their servers perform certain tasks.
> Claude is just a tool
I dont think Anthropic will agree with that statement.
Looks like we need to ban paper. Paper can be used to reproduce copyrighted material.
Even without a computer, you could use a pencil and a notebook to write down some song lyrics without express written consent of Universal Music Group!
It's the wrong approach, because the public demand to reverse engineer games (a pretty benign activity, for humans at least not corporations) is massive and a new subset of hackers who will release public jailbreaks that could be used for hacking which is more of a grey area
We're already knocking on the door of just clean-room recreating any game or experience in one shot. In such an environment, who really cares about reverse engineering old games?
I mean, from game company perspective, will they really care about their old games getting reverse engineered when their next big title can be clean-room recreated by anyone with the skill to write a sentence? Maybe creating a game similar to the next big release will be something that the AIs refuse to do next? Interesting times.
As an aspiring game developer myself, I guess reducing the accessibility of old games benefits me (but I don't like it)--and hey, if you can't get that old game to run, maybe we can vibe code for a weekend and make a new game that captures the same feeling.
> who really cares about reverse engineering old games?
Tetris copyright for example is still heavily policed.
I think however if games continue to be killed there should be a legal route towards the community taking ownership in whatever way is necessary.
"Clean room" is doing a lot of heavy..
Anyway, 99.99% of "clean room" vibe coded projects are 100% NOT putting in place the proper policies and controls.
It's the wild west out there right now.
I think from a legal perspective modding is technically a violation of the ToS.
But ofcourse the videogame industry has always turned a blind eye to it provided you don't make money from it.
Ultimately, the person offering the service gets to decide what the service is.
If I want to make a knitting forum, im not going to feel bad about deleting posts about reverse engineering video games.
> Who decides what gets to be reverse engineered and what doesn't?
The service provider decides the terms and conditions, as long as they comply with the law. For example, Google decides whether pirated movies can be hosted on its cloud service, because it provides the cloud service. It's pretty clear.
In a pure capitalist system, competitors would emerge if the repressed service were genuinely in high demand and lawful. If it was not, then well, that's just how we regulate the world but this cannot be considered a case of one industry deciding the fate of another.
Honestly the collateral worries me more than the game policy itself. The Tom's Hardware piece mentions users saying generic reverse-engineering tasks get blocked too, and a classifier looking at disassembly can't easily tell a commercial game from your own firmware, a binary you're patching for interop, or a CTF challenge. If a filter is going to draw that line, I'd rather it were documented than discovered one refusal at a time.