Hacker News: SmasherEpilepti

New comment by SmasherEpilepti in "Decompiling a Nintendo 64 game in 84 days"

SmasherEpilepti — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:00:14 +0000

That's a terrible analogy. It's more like using a typewriter where the job is calligraphy.

I use LLMs at work all the time, and it truly does feel like somebody else coding for me, and me reviewing, cleaning up, and asking for changes. It's really not my work, nor is it my code, but I'm still fine bringing it in.

I also don't use LLMs on my personal code done in my free time because I want my brain to still be fully functional in a few years.

New comment by SmasherEpilepti in "Decompiling a Nintendo 64 game in 84 days"

SmasherEpilepti — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 23:56:34 +0000

A decompilation is not clean room, nor is it "created from scratch". If that was the case, you could just compile a program to remove the copyright, because the machine code doesn't resemble the source code at all either.

A reimplementation or a behavior-based clone is an entirely different legal world from decompilation.

New comment by SmasherEpilepti in "Executable Is a SQLite Database"

SmasherEpilepti — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 19:44:15 +0000

> ELF MECHANISM: .strtab / .dynstr > The database primitive it reinvents: string interning

> Surprisingly a lot more falls out as well: .dynstr is gone, because name is TEXT and SQLite already interns strings

What's with this claim? SQLite does not intern strings, as far as I can find anywhere, and a quick test shows that duplicate strings are actually duplicated in a database file. You can intern strings in SQLite manually with an intern string table, but it doesn't happen automatically.