Hacker News: gmerc

New comment by gmerc in "Yandex Takes a Second Data Center Hit in 48 Hours"

gmerc — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 14:50:42 +0000

Not reelecting Donald Trump to stop the aggressive destruction of global collaboration and peace would be a vastly cheaper strategy

New comment by gmerc in "Why isn't the industry freaking out about DeepSeek 4.1 Flash?"

gmerc — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 01:52:02 +0000

DS4.1 Flash is 300t/s and absolutely above Luna, especially on things like reverse engineering and cybersecurity

New comment by gmerc in "The cost of lies: A Mineserver story"

gmerc — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 04:12:23 +0000

Richard Garriott, Peter Molineux, Chris Roberts there's a long list of similar "Don't give money to your childhood heroes" stories

New comment by gmerc in "Our Project Suncatcher prototype satellite is in orbit"

gmerc — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 13:11:22 +0000

Everyone just needs to open the history books, we’ve run the same scam before making the same people rich. It was called SDI

New comment by gmerc in "One month coding with GLM 5.3 Flash"

gmerc — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 13:02:56 +0000

But bro we need to shoot the DC to space because UNLIMITED POWER

New comment by gmerc in "What reversing, modernising old games tells us about the economic impact of AI"

gmerc — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 07:59:34 +0000

RPGs are much heavier on rules than other types of games and in these old games, many of them are hardcoded in the executable which means heavy RE to extract them.

They are also usually heavier on content than other games so you have file format shenanigans like custom compression schemes or crazy memory management (see Ultima 7) to make them work / get to their internals.

If you’re lucky they have a scripting VM that drops much of the gameplay in place (Adventures of Robin Hood for example) because you can just translate it, but many older games are a mess of data files, data embedded in the EXE and procedural rules.

Coming from BioWare games and having contributed to making that massive complexity mess testable in the 2010:, RPGs are the hardest to test games overall because branch converge is very hard to achieve.

If you take for example SWTOR - designers store quest variables on random animals in the world. Thoughts and prayers even for the LLM ;)

New comment by gmerc in "California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops"

gmerc — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 14:49:37 +0000

GLP-1 is hitting alcohol sales

New comment by gmerc in "What reversing, modernising old games tells us about the economic impact of AI"

gmerc — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 11:51:10 +0000

I think it’s possible, yes. RPGs are tough because they require a lot of detail but for example Ultima 6 “modernized” to Duke Nukem style 3d https://u6.tooclever.org/map3d or Syndicate or Dungeon Keeper all were no problem to do with modern models

New comment by gmerc in "Back in 1990, when technology was still fun"

gmerc — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 09:13:05 +0000

A simulated 1990s bedroom filled with simulated technology from the time.

Back in 1990, when technology was still fun

gmerc — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 09:13:05 +0000

Article URL: https://myroom.isfine.org/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49890303

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by gmerc in "What reversing, modernising old games tells us about the economic impact of AI"

gmerc — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 09:10:24 +0000

I think my work speaks for itself.

New comment by gmerc in "What reversing, modernising old games tells us about the economic impact of AI"

gmerc — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 08:36:58 +0000

You know, why don’t you actually try it yourself? It’s not my job to convince you of anything - if anything the stations of my career should give you a very uncomfortable feeling that I may actually know what I’m talking about. And I suspect that’s the very reason for your reaction, it’s really creating some serious pressure on your cognitive dissonance.

New comment by gmerc in "What reversing, modernising old games tells us about the economic impact of AI"

gmerc — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 07:55:38 +0000

Math Olympiads benchmarks at the time were reliant on training data stuffing / Benchmaxxing and this was the absolutely correct statement at that time in that particular context (Dramatic drop of performance on out of training set questions).

We hadn’t broadly moved into lean proof harnesses and brute force compute spend at the time yet and the statement itself continues to be true for LLMs on their own.

New comment by gmerc in "What reversing, modernising old games tells us about the economic impact of AI"

gmerc — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 07:37:08 +0000

OpenAI and anthropic make the case that if the model decided to reverse engineer the game itself after getting prompt injected, I mean inspired, “GPU did it” is a perfectly valid defense and we should invite the owner of the GPU to write future regulation

New comment by gmerc in "What reversing, modernising old games tells us about the economic impact of AI"

gmerc — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 07:25:47 +0000

Pretty sure porting a PC game into a gameboy ROM, even a 1989 PC game, is exactly that.

Trust me, operated by a skilled individual AI will have zero problem with that. I never make the case for amateurs doing these things.

Catalog is under “shop”.

New comment by gmerc in "What reversing, modernising old games tells us about the economic impact of AI"

gmerc — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 05:42:12 +0000

Author here. I’m as far from an AI booster as it gets (look me up) and I worked in the industry for almost 2 decades. I know how assets look like, especially from outsourcers and internal outsourced studios on titles like Assassins Creed.

I’m telling you Astra+ is massively improved under proper guidance and it’s going to be good enough for 80% of games. Maybe not your GTA, Kojima or Call of Duty but that claim was never made. We have the pipelines of tools to deal with mass produced assets. Especially if you pass reference assets not just pictures which all game studios have aplenty.

There’s no way to assume the technology, given training data, will not solve this completely either.

Have a look at myroom.isfine.org - an 1 day experiment with one of said pipelines.

New comment by gmerc in "What reversing, modernising old games tells us about the economic impact of AI"

gmerc — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 05:35:41 +0000

Word 1:0 for windows makes an excellent high speed wasm layout engine …

New comment by gmerc in "What reversing, modernising old games tells us about the economic impact of AI"

gmerc — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 05:32:05 +0000

Author here: It had no problem creating gameboy and NES ROMs for me https://myroom.isfine.org (order the gameboy from the catalog) was an initial test, I’ve halfway through a demake of dragon strike after stumbling on the fact this was trivial

New comment by gmerc in "Google’s Project Suncatcher to put ML infrastructure in space"

gmerc — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:11:43 +0000

Any nation with the ability to lift a sack of ball bearings into space can trigger a kessler cascade on your plane, so the is is fucking nonsense

New comment by gmerc in "Google’s Project Suncatcher to put ML infrastructure in space"

gmerc — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 18:01:02 +0000

That's the fun part, they don't need to be viable. It's just the excuse to shovel tons of money to Trump donors, by rerunning the scam that was SDI.

And they never will be because it's always going to be cheaper to build them on the ground.