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hackit2

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Yup, it makes me think that the whole bubble/marketing about how AI is going to revolutionize business and managers can just fire or make redundant 80% of their developers because they can replace them with a single Claude subscription to be hyperbolic, and very short sighted. Even from a Business standpoint - most of the cost that is associated with running a business isn't in the people but in the marketing and material cost - developers are probably the least costly part of a business. This is just due to the fact that developer have such a high ROI that it is silly to make the case that your developers are such a significant cost factor for running your business.

That being said, I may get to that stage. How-ever there is still a lot more growing pains to be had with LLM/AI before it reaches that point - if it ever does.

I spent more time correcting LLMs or agentics systems than just learning the domain and doing the coding myself. I mainly leave LLM to the boring work of doing tedious repetitive code.

If I give it anything resembling anything that I'm not an expert on, it will make a mess of things.

That can be so far from the truth it hurts thinking about it. Governments passed laws that mandated that businesses must legally comply with DOJ or Government Investigates on people of interest. Otherwise they will be blocked in those countries. No users = No money. Most government consider they're extending you the privilege to conduct business with their citizens, and by virtue of granting you those rights you're burden with complying with the countries laws/security and/or audits.

I'm not concerned, they're accelerating research and development into hardware and more optimal models. People forget that you can locally host some of the early models quantized to 4 with reasonable inference with a 4080 and 64gb of ram. There are daily tools being released that are a simple click and run, without much hassle other than downloading the model and you're off and running.

Yes there is mad dash by Google, Oracle, Microsoft, Meta, and China not to cede their position to each other - it actually isn't about who will buy or pay for the service its more of a Business Strategic position to obtain critical mass in a new market using their massive reserve of cash. The users right now are insignificant to their goal - they probably aren't even given a second thought.

I've all-ways asked the managers can you kindly disclose all confidential business information. In which they obviously respond with condescending remarks. Then I respond with, then how am I going to give you a answer without all the knowledge of how the business runs and operates? You can go away and figure out what is going to make work for the business then you can delegate what you want me to do, it is the reason why you pay me money.

When I started with the gaming industry (Operation Flashpoint), I was coming in near the end of fixed point arithmetic where floating point units where becoming more common as part of the PII or PI era. It was around mid-1990, I'm actually in my early 40's now. I knew a little bit of floating point units but never really dived into the area - also at the time I wasn't really mathematically minded and we really didn't have access to the internet - Australia.

A-10 Cuba! came out around 1996, and only now am I getting to know its internal engine. For example, it utilizes a signed Q15.16 fixed-point representation for its X and Z axes. For instance, a raw value of 98,304 (0x00018000) decodes to 1.5 units - where a unit is defined as 6607.92 feet - which translates to 9,911.88 feet in the game world. Then to top it off, it uses a different coordinate scaling convention for its up axis. For example the up-axis resolution is 1/10th of a foot so a raw value of 10,000 is actually 1,000 feet. Then there are other discrete exponent scaling factors which the game applies to maintain numerical precision and accuracy.

I had a great time learning all this well reverse engineering the game, and also come to learn even today how common it is for chips not to come with FPU unit, and how common it is that those chips actually perform fixed point arithmetic.

The plan is to put everything into a repo on github, this includes documentation on the file format, and also the rewrite of the original code in modern C++ and DirectX or Vulkan. I don't see much point in reverse engineering the old rendering engine - I can do it but I've got everything I need right now that I can just rewrite the game inside the browser.

It isn't that hard. I'm currently reverse engineering a old flight simulator game called A-10 Cuba. I had to teach myself X86 Assembly, and understand basic calling convention. Then C++ vtables, struct alignment and struct layout. How-ever you do need this basic level understanding of the core fundamental to help you along when the tools you use IDA, Ghidra that turn the assembly code back into C pseudo code.

So there is a big hurdle to get over in the initial stages but you soon find out that a lot higher code structure/scaffold isn't wiped out by the compiler. For example, the generated assembly code very closely mirrors the C/C++ function boundaries. This enables you to infer the over-all original code structure/layout basically from the call chain, and then you can manually step through and figure out what the original programmer was trying to achieve - abet the order of execution does get messed up by the compiler but it isn't that bad.

In my project with A-10 Cuba, I was successful in reverse engineering its file format, the over-all module layout, engine and rendering engine during my three weeks break. I still have some time to work out the AI logic, and mission design but one builds on another. What do I mean one builds on another? Well when you first start you have no types, not structs. So the first days you think you're making absolutly no progress because you're trying to calculate pointer offsets and structs layouts in IDA. I highly recommend Google Gemini or Claude code to do this heavy lifting because you can get away with a lot by asking it (for this IDA Pseudocode, infer what the struct layout is and tell me what it is doing?).

The first stage of getting those first struct layout is painstaking, then you soon can branch off one strut, or struct pointer to another. This feeds back like a feed-back loop - because programmers are lazy. And you soon have a large part of the struct/code-flow layout figured out.

You then take the structs/code-flow, and pesudo code and then do a re-write in a modern C/C++ compiler until you have a working version.

In his own words he all-ready got early feedback from his family.

"I tried the local Iranian market. I showed it to friends, family, and potential clients. Their response: "Nobody in Iran will pay $500/month for this. The Persian language quality isn't perfect. We'll use free ChatGPT instead.""

Which should of been free feed-back on the risk vs reward.

Most of the internet still assumes you're using a 96 DPI monitor. Tho the rise of mobile phone has changed that it seems like the vast majority of the content consumed on mobile lends itself to being scaled to any DPI - eg.. movies, pictures, youtube ect.

In high social cohesion there is social pressure to adhere to reciprocation, how-ever this start breaking down above a certain human group size. Empathy like all emotions require effort and cognitive load, and without things being mutual you will eventually slowly become drained, bitter and resentful because of empathy fatigue. To prevent emotional exhaustion and conserve energy, a person's empathy is like a sliding scale that is constantly adjusted based on the closeness of their relationship with others.

You forgot to add the cognitive load of needing to learning their business domain. Programming or working on code is very much like replaceable lego blocks, which are made up of your typical functional, procedural, queues, dictionaries, link list, and your data model. The mental load really comes from needing to learn a often narrow niche with all their idiosyncratic edge case conditions and data models.

I've worked on Titling Systems, Game Development (C/C++), Integration Systems, and Backend database systems. All those niche data models/systems live rent free in my head. It is all absolutely worthless to my current employer or people around me because they're focused on solving their unique problems which at the end of the day just become another piece of worthless business procedure in my head. It is worthless because of the fact that business and people only care about solving their problem, once its solved they just move onto the next.

Each party has their own valid argument that is why they're seeking the court to make a ruling. How-ever coercive threats of legal action is also in of itself constitute a encroachment of someone free will and statutory right which everything being equal could be ground for further legal recourse by the other party. You could also go into nit picking details around consent and duress during employment, which can get complicated really quickly.

a half assed job

A judge would automatically throw out the case if this was the argument for suing an employee. The reasoning being, if you continued to pay the employee during the term of their employment, and you knew that the employee was not performing based on some KPI or some yard stick, you would issue warning to the employee to improve their performance, or you would fire the employee on the spot. Continuing keep an underperforming employee is giving tactic consent that their work is reasonably acceptable because if it wasn't, you would start disciplinary action or cease their employment.

Threating a employee with coercive threats (such as threats of legal action) is going to land the business into hot water in any modern society.