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.
That’s about five months of wages up here in rural nowhere NY doing IT, for what it’s worth.
Some of us are just out of the AI race completely.
You mean appreciating? They have doubled in price since release...
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.
2x Spark? As in two DGX Spark machines? That is obscenely expensive.
Is it? How much would it cost to hire a person to do the same work two of these can do?
Maybe fair to compare to using AI subscription ~20$/m (not Anthropic neither Openai)
Especially now with OpenAI constantly changing (and always reducing) what the subscription can do ... At least it will keep working.
Right now I need 4 subscriptions to do what 1 used to do. And they're tightening it further, without announcing:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50320588
(technically it isn't even legal, since changing what people get after they've agreed to the sale is obviously highly illegal)
Not that they've ever actually announced how much a subscription buys you. In fact the token use for a task on the API is also not consistent, so even on the API you don't know. And then there's Sam Altman in interviews, where he says what he wants to do: you submit a prompt, ChatGPT sends you a price and just charges it.
> 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.
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.
> 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
OK for monetization: We may have created yet another AI of DoOooOM this year!
Not OK for monetization: Someone vibecoded a clumsy clone of Alley Cat to the C64!
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.
Who? Netflix and Disney are the largest media rights holders, and they have market caps of ~$250 billion and ~$190 billion, respectively. OpenAI and Anthropic are both privately held, but currently have valuations of somewhere in the $1-2 trillion range.
That is not a fair fight.
While a good rule of thumb for the US court system is that someone with more money can screw over a smaller party. That's only up until a point. The most expensive lawsuit in history by legal fees was (adjusted for inflation) $1.15 billion. That was the 1998 Tobacco masters settlement (involving years of litigation by law firms across 46 states). So any award in the billions makes a case arguably justifiable (even more so when the highest litigation cost cases are often that expensive because the litigation fee includes a percentage of winnings).
Companies like autodesk with a ttm revenue of $7.8 billion would probably have fiscally compelling cases (if not legally compelling) to pursue if reverse engineered tools cut into their revenue. That's without getting into class action cases.
> While a good rule of thumb for the US court system is that someone with more money can screw over a smaller party. That's only up until a point.
Exactly.
Adobe had a FY2025 operating income of 8.7b on 23.77bn revenue. They employ over 33k people..
So Adobe alone has the money for a law suite that defends themselves from an existential threat, but I would imagine a class action.. It is, IMHO, just a matter of time before these companies put it together and take their shot.
Compared to the sums they bleed, sure, the 3+ billion that Pokémon alone sells every year is peanuts.
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
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.
Depends on whether it is or isn't in their interest.
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!
The obvious answer is using licensed paper and licensed pencils, that will erase your writing if you don't pay your monthly subscription.
You could use paint and scrawl it on with your fingers.
Surely the only way to be sure is to license people's hands.
> Who decides what gets to be reverse engineered and what doesn't?
Laws, ideally.
> 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.
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.
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.
Interesting example because there is no lack of Tetris-like games.
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.
"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.
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.