The website decomp.dev said Thursday that it is shutting down because “the community aspect of decompilation has been broken” by AI, and that projects that once required intense collaboration between people with different skills can now be done trivially with AI. The administrator of the website said that it has become impossible to keep track of which projects are primarily human-led and which ones are done by AI.

“Historically, matching decompilation has been a brutally difficult, time consuming task, on the scale of years for any moderately-sized game with a number of active contributors,” the pseudonymous admin of decomp.dev, who goes by Encounter, wrote on the site.

But recent frontier AI models like GPT-6-Astra have made it trivially easy to decompile a game: “They are significantly better at following complex directions, cross-referencing resources for symbols or debug information, and writing natural code with enough guidance,” Encounter wrote. “It is now clear that, with the right guidance, human input, and code reviews, AI can expedite the decompilation process in a significant way. What is also now clear is that the community aspect of decompilation has been broken.”

AI-powered video game decomps and recomps (recompiling code after modifying it) are everywhere. People have, for example, used AI to put Mario into Elden Ring, port games to platforms they were never designed to work on, or to combine various games in any permutations you could possibly imagine. In recent days, tools specifically designed to decomp games with AI have popped up, such as "decomp.wtf," which promises to "point the AI agent you already use at a game you own. decomp.wtf turns it back into C, one function at a time, and checks every function byte for byte against the original."

Decomp.dev was a collaborative website that hosted file libraries and tools for reverse engineering, re-coding, and decompiling existing video games, meaning taking an existing game and recreating its source code. Decompiling a video game can be done for a variety of reasons and is popular in a few different niches of video game fandom. Speed runners decompile video games to find potential glitches or advantages they can use to beat a game faster; hobbyists decompile video games to port them to new platforms or to emulate them (for example, making Super Mario 64 run natively on PC); modders decompile games so they can more easily modify them; archivists decompile games to recreate code that may be lost; and some people decompile games just for the challenge.

Encounter wrote that the use of AI in the community has sped things up to the point where it has become overwhelming to track human-led projects, and people using AI have taken existing, human-led AI projects and have created “hostile forks” of them, where open-source code written by humans is taken and “finished” by AI: “These kinds of hostile forks put little to no effort into meaningfully contributing to existing projects, tearing apart our community fabric.” Encounter added, “anyone with an AI subscription can manage to create a port or static recompilation that functions at a basic level […] While community members put in the effort to decompile a game, opportunists have frequently raced to release a half-baked, barely-functional port from it.”

Tech billionaires have been dumping hundreds of millions of dollars into the fight against a wealth tax in California. They’ve raised more than $340m, and the campaign they’re funding is spending more than $1m a day to defeat the measure, according to state financial disclosures.

With the election less than a month away, those funds are being spent at a stepped-up pace. During the first 19 days of September, according to the most recent campaign filings, the opposition campaign plowed through at least $21.2m to fight the billionaire tax – surpassing $1m per day. Voters are being inundated with robotexts, mailers and advertisements that warn a tax on billionaires would “expose all Californians to higher taxes”, as one ad reads.

Californians will vote on the ballot measure, Proposition 40, in early November. If passed, it would require a one-time 5% tax on the state’s billionaires, with the proceeds mostly funding healthcare programs, along with some education and food assistance. The measure has divided Democrats in the state, with some giving enthusiastic support and others rejecting the proposal because it’s just a one-time levy and the bulk of it would only fund certain healthcare programs.

Modern food blogs wish they had this level of longevity. No popups, no ads, just stew!

A Babylonian stew prepared by Tasting History if anyone wants to try out an updated recipe:
https://www.tastinghistory.com/recipes/babylonianlambstew

and a Babylonian tuh'u specifically made for the New Year celebrations:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IYYhoO-hiY

And just yesterday Max posted a video about assyrian pomegranate beer
https://youtu.be/MO0lKDNKxmE

Table of the Gods is a similar channel specifically about recipes of ancient Mesopotamia. Very neat stuff, some of which I believe comes from this very tablet.

All this content proudly and shamelessly lifted from the evil empire. 🙂

Video of Democracy Now interview

We speak with tech journalist Paris Marx about his new book, *Hyperscale: The Ambition and Excess of Big Tech’s Data Empires*. In the book, Marx exposes the deceptive ways tech companies are taking resources from vulnerable communities in order to build massive AI data centers. “We have seen the tech companies that, back in 2019, 2020, wanted us to see them as climate leaders … completely throw their targets out the window in order to pursue generative AI and this data center buildout,” says Marx. He notes that after failing to connect to electrical grids in the locations where they were building data centers, some AI companies have pivoted to building “on-site gas plants,” further increasing dependency on fossil fuels.

Tech companies “want us to believe” that AI models are “starting to become so powerful that within 10 years they could decide that they want to wipe out humanity or a significant chunk of humanity,” says Marx. “That is a mix of science fiction and delusion … and it is also a very effective way to distract from the real harms that we’re seeing from these generative AI products.”

Here’s another crappy pun to ruin your day. 😎

yeah well it finally happened, i got lazy. if my nails are painted, the first thing i do when getting home is clean em off... but last night i was tired and figured i could just do it in the morning. well, of course that backfired immediately - first thing that happens when i leave my room this morning is my dad seeing me heading into the bathroom with bright blue sparkly nails and a bag of cosmetics. he didn't say anything immediately, but has been weirdly sigh-y all day, and just now stuck his head in my room saying he "wants to chat" later today (extremely out-of-character) while being extremely cryptic and evasive about what exactly he wants to talk about.

(for context, although i live in switzerland, my parents are hardcore USA-an tradcaths (the kind who hate the "woke" pope). my dad has voted for trump the last 3 consecutive US elections and will do so again, has trump merch proudly on display in his room, immediately started voting for the far-right immigrant party as soon as he got his swiss citizenship, regularly goes on unprovoked angry diatribes about how much gay people disgust him, etc. you get the picture; he's pretty much the stereotype of the "far right religious nutjob". my mom is almost aggressively unopinionated about most things, and certainly doesn't make any effort to rein my dad ever)

anyway, i'm looking forward to talking with him this evening, i'm sure it'll be great fun! ಠ_ಠ