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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 19, 2026

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Automatically reconfiguring existing stuff is an incredible demonstration of capability. Smashing Counter Strike and Warcraft 3 together would never have been done before this because it's really difficult. Decompilations had been done before this, but they took years of effort. That Diablo 1 decompile was done by one guy, who said it took him over 1000 hours. This isn't something you can wave away as "gimmickry" and "plagiarism". If it can do these really difficult things, it can certainly create really good new things, too.

Also how many genuine original ideas exist? People stand on the shoulders of giants doing their best to jam together information that exists previously, for the most part, if AI can just do that at scale then it kinda wins.

A bulldozer can do really difficult feats of moving vast masses of earth about, too, but its potentials are still limited.

If all AI ever is is a digital bulldozer, then, not unlike real bulldozers, it's still going to reshape the whole world.