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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 19, 2026

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I don't know if it's because I skip most AI conversations, but I think you guys might have failed to discuss some things that have been happening for the last several weeks.

Reverse engineering with AI has gotten really, really good, somehow. It's so good that you can reverse engineer Microsoft Office and host it online for free. It's so good that you can submit your tokens to the Machine God and get World of Warcraft open source. You can now play the original Xbox Halo, but with 32 player coop (seemingly most of the players being Mexican). On your Nintendo 64. In fact, you can play Halo in your browser now. You can play lots of stuff in your browser now. I looked up an old game called Apeiron for old Macintosh, released in 1990 something, just a Centipede clone developed by Ambrosia Software, long since abandonware. There are two ports of it that I found in comments sections on Macintosh Garden. The classic decompilation site is shutting down due to sheer volume. And yes, there's also mods. Flying my Banshee across the Mojave almost makes me wish for a nuclear winter. My Foundry in Warcraft 3 just told me that my AWP research has completed, so I went on a tear across Lordaeron.

On the other side of this, AI can now shut down 70% of the Internet. This bug was in PHP for a long time, and only now discovered, because someone pointed a technological superweapon at it.

What the hell even happens from all this? Can Apple really continue to have a closed ecosystem? Are we going to wake up with no money in our bank accounts? Does proprietary code even exist anymore? How is Steam going to cope with having tens of thousands more games submitted to it? And why now? AI was good for several months up to now. Was it the release of tools that work with agents effectively? This seems a bit more significant than hundreds of mathematical proofs being published at once to me, especially because you can verify it works yourself, on your machine, and see the effects on the world right in front of you.

The economy and way-of-life of the first world as we know it might be ending. But at least we can play Bloodborne natively on PC.

Hardware exploits being much easier to find is also true. PS5 had several discovered and patched, and now even Switch 2.

Personally what I look forward to is retro games being translated. Imagine opening up a mook listing Top 100 FC or SFC games, and now being able to play evey single one knowing only English. Romhacking now no longer being a bottleneck. While path dependence would still cloud the judgement, arbitrary choices which games would be localized made by Americans in the 80s and 90s, now the barrier wpuld be lowered for those interested in game from those times to come to their own conclusion.

Perhaps a situation analogous to discovery of new manuscripts of Ancient authors will occur. Some text may have been only found in the late 19th century, thus it was unable to exert influence on thought about its writer, until its rediscovery, but now this is no longer the case. A more complete tradition now forms.

in an amusing coincidence, my "for you" twitter feed has been not-stop shit-flinging between Japanese users and everyone else over a mod - not even a prated copy, but just a mod - of Tekken 6 that lets you play online. When there's finally translations of Mother 3, the shitshow is gonna be glorious.

Mother 3 was translated years ago pre-AI.

Yeah aside from game slowdown during text scrolling, it seemed about perfect to me. You can also play it natively on your 3DS or DS, which is what I did.