At $45 per hour … call this a contract job with no taxes or health benefits or anything … thats 200 hours of dev time or 25 8-hour workdays.
You’d almost certainly need at least 3 months (probably more) to lay a solid foundation at get a base level, functional proof of concept, if you had only person, one pretty darn high skilled low level expert working on this.
So $9000 would produce nothing useable, just another call for fund raising.
And I’m sure you could find many programmers qualified and capable of this task who would call $45 an hour for doing this solo, lowballing them.
Doing a project like this with only humans is certainly possible, and likely would yield a higher quality result, but it would take substantially more time and money, orders of magnitude more.
Sorry, but just being entirely, blanket, always mad at AI/LLMs is stupid.
These things do actually have very sensible use cases, and reverse engineering a giant undocumented black box program is one of the most clear cut of these.
Its also possible to run these things locally… its slower than a cloud LLM service, but its still very usefully fast, and isn’t funding some corpo datacenter.
99% of the problems that are being caused by LLMs right now are due to idiot humans using them in very obviously stupid ways.
LLMs are tools, like hammers, guns, chainsaws, forklifts, etc. If you don’t know what you’re doing, ita very easy to cause a lot of damage. Also like other human tools, you cannot uninvent them.
This kind of use of an LLM, as a tool assisting in a very complex reverse engineering project, directed and overseen by actual human experts, not just trying to naievely one shot it with a novice in charge… is almost certainly the optimal or most reasonable way to balance the [fast, cheap, good] factors in approaching a project like this.
I’m not saying this random 14 yo is doing this in the best possible way, not even close, but I am saying that if you think just $9000 thrown at a or multiple humans could produce anything even comparable, then you do not understand anything about the actual realities of working in the computer software development field.
Its also possible to run these things locally… its slower than a cloud LLM service, but its still very usefully fast, and isn’t funding some corpo datacenter.
But it wasn’t done locally, which begs the question: can local models reverse engineer on any kind of reasonable time scale?
Answer: something that would’ve run much better on much lower end hardware and worked for more than one game, but would’ve taken much longer to produce (since actual human thought went into it) which is the only metric people seem to pay attention to.
Immediate convenience is the metric we’ve been trained to exclusively focus on. Bread and circuses and all that. It’s why I’ve been purposefully adding inconveniencea to my life to try to build up some of my patience and preservation again.
Lets say you get a dev working for 320 hours over the course of two month on the project for that money. I hate AI as the next person, but I honestly don’t think he would have achieved anything noteworthy to the Normies in those two month.
I think it was that easy, people would have done it already. People with a lot of knowledge spend a shit ton of money on mods and cracking games for free.
It would have to happen through donations to people already working on this stuff on a volunteer basis, not normal contract work. As the whole thing is based on IP theft anyway it would be a terrible idea to hire people for it in a normal way.
I wonder how far $9000 would have gone if it was donated to real people working on a port instead.
In either case I’ll never lower myself to voluntarily consume AI slop.
$9000?
At $45 per hour … call this a contract job with no taxes or health benefits or anything … thats 200 hours of dev time or 25 8-hour workdays.
You’d almost certainly need at least 3 months (probably more) to lay a solid foundation at get a base level, functional proof of concept, if you had only person, one pretty darn high skilled low level expert working on this.
So $9000 would produce nothing useable, just another call for fund raising.
And I’m sure you could find many programmers qualified and capable of this task who would call $45 an hour for doing this solo, lowballing them.
Doing a project like this with only humans is certainly possible, and likely would yield a higher quality result, but it would take substantially more time and money, orders of magnitude more.
Sorry, but just being entirely, blanket, always mad at AI/LLMs is stupid.
These things do actually have very sensible use cases, and reverse engineering a giant undocumented black box program is one of the most clear cut of these.
Its also possible to run these things locally… its slower than a cloud LLM service, but its still very usefully fast, and isn’t funding some corpo datacenter.
99% of the problems that are being caused by LLMs right now are due to idiot humans using them in very obviously stupid ways.
LLMs are tools, like hammers, guns, chainsaws, forklifts, etc. If you don’t know what you’re doing, ita very easy to cause a lot of damage. Also like other human tools, you cannot uninvent them.
This kind of use of an LLM, as a tool assisting in a very complex reverse engineering project, directed and overseen by actual human experts, not just trying to naievely one shot it with a novice in charge… is almost certainly the optimal or most reasonable way to balance the [fast, cheap, good] factors in approaching a project like this.
I’m not saying this random 14 yo is doing this in the best possible way, not even close, but I am saying that if you think just $9000 thrown at a or multiple humans could produce anything even comparable, then you do not understand anything about the actual realities of working in the computer software development field.
Thank you for a nuanced take in the middle of this generated outrage.
Meanwhile, the persone above you with 24 upvotes advancing estimates with no other source than “trust my gut instinct bro.”
But it wasn’t done locally, which begs the question: can local models reverse engineer on any kind of reasonable time scale?
That is a genuinely good question!
Which I am currently investigating in my spare time, lol.
Answer: something that would’ve run much better on much lower end hardware and worked for more than one game, but would’ve taken much longer to produce (since actual human thought went into it) which is the only metric people seem to pay attention to.
Immediate convenience is the metric we’ve been trained to exclusively focus on. Bread and circuses and all that. It’s why I’ve been purposefully adding inconveniencea to my life to try to build up some of my patience and preservation again.
Lets say you get a dev working for 320 hours over the course of two month on the project for that money. I hate AI as the next person, but I honestly don’t think he would have achieved anything noteworthy to the Normies in those two month.
I think it was that easy, people would have done it already. People with a lot of knowledge spend a shit ton of money on mods and cracking games for free.
$9k won’t get you far in the US or most of Europe.
Given that he is almost certainly using a $100 or $200/month plan, he could probably only afford a 30-60 minute consultation.
🤷♀️
It would have to happen through donations to people already working on this stuff on a volunteer basis, not normal contract work. As the whole thing is based on IP theft anyway it would be a terrible idea to hire people for it in a normal way.