mrandish

I'm old enough to have seen it when I was in high school in the late 70s. More than a decade after its release it still seemed pretty relevant and edgy. Unless your parents were outliers, in the 70s most suburban parents were pretty 'square' and the sort of existential meltdown rebellion at the end wasn't generally part of mainstream culture.

Per a screenshot of Claude Code on Twitter, the full rule is: “Do build original games, games in a genre, and games from the user’s own designs and assets. Don’t build a recreation of a specific existing game, even if it is renamed or called original.”

It's so broadly worded, the LLM could refuse just about any retro or vintage related decomp. Pong (1972) and Space Invaders (1978) are both "specific existing games." Seems like dropping a grenade when a scalpel would have sufficed. The "Do" and "Don't" also seem bizarrely inverted. Using actual existing game assets or code is copyright infringement. Re-implementing an existing game without original assets or code is generally legal.

The collateral damage here is killing some truly wonderful (and completely legal) retro game preservation decomps, ports, deep mods, community translations/expansions, and academic study of classic titles which Claude has been instrumental in enabling.

The retro preservation community doesn't distribute or even link to original game binaries or assets. A more nuanced rule would still allow for fair use and preservation.

> ... permitted?

Under the expansively vague copyright provisions added thanks to Hollywood lobbyist pressure in the 80s & 90s to deter physical media piracy (Sony Betamax / DeCSS DVD), basically nothing except fair use is clearly "permitted."

However, in practice, a lot of historical retro preservation and emulation for personal use is 'tolerated', as long as it's titles long out-of-print, strictly non-commercial (no one makes money) and kept relatively low-key. Projects like MAME and RetroArch have existed for decades doing truly wonderful work.

While manual decomp / recomps existed in the scene, the 2020 release of the amazing Super Mario 64 decomp SM64 showed that hundreds of hours of painstaking work could unlock ports, deep mods, community translations/expansions, and academic study of classic titles. In the last couple years decomp/recomp has been turbo-charged with LLM agent assistance. Of course, there's now the usual spectrum between carefully guided, curated efforts being accelerated and generally unhelpful slop.

I've been into retro preservation for decades now and the recent explosion of interest, new projects and contributors has been great but there's also concern too much attention, too quickly could attract profiteers who 'cross the line' the community has been careful to avoid, triggering a legal crackdown. So, welcome to the community but please try to not screw up a good thing.

Generally speaking, free emulators without game code or content are fine but free decomps even without original binaries or game assets are a little bit fuzzier. They could be closer to the line but 'how much closer' depends on how it's implemented and the degree to which a company sees it as commercially threatening. So far, there's been no sign of issues but the retro and preservation communities have been careful not to release decomps or recomp ports of titles currently (or recently) for sale. Of course, if someone does a recomp port just for their family and friends, no one will know or care, and if something anonymously ends upon a torrent site, that's just 'software piracy' and on the other side of the firewall. As always, don't talk about or link to that stuff in retro and preservation forums.

> preemptively protecting themselves from potential lawsuits ... for offering the means to reverse-engineer their software.

I think the legal concern isn't so much the act of reverse engineering itself which is mostly legal (except RE specifically to remove anti-copying protection under DMCA), it's that damages from contributory infringement are theoretically unbounded because it's up to $150k per work and $2,500 per download. When the client is worth billions, corporate counsel is going to default maximally conservative, which is extra tragic because secondary infringement almost certainly doesn't apply to AI in this context. Meanwhile, overreacting to this extremely unlikely threat IS causing significant disruption to innocent activities.

Under copyright law secondary infringement doesn't apply to "general purpose technology". It requires "encouraging or knowing in advance it'll be used for infringement," set in the early 80s in the Sony BetaMax case. Under DMCA it requires being "primary designed to circumvent access controls," set in the late 90s by Hollywood lobbyists targeting DeCSS for DVDs. Lawyers today are only defaulting to prohibition because there hasn't yet been a case ruling AI is a general purpose technology. Yet it's obviously the most 'general purpose' tech since, maybe.... the wheel?

OAI / ANT management needs to revisit the secondary copyright infringement prohibition because it's hurting not only their product and brand but also the entire AI value prop. A helpful intelligent agent that randomly goes AWOL for irrationally mistaken reasons is a serious product issue. While mistaken concerns around bioweapons and IT security are understandable, dropping secondary copyright infringement prohibitions seems like an easy win.

The real liability to OAI/Ant is much smaller than it appears, while the long-term downsides are larger than they look. Pragmatically, copyright trolls are just a nuisance, the real threat is someone with deep pockets like Nintendo/Sony, but those guys don't want to sue anyone who might go to court. The last thing they want is a clear ruling that AI is general purpose which would forever remove their vague threat.

PS2 is certainly a high-point in retro gaming via emulation. The huge, diverse game library spanning >10 years, a great emulator in PCSX2 and tons of community mods and HD texture packs make it amazing.

You've got the option of OG authenticity with CRT emulation (although I use a shader emulating a high-end analog RGB CRT so the effect is more subtle) or you can 'upgrade' games to looking and feeling quite modern yet without the modern cruft. Also want to give a nod to PS3 / X360 emulation as both have come a long way in the last ~18 months and I'm really enjoying working my way through a backlog of titles I never played back in the day.

TFA also offers no support for the assertion she's a "spy" vs just a source. When most people hear "spy" they think of a "Non-Official Cover" agent (aka NOC in the biz) with training, a false identity and a directed mission. But those are actually extremely rare. The vast majority of 'spying' is not done by 'spies' in that sense. It's basic information gathering from normal people who are already in a job which puts them in casual contact with a person, company or agency of interest.

There are literally thousands of these 'sources' for every NOC on a targeted mission. Many of these sources aren't even paid, they're just predisposed to be friendly to the nation who wants the info and willing to pass along things they see or hear in exchange for a favor or access. Most of what they pass along is irrelevant and useless impressions or chatter but it's all captured and cross-referenced by analysts.

When Jensen makes a two day visit to some Asian country like Singapore, he probably has over a dozen meetings including various local employees, distributors, vendors, govt agencies or media contacts. Nvidia's posture and distribution plans in Asia are of great interest to China, since they're trying to divert a good chunk of those GPUs to China. I have no doubt the Chinese (and other intel agencies) got reports from over half a dozen different sources regarding what happened during Jensen's visit.

Jensen is very smart and has a lot of experience. He knows he's a high-value target and everyone is info gathering on him. Hypothetically, even if he was banging the hot, young distributor rep when visiting Singapore (and I doubt he is), she wouldn't get any actionable intel. Not because she might send an email report to Chinese intelligence but because she'll certainly give a detailed report to her bosses at the distributor. All of NVidia's distributors are trying to glean any competitive insight or favor from NVidia they can.

> The problem is not even affording them the rights guaranteed to prisoners of war.

I agree. There are really two separate issues.

Circa WWII, the term 'enemy combatants' was created to solve a definitional issue around military 'rules of engagement' (a concept which evolved with the rise of the professional military). There were "enemy soldiers" and "civilians" with separate rules of engagement for each (at least in theory, as the rules weren't always applied uniformly).

As you said, not affording "enemy combatants" any rights after capture is the problem and it's really arisen since the "War on Terror". The only slightly positive sign in all this is the U.S. military is clearly aware U.S. courts won't let them get away with defining a category of human that doesn't have any rights, forcing the military into temporary workarounds like Gitmo. When U.S. courts have been able to establish jurisdiction over enemy combatants, the rulings have not generally gone favorably for the military.

I'm still grateful whenever the U.S. Constitution manages to be inconvenient and annoying to the U.S. government :-). And I hold out some hope we're slowly beginning to claw back some of the unconstitutional excesses of the "War on Terror."

Indeed, the current White House occupant is much louder and more annoyingly abrasive with some bizarre one-off impulses vs the usual occupants, but it's now clear that over the last ~30 years, career politicians, corporate vested interests, lobbyists and the administrative state have increasingly subverted the two-party duopoly into pure political theater.

It's a little sad that Trump is such a divisive train-wreck spectacle that many haven't noticed that Clinton, Obama and Biden were achieving many of the same outcomes as Bush/Trump, just more smoothly and with more appealing rationalizations.

The best thing about Trump is that he's such an obvious self-interested kleptocrat and he doesn't even care to hide it (in fact, he seems to enjoy flaunting it). But is it really that much better to be sold out by a more likeable persona who seems like part of our tribe and has the skills to mask the long con more deftly? I guess maybe at least then we won't notice as much or feel as bad about the same outcome?

Not being familiar with this, I'm curious where the humans are still required in the process of doing a dozen or hundred of each board. I assume the parts still arrive from distributors on rolls inside boxes or on pallets and a human has to scan, open, unpack and load them in some feeder?

> A plant in, say, Kansas.

While logistics and delivery (both inbound parts and outbound product) are a key factor, time and cost don't map linearly to distance. Rather than being exactly central, the optimal solve is often somewhat geographically central but leverages proximity to transport corridors, ports and other factors such as weather variability.

KCI isn't a central air hub and winter weather can disrupt flow. Being further south near an East-West hub like DFW can be better (or Houston if an Atlantic port is valuable). Or if bidirectional delivery is everything, base near a Super-Hub like Memphis (Fedex) or UPS WorldPort (Louisville, KY) and go all-in on reaching lower rate tiers with one preferred domestic delivery partner.

For high-automation physical plants, scale can tend to chunk into increments beyond which 'one double-size plant' isn't meaningfully cheaper than two 'single-size' plants. Then an optimal build-out end game can be East and West plants that are each one air-hop from all major metros on that coast and a one-day truck/rail hop from 50% of customers on that coast. If it's a rapid-turn tech product, Reno can work well - half-day road trip from bay area for outbound and a Pacific port for inbound (Stockton). I don't know the quick-turn PCB assembly biz but maybe basing across the street from Digi-Key's biggest distribution center is a 'checkmate' move that beats all other advantages?

Logistics strategy is fun!

> There are certainly techniques for monitoring communications that use justifiably classified technologies

Wyden and others who are privy to what this is have made clear this is NOT about means or methods. This isn't about how the spying is done, it's about whether it's legal for the NSA to ever spy on U.S. citizens by ANY means. Existing law is very clear, it's absolutely not ever okay - no exceptions. It's completely irrelevant whether they're steaming open envelopes to read your junk mail or using a secret orbital mind-reading satellite to read your deepest private thoughts.

Experts like lawyers from the ACLU think it's something like a legal opinion which re-interprets the "absolute, no bulk spying on U.S. citizens ever" rule by claiming "it's not 'spying' if the govt pays a third-party commercial data collection service to give them the data voluntarily." That opens a backdoor for the govt to now back-link metadata and build one composite profile that includes all the private info the federal, state and local govt has ever had on you since birth (tax, employment, DMV, voting, school, govt assistance, Medicare, social security, etc) with everything any bank, credit card, or store knows about you, with every phone call, text, email and cell phone location ping you've had since 2014, with every bit of behavioral data Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc have about you.

To be clear, this is not "with probable cause they could get a warrant from a judge to send a supoena to each of those providers." This is something more like "they already have all that data in one searchable database but without this new secret legal opinion, as soon as it was clear the person was a U.S. citizen they could NOT look at it.

Now they can sit in a chair, and with just your phone number, email address, license plate or a facial ID match from a traffic camera to your driver's license, passport, Facebook profile or TSA airport photo, then instantly search for every single person you've communicated with in the past 3 years and every person they've communicated with and have an AI examine all that data from all those people and have a full 600 page report available in 15 seconds containing 7 million unique pieces of private data from 17,000 people that's instantly searchable - every email, every text, every purchase, every license plate scan, every location ping. No judge, no warrant, (and according to several recent reports), no record it ever happened, who did the search or under what pretext.

Everyone paying attention already knew it's been possible to do this for a decade. And everyone knows the government ALREADY does this for non-U.S. citizens. We just trusted that the government could not do it with U.S. citizens because the constitution and dozens of SCOTUS rulings make it so clearly ILLEGAL. But just like waterboarding and droning teenagers were once so clearly illegal, one secret legal opinion redefined "Spying" just like "Torture" was redefined in the 2000s and "Murder" was redefined in the 2010s - what the 4th Amendment has absolutely forbidden for 250 years instantly became legal to an invasive level Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton couldn't have dreamed in their worst nightmares.

> laws should not be interpreted at all

I get why that may reflexively seem right but such a blanket proscription would go off the rails and lead to unintended consequences you definitely don't want. It's simply not possible to write a law both specific enough yet broad enough to cover all cases. You or I can read a plainly worded law and think "There's no way this can be misconstrued, gamed or subverted" and, sadly, we'd be wrong.

> parliament should make any bug fixes rather than allowing courts or administration to interpret laws in any other way other than how its written down in the law.

It's certainly possible to theory-craft completely new and different governance, legal and justice systems from scratch which have different sets of constraints and trade-offs, but then it's a long conversation and unrelated to the existing U.S. system. If we limit ourselves to starting from what the existing U.S. system is and proposing modifications which are actually both constitutionally and logistically possible, then forcing all interpretation and clarification to be passed by congress would require monthly revisions, immediately breaking an already dysfunctional congressional system.

I think it's worth mentioning that in the U.S. system, judges interpreting application of laws passed by elected representatives is a feature not a bug. The U.S. system was designed to be adaptive and self-gating, so each of the three branches of the government have built-in checks and balances on the other two. Setting aside current politics, on a long time-horizon like the last ~50 years, I think the U.S. justice system, as imperfect as it is, is actually serving its designed purpose far better than the other two.

> When the other guys have control of the government

The most revealing part of the cycle comes around about once a decade, when for two years, the same party holds the White House and a majority in both houses of congress. They can pass whatever they really want and can't blame the other party when the things they've loudly claimed they stand for in every election, don't actually change. That's the only time those who are paying attention get to clearly see the difference between what the party claims to stand for when campaigning and what they really stand for. It's a sobering lesson and both parties do it equally.

That's when we see some extreme stage management to obfuscate the 'long con' both parties are running. Yes, a few things get passed but it's amazing how little of their long-time agenda really becomes law (or becomes law that's loop-holed and/or nerfed). It's so surprising how many politicians in the majority party suddenly discover rationalizations to not vote for a bill their party supports and which they should be for. Weirdly, these bills always fail to pass by just one or two votes. What are the odds of that happening - over and over again and only during those super-majority years?

Somehow, the politicians in the majority party from the 'safest' districts are the ones who suddenly find rationalizations to vote against what they loudly campaigned on (and will shamelessly campaign on again). Why is it only the politicians who stand little risk of losing their seat in the next election? Conversely, the politicians from the districts most at risk of losing to the other party somehow find the "courage of their principles" and don't sell out on traditional 'party-line' campaign issues. Ultimately, the big-money lobbyists feeding both political machines don't care how their goals are achieved or who votes for what. All that matters is any strongly worded law that goes against their interests either fails to pass by one vote or gets watered-down in committee and then passed.

> I don't really understand how it can be in any way justified in any country that's even pretending to be a democracy?

You're not misunderstanding. It really is against everything most Americans think their government is allowed to do. To your question, the 'classified' part is what you think it is: secret. 'Interpretation' is the tricky part.

Unfortunately, laws and regulations aren't exactly clear and over time situations change so one important role of the court system is interpreting how, when and whether the words in a law apply in a specific context. Courts at different levels do this all the time as cases with unique situations arise. Sometimes it's as simple as deciding if a horse counts as a vehicle in a state law which says "no vehicles on this type of road." Assuming that ruling survives appeals without being overturned, the judge will have justified the basis and, hopefully, some clear reasoning for why a horse does or doesn't count as a vehicle. That judge's ruling then becomes part of the "precedent" (aka 'body of case law') attached to that law. In effect, such precedents become part of the law since they can clarify if and how the law applies in certain situations.

So whether some action is or isn't against a law can't solely be determined by just reading the law. You have to do some interpretation, which includes looking up any relevant precedents and weighing them. A single prior ruling from one local municipal court has low weight. The main job of the Supreme Court is resolving conflicting precedents set by lower courts, so a SCOTUS ruling has a lot of weight and multiple SCOTUS rulings over time, each successively refining and narrowing (or occasionally reversing) their prior interpretations, carries maximum weight. All of this happens in the open and, in the long run, I think SCOTUS manages to eventually get most things, if not perfect, pretty close to right.

Hence, the answer to "Is this legal" can be a bit tricky when the law is new or there aren't decades of court precedents. So lawyers have to do research and assess how a court would probably rule on a given situation. That's called "a formal legal opinion" and it's provided in writing, usually including research and justifications, like references to existing case law, as well as legal reasoning supporting the opinion. Anyone can hire a lawyer to research and assess if X action violates Y law (but if you get sued for relying on the lawyer's opinion, they won't be on the hook - you will). It's called an opinion because that's really all it is.

When a govt agency wants to know if they're allowed to do X under Y law, they ask the justice dept to assess and provide a formal opinion just like any company might ask their corporate counsel to. This is often routine but can be very consequential. Where this can go horribly wrong is when these govt lawyer opinions are classified top secret. For example, we all know torturing prisoners is against U.S. law, so in the 2000s the military and CIA asked the Bush Justice Dept to provide a secret legal opinion on whether certain 'enhanced interrogation' techniques met the legal definition of torture. And they got what they wanted, a written legal opinion that waterboarding isn't torture. The Obama Justice Dept issued a secret legal opinion that droning a teenaged American citizen in Somalia, who posed no exigent threat (but had the wrong Dad), did not meet the legal definition of murder. After it happened and was no longer secret, Senator Rand Paul was the only politician willing to stand on the floor of the senate and say killing a U.S. citizen without any legal due process was first degree murder authorized by a sitting U.S. President. While it's true his Dad was sort-of a terrorist (the real terrorists were happy to use him for propaganda but being an American, they never really trusted him). The dad was arguably an enemy combatant and maybe you could make a case he was an "exigent threat", but the kid wasn't and didn't. Reasonable people can differ on acceptable levels of 'collateral damage' (aka killing foreign innocents) but U.S. law is clear, non-combatant American citizens who aren't a clear and immediate threat are a hard, bright line. They get a judge and jury, not a drone.

Senator Ron Wyden is on the Senate intelligence committee, so he gets oversight on what intelligence agencies are doing and sees the secret legal opinions they're relying on. And he's saying the U.S. govt is relying on a secret legal opinion to do something in secret which is obviously, very, VERY wrong - but he's forbidden from telling us what it is because they made it top secret. For context, Ron Wyden has been a Senator and on the intelligence committee for a while and is pretty much a straight-shooter, not known for hyperbole or politically-motivated grandstanding. He'll call out his own party when he feels they're seriously wrong and he gets no benefit from making a big deal over this. His own party isn't supporting him and wishes he'd shut up about it. Yet for the last six months he's been signaling "DANGER, DANGER" in interviews, speeches and in writing over and over again - so I'm going to assume whatever it is is way beyond the Snowden revelations and probably in the neighborhood of the worst things we can possibly imagine.

The perverse thing is that the pretense for keeping it secret is to prevent 'foreign adversary governments' from knowing what it is, but it's clearly about domestic spying on U.S. citizens - and Russia and China probably already know exactly what it is (and are like, "Hmph amateurs, we've been doing that to our citizens years").