Indie game developer Popcar discusses the double-edged impact of AI massively decompiling existing games: on one hand, it is fueling a wave of game mashups and game preservation, using WebAssembly to run old games on new hardware and even in browsers; on the other, anyone can decompile any software and use it freely, companies could steal competitors' software, and paid games and apps could be open-sourced against their owners' will.
Ben Affleck says he has been involved with machine learning since the digital cinema era and can write fairly bad Python scripts. He explains how film VFX pipelines have used machine learning for years: applying convolutional neural networks to analyze tensors (numeric representations of images) for edge detection and feature extraction to key green screens and swap backgrounds, calling Transformers an evolution with far more compute.
Simon Willison sent his September sponsors-only monthly newsletter, readable immediately by sponsors only, covering frontier models, price wars, LLMs moving into math, a misconfigured-network incident, and a Datasette vulnerability saga. A free version will be published later; paying $10/month grants access a month early.
NVIDIA validation engineer Sakeena Fiza tests data center hardware before mass production; her team witnessed the first system-level power-on of the Rubin GPU. Validation spans the entire chain from tray to rack to AI factory—a single board contains tens of thousands of components and a rack can approach 500,000—with the goal of catching issues before customers do.