> it is not only morally correct to pirate Windows Touhou, but in fact morally wrong to pay for it.
> I have no interest in doing anything else in this scene, and especially no interest in working on closed-source games for a media empire in a humble doujin trenchcoat.
wth is ... this anglosphere otakus assuming anime content creators to be high-double-to-mid-triple-digit millionaires only when they don't seem to be ones? I don't know how many digits are in the bank account for ZUN so there is a chance that he is a multiquadrillionaire, but it frankly looks like a twisted edge case of right makes might mindset rather than a logical argument.
Though, granted, I am aware that it gets quite stressful when a seller isn't able to take your money.
People should really read the whole thing (well at least the last chapter) because it's not as simple as "vibe coders made meg go away".
The writer equally hates ZUN, vibe coders, and AI haters (Bluesky crowd)
And if not then the TLDR is basically: ZUN made the games for japanese people. Western people wanted to play the games. Reverse engineers came along but they relied on community funding. Now the community is taken apart by vibe coders but the same community is not willing to fund manual labor. Also the community is still paying for ZUN which enforces the status quo of not bothering with english releases.
Although I love the new era of LLM assisted reverse engineering, it really breaks my heart how much it negatively affect veterans in their area of passion.
This idea that if you want recognition for your work you aren't passionate is literally insane. Humans are social creatures by nature, the two aren't in any way exclusive.
This is nothing like that. The disillusionment comes from imposters getting more attention and credit than the real thing. These shitty projects are nowhere near being superior to what a human can do, and most of them are blatantly lying and exaggerating their accomplishments. ie. dozens of "no emulator recompilations" that are actually just embedding an emulator into a binary with the game, and people are too fucking stupid to check and upvote it to the top of HN because we all love a good fraud here. Now this garbage can be mass-produced and get the adoration of the AI hype crowd, drowning out the content that people put hundreds/thousands of hours into despite the slop being of wildly inferior quality that doesn't hold up if you inspect it for longer than it takes you to click the upvote button. Not only here, but all over the internet. Of course it's demotivating.
> dozens of "no emulator recompilations" that are actually just embedding an emulator into a binary with the game
Even those, which take about 20min, are incredible useful, as you can add save state, level select, cheats and gamepad controls on top that most emulators would struggle with or at least make a hell of a lot more complicated.
> Now this garbage can be mass-produced and get the adoration of the AI hype crowd
Those games wouldn't exist without AI. Decompiles that ended in a fully playable state have been incredible rare before AI. Best you would get was often just an incomplete reverse engineering of the data formats involved.
??? emulators already had literally all of those things
> Decompiles that ended in a fully playable state have been incredible rare before AI.
Actual decompilations are still rare. I'm repeating myself here, but the vast majority of these, they're not doing much more than embedding an emulator. You have to understand that an emulator is sort of a JIT decompiler already. There are a few AI-accelerated ones that have some legitimacy to them but still involved months of human effort too, it is by no means as automated as the hypers would like you to believe.
> I have no interest in doing anything else in this scene, and especially no interest in working on closed-source games for a media empire in a humble doujin trenchcoat.
wth is ... this anglosphere otakus assuming anime content creators to be high-double-to-mid-triple-digit millionaires only when they don't seem to be ones? I don't know how many digits are in the bank account for ZUN so there is a chance that he is a multiquadrillionaire, but it frankly looks like a twisted edge case of right makes might mindset rather than a logical argument.
Though, granted, I am aware that it gets quite stressful when a seller isn't able to take your money.
The writer equally hates ZUN, vibe coders, and AI haters (Bluesky crowd)
And if not then the TLDR is basically: ZUN made the games for japanese people. Western people wanted to play the games. Reverse engineers came along but they relied on community funding. Now the community is taken apart by vibe coders but the same community is not willing to fund manual labor. Also the community is still paying for ZUN which enforces the status quo of not bothering with english releases.
As I said before [1] we are all Lee Sedol.
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-50573071
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49505141
Even those, which take about 20min, are incredible useful, as you can add save state, level select, cheats and gamepad controls on top that most emulators would struggle with or at least make a hell of a lot more complicated.
> Now this garbage can be mass-produced and get the adoration of the AI hype crowd
Those games wouldn't exist without AI. Decompiles that ended in a fully playable state have been incredible rare before AI. Best you would get was often just an incomplete reverse engineering of the data formats involved.
> Decompiles that ended in a fully playable state have been incredible rare before AI.
Actual decompilations are still rare. I'm repeating myself here, but the vast majority of these, they're not doing much more than embedding an emulator. You have to understand that an emulator is sort of a JIT decompiler already. There are a few AI-accelerated ones that have some legitimacy to them but still involved months of human effort too, it is by no means as automated as the hypers would like you to believe.