The power bricks were always failing. I ended up chiseling the case of the power supply and potting plastic to get at the wires so I could solder in a regulator IC from Radio Shack to revive the C64. That lasted several years (longer than the original).

You'd be wrong.

From a purely practical standpoint, codebases like this (I have 20+ years in the console games industry as a programmer) contain source code, headers, and other proprietary stuff from other vendors (to say nothing about the console SDKs) we're not allowed to just release. Finding it all, ripping it out, and being confident it's been done properly from a legal perspective is expensive, cumbersome, and risky.

Watch the opening screen of a modern AA to AAAA videogame these days. It's littered with 3rd party software. A multiplatform console game that was never intended to be open sourced is not trivially open source-able.

Also, EA gets to keep it, because it may be of value to them down the road. (I mean, probably not, but that's what they'd say. They own the work.)

Yes, but for that you've gotta do something suspicious first. And that's the point - visiting a Star Wars fan site is not suspicious. Getting e-mails from someone@cia.gov is.

Where have we heard that before? Ah yes. The movie industry once swore in court that not making VHS illegal would kill the movie industry.

So sad that the court decided against them, and we all know the industrial wasteland that Hollywood became and how no movies were ever made again...

They manage to find ways to be obviously incorrect, even if you don't know the answer.

real examples I hit:

Q: "On what coin does Abraham Lincoln appear"

A: "The coin Abraham Lincoln appears on is the US 50 dollar bill." (a bill is not a coin)

Q: "What is the rule in the game Monopoly when doubles are rolled three times in a row"

A: "[go to jail blah blah] if three doubles are rolled, like two 3s, two 5s and two 9s" (Monopoly uses 6 sided dice)

Q: "On the TV show Bluey, what is Bandit's wife's name"

A: "Bandit's wife is Bluey, and they have a loving relationship." (Bluey is his daughter, a small child.)

Or better, just take it behind the barn and do the right thing.

Worse, there is now no uncontaminated internet to steal for a second time. It's too polluted with hallucinations from the first wave of LLMs.

Yes I mistyped, nuclear causes far fewer deaths overall.

The 90s called, they want their parsing problems back, and they were incredily surprised that in 2025 we still haven't solved them.

(especially in HTML, where it's so trivial: & + known list of characters + ; - I mean, the moment you encounter a space you can stop parsing, for example.

Ah, there's your problem. It's managers thinking that the productivity of programmers can be measured in lines of code or some other silly metric.

Speaking about it, that DOES explain why everyone and their dog have shifted to the bullshit "let's put every bracket on its own line" style. More lines. Clever.

Something that quick won't be from random mutations of coding genes, but it's entirely believable for genes that aren't considered coding but which control coding genes. It would also be believable for epigenetic markers.

So there's quite a few ways you can get extremely rapid change. I'm curious as to which mechanism is used - it might not be either of those I suggested, either.

I didn't see any outrage. If you need to see outrage that desperately, seek help.

I don't think so. And also: I'm old enough to remember at least two times before were AI was "on the brink of revolutionizing everything". I agree that this time we're closer than before, but:

One, AI is still no guarantee to get what you want.
Two, sooner or later people will realize that if you can describe what you want in enough detail for an AI to do it, you could get a human to do it as well.
Three, the immense cost of AI is currently shouldered by a couple companies with deep pockets (or investors with such). Once the hype has gone down and people ask for ROI, prices will raise.
Four, in everything that I've used AI for so far, I would rate its competence level at intern - has some basic knowledge, mostly knows what it's doing, you definitely want to check the output for mistakes.
Five, there are still plenty of creative things that AI doesn't do, or only does in very specific ways. When you've done enough text or image generation, you start to see the patterns. The repetitive outputs. The difficulty of getting the AI to give you a DIFFERENT output once it's gone down one path.
Six, as AI is training more and more on AI output, quality is already dropping in some areas. For other areas, it's a real challenge to find good training data. Many of the coding assistants are trained on StackOverflow and similar sites, and they are good for producing example code, and terrible at producing performant and secure code.

In summary: There are still enough challenges in AI and it's way too early to predict the end of the human race, again.

Someone using AI to write their book probably uses AI as an editor as well.

I've used AI to do proof-reading myself. It's fairly competent at catching simple spelling and grammar mistakes. Other errors are a coin toss. I wouldn't be surprised at all if an AI "editor" missed these.