211–220 of 293 posts
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>They killed Yuzu (a Switch emulator). For the record Yuzu included code for circumventing Nintendo's DRM they had on game carts. It violated the DMCA.
yuzu also sold access to more recent builds which allowed people to play unreleased nintendo games early, afair
I am not by any means a copyright lawyer, so can anyone enlighten me on if it is a good idea for upstream projects to accept such kind of code from an ex-Apple employee, especially since Apple is currently suing OpenAI.
Great observation, two things: - During my time at Apple I never saw any of the macOS source code, at all, even for userspace components. I had not even heard of things like SPTM. - I have not worked there since June 2025 I don't believe that there's any risk due to my former Apple employment. As another example, WINE does not ban all former Microsoft employees, they just ban anyone who has ever looked at the Windows…
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43929828 , MS / ex-microsoft employee developing windows 11 like linux distro
- https://github.com/KyleGospo , MS employee developing Bazzite competing with Windows Game Ecosystem / DirectX
https://www.reddit.com/r/AsahiLinux/comments/1whecn1/comment... > The author was banned from Asahi Linux for hiding his extensive use of LLMs from us in another attempted contribution, and (more importantly) for concealing that he is a former Apple engineer with direct contacts to the people involved in Apple Silicon development. Make of this what you will.
I find it extremely ironic that big corp openly steals IP en masse to build their models but hackers are still concerned about using same models for their reverse engineering work. I think at this point the hacking community needs to grow some balls.
In emulators, there is Azahar which is an emulator without the ability to decrypt games, and there is Azahar Plus, by different people, which is downstream of Azahar and adds piracy-specific features. The Azahar developers, who do the majority of the work, do not need balls. Only the people making the piracy fork need balls.
Maybe I’m getting really old, and I know we live in changing times but the fact this works at all is insane, as in black magic insane. I assume I’ll get used to it, but my mental model of what’s possible hasn’t been fully rewired yet.
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I find it extremely ironic that big corp openly steals IP en masse to build their models but hackers are still concerned about using same models for their reverse engineering work. I think at this point the hacking community needs to grow some balls.
Agree. Especially since even a tainted GPU driver (tainted as in, used former Apple Engineer knowledge) is usefull as we just throw another LLM onto it and tell it "rewrite in rust" and get an untainted version of it (at least that is the current judicial state, and the bigtech argues in this direction).
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It's not ironic, it's the flipside of exactly the same reason. Bigcorps can steal with impunity because they have unlimited money to pay expensive lawyers. FOSS projects do not, so they cannot.
No judge I’ve ever met gave a damn how much a party spent on legal resources. With rare exceptions, they care a great deal about achieving justice, and often bend over backwards to help indigent parties avoid prejudicing themselves. Keep in mind that there are no indigent parties in this debate; both major IP rights holders and the frontier AI companies are well capitalized. (I worked in a federal district court for…
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The argument is not esoteric. An Apple employee working on a reverse engineered GPU driver might (intentionally or not) incorporate internal knowledge that they are contractually obligated to keep secret or write an implementation that is too close to proprietary code they had access to, to the point that it could be argued that it is a derived work. This sort of thing has always been a concern for projects that re-i…
Exactly! That’s why companies create a clone every time they hire someone, put a clone into vat, and upon person quitting, the person is disposed of and the clone is sent to his family to take upon his role, without leaking company’s internal knowledge.
What would it take to run pytorch on the M4 GPU efficiently? Is there still a gap between what MPS offers and this driver (if properly hooked into Pytorch)?
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Probably not. Clean room RE is serious business, projects like Dolphin have to carefully vet contributors to remain legal.
Everyone says this, and then exactly zero cases are cited in support of or against this creative legal theory known as "clean room RE." No statute defines "clean room RE" and there's basically no relevant litigation establishing case law.
I do agree with you that the term is misused (it’s almost completely irrelevant here, anyway) and over-applied, but “not having ever been in a position to see or access the source code” is proven, especially in SAS v World, to be a pretty strong defense that’s worth pursuing in some re-implementation scenarios.