AI Video Game Mods, Chinese Cars Take Over UK, Apple Tightens Mac Data Controls | Diet TBPN

October is the hardest month in the road to Christmas.

Totally.

And it's because everyone is going to be looking—

We're so close, but it feels so far.

But there's a distraction.

Yeah, you're right.

Halloween. Halloween. If you go up to someone and you say, hey, there's only 80 days till Christmas, they'll be like, why aren't you counting down the days to Halloween? They'll start looking at you like you're crazy. You're not crazy. They're crazy for thinking that it's not worth Counting the days till Christmas in October. There's only 80 days. Get ready. Halloween is a speed bump on the way to Christmas.

That's right.

That's what I've always said. So keep counting down those days. Ignore the distractions.

Or don't, but we will.

Okay. Who wants to play these AI-generated video game mods? Kotaku does not. They posted an article that said, I don't want to play your AI-generated mod that puts Skate 3 inside Modern Warfare 2 inside of Minecraft. They don't want to play them. Tyler, what do you think? Do you want to play these, or did I have to force you?

I want to play these.

You want to play?

I'm actually playing it right now.

Okay, well, Tyler is playing one of these AI-generated mods, and it's very interesting because we've seen a lot of these. We talked about them. We pulled up a random one, uh, that we actually did an Instagram reel of, of, uh, I think it was, uh, Minecraft in Elden Ring. I've never been a big Minecraft person, so it wasn't, uh, it wasn't big for me. This is Tyler's playing Modern Warfare 2 in Minecraft. But what's actually going on here, Tyler? Explain, like, how did you get this installed? What is this?

Yeah, so from my understanding, it's basically like there's no, you're not really like putting one game into another. It's fully like a Rust engine and then you're pulling assets from both games and like kind of pulling them together somehow.

Interesting.

So like, I had to buy Modern Warfare 2 on Steam. Yeah, it's using the actual game assets. And the same thing for Minecraft, like it's using the actual assets. It found them online.

Interesting.

And then I basically had Codex like set it up, wired up so I can run it on Mac. Yeah, but it's like fully featured. Like I can, I can mine, I can build. You can build using the—

can you get a nuke?

I don't know if I can get a kill streak.

That's the question.

I gotta figure this out.

If kill streaks aren't in it, it's not Modern Warfare 2. Yeah, it doesn't make any sense. There are actually a whole bunch of different ways people are modding things. And it's interesting because they're all getting sort of lumped together into one bucket, but they are very different. Like the classic, like the most approved or like company-approved mod might just be something like, you know, there's a Fortnite skin and you get to— and I don't know if they actually did like a Batman skin or Spider-Man skin, but those skins come over and it's just assets that fully live inside of Fortnite. There's no game code from any other game coming over. It's purely just, okay, the Fortnite game developers looked at what Spider-Man looks like. They made a Fortnite model out of the Spider-Man, like, character, and then you can play as them and everything is integrated fully. You're not gonna risk changing any game files. It's fully approved by corporate. Now these go a step further and run the gamut of different techniques. Some of them that you have seen, some of these mods actually are just the old ways.

Yeah, I play.

Could you try swimming?

Yeah, swimming is a little bit broken.

And that's the nature of the vibe-coded slops.

Oh, it's over for you.

Yeah. Are you drowning though?

I don't think so. I'm just basically walking as if there was no water.

There's no— yeah, the mechanic is— because yeah, I think your health is being monitored by Modern Warfare 2, whereas Minecraft is just the geometry that you're around. I don't know. Some of them are the old way of modifying, just bringing game assets into the actual game. None of the actual code is running. Others are actually merging 2 games. For that Mario in Elden Ring video that we saw the other day, the mod actually borrows a subsystem called LibSM64, which is derived from a Super Mario 64 decompilation. So what they'll do is they'll—

Can we keep politics out of video games?

Please.

Yeah, please.

So what they'll do is they'll download the actual binary, like the code that is on the cartridge. They will convert that into just a file that's on a computer. You can run that in an emulator, but then they can actually reverse engineer the underlying code from what has been compiled. So you get basically a bunch of ones and zeros, and there are tools that will look at that and work backwards to understand what the actual game logic is. And so, an example is like, in the game code, you might have like health equals 100. But in the compiled code, it might just be like some memory address like X— like 0x1234FC. And then you might work backwards in the decompilation step to figure out that that's the health. So, a bunch of things happen in the game. games played. As things are changed and updated, that game state is then sucked out into the decompilation file. Interestingly, the NSA is involved. So, no, we can't keep politics out of game development because they're actually— a lot of these game modders are actually using software from the National Security Administration, the NSA. So the NSA has a GitHub with an open source project called— it's called Ghidra and it's a— it's on the National Security Agency's GitHub. GitHub. It's a software framework for reverse engineering software. And so you point this thing at the game and you wind up getting more of the code, and then you can break it up and bring it into other games. Tyler?

Okay, I'm gonna trick shot this pig if we can cut to that.

Trick shot this pig.

No, no, no. Oh, he did it!

He did it!

Come on, Tyler. He did it.

Why? Little—

can we get a content warning? Oh, okay.

I think it's fine. Minecraft's a pretty focused game. Anyone at home? But there is something else going on now that I hadn't seen before. I don't know if this was popular in the modding community before, but there is a version you might have seen. We can try and pull it up. ArkWeb. It's a Batman: Arkham Knight pass-through Spider-Man mod. So you play as Spider-Man in the Batman game, and so you're in Arkham. What's funny about this is that the two games feel very similar, so they mesh very well together. But from an intellectual property perspective, this should never happen because, of course, Marvel is DC, or it's Marvel and DC. So Marvel is owned by Disney and Batman is owned by Warner Brothers. These two companies are direct competitors, and so they should never really be collabing in this way. But the fascinating thing about this is that it's not just They took the Batman game and created a Spider-Man character. It's actually running both games and then it's passing data between the games to create this experience of being Spider-Man in Arkham Knight. So what's happening is like the mod goes into the Batman city, Gotham, grabs all the geometry, all the collision data, all the geometry of like where that building is. It takes that and in real time it passes it To the Spider-Man game, which is actually running a different physics engine. So it has to translate all of that. Also, the 2 games use different coordinate conventions, different axes, and different units of length. So it has to translate all of that, create that in Spider-Man, and then also keep both of them running like the controller input. Because normally, if you have a controller on a video game, it'll just be on one—

Controller.

Uh, one game at a time and if something's in the background. But you can see there's like, yeah, bugs already. Uh, and this is like part of the problem. And then it needs to actually merge the graphics. And so the games use different graphic systems too. This feels like it would be so much easier if it was 2 games that were built on the same underlying technologies. Uh, but through the power of slop, they're able to sort of merge these 2 in real time and get them actually running at seems like near 60 FPS. Um, and then even when you go into— they don't show the fighting, but I think— When you go into the fighting, you switch into like the Batman combat setting instead of the Spider-Man system. So you're using Arkham's free flow combat. It's very, very odd. But the end result, it looks great and it feels like it's almost ready to serve as a reason to be like, oh, I love that game. I want to play it again. Why don't I give it another spin? Sort of a new game plus. You get to play as a different character. There's a lot of old games that are getting remastered. rebuilt could be an interesting reason to go back into a game that you loved with a different twist this time. And stuff like this happens all the time. I mean, the, the, even like the latest sequel to Spider-Man was the same city but just a different character. Uh, and so some different mechanics, some different story elements, but a lot of the same assets. Uh, but it was still a reason to jump back in for a lot of, uh, players. But all of this is the classic 90/90 rule. Have you heard of this?

No.

coined by one of the greatest of all time, Tom Cargill.

Bell Labs.

At Bell Labs. He said, when it comes to software engineering, the first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time, and the remaining 10% accounts for the other 90% of development time. Because you, you get 90% of the way there, and you're like, great, I only have 10%. And then you spend even more time on that last 10%. No matter how much you estimate it, things always grow in scope. And so when you think about the bug bash that would be necessary to take that to anything relative to like—

You're looking at 5 years.

What?

You're looking at 5 years.

You're looking at 5 years. Yeah. Here's Minecraft and GTA. Similar structure.

Yeah. The sort of multiplayer first-person shooters.

Yep.

You could imagine actually that being like relatively straightforward to get a working version that would be fun.

It all just depends on how you scope it.

Yeah.

Because if you're just talking about you're only changing the textures, like you're using the same model from Call of Duty and you're just changing the textures, you're probably not going to introduce too many bugs. But as you include a different physics mechanic, a different explosion, like all of a sudden you're introducing so much risk that you could fall through the map or things could not collide correctly. You got to go rewrite that collision software that triggers something else. Then— and all of these demos, none of them show The actual, like, playing the full game. Like, there's a mod to bring Minecraft into Skyrim. It's called Skycraft, I think. And in the developer's documentation for, like, the open source implementation of this mod, it says, like, don't start the game normally. Like, do not try and play the opening sequence. It will break. You should start with, like, the alternate starting point that starts you further into the game because it's It's so broken, and that's just the nature of being in the slop era. So the interesting thing is that all these mashups—they feel like tailor-made for the short-form video era because you watch one of these for 30 seconds, 60 seconds, and you're like, "Wow, that's amazing!" I have dual nostalgia. I love GTA Five. I love Minecraft. Put them together, double love. It's amazing. Everybody is you know getting like millions of likes on these videos, but. No one has actually played these all the way through. No one is sitting back down and being like, okay, yes, this is actually as good as GTA V, which a lot of people played for 100 hours or more. Same thing with Minecraft. The base game remains dominant in terms of like actual entertainment value. This is pure meme value. And so, it feels like it's another Harry Potter Balenciaga moment, but for video games. And the Harry Potter Balenciaga video by Demon Flying Fox, that was released March 15th, 2023. Wow. Can you believe it's been 3 and a half years since that? That's a while, right? That's a while.

Yeah. It makes me think, how did they make it at that time?

That was AI video. That was the best AI video was. But what they did was it was, you would train a dedicated model on every character. So they would train a model on Harry Potter or on Daniel Radcliffe, basically. Just his face, and then they would use AI-generated imagery to to generate something that looked like a you know sort of art station style Balenciaga runway show in a in a Harry Potter scenario like at Hogwarts, and Midjourney at the time was pretty good at that style. The the the the dark like sort of odd backgrounds. Like, it was okay if it had some hallucinations in the background because it leaned into that because it's a dark fashion show in a castle. You don't really have a strong reference point for that. And then they would run the face swap, and then they would animate that image just a little bit, and then there was a ton of editing to actually— to make it so that you would never linger on a single frame for more than a second or 2. And so you'd move on. But what was the conclusion from seeing that? I mean, at the time, people were like, we're going to be watching full AI movies next year. What was your conclusion? Did you have one?

From the Balenciaga?

Yeah.

I mean, it's just like, these are all very novel ideas. But at some point, now I've seen a bunch of different games that have been ported to each other. And it's like, OK, there's another— it's like, oh, yeah, you put Minecraft and Mario. And I kind of get the idea.

Yeah. And it's notable that Team Flying Fox did Many, many sequels and sort of stopped breaking through to the same degree and still has a YouTube channel and I think posts a bunch of stuff. But we didn't get Daniel Radcliffe at a Balenciaga runway show, and we also didn't get a fully AI-generated movie within 3 and a half years. And so, it was still a heavily important tech demo though. And I do think, you know, there will be a breakout video game mod. That sees heavy assistance from AI in the near future. But the key is crafting a really innovative strategy loop. That's what Dota 2 was. It was a spinoff of World of Warcraft, I believe. It was a mod. There are plenty. I mean, Counter-Strike started as a Half-Life mod. There are clearly games that can be birthed from that. And the fact that you have AI tooling to speed that up, you're just moving a lot of people into the indie developer category who can move things faster. They're still going to wind up spending, you know, 99.999% of their time in the last 1% if they want to break through. But it's, it's cool that many people will see this and be like, I got to make a mod. I got to make something. I've always had this idea for this game, and now I can actually go and get started. Although they will obviously need to lock in for a long time to get something Actually polished. Theo is optimistic about this. Millennial age gamers are about to become more pro AI than the average SF tech bro because of all the nostalgia from Halo in Modern Warfare 2. I do think some people will see this and be like, oh, this is cool, I like this. But there are still plenty of gamers who are like, I don't like AI at all for a bunch of reasons, and they bring that over.

There was an interesting chart Oh, I think, I think for— I think for the gaming community to become broadly pro-AI, a very well-loved franchise has to release a new game that is noticeably better or bigger because of the technology. Yep. And until then, I think people are just gonna be like, you know, again, these sort of combinations are cool, but, uh, until, well, one, I don't think they can, really get users because of all the IP issues.

It's just blatant IP theft.

But yeah, I think you're gonna need to see like GTA 7 and it's the entire world, right? And for people to get excited. And I don't know that that's even a path that they'll take.

Yeah. I like that lawyers are extremely pro-AI now 'cause they're like, I'm gonna get so much business from this. How serious do you think the risks of AI are of AI causing serious harm. Everyone is basically moving to the right. They're more worried just in the past 2 weeks, 3 weeks, just through from August 28th to September 18th, except for millennials aged 30 to 44. They saw Jacob Coxon, they saw Dario Hamadej, they saw the SNL sketch, They saw the Ezra Klein interview and they were like, yeah, I was worried before, but I'm good now, which is kind of crazy.

Less worried than ever.

Less worried than ever, apparently, according to The Economist.

No, it's—

It's a narrative violation.

Yeah.

It's a narrative violation. But yeah, everyone else is getting increasingly more worried. And of course, the top of that chart, that is the voter base, 45 and up. If you're seeing even 65+ move to 40% very serious, that's going to move some elections.

Jim Prosser says, it's a fascinating outlier. My hypothesis, we're the gen most comfortable with this degree of technology change and uncertainty due to coming of age through the internet and mobile.

Yeah. I mean, a lot of millennials are in a are in a very fortunate position with like not getting caught off guard by brain rot and slop and screen time addiction. It's like we sort of got brought up in the craziest era and then have seen the children data and can fight back on that. So, I think a lot of people in their 30s and 40s are like, yeah, I'm set up for success. I'm not getting the kid the iPad on day one, that type of thing. So, it feels a little bit more like there's a danger, but it's known. It's like we also grew up with cigarettes, but we were like, yeah, we knew the risks of cigarettes. So, we were like, yeah, we're going to treat that accordingly.

The other resource people haven't really been talking about at all, maybe they should, is construction paper. Celine says, you don't really hear about construction paper much anymore. Back in my day, this was Always felt like it was top of mind almost constantly.

Top of mind.

As a child, certainly.

So, I know construction paper useful for just drawing on. It's thicker.

Yeah.

The ink doesn't go through the paper. That's a benefit. But were people actually constructing things with it? I know people would make those loops, like those daisy chains around holidays.

Perhaps Christmas?

I don't know that I— it feels like if you were building like a real diorama, you would get out the cardboard. So maybe cardboard just squeezed construction paper a little bit. And I mean, have you seen those cardboard cutting saws? It's like a saw designed to rip through cardboard because people get a lot of boxes. But that's also had the knock-on effects of if you're an ambitious child and you're trying to construct something significant that might last the test of time, you might forego the construction paper in lieu of the cardboard. What do you think? Is cardboard responsible for the downfall of construction paper?

That's interesting.

Because we—

Because there's an eco-angle there, John, right? It's like people getting a lot more e-commerce products today.

Yes.

There's boxes coming through the house all the time.

We're post-scarcity on cardboard in most households. Especially ones with children, because you're ordering a lot of things online. There's a lot more cardboard around. I know the last few construction projects I did, cardboard was my material of choice. So maybe that's what's going on here. Yeah, I'm glad we got to the bottom of it.

I'm trying to find the best way to get exposure in the market to construction paper.

You want to go long?

It's almost a perfect store of value over the last 5 years. Fabbrica Italiana Lapis. Ed Affini. Okay. It's been completely— it's a half a billion dollar company completely flat for the last 5 years. So more on this on the next episode. We got to talk about Topic Crawler. Okay. I'm on— spent half an hour going back and forth with ChatGPT so it could make me a tool that spits out links for any topic. he's researching, and it actually gave me exactly what I wanted in the picture below.

And then the follow-up, only 2 minutes in, and I realized how dumb this is. Reinventing the wheel. Reinventing the wheel.

Using the tool to create— use the tool to create the exact same tool.

I mean, the funny thing is, I don't know if this was like created as a joke from the start and the whole idea was like, let's just be funny in the first post because the punchline will be in the second post, or if he actually went through this. But it does speak to the fact that like a lot of the functionality is really buried. Like just the ability to like put something on a cron job is like not advertised anywhere. You know this, right? Yeah. Like if you, If you want to get a weekly digest of where the swells are the biggest across the world for surfing, you can totally do that. You don't need to build a tool. You don't need to write a line of code. You don't need to host anything. It doesn't need to use anything else other than ChatGPT. But you would never know that from any of the marketing really because there has never been just like a cron jobs are here or whatever you'd call it, scheduled tasks are here and there's a national campaign. Very, very difficult as the models get. And the harnesses get more capable to actually educate people.

I mean, Delta just taking blow after blow because you can now watch Cheeky Pint on your United flight. Everyone's really, really just showing that United is, is a, you know, is a serious, highly commercial airline. Yeah, they don't want you watching movies, TV, music. They want you watching the Cheeky Pint archive. You gotta learn from Susan Lee. And I'm hoping this means that we're gonna see more episodes of Cheeky Pine hitting the timeline. It's been about a feels like a six-month holiday, but it's going to come back. What's that? Take a break. Oh yeah, hangover. That's right.

Hangover. They're taking a break, resting off, sleeping it off. Yep. They'll get back in the pub soon. The Brits have turned their back on their day ones. British people are apparently buying Chinese knockoff Land Rovers. Especially lookalike Range Rovers. They love Chinese cars. The JQ7 made by Chinese Chery. I'm learning about a new Chinese automaker every week now.

We got mosquitoes in the ultra dark.

Take off.

We got mosquitoes. Get the flies. Heads up. Heads up.

You think you get it? No, I don't want to go for it. Run around. I'll read this while you fight the mosquitoes. It's a nice little side quest. Get the tracking cam on him while he goes and hunts it down. When Mark Thulis went looking for a new family car this summer, he was struck by how much cheaper the JACU7 was than luxury brands with a similar look and feel. The 33-year-old from England's south coast calculated the upfront cost of his preferred version of the Chinese SUV at the equivalent of around $50K, half the price for a visually similar Range Rover model. You think that car is Visually similar. Its resemblance to the 56-year-old British luxury brand has earned the Jaiku a double-edged nickname: the Temu Range Rover. My first reaction was, "What's the catch?" He said a test drive convinced him that buying the Jaiku was a no-brainer. No big industrialized economy has embraced Chinese cars more enthusiastically than the United Kingdom, where Brits like him are being won over by the combination of affordable prices. with status signaling, styling, and technology. It does look pretty good inside.

Yeah. Calling it a Temu Range Rover doesn't quite work because I would expect that the car is just better in most ways than the Range Rover. When you think about the Temu branding for a product, you think it looks good in the image, and then in person, it's like—

It falls apart.

Yeah, it falls apart. It's a mess. I would expect this car to be actually pretty solid.

Yeah, probably very reliable.

Yeah, they're very good at making products.

Yeah. I wonder how—

Undeniable.

These Chinese brands have rolled out dealerships and service departments because that seems like the dealer footprint seems hard to spin up quickly, but they must have figured out a solve because I would imagine that potential buyers are worried whenever you're, whenever you're dealing with an upstart brand. It can be really tricky if the brand goes under while you own the car because there's just nothing really to work on. A lot of people went through that with the Fisker Ocean. The Fisker Ocean, I think. Fisker maybe went through restructuring, and a lot of people got stuck with cars that couldn't update software.

Yeah. Every once in a while, I'll see a Fisker on the road, and I'm just like, incredible.

Well, not the Ocean.

No.

The Fisker Karma. Yeah, which I saw Jay Leno in one recently. And the Fisker Karma, it does look like— I don't know, I would expect it to be like the modern Back to the Future car. Like, it's like the new DeLorean. It's so, so unique. It's not quite as striking, but it's still very cool. The UK, a cradle of the car industry, showcases what could happen in America if Chinese cars were let in. Range over began a press release trumpeting JACU's early sales success. Is that a press release from them? Are they just dancing on their enemy's gravestone? That's crazy. That's crazy. We got to figure out who actually posted this Range Rover thing, uh, winking at its likeness to the Range Rover Evoque, the smaller one. Uh, the managing director of a dealership in Leeds, Yorkshire said the appeal was simple. It looks expensive, it feels expensive, and then you find out how much it costs. For now, Chinese cars are essentially shut out of the large US market by high tariffs and restrictions on Chinese software. President Trump in September repeated his openness to Chinese cars produced in American factories, alarming Detroit. Oh, that's interesting. He wants the jobs, he wants the manufacturing base, the control over the industrialization, but Detroit automakers just don't want more competition, so there's actually some tension there. Interesting. Congress is debating a bill that would permanently ban Chinese cars on U.S. roads. The spectacular growth of Chinese brands in Britain this year has been led by Chery, China's top vehicle exporter. Through September, its sales more than tripled compared to the previous term. The last story we got to get to is Apple plans to introduce new privacy controls for Mac users. Warning: of the risks growing around granting broad data access to third-party software, including AI agents. So your iMessage data is not— I don't think it's encrypted when it's on your hard drive. So you can potentially give an agent access, like, yeah, just read, just be able to edit my files. And then it can also read your messages and maybe you don't want it to and maybe you want that to be a specific permission. And so Apple is sort of grappling with what permissions it gives when. At the same time, Ben Thompson seems like he's on the verge of going Linux on the desktop because he's been very frustrated because he runs a headless Mac Mini that he remotes into when he needs to see the screen. But most of the time, he's just having an AI agent write pieces of software for him. But those pieces of software need permissions, and the permissions are UI pop-ups. So you have to jump in and click the button and say, yes, I allow it to read from the network or interact with the screen or interact with the file system. And so he's been very frustrated by this and is sort of questioning whether Apple— they're so clearly set up on the hardware side to take advantage of the hardware boom, the hacker boom. But he went back to Paul Graham talking about the moment maybe 20 years ago where all the best hackers, software developers, were using Macs. Mac became dominant in like the startup ecosystem and then it just became like every company just provisions Macs and MacBook Pros for basically everyone regardless of what they're doing. And there's this question, Apple's in this like tense moment of, you know, how much freedom should they give? How much privacy should they give? How much flexibility should they give to the user? How responsible is that? If you take all the guardrails off and you're on Linux, you can— the agent can just do anything. That's a benefit, but it's also a risk. He also shares a fascinating anecdote that his Mac Mini got hacked. Like, there was some system that was on an open port, came in and installed a crypto miner. But his AI agent actually detected it and sent him a note on Telegram and said, like, urgent, you've been hacked, we should do something about this. And the AI agent was like, oh no, no, you don't need— you shouldn't use me right now. I should sit this one out. And he was like, You're dead wrong there. You're fixing this. And it did. And it went and reset the Mac, like, you know, cleared all the— closed the port that was opened so it couldn't— so the hackers couldn't get back in. And then also cleared out the crypto miner. But it's very funny that it was like this referendum on like you creating more vulnerabilities, but you're also able to fight them because typically that's something like if there was a crypto miner on your computer, you wouldn't find out until you were like, oh, I'm trying to do some stuff. It's slow. Let me go figure it out. Oh, Apple just patched this randomly. Okay, it got— it fixed it. It detected it later downstream. Instead, it's like 15 minutes.

That's such a wild scheme.

Yeah.

Where you're hacking, I'm sure, millions.

Oh, yeah. It's just like a scrambler.

If they're getting to millions of devices, they would actually have a meaningful amount of compute.

Yeah.

And it's free. That's our show. We can close it out.

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