Zwar erstmal “nur” im Browser und als App/AU/VST3 für macOS, aber die Windows-Version dürfte nicht lange auf sich warten lassen. Wer’s kennt, muss nicht lange überlegen, alle anderen: Ausprobieren! Da geht er dahin, der Tag.

Ich pflege ja immer noch einen gesunden Spleen für so Vintage-HiFi-Kram. Nun ist 2003 vielleicht noch gar nicht vintage, vielleicht ja aber doch. Loewe hat damals mit dem „Certos“ eine eher ungewöhnliche Kompaktanlage in die Regale gebracht, die auf jeden Fall schon mal ein echter Hingucker war und immer noch ist. Vintage-Tech-Experte Posy sieht sich das Ding mal genauer an und nimmt uns dabei mit.

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Actually for me you can get it down to an eyeroll and a tired sigh.

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If I can get just one teen girl to use the word epistemic, this entire career will have been valuable.

Over the weekend, it became fashionable to use AI to replace the operating systems on smart TVs with vibe coded or AI reverse-engineered ones to make them less bloated. People have taken proprietary internet-of-things devices that were bricked and abandoned by their creators and used AI to hack them and install new software on them, giving functionality the original developers took away.  

In the last few days I have seen people hack smart picture frames to become AI-powered smart calendars, baby monitors to remove all ads, and bricked Lululemon mirrors to bring them back to life with new software. And dozens and dozens of TVs to install AI-written software that removes bloatware, ads, and simplifies the user interface. 

What we’re seeing is vibe coding, but instead of making something from scratch, people are using AI to take an existing piece of software and replicate its features, its functionality, or cloning it wholesale. In some cases, people are using AI to take a proprietary piece of hardware and install some version of open source software on it. All of this is some mix of “decompiling,” “reverse-engineering,” “hacking,” vibe coding, AI slop, and stealing. It is the plagiarism machine being used for plagiarism, but also it is random people using AI to take control back over devices whose proprietary software was used to arbitrarily lock away basic functionality, to add advertisements, surveillance, and bloat to devices that probably shouldn’t have them, or whose functionality was bricked altogether. 

“All I am hearing from software engineers is that software-as-a-service is dying as a business model,” Mike Nolan, who studies the politics of open source software, told 404 Media about the recent spate of AI-driven clones. “It’s becoming so easy to recreate the functionality that you want [with AI.]”

“The barrier for recreating this stuff is lower, so a lot of people are doing it for fun,” he added. “But there’s a lot of work associated with maintaining software so there may be a lot of instances where the software may not be reliable enough to use—I don’t know how many companies are going to be adopting these clones.”

In one example, a user named Gathin wrote in a post on X: “Vibe coded my parents’ TV this afternoon! It was showing a sponsored ad before you could even get to Netflix. Gave Claude Code the model number, it found the TV on wifi, removed 25 Xiaomi packages and wrote a new launcher.” That post has allegedly been viewed more than 6 million times. “Looks like an Apple TV now lol.”

It has been possible to do a lot of this for a long time using open source, human-coded repositories. There are many communities of people who have spent hundreds of hours bringing bricked internet-of-things hardware from the dead or finding vulnerabilities that allow one to modify or repair devices that have proprietary software on them. 

But over the weekend, a project called “Reverse Engineer Anything” became one of the most viral GitHub repositories in recent memory, with more than 342,000 stars as of the time I’m writing this. The project uses AI to deconstruct features in other pieces of software, and allows the user to replicate them: “See a feature in an app that you want in your own product? Ask your agent to investigate it with REA. It can inspect the app without its source code, explain how the feature works, show the evidence, and build a version for your project.”

What this promises is a way to easily clone and modify other people’s products; it is the same general principle that has in recent weeks allowed for the viral, AI-driven clones of Adobe’s Creative Cloud software, Microsoft Office and the “decompilation” of hundreds of different video games. This tactic is being used not just on software you run on your computer, but also to reverse-engineer and modify the embedded software on physical devices. 

A person who claims to make guitar pedals, for example, claimed on Hacker News that he used AI to clone the effects algorithms of three of his competitors using AI: “In the past 72 hours I have ONE-SHOT decompiled 3 of my main competitors products. Like, I could in theory just stick them in a box and resell them […] Basically, anyone with a Claude subscription can now rip off [sic] any best-in-class algorithm from any competitor.”

It is not necessarily the case that everyone will be writing and running their own software or that Adobe or Microsoft are screwed. But I’ve seen enough to say that the “decompiling” or “reverse-engineer anything” craze is going to have an actual real-world impact on software companies, coding communities, and open-source projects. 

One of the criticisms I heard last week after writing about video game “decompiling” communities being overrun with AI-powered decompilations, ports, and clones is that a lot of the AI decompilations are not actually “decompiling” anything — that the resulting source code usually isn’t the same as the original, and that the resulting software has weird bugs, is of low quality, or doesn’t fully work. 

But that’s one of the main problems here: AI-powered, cloned software often has bugs that the person using the AI doesn’t understand or know how to fix, and people are doing it anyway, using the software anyway, and unleashing it on the world and on these communities at a speed with which it cannot be vetted or moderated. Part of the reason that this will have an impact is specifically because, at least in the short term, a lot of this software will suck: The ability to cheaply and quickly clone software and modify features is going to have some sort of sloppifying impact on society whether you vibecode software or not. Unlike some of Silicon Valley’s wildest sickos, I do not expect most people to vibe code their own software or to hack their baby monitors, but like AI slop on social media or on menus, flyers, and billboards, you do not need to actually use AI or think that it’s good in order to be affected by this. 

Inevitably, poorly coded, barely-functional, insecure software is going to be installed on critical hardware, which will lead to devices and networks being hacked; reverse-engineering communities and open source projects are going to be overrun with people Kool-Aid manning in with “their” AI projects and code. 

All of this has been enabled by the agentification of AI, improving models, and the removal of guardrails. It is now possible to tell an AI to go do something, and to generally have it do that thing. This is leading to more people making more things and more AI agents acting in annoying and perhaps antisocial ways on the internet—we are likely to see an onslaught of semi-functional software and hardware slop, which will have knock-on effects for us all.

We are going to see hastily-created hardware startups using poorly cloned software that barely works, we are going to go to restaurants and be asked to order through a touch screen using cloned software with bizarre bugs. We are going to see people installing and using random code that they know nothing about on internet-connected physical hardware; and we are likely to see hackers try to infiltrate this process to include malware on some of that code. We are going to see smaller software and hardware companies killed by competitors who used AI to steal their products and undercut them. But what people use this for is likely to be a bit of a mixed bag; we are also likely going to see decompiled software used to remove manufacturer guardrails on products that never should have existed in the first place.

It’s election season, and most of the national discourse is focused on the midterms and the increasing likelihood that Democrats will take back the House and perhaps even the Senate. But here in California, the eyes of the tech elite are focused on another target: Proposition 40, aka the billionaire wealth tax.

Prop 40 would enact a one-time 5% wealth tax on the 250 or so billionaires that reside in California, and redirect the funding towards healthcare and education. Predictably, billionaires are furious about the idea. Opponents, like Google co-founder Sergey Brin, have spent some $200 million to oppose the measure. And this comes on the heels of the AI industry and its ultra-rich executives working overtime to stop a slate of new laws designed to protect workers from AI.

Today, on Blood in the Machine, we’re going to dive into these fights, with a woman who’s been at the center of many of them. Lorena Gonzalez is a former state legislator and current president of the California Federation of Labor Unions. She’s a driving force supporting both Prop 40 and the newly passed laws shielding workers from AI abuses and surveillance. (Gonzalez is, for example, a big reason why companies are no longer allowed to surveil you in the bathroom, a law tech firms actually lobbied hard against.)

Gonzalez breaks down the importance of taking on the billionaire tech titans, what they’re really mad about (hint: it’s not just the money), and how working people can fight back against an increasingly oligarchic and dystopian-looking future.

This was a great chat, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Show notes and links to articles cited will follow at the end of the post here.

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I’m still breathing myself back to life after my bout with Covid—reasonably short, only truly brutish and awful for a day or two, but the long hacking tail of that special covid cough clings on—and a brief trip to the California state capitol to meet with researchers, labor leaders, and policymakers to hear about and discuss the AI policy agenda for 2027. Lots of interesting work and ideas coming down the pike, more on that soon. Next week, I’ll be headed to New York for the People’s AI Assembly, if you’re headed that way too drop by and say hello.

I’ll be back on a proper newslettering-and-podcasting schedule next week, but I did want to make sure to flag a few developments here that we should all be watching extremely closely.

First, Character.ai, one of the early headline-grabbing AI startups not named OpenAI or Anthropic, has declared bankruptcy. As 404 Media’s Jason Koebler notes, this can be seen as “one of the first dominos to fall in the long-foreseen AI bubble.”

He continues:

The circumstances of its bankruptcy are exactly what critics of AI have been saying would happen: Character.ai lit a huge amount of money on fire running its product, did not bring in a lot of revenue, and faced enormous legal fees after causing harm to its users. Enshittifying its product to try to make its expenses cheaper did not work, according to a narrative filed in bankruptcy court Tuesday…

Character.ai is one of the best-known AI chatbot companies that has become popular in the AI companion space. The company has faced various legal problems after being sued by the family of one of its users who killed himself after chatting with a Character.ai chatbot, and has been the target of regulators pushing for age verification tech because of its popularity with kids. In its bankruptcy filings, the company says that its enormous legal costs contributed to its bankruptcy, but that even without the legal problems, its business was wildly unsustainable.

has a good writeup of some of the implications of Character.ai’s bankruptcy, and lessons we can draw from it—namely, that, thanks to legal action taken by victims and supported by nonprofit advocates, it was made liable for the harms its products caused people, which was one contributor to its decline. Mock suggests that even if you’re worried about AI doom scenarios, such an approach is much more effective in reining in AI companies and holding them accountable than continual handwringing over doomer scenarios.

tomorrow's mess

Character Flaw

On Monday, CharacterAI filed for bankruptcy. It’s a story that’s much bigger than the amount of coverage it’s received would suggest; it could portend the popping of the AI bubble — perhaps equivalent to New Century Financial or even Bear Stearns going under prior to the 2007-2008 subprime financial crisis that triggered the Great Recession. The bankrup…

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Regardless, there is fresh chatter, as Koebler indicated, that the AI bubble is under strain. Especially since Character.ai’s bankruptcy is only one disconcerting factor among many here. Anthropic released its third-quarter earnings as it gears up for its IPO, and its slowing growth rate worried some investors. Market Watch called it a “red flag” while other observers were harsher. Anthropic pulled in $16.8 billion, but it’s aiming for a valuation of *$2 trillion* and its overhead and committed costs are enormous.

Elsewhere, the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz laid off the bulk of its recruitment team, which observers flagged as a sign that fears of leaner times are ta

Finally, these concerns, as the Financial Times reports, appear to be hitting the banks and larger institutional investors, too:

Investors are losing confidence that revenues from the AI boom will be sufficient to support the vast debt piles financing data centres, pushing bonds backing some of the largest US infrastructure projects into increasingly stressed territory.

Prices of bonds issued to fund prominent data centres where Meta, Nvidia, Oracle and others will become tenants - such as “Hyperion” and “Project Excalibur” - have fallen well below par in recent weeks.

Investors are also dumping debt issued by so-called neocloud companies - of which the best known is Nvidia-backed CoreWeave - which have been the most aggressive in how they finance their Al build-out.

CoreWeave, whose stability has long been viewed as an indicator of the AI economy’s health, saw its stock tank this week, before recovering some value on Thursday.

There have been lots of ‘is the AI bubble finally bursting’ moments over the last few years to be sure, but it’s hard not to see some uniquely bad trendlines taking shape here.

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Podcast show notes:

California Labor Federation

Blood in the Machine Newsletter
Brian’s Bluesky

Producer Ryan’s Newsletter

Ryan’s Bluesky

Articles mentioned:

California just passed the strongest AI labor laws in the US

California Proposition 40, One-Time Wealth Tax for State-Funded Healthcare, Education, and Food Assistance Programs Initiative (2026) - Ballotpedia

Paramount completes $111B Warner merger, creating “Skydance” behemoth - Ars Technica

Newsom signs landmark bill aimed at giving lifeline to struggling California newsrooms - Los Angeles Times

The NO FAKES Act

AI in hiring and firing: California’s No Robo Bosses Act

Get the Facts: NO on PROP 40

An AI School, With No Teachers, To Open in Chicago This Fall

The billionaires fight back: Propositions 41 and 42 could kill California’s billionaire tax even if it passes

Billionaire Google Co-Founder Pumps $102 Million Into Fighting California Wealth Tax | Common Dreams

California Billionaires Are Spending Big in Costly Wealth-Tax Fight

The Blue Wave Could Reshape Politics in the South | The New Republic

$200 million-plus spent fighting and supporting billionaire tax - Los Angeles Times

Gavin Newsom backs measure to kill the billionaire tax and ban future wealth taxes

Gavin Newsom opposes California’s $100 billion billionaire tax. The fight may outlast the vote

Billionaire Tax Explained: What Proposition 40 Would Mean for California

Google co-founder Sergey Brin spends $102M opposing California Prop. 40 | abc10.com

California’s ‘carpet-bombed’ wealth tax measure runs into a wall - POLITICO