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Over the past few months I've been heavily involved in the decompilation community. I've been hands-on decompiling a beloved game from my childhood (Star Fox Adventures). I started this journey with zero prior decomp experience—and to make things worse I had never really touched C nor assembly either.Learning how to decompile was challenging. It's difficult to find any good learning resources for it and any open-source projects for this are inactive and/or contain little actual learning material.So I put together Decomp Academy! Decomp Academy is an interactive way to learn how to decompile PowerPC assembly back into C. The site runs a live Metrowerks CodeWarrior GC/2.0 compiler, converts your C into assembly, and then checks how close your assembly matches the target. If even 1 instruction or bit is off, that's a fail. This is the gold standard for video game decompilation and this is much stricter than a normal decompile.As of writing there are 250+ lessons on the site and the lessons start at the very basics so anyone with a little programming experience should be able to jump straight in, even if you're not a C expert. Some lessons also have real functions taken from live open source decomp projects (Star Fox Adventures, Mario Party 4, Pikmin, Metroid Prime). The idea being you learn everything you need to know to be able to jump in and contribute to a real decompilation project when done.The site is completely free, open source and you have access to all lessons without having to sign up. All lessons are stored in markdown in the repo (src/curriculum), it's trivial to add or modify lessons. The site is very new and the lessons are rapidly changing every day with a whole C++ section on the way. The site has already been well received by the decomp community and I'm happy to share it with HN. I'm very keen on others to contribute to this project and I hope this becomes the best resource on the internet for learning the art of decompilation. Please let me know what you think!Source: https://github.com/JackPriceBurns/decomp-academy-fe Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48703412 Points: 4 # Comments: 1

OpenAI says ChatGPT has become less literal and more conversational after quietly updating GPT-5.5 Instant for everyone. Naturally, I wanted to know whether I could actually tell the difference.After spending the day chatting with the updated model, both by text and in Voice Mode, I came away with mixed feelings. Some conversations did feel more natural, but others reminded me we're still a long way from talking to AI as effortlessly as we talk to another person.Rather than making ChatGPT dramatically smarter, OpenAI says the update should make it feel easier to talk to. The AI is supposed to infer what you're trying to accomplish instead of taking every prompt literally, adapt more naturally when you change your mind, and keep track of the thread of a conversation without needing as many reminders.Fade into the backgroundNow, a lot of that will naturally fade into the background as you talk to ChatGPT, since none of it is designed to stand out, so it can be hard to quantify if the update is objectively better. In my own testing, I noticed ChatGPT felt quicker to adapt when I clarified what I wanted. Instead of sticking rigidly to its original interpretation, as it often does, it seemed more willing to adjust course as the conversation evolved.I still have to tell it if it's off the mark, but I get the feeling that it’s actually listening to me and is going to remember what I want and deliver it next time. It's not reading my mind. I still have to tell it when it's misunderstood me. The difference is that, once corrected, it feels more likely to carry that feedback through the rest of the conversation instead of slipping back into its original interpretation.In fact, I’ve been quite impressed by how much more insightful it appears when I bounce ideas off it. Instead of simply agreeing with my first suggestion, it's become a little more likely to ask whether I'd considered a different angle.Voice ModeOf course, because Voice Mode also uses GPT-5.5 it has also received an update. To test it out, I fired up ChatGPT Voice Mode on my iPhone and had a quick chat with the AI. Despite it telling me that it now had “more nuance and contextual awareness” I didn’t really notice a difference in this mode.I decided to try tripping it up with a bit of sarcasm. When I replied "No way!" after one of its suggestions, ChatGPT took me completely literally and assumed I wanted to end the conversation. So much for all that extra contextual awareness.Using ChatGPT in Voice Mode still feels a bit unnatural to me, just like it did before. I still prefer to ‘talk’ to ChatGPT via text.So, while the GPT-5.5 update means that ChatGPT may have just got a bit more natural to converse with, at least by text, I’d say we’re still a way off completely smooth human / AI vocal interaction. At least we’ve taken a small step in the right direction.