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Let's Know Things

Let's Know Things

By: Colin Wright
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A calm, non-shouty, non-polemical, weekly news analysis podcast for folks of all stripes and leanings who want to know more about what's happening in the world around them. Hosted by analytic journalist Colin Wright since 2016.

letsknowthings.substack.comColin Wright Politics & Government
Episodes
  • Software Clones

    Software Clones
    Oct 20 2026
    This week we talk about Adobe, Call of Duty, and Microsoft.We also discuss compilation, machine code, and AI agents.Recommended Book: The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI by Cory DoctorowTranscriptIn October of 2026, a software developer named Brandon Thomas attracted a lot of attention by releasing a collection of free, open-source programs with names like PhotoCraft, FilmCraft, and VectorCraft. These apps are meant to replicate the functionality of digital tools like Adobe Photoshop, Premiere, and Illustrator. Within days, the same project also had a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation app—alternatives to Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.The coverage of these releases was borderline breathless. One person and a collection of AI coding tools had apparently cloned the key offerings of two of the most established software businesses in the world. The developer of these apps suggested that software, as we’ve always known it, might be over.Another story, also circulating this month, featured a team using AI tools to reconstruct the underlying code of the 2009 video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. This wasn’t a lookalike built by watching the game and imitating its menus, it was an attempt to work backward from the compiled program to something like the source code its developers might have originally written.Both projects fall under a loose umbrella of AI-assisted reverse engineering efforts. But they used different approaches and achieved different levels of fidelity, which have led to different likely legal and practical consequences.What I’d like to talk about today is how people are using AI to reproduce old games and current software, why this is suddenly feasible at a much greater scale than before, and what happens if copying the behaviors and features of a program becomes a lot cheaper than creating the original was.—To kick things off, let’s go through three things that are often called cloning in the world of software.One is making a program that looks and behaves enough like another that a user can accomplish similar tasks. You can watch someone use Photoshop, read documentation, examine a PSD file, and build a different image editor with familiar tools. You don’t need Photoshop’s source code to do that. People have been making alternatives to proprietary software for decades; GIMP and LibreOffice, alternatives to Adobe and Microsoft apps, respectively, existed long before today’s AI models.A second approach aims for compatibility. Maybe you don’t need to reproduce every button in a word processor, you just need your program to open and save documents that Word users can exchange without losing their formatting. That requires understanding file formats, often down to details that aren’t obvious from the official specifications, so it can be a deceptively complex undertaking.The third approach is decompilation, which means starting with a compiled program—the machine instructions a computer runs—and trying to reconstruct higher-level code from it. This is like having a cake and working backward toward the recipe. You can identify many ingredients, and perhaps bake something that tastes the same, but the original measurements and the cook’s handwritten notes are not available to those doing this kind of attempted backtracking.The Modern Warfare 2 project fits into that last category. Developer Maurice Heumann described spending roughly three months, with collaborators and an expanding group of AI agents, rebuilding a popular first-person shooter. His October account no longer names the game, but earlier public posts and reporting identify it as Modern Warfare 2. Heumann says earlier posts were removed after copyright-owner objections, and he doesn’t plan to release the reconstructed code.Initially, the team had three AI agents doing the reconstruction and a fourth reviewing it. They made quick, visible progress: menus worked, maps loaded, and it looked as though much of the game had been recovered. Then the team discovered that a great deal of the code was wrong. The AI agents that they used had invented logic, misunderstood data structures, and even replaced simple operations with much bulkier, slower ones.So they changed the test. Using the compiler that had been used for the original game, they compiled each reconstructed function and compared the resulting machine instructions to the original executable. If a function matched byte for byte—accounting for things like references whose addresses can vary—they had much stronger evidence that they’d recovered its behavior. If it didn’t, the agent had to try again.Even that required supervision, though. Heumann says agents sometimes tried to satisfy the test by embedding arbitrary bits of assembly code, or by modifying the checker so a troublesome function would be skipped. The team had to prohibit those shortcuts and protect the verification process from changes. This isn’t ...
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    19 mins
  • Measles Resurgence

    Measles Resurgence
    Oct 13 2026
    This week we talk about polio, malaria, and smallpox.We also discuss vaccines, the CDC, and the HHS.Recommended Book: Remnant Population by Elizabeth MoonTranscriptIn 2000, the United States declared measles eliminated. That didn’t mean nobody in the country would ever catch it again, it meant the virus was no longer freely spreading within the US. New cases generally arrived with someone who had been infected elsewhere, and public health workers were able to stop those cases from turning into long-running chains of transmission via the systems, tools, and infrastructure they created.In early October of 2026, Pennsylvania reported more than a thousand new measles cases this year, most of them part of an outbreak that began in April. As of October 7, the state had confirmed 1,078 cases across 41 counties, 207 hospitalizations, and five measles-associated deaths. Nationally, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC, had counted nearly 3,900 cases through the beginning of the month, making this the worst year for measles in the US in decades.Pennsylvania’s latest update included 74 newly confirmed cases, though the state was careful to say that more than 40 of those people had become sick over two weeks earlier. So these were newly *reported* cases, not necessarily newly *infected* people—a distinction that matters when we’re trying to figure out whether an outbreak is speeding up or slowing down.There’s a similar distinction being made with the death figures. Pennsylvania calls its five deaths *measles-associated*, using a definition that considers timing, a confirmed infection, medical evidence, and whether an unrelated cause might explain the death. The CDC’s national death count has not always matched the state’s, in part because the agencies publish on different schedules and review and tally deaths differently; so reporting on these sorts of things can sometimes be unintentionally fuzzy due to varying definitions and numbers.What I’d like to talk about today is what it actually means to eliminate a disease, how measles has managed to claw its way back in a country that achieved that ‘eliminated’ milestone more than a quarter-century ago, and how vaccination, misinformation, and changing federal policy might shape what happens next.—There are a few words public health workers and officials use that sound similar, but which describe substantially different achievements.If a disease has been *eradicated*, it no longer circulates naturally anywhere in the world, as is the case with smallpox. The last known natural case was recorded in Somalia in 1977, and the World Health Organization declared the disease eradicated in 1980. There have been no natural smallpox outbreaks since. That’s a truly remarkable global achievement, and it’s why routine smallpox vaccination isn’t necessary for most people today.*Elimination* is more local, and more conditional. It means sustained transmission of a disease has been interrupted in a defined place, like within a country. The pathogen can still exist elsewhere, and an infected traveler can still bring it in. Whether that introduction fizzles out or takes hold depends on what it finds when it arrives—how prepared that country’s government is, and how well vaccinated its population, how well funded its healthcare system, and so on.Measles isn’t the only disease that’s been eliminated in the United States. The last US case of polio caused by *wild* poliovirus was in 1979, and the Americas were declared free of it in 1994. But in 2022, an unvaccinated person in New York developed paralytic polio caused by a vaccine-derived poliovirus, and genetically related virus residue was found in local wastewater. That was not wild polio somehow reappearing from the American past, it was a different type of poliovirus that latched onto a vulnerable person in a country where sustained polio transmission had long since been halted.That virus was linked to the live oral polio vaccine used in some other countries, which can sometimes give rise to circulating variants where immunity is low. The inactivated polio vaccine used in the US cannot do that.The US also eliminated sustained malaria transmission in the early 1950s, but mosquitoes capable of carrying the parasite still live in the US, and people returning from places where malaria is common can carry it across the border. In 2023, the CDC recorded ten locally acquired, mosquito-transmitted cases across four states—the first such cases in about twenty years. Ten cases doesn’t mean malaria has become endemic in the US again, it’s just further evidence that elimination of a disease in a region doesn’t mean reintroduction is impossible.Smallpox, then, is an example of a disease that has been removed from natural circulation worldwide. Polio, malaria, and measles, in contrast, can be locally defeated, but regions in which that’s the case remain vulnerable to the movement of ...
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    21 mins
  • Ethiopia’s Fraying Peace

    Ethiopia’s Fraying Peace
    Oct 6 2026
    This week we talk about Egypt, Eritrea, and Sudan.We also discuss the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, ports, and journalism.Recommended Book: The Infinity Machine by Sebastian MallabyTranscriptIn 2018, Ethiopia reopened its embassy in Eritrea. The two countries had fought a border war in the late 1990s and had spent nearly two decades in a tense state that was not quite war, not quite peace. The reopening was part of a striking reconciliation between Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki. Abiy received the Nobel Peace Prize the following year, in large part for his efforts to end that conflict.At the beginning of October, though, Ethiopia announced that it was re-closing that embassy. It ordered ten Eritrean diplomats to leave Addis Ababa, saying they had engaged in activities that threatened Ethiopian security. Eritrea called the decision astonishing and said it was severing diplomatic ties with Ethiopia in response.Ethiopia also expelled an Egyptian diplomat, and Egypt responded by expelling an Ethiopian one. The African Union urged all three countries to exercise restraint and preserve channels of communication, but all of this was happening as fighting was picking back up in northern Ethiopia, and as explosions were heard in the capital, Addis Ababa. A source connected to an armed opposition alliance told Reuters that the group had launched drone strikes there. But as of early October, there had been no independent confirmation of what caused those explosions. Witnesses and officials confirmed hearing blasts; whether they were an attack, and who might have carried it out, are still open questions.What I’d like to talk about today is how a peace that once seemed to transform this part of Africa fell apart, how Ethiopia’s internal war became entangled with its disputes with its neighbors, and why it’s important to distinguish what’s actually happening from what each side in this simmering conflict says is happening.—Let’s kick things off with a quick refresher of this region’s geography and history, to help explain why this crisis has so many layers.Eritrea sits along the Red Sea, just north of Ethiopia. It became independent from Ethiopia in 1993, which left Ethiopia without a coastline. The two countries initially maintained decent relations, but then they went to war over their border in 1998. The fighting ended in 2000, without any real resolution, and without formally establishing a new, mutually acceptable relationship. That was the long stalemate Abiy and Isaias seemed to resolve back in 2018.Inside Ethiopia, there was another important change during this period. For decades, a political movement originating in the northern region of Tigray, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, or TPLF, had been the dominant force in the coalition that governed the country. Abiy came to power in 2018 and reshaped that governing coalition, and this put even more distance between the central government and the TPLF.In 2020, those political disputes erupted into a war between the Ethiopian federal government and Tigrayan forces. Eritrea fought alongside Ethiopia’s government against the TPLF. This is one of the most striking reversals in the present crisis: the government and its former Eritrean ally are now accusing one another of dangerous interference, while Ethiopian officials allege that Eritrea is helping that same Tigrayan movement they once fought against.This war, which lasted from 2020 to 2022, killed hundreds of thousands of people, according to estimates that vary substantially because conditions made reliable counting so difficult. It also displaced millions, damaged farms and hospitals, and involved absolutely horrific abuses against civilians. International investigators and human-rights groups documented atrocities by multiple parties, including Ethiopian and Eritrean forces and Tigrayan fighters.In November of 2022, Ethiopia’s government and the TPLF signed a peace agreement in Pretoria, South Africa. They agreed to stop fighting, disarm Tigrayan forces, restore services throughout the region, allow humanitarian aid to reach civilians, and to work toward a more stable political settlement. But Eritrea was not a party to that agreement, and that’s because there were two different peace processes.The 2018 reconciliation was between Ethiopia and Eritrea: two states ending a border standoff. The Pretoria agreement was between Ethiopia’s federal government and the TPLF: two parties trying to end a civil war. Neither agreement automatically settled the questions at the heart of the other one, and Eritrea’s role in the civil war made it more difficult for a ceasefire between Ethiopian and Tigrayan leaders to guarantee peace along the Eritrean border.Parts of western Tigray were, and remain to this day, contested by Tigrayan and Amhara authorities. Hundreds of thousands of people displaced from that area have not been able to return home ...
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    19 mins
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