Super Mario inside an AI, and a shield against AI reverse engineers
Follow-up to Thursday Oct 29: A computer inside an AI, free transcription, and Qwen4 on the wayRemember Thursday's Qwenputer, a computer processor built inside a small AI model? Drew Breunig went further. His project, nesformer, bakes a working Nintendo (NES) processor into the weights of Qwen3.5-4B. Weights are the numbers that make up the model. You can play Super Mario Bros inside it, very slowly. He built it with prompts to Opus 5.5, and it got 252 points on Hacker News.
On GitHub, BLA (Blind LLM Agents) gained 1,565 stars in its first days. It tries to protect apps against AI reverse-engineering agents like REA, the tool we saw blocked by Claude last Sunday. Its method: poison, exhaust, and make the AI hallucinate. Another project, unslop, is a Claude skill that turns AI-looking app designs into cleaner interfaces, with 2,075 stars.
Nesformer is pure fun, and it shows how strange these models can be. BLA shows a new arms race: AI agents that take software apart, and tools that try to trick them. Developers who ship apps should watch this space.
