Wow, that’s really wild! Yeah, I remember this — 8 years ago Pokémon go came out and I was working on some projects to reverse engineer the API. Now I’m reverse engineering neural networks. Go figure.
I had an encounter like this in real life. Turns out Tom Scott was a really early contributor to POPFile. He was a teenager and I’d never met him. Had been enjoying his YouTube channel for a long time. One day he interviewed me at some conference and thanked me for accepting his commits when he was a teen.