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FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me

vladimir.varank.in

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Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me

#51

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

tkiolp4 wrote: post #29
ulf-77723 wrote: post #13

Software is still eating the world, now even faster. I wonder how soon we will adapt to this new situation where software is vibe coded for anything and make use of this software without caution as expressed in the article. For most people the main difference will be: Will it run and solve my problem? Soon we will see malware being put into vibe coded software - who will wants to check every commit for write-only sof…

I think in the future (in 10 years?) we are going to see a lot of disposable/throwaway software. I don’t know, imagine this: I need to buy tickets for a concert. I ask my AI agent that I want tickets. The agent creates code on the fly and uses it to purchase my tickets. The code could be simple curl command, or a full app with nice ui/ux. As a user I don’t need to see the code. If I want to buy more tickets the same…

This is also where I think we end up. If the behavior of the system is specified well enough, then the code itself is cheap and throwaway. Why have a static system that is brittle to external changes when you can just reconstruct the system on the fly?

Might be quite awhile before you can do this with large systems but we already see this on smaller contextual scales such as Claude Code itself

Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me

#55

Post by dev_l1x_be »

diath wrote: post #17
petcat wrote: post #2

I feel like ubiquitous hardware support in every OS is going to be a solved problem soon. We're very close to just being able to set an AI coding agent to brute-force a driver for anything. The hardware designer would have to go well out of their way to obfuscate the interface if they really wanted to forbid it, instead of just not bothering to support an OS like BSD or Linux.

The primary reason why it worked is because Claude could rip off the Linux driver. Without any prior work to rely on, how will the AI figure out proprietary hardware?

Combine AI + genetic algo?

https://www.reddit.com/r/learnmachinelearning/comments/1665d...

Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me

#56

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

integralpilot wrote: post #38
b8 wrote: post #16

It'd be nice to have drivers for newer Mac's for a better Asahi Linux experience. Good use of AI imo.

We don't use AI to help write code due to copyright concerns, it's against our policy. We obviously need to be very careful with what we're doing, and we can't be sure it hasn't seen Apple docs or RE'ed Apple binaries etc (which we have very careful clean-room policies on) in its training data. It also can't be guaranteed that the generated code is GPL+MIT compatible (as it may draw inspiration from other GPL only dr…

Given that literally no one is enforcing this it seems like a moral rather than a business decision here no? Isn’t the risk here that your competitors, who have no such moral qualms, are just going to commit all sorts of blatant copyright infringement but it really doesn’t matter because no one is enforcing it?

Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me

#57

Post by tokyobreakfast »

petcat wrote: post #32
ahoka wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That pesky GPL does not stop us anymore, cool.

What would the GPL have to do with this?

In the mid-2000s there was a bit of drama when Linux wireless driver code ended up in BSD (or maybe the other way around). The Internet was angry that day my friend; a bunch of nerds sperging out over licenses and which license is more "free". Ultimately the code was removed.

It sure seems like AI agents can sidestep all that by claiming ignorance on license matters.

Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me

#58

Post by cryptonector »

octoberfranklin wrote: post #21

That AI was trained on the GPLv2 Linux source code, which does have a driver for your Wi-Fi. How is this not copyright laundering?

Prove the new code is similar to the corresponding driver in Linux. If you can then you can get the authors of the latter to file suit against TFA.

Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me

#59

Post by ssl-3 »

Gigachad wrote: post #19
petcat wrote: post #2

I feel like ubiquitous hardware support in every OS is going to be a solved problem soon. We're very close to just being able to set an AI coding agent to brute-force a driver for anything. The hardware designer would have to go well out of their way to obfuscate the interface if they really wanted to forbid it, instead of just not bothering to support an OS like BSD or Linux.

Maybe one day, but it doesn't look like we are very close yet. From the OP article, they handed it the working linux driver and asked it to just make this FreeBSD compatible, but it could not. Looks like it took OP a significant amount of work over 2 months to get something that seems to work. What is interesting is it seems like the work resembles regular management, asking for a written specification, proof reading…

> What is interesting is it seems like the work resembles regular management, asking for a written specification, proof reading, etc.

That's how I've been using the bot for years. Organize tasks, mediate between them, look for obvious-to-me problems and traps as things progress, and provide corrections where that seems useful.

It differs from regular management, I think, in that the sunk costs are never very significant.

Find a design issue that requires throwing out big chunks of work? No problem: Just change that part of the spec and run through the process for that and the stuff beneath it again. These parts cost approximately nothing to produce the first time through, and they'll still cost approximately nothing to produce the second time.

I'm not building a physical structure here, nor am I paying salaries or waiting days or weeks to refactor: If the foundation is wrong, then just nuke it and start over fresh. Clean slates are cheap.

(I don't know if that's the right way to do it, or the wrong way. But it works -- for me, at least, with the things I want to get done with a computer.)

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