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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

#281

Post by democracy »

falkensmaize wrote: post #278
tkiolp4 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't know if this is the future or not, but it seems to serve no real purpose other than to enrich LLM company profits. There is real value in well designed code that has been battle tested and hardened over years of bugfixes and iteration. It's reliable, it's reusable, it's efficient and it's secure. The opposite of hastily written and poorly understood vibe code that may or may not even do what you want it to do…

there is software and software. lots of enterprise software gets re-written every 2-5 years, some projects are in rubbish bin as soon as finished (if finished)

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

#282

Post by deaux »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #256
deaux wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Think of all engineering disciplines that aren't software. Those all depend on human-language formal instructions.

The non-software engineering disciplines I'm thinking of rely on blueprints, schematics, diagrams, HDLs, and tables much more than human language formal instructions. More so than software engineering.

Disagree, they rely on both equally, not much more on one of them. Consider the process of actually building a large structure with only a set of such diagrams. The diagrams primarily cover nouns (what, where, using what), whereas the human language formal instructions cover the verbs (how, why, when). You can't build anything with only one of the two.

And sure, the human language formal instructions often appear inside tables or diagrams, that doesn't make them anything less so.

This is based on having worked with companies that do projects in the 10 figure range.

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

#283

Post by democracy »

jomohke wrote: post #128
slopinthebag wrote: post #78

> I didn’t write any piece of code there. There are several known issues, which I will task the agent to resolve, eventually. Meanwhile, I strongly advise against using it for anything beyond a studying exercise. Months of effort and three separate tries to get something kind of working but which is buggy and untested and not recommended for anyone to use, but unfortunately some folks will just read the headline and…

You're validly critiquing where it is now. The hype people are excited because they're guessing where it's going. This is notable because it's a milestone that was not previously possible: a driver that works, from someone who spent ~zero effort learning the hardware or driver programming themselves. It's not production ready, but neither is the first working version of anything. Do you see any reason that progress w…

>> Do you see any reason that progress will stop abruptly here?

I do. When someone thinks they are building next generation super software for 20$ a month using AI, they conveniently forget someone else is paying the remaining 19,980$ for them for compute power and electricity.

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

#284

Post by [deleted] »

cmeacham98 wrote: post #277
fdefitte wrote: post #273

[dead]

What? No. An LLM cannot reason, at least not what we think of when we say a human can reason. (There are models called "reasoning" models as a marketing gimmick.) TFA describes a port of a Linux driver that was literally "an existing example to copy".

[deleted]

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

#286

Post by tehjoker »

scuff3d wrote: post #269
luckman212 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we please have some calm, stable, boring years please, before I'm dead? The last 5 years have already been "wild" enough. The world is unrecognizable. I'm unprepared for further wildness.

Excluding the batshit insane political side, I don't actually think it's been as nuts as people think, or at least not uniformly so. I have a lot of friends in the tech sector, but outside the FANNG/silicone valley/startup bubbles. It's been largely business as normal across the board. Twitter and social media warps our perspective I think.

there was a whole pandemic

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

#290

Post by bot403 »

fragmede wrote: post #202
lich_king wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most hardware drivers are simpler than people expect. The hardware is usually designed to do the sensible thing in a straightforward way, and you're just translating what the OS wants into a bunch of bits you need to write to the right hardware register. On the flip side, the perceived barrier is high. Most folks don't have an intuitive sense of how the kernel or "bare metal" environment differs from userland. How do…

Harder, but not impossible. You 3d print a jig for a solenoid and a relay so you can warm/cold reboot the laptop, get a pizerow setup and configured to be a keyboard you can control over SSH, a webcam watching the screen, a hardwired Ethernet port, a second computer to manipulate the Device Under Test (aka the MacBook/laptop with a missing whatever driver). Even though waiting on Claude Code doesn't hit flow state if…

Or, for many things, a VM with hardware passthrough could work.
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