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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

#321

Post by croes »

treesknees wrote: post #267
with wrote: post #249

a kernel module written entirely by AI, loading into ring 0, that the author admits has known issues and shouldnt be used in production. Were speedrunning the "insecure by default" era.

And so what? Security is important, sure, but there’s nothing wrong with an experiment or side project with full disclosure upfront about its known limitations. People should be empowered to share and tinker, without feeling like they need to setup a bug bounty program first. Not every GitHub project is a vendor/customer relationship.

But LLMs will get that code for the next raining and planty of people will use it productive, just look how many people use OpenClaw.

There are people for whom a software that compiles without error is for productive use cases

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

#322

Post by hnarn »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #43

Had an experience like this recently. QEMU stopped compiling for old versions of MacOS (pre-13) w/M1 arch, due to it requiring newer SDKs which don't support older MacOS versions. I put Sonnet 4.6 on the case, and it wrote a small patch, compiled and installed it in a matter of minutes, without giving it any instructions other than to look at errors and apply a fix. I definitely would have just given up without the A…

Why would you solve an issue like this and then not supply a patch upstream, or at the very least contact someone that could? It seems to be like the FLOSS equivalent of posting about a problem on a forum and then replying "nvm, solved it".

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

#323

Post by miki123211 »

dumbfounder wrote: post #65

The future is that people stop buying software and just build it themselves. The spam filter in thunderbird was broken for me, I built my own in hours and it works way better. Oh that CRM doesn’t have the features you want? Build one that does. It will become very easy to built and deploy solutions to many of your own bespoke problems.

Funnily enough, this will make many "tragedy of the commons" / "Goodhart's law hacking" problems more tractable.

Right now, there's only one Google algorithm, one Amazon search and so on. The moment you let agents run wild, each with a different model, prompt and memory, effectively introducing randomness into the process, it becomes much harder to optimize for "metric go up."

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

#324

Post by miki123211 »

mixdup wrote: post #69
dumbfounder wrote: post #65

The future is that people stop buying software and just build it themselves. The spam filter in thunderbird was broken for me, I built my own in hours and it works way better. Oh that CRM doesn’t have the features you want? Build one that does. It will become very easy to built and deploy solutions to many of your own bespoke problems.

Unlikely. The future will be some people will do this, but honestly I think it will largely be people who were already tinkering with building things, whether full on software development or not My mom and dad, my brother who drives a dump truck in a limestone quarry, my sister-in-law, none of them work in tech or consider themselves technical in any way. They are never, ever going to write their own software and wil…

They won't think about it in terms of building software, just like many house buyers don't think in terms of building houses, even though somebody has effectively built a house just for them.

They'll just ask their bank to help them fill out a family income form based on last year's earnings. They'll get the numbers back, without thinking about the Python script that used Pandas and some web APIs to generate those numbers. They'll think about it in terms of "that thing that Chat GPT just gave me to compare truck from nearby local dealers", without realizing that it's actually a React app, partially powered by reverse-engineered APIs, partially by data that their agent scraped off Facebook and Craigslist.

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

#325

Post by reactordev »

miki123211 wrote: post #323
dumbfounder wrote: post #65

The future is that people stop buying software and just build it themselves. The spam filter in thunderbird was broken for me, I built my own in hours and it works way better. Oh that CRM doesn’t have the features you want? Build one that does. It will become very easy to built and deploy solutions to many of your own bespoke problems.

Funnily enough, this will make many "tragedy of the commons" / "Goodhart's law hacking" problems more tractable. Right now, there's only one Google algorithm, one Amazon search and so on. The moment you let agents run wild, each with a different model, prompt and memory, effectively introducing randomness into the process, it becomes much harder to optimize for "metric go up."

we've seen what "no barrier of entry" marketplaces look like...

Quality go down.

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

#326

Post by fragmede »

mixdup wrote: post #69
dumbfounder wrote: post #65

The future is that people stop buying software and just build it themselves. The spam filter in thunderbird was broken for me, I built my own in hours and it works way better. Oh that CRM doesn’t have the features you want? Build one that does. It will become very easy to built and deploy solutions to many of your own bespoke problems.

Unlikely. The future will be some people will do this, but honestly I think it will largely be people who were already tinkering with building things, whether full on software development or not My mom and dad, my brother who drives a dump truck in a limestone quarry, my sister-in-law, none of them work in tech or consider themselves technical in any way. They are never, ever going to write their own software and wil…

No judgement, but if my mom or dad had a problem I could solve with a couple hours a month, with an larger initial investment of time at the beginning, I'd be willing to make it for them.

To the matter of driving a truck though, if someone needs an app idea, blue collar workers are having to spend an hour after work logging what they did that day. If they could do it in their truck while driving home for the day, you could make a pile of cash selling an app that lets them do that.

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

#327

Post by petcat »

croes wrote: post #321
treesknees wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And so what? Security is important, sure, but there’s nothing wrong with an experiment or side project with full disclosure upfront about its known limitations. People should be empowered to share and tinker, without feeling like they need to setup a bug bounty program first. Not every GitHub project is a vendor/customer relationship.

But LLMs will get that code for the next raining and planty of people will use it productive, just look how many people use OpenClaw. There are people for whom a software that compiles without error is for productive use cases

> Never make toy software and share it!

> Someone might try to use it and get pwned!

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

#328

Post by Gud »

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?

Why is this “ripping off”? It’s an ISC Licensed piece of code.

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

#329

Post by mlrtime »

samplatt wrote: post #270
alwillis wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unlikely. The future will be some people will do this, but honestly I think it will largely be people who were already tinkering with building things, whether full on software development or not Billions of dollars of stock market value disappeared because of the concern AI can create core SaaS functionality for corporations instead of them spending millions of dollars in licensing fees to SAP, Microsoft, etc. This…

>Billions of dollars of stock market value disappeared because of the concern That's really the key, right there. The value disappeared because of concern, not of anything real. When ungodly amounts of money is governed entirely by vibes, it's hardly surprising they lose ungodly amounts of money to vibe-coding. The downside is the effects of all that money shifting is very real :(

That's because of P/E and how future earnings work.

If the P/E = 1 then there would be no sell-off. Looks at utility stocks with divs, they don't sell off [as sharply] when there is AI news.

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

#330

Post by petesergeant »

dumbfounder wrote: post #65

The future is that people stop buying software and just build it themselves. The spam filter in thunderbird was broken for me, I built my own in hours and it works way better. Oh that CRM doesn’t have the features you want? Build one that does. It will become very easy to built and deploy solutions to many of your own bespoke problems.

I think Greasemonkey scripts to fix the websites you use is an interesting area too. My bank now supports OFX exports because Claude vibecoded me an extractor for it in 10m.
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