Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 241 posts

Re: Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows

#91

Post by TacticalCoder »

If this could all finally solve, once and for all, printing and scanning issues it'd be lovely (btw there are entire businesses who's only raison d'etre is "installing printers at clients and fixing them when they stop printing").

But of course it's hard not to both marvel and lament (at) the fact that in the mid-1990s (so yup 30 years ago) I could:

    nc 192.168.1.150 9100
And the native PostScript printer (also an HP laser btw: a LaserJet) would just start printing.

I know, I know, about garbled print jobs, pages of codes being printed, etc.

But still: it's hard to not at least wonder if some things haven't been lost. For a start printers with their own IP addresses were sweet (instead of a USB cable and, now, people setting up, say, a Pi just to expose a LAN IP for/to their printer). Then of course another talk could be had about the "quality" of modern day HP laser printers compared to what you'd get int the nineties.

Re: Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows

#92

Post by Avamander »

jwr wrote: post #5

Freedom -- that's what it is. There are now more and more cases where we don't have to ask for permission. Unfortunately, as I look around, I see most of the hardware vendors around me as gatekeepers. They prevent me from writing custom code in various ways. Apple restricts access to NFC or their UWB positioning, Supernote Manta does not let me access a bluetooth microphone, the list goes on. Denon at least has an AP…

Denon is definitely one of the better examples, there's so much expensive home hardware out there that gives you basically nothing. Starting from ACs ending with TVs.

I unfortunately can't see it becoming in any way legally mandated either, just have to hope for a good vendor.

Re: Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows

#93

Post by fl0id »

ryandrake wrote: post #86
sinpif wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had a similar thought today - maybe we could finally get Linux drivers for more HW...

I don't understand the technology enough to see why, but LLMs seem unusually skilled at reverse engineering proprietary software.

To some degree. But esp for drivers, you still need to know when they go wrong, and steer them right, or your code will either just not work or be an unmaintainable, not-upstreamable mess.

Re: Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows

#94

Post by nevi-me »

sinpif wrote: post #79
ryandrake wrote: post #76

I was able to (through heavy Claude use) successfully reverse engineer a golf cart motor controller that is programmable over USB, but only was supported by a Windows application. Claude walked me through using ILSpy on the .NET assembly, using Wireshark to capture the protocol over USB, and to completely map out all of the functionality in the Windows application. The output was a portable C library and CLI program…

Had a similar thought today - maybe we could finally get Linux drivers for more HW...

And with the Linux Kernel being friendly to both LLM usage and a modern language, for some of us who don't know C, a huge barrier is lifted from being able to write device drivers.

Not a successful anecdote, but I have a Windows Hello compatible Kengsington fingerprint reader, and for some time I wanted to write drivers for Linux. Even without using C, it would have been a huge undertaking only to fail in the end; because Claude did much of the research and concluded that the device wouldn't work on Linux (can't remember why but it made sense). Then it suggested what could work.

Re: Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows

#95

Post by ryandrake »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #91

If this could all finally solve, once and for all, printing and scanning issues it'd be lovely (btw there are entire businesses who's only raison d'etre is "installing printers at clients and fixing them when they stop printing"). But of course it's hard not to both marvel and lament (at) the fact that in the mid-1990s (so yup 30 years ago) I could: nc 192.168.1.150 9100 And the native PostScript printer (also an HP…

I've always thought USB-only made no sense on a printer. If there was one device in your house that multiple computers (and phones, don't forget) would want to use simultaneously, it's a printer. I'll only buy a printer that has its own built in network connectivity. Infuriating to have to stick a Pi onto your printer just so it can do what should be basic, table-stakes functionality.

Re: Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows

#96

Post by TacticalCoder »

saejox wrote: post #66

my Brother dcp-t230 also doesn't have macos drivers and it's a usb only printer. if i ever get some tokens to burn, i would try the same.

> my Brother dcp-t230 also doesn't have macos drivers and it's a usb only printer.

Same thing here brother: DCP-L2510D (laser printer + scanner).

Wife is on MacOS and cannot print/scan from there, so I'm the scanman.

Re: Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows

#97

Post by nevi-me »

yakz wrote: post #89
embedding-shape wrote: post #77

Somehow, I'm not exactly sure why, I got creeped out by Claude's finishing line: > Thanks for being such a game debugging partner through all the test pages. Enjoy printing, you and the family. Maybe it's because my own LLM usage is very "Question > Answer" or "Do this > Agent does that" and I never say "Wow, that's crazy it works, thank you!" at the end or such, so I don't see that sort of things, but if I saw that…

The way that you talk to it influences the way that it responds to you and it is not subtle. I don't want to hitch on to the "it's just really complicated autocomplete" bandwagon, but this is one of the ways that it does feel like that.

With voice dictation (wispr flow), I find it easier for me to talk naturally as if I'm talking to a friend. I'll sometimes give lengthy notes on context for a project, like why I want to do it, e.g. something for my wife to use.

So I find it common (and fine, I suppose) for Claude to reply using that context. "Let me know what your wife thinks of the app" etc.

Re: Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows

#98

Post by fl0id »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #60
3129476 wrote: post #54

Claude did not write any macOS driver. It uses the HP Linux driver inside docker. Here is prior art from 2017. In contrast to the AI gibberish, one can understand it: https://www.alecburton.co.uk/2017/printing-from-a-docker-con... There are many such tutorials and Claude just plagiarized as usual.

On the bright side, I hope LLMs erode IP copyright so much we can have a cultural renaissance. China is always put as a horrible piracy heaven, but it is precisely their disregard of IP that got them where they are today. The exhorbitant copyright length of today is a net loss to society.

how would that be a cultural renaissance? quantity without at least discoverability just makes it worth-(less). And it's not like chinese companies are by default anti ip, they do like their work protected like most companies...

Re: Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows

#99

Post by mmh0000 »

ryandrake wrote: post #86
sinpif wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had a similar thought today - maybe we could finally get Linux drivers for more HW...

I don't understand the technology enough to see why, but LLMs seem unusually skilled at reverse engineering proprietary software.

LLMs are good at producing what they/the public know.

In this case:

  LLMs know the USB Spec very well.

  LLMs know how to read raw packet dumps.

  LLMs know how to convert a packet dump to USB spec

  LLMs know how to write code to generate USB packets from the spec.
LLMs are also VERY good at transliteration, i.e., converting known-good Python to Rust.

Basically, If you have a well-documented problem, the LLM is a shortcut to learning it yourself. LLMs fail when you have a novel or poorly documented problem. They also fail when you provide the LLM with terrible context or too much context.

Re: Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows

#100

Post by yakz »

nevi-me wrote: post #94
sinpif wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had a similar thought today - maybe we could finally get Linux drivers for more HW...

And with the Linux Kernel being friendly to both LLM usage and a modern language, for some of us who don't know C, a huge barrier is lifted from being able to write device drivers. Not a successful anecdote, but I have a Windows Hello compatible Kengsington fingerprint reader, and for some time I wanted to write drivers for Linux. Even without using C, it would have been a huge undertaking only to fail in the end; be…

Back in the day when dial-up modems were a "significant" market, the concept of "WinModems" came around. Minimum hardware, maximum software. If the sensor is good enough to actually work though, it probably won't be long before an agent can implement the driver, if it can't already.
Post reply on HN