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

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

#101

Post by danielheath »

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.

IMO it's because they don't get burnt out by a lack of results.

After 5-6 consecutive approaches fail, I need a reason to think the next one might work out to stay motivated.

Claude will keep burning credits trying new approaches until something sticks. That's a huge advantage in a field where most of the things you try don't go anywhere.

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

#102

Post by tonyarkles »

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 was digging into the history of PostScript engines inside laser printers and Adobe made tons of royalty money off of that for quite a long time.

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

#106

Post by xyst »

Tiberium wrote: post #73

Unfortunately this is a very misleading article and headline. I don't doubt the end result - it's useful that it works, but it's not "natively" and, unlike what some people assume, Claude didn't write a driver. It basically used HP's existing proprietary driver in a Linux VM on macOS, and just bridged that to macOS. It also requires a root launcher that runs code from the user ~/.hp1008 dir, so security is weakened.

yup, clocked this in just the first few lines of the transcript.

I am sooo tired of this AI generated slop.

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

#107

Post by mjmvisser »

Had a similar experience. I bought an ePaper display and a Pi 4 to run a calendar widget on. I got stuck because the open source project I was building off expected the previous generation of ePaper display, and the firmware had changed completely. I found the new firmware examples, but got stuck trying to get it to work. With Claude assisting we banged it out in two sessions of about 3 hours each.

codeberg.org/mjmvisser/infoframe if anyone’s interested.

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

#108

Post by oneplane »

Wouldn't it have made more sense for Claude to suggest using the existing Linux-Airprint-VM project/product that already does this exact thing?

There's even a zero-install method via https://printervention.app where it runs that Linux VM isolated inside a WebUSB-capable browser. That website itself was posted right here on HN not too long ago.

I get that the LLM code assistant software prefers writing stuff, but constantly re-writing the same solution seems a bit inefficient.

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

#109

Post by xyst »

sgjohnson wrote: post #105

This is awesome. I take it your plans for the next weekend include actually cleanrooming the driver so you can skip running it in a linux container? =P

bro is going to need opus and a couple thousand dollars in tokens for something that _may_ work.

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

#110

Post by Lucasoato »

oneplane wrote: post #108

Wouldn't it have made more sense for Claude to suggest using the existing Linux-Airprint-VM project/product that already does this exact thing? There's even a zero-install method via https://printervention.app where it runs that Linux VM isolated inside a WebUSB-capable browser. That website itself was posted right here on HN not too long ago. I get that the LLM code assistant software prefers writing stuff, but cons…

But it wouldn’t have used so many tokens ;)
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