Notably done on Opus 4.8.
Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows
111–120 of 241 posts
Re: Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows
#112Earlier 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.
I don't think they're any more skilled at it than someone who knows how to reverse engineer stuff... But it is definitely a place where AI is amazing because reverse engineering is usually extremely time consuming and tedious. AI doesn't care about that.
It also has the benefit that it doesn't usually matter too much if it gets minor details wrong. It's definitely one of the areas - like hacking - where it's a) tedious and b) insensitive to mistakes where AI absolutely shines.
Re: Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows
#113Earlier 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 seem to be trained to work very well against a goal, especially one it can verify against. I guess because it can easily know if it passed or failed, va other tasks where good/bad output is subjective
Re: Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows
#114If 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.
A usb controller is way less expensive than something that can run a TCP stack and the associated software.
Re: Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows
#115Unfortunately 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.
It's strange, because I have zero doubt in my mind that Claude could 100% genuinely reimplement the driver and port it to actually natively run on macOS, were it prompted that way.
Re: Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows
#116I 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 experience getting a niche app running under wine. The bot had to bring in a different open source renderer, patch dlls, adapt a mapping tool from a different chip architecture to partly map and modify the binary, crazy stuff. Alternatives exist but are expensive, this got it working in an hour when doing it myself would probably be 2 weeks.
Re: Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows
#117Unfortunately 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.
For the amount of electricity wasted by the LLM in the data center it would have been more efficient to buy a new printer that works out of the box.
Re: Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows
#118Claude is great at that. I have a usb keypad with no linux version of the app to program it. Since its just a vial/qmk based, claude built me a linux version in qt/python.
Claude can do Linux drivers too. A friend bought a second-hand Intel Mac, installed Linux, and found that some of the hardware didn’t work. It wasn’t very hard to get Claude to write those drivers.
Re: Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows
#119If 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…
That mid-1990s postscript, networked printer when new cost as much as a small car! The HP Laser 1000 was like $250 tops new.
Re: Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows
#120Unfortunately 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.
For the amount of electricity wasted by the LLM in the data center it would have been more efficient to buy a new printer that works out of the box.
Redditors actually believe this