Amazed Claude didn't refuse this for "cybersecurity". Then I noticed this was this Opus 4.8? Did the author start with 4.8 or was this a fallback from the 5 series?
Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows
171–180 of 241 posts
Re: Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows
#172Unfortunately 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.
I do not want to call anyone names but the level of pedantry and gatekeeping in this comment and the replies is outstanding. I can hear Chuck McGill screaming "You're not a real driver!".
Since when is pointing out technical errors a sin on HN?
Re: Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows
#173If 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.
They needed more memory and a faster processor as well which bumped the price up. In the mid eighties I worked for a company distributing QMS printers in the UK. A basic laser was selling for £2,000 and the PostScript equivalent was £4,000.
Re: Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows
#174I 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...
Well good news... er... the opposite actually....
>Additional Old Linux Drivers Face Removal Due To Noise From AI/LLM Coding Agents
Re: Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows
#175Earlier 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.
That's actually pretty simple.
Reverse engineering isn't so much hard as it is exhausting.
LLMs simply don't care about exhaustion.
Re: Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows
#176Majority of people are still completely blind to what's going on
Re: Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think so, no. It does not appear to be functioning as an OSX device driver. It's just hosting a network print server in docker.
Tbh I actually like this even more than writing a driver … Makes it so if there’s an issue I don’t get a kernel panic Maybe it could write something CUPS compliant though ?
To be fair print drivers have mostly been user mode. On Windows since win2000, and on macOS - since macOS 10 Cheetah.
Re: Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows
#178I 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…
Doing something similar with audio equipment. I have an older USB midi controller that doesn’t seem to have official support. Claude helped bring it back to life!
Re: Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows
#179This adds to my feeling that LLMs are incredible at storing compressed information and accessing it in a versatile way.
Apart from occasional hallucinations we celebrate their ability to dissect information and to find obscure links between facts. Hence their stunning effectiveness in finding security holes or new approaches to math problems.
Interestingly the generative part - producing the answers - is what we are criticizing a lot: we think the code is verbose, texts have a weird repetitiveness to them etc.
Re: Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows
#180How much longer until such use is deemed unwanted by our AI overlords?