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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

#211

Post by ValdikSS »

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…

Once and for all solution is to run a dedicated print server for outdated printers, which implement AirPrint/Mopria and convert the incoming data into printer's native language. This way it withstands all the PC/smartphone OS updates and don't require compatibility fixes.

I've spent 3 years on improving all the underlying stack and drivers to make it work reliably and bug-free, but the current RAM prices resulting in 2x price increase for the cheapest SBC, which makes the project economically infeasible to continue.

People on Reddit told me that in US there just "is'nt any non-wifi models". I'm not sure how true this is. If you have anything to comment, please do: https://old.reddit.com/r/printers/comments/1v09kb8/usbtowifi...

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

#212

Post by ValdikSS »

tonyarkles wrote: post #102
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.

Printers of the 80s and early 90s were more performant PCs than the typical PC which printed on it. Because you can't process full color 600 DPI page on the 90s PC with 8-16 MB of RAM, but the printer needs to do that.

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

#213

Post by ValdikSS »

ryandrake wrote: post #95
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.

USB-only is a cost cutting measure. Canon CAPT printers have so low amount of RAM that the page is streamed over USB. There's not enough RAM (1-2 MB) to accept the full compressed page at once for complex pages.

Network/Wi-Fi printers have at least 16 MB of RAM, usually 64+ MB nowadays.

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

#214

Post by sushibowl »

I found this bit in the chat log, where the user got an "adverserial LLM" to look at the driver, decidedly humorous:

> This is exactly the kind of feedback worth taking seriously, and it's checkable. [...] But I don't take an LLM's word for it, especially citing specific commits.

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

#215

Post by dolmen »

swerner wrote: post #29

I tried to get Copilot to port the Linux drivers for my HP CP1025 to macOS, but it failed. Even modern Linux can’t print to it any more, I had to put an older distribution on a RasPi and now I’m printing at reduced quality. It was crazy how the LLM held on to outdated information. It suggested so many things that might have worked on an older macOS but very obviously wouldn’t nowadays. It also tried to port from Linu…

Have you tried https://printervention.app/ ?

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

#217

Post by jsjdjdndn »

josephg wrote: post #132
squibonpig wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Last week I had Claude add support for aac audio to davinci resolve on Linux, just by patching the binary. It did almost exclusively with gdb and objdump, patching about 5 functions over an hour or two. I only got it to the proof of concept stage. The patch adds aac but breaks flac support in the process. And it only works for aac in mp4 container files. But I’m sure with a bit of time we could make a patch which wor…

"I only got it to proof of concept.... I'm sure with time"

this is AI psychosis. LLMs by design product plausible output -- it ALWAYS seems like you just need a little more time. That's why the junkies are up all night playing with these things, and yet the next industrial revolution has NOT arrived. if this is the singularity where is my clothes folding bot, my cold fusion, and my cure for all cancers?

Please do not post about things the bot almost did. Nobody cares. When you COMPLETE something with the bot you can post. The rest is delusions.

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

#218

Post by losvedir »

adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #181
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.

It runs natively... did you even read the post at all?

Yes, they probably read it 15 hours ago when that comment was posted, before OP changed it, in response to these comments.

Though I'm not convinced it actually is. OP said the same the first time around, and I don't think actually understands what they (or rather Claude) is doing. The HN comment here claiming they updated it, clearly written by Claude, doesn't inspire much confidence.

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

#219

Post by themaninthedark »

ripdog wrote: post #189
themaninthedark wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well good news... er... the opposite actually.... >Additional Old Linux Drivers Face Removal Due To Noise From AI/LLM Coding Agents https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Retiring-Moxa-Driver

They're being removed due to a lack of maintenance. If anyone cared about that hardware and fixed the bugs, surely they would be kept.

Don't know much about driver maintenance but if it is working why remove it?

What I read in the link was that it was removed because LLM was making suggestions to improve the code/bring it up to modern standards but since it was rarely used no-one wanted to review it not that it was buggy.

>In recent months we have seen a lot of old kernel code removed stemming from that AI/LLM noise.

This is the opposite of what my parent was hoping to see, extended support for old/obscure hardware because we have LLM.

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

#220

Post by ripdog »

themaninthedark wrote: post #219
ripdog wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're being removed due to a lack of maintenance. If anyone cared about that hardware and fixed the bugs, surely they would be kept.

Don't know much about driver maintenance but if it is working why remove it? What I read in the link was that it was removed because LLM was making suggestions to improve the code/bring it up to modern standards but since it was rarely used no-one wanted to review it not that it was buggy. >In recent months we have seen a lot of old kernel code removed stemming from that AI/LLM noise. This is the opposite of what my…

Because more-or-less all code in the kernel increases the attack surface and makes general security improvements more difficult. Removing code of all types makes maintainability easier, so old, unmaintained code is an easy sell for removal.

>This is the opposite of what my parent was hoping to see, extended support for old/obscure hardware because we have LLM.

That would only happen if the linux project was happy to accept LLM-generated fixes without human review - which they aren't. If human review is necessary, then unleashing LLMs to produce fixes and improvements to thousands of linux drivers is a detriment, not a benefit. The amount of code would just be too much, and reviewers would be swamped.

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