231–240 of 241 posts
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…
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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…
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What's the repository link? I think it would be fascinating to have a corpus of "hacked" solutions like this. Can't tell you how many times a couch co-op game night got sabotaged by some piece of hardware failing to communicate with another.
The creatively-named https://github.com/Netruk44/wolverine-v3-pro-linux The "linux" support is pretty narrow (because I made this for myself). It's restricted to SteamOS. But I'm sure it could be ported easily, the repository contains documentation about the important parts from reverse engineering the firmware.
I've been going a step further and trying to get AI to decompile the firmware to a different controller to add native SInput support. Hasn't been going well.
Also, having tried my luck recently on an old scanner (Canon 9950f), a word of cautious:
These devices, specially older ones, may not have built-in safety limits in their firmware. In my case, it ended-up only being a few belts rubbing a bit, but it could have been more serious.
Don't let the LLM test stuff unattended, and be ready to pull the plug.
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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?
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…
ChatGPT 5.6 helped me to fully reverse engineer save file format for a relatively-known game, and write a working serializer/deserializer to edit in-game currency. Reverse engineering is something I've always wanted to learn but now I am starting to question if it is worth learning manual reverse engineering at this age when AI can do it for us.
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That would be a justifiable inference in that case. But you didn't get to this point on your own. You haven't learned the knowledge you would have learned getting to this point on your own. Claude didn't either; generally speaking, it doesn't learn. So it may be misleading to reason by analogy to the counterfactual where you had gotten to this point on your own. Claude may or may not be able to finish the job. You wo…
> Claude may or may not be able to finish the job. You won't know until you try. Yes, it’s weak evidence. Not proof. That is why I was quite explicit about what it has and hasn’t accomplished. In my time with it, Claude seems fine at finishing up projects. And I’ve done enough reverse engineering to have a reasonably firm understanding of the outstanding work. I predict that Claude will have no problem finishing this…
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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…
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…