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Everything I own, owned

schlarp.com

111–120 of 367 posts

Re: Everything I own, owned

#111
post #35

> My ASUS ROG Swift PG42UQ monitor was actually where I started, because I got annoyed at the pop-up overlay that comes up every once in a while that tells me to run “pixel cleaning”. I have never intentionally run pixel cleaning on this monitor and I never will, I don’t care, and I would like for that overlay to go away forever. Maybe there’s a debug menu or something that can turn it off, or worst case we patch a b…

Perhaps you didn't read the text you just copied and pasted, but here it is for you: "I have never intentionally run pixel cleaning on this monitor and I never will, I don’t care, and I would like for that overlay to go away forever." No need for ackshually, the guy is clear with what he desires. That is, by the way, the point of TFA. I want my devices to do what I want , not what a product manager wants or what a du…

The user should be the final authority over what his computer does. Not the computer manufacturer. Not the OS developer. Not the 3P app developer. Not some product manager at a software company. The end user.

Even time computer says no, or does something without your permission, or does something counter to your wishes, or alerts you to do something, or urges you to do something, or makes you opt-out, is a failure.

Re: Everything I own, owned

#112
post #105
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of pre-2023 resources out there, especially conference talks. But, Claude has no issues discussing glitching if you have CVP.

I guess this is a fine reply but just seeing your earlier comment, mentioning there are tons of glitching tools out there, I would've hoped to hear about some specifics here. Just my 2c

Is this the zoomer syndrome I am hearing about lately? My friend says zoomer coworkers increasingly start asking easily searchable questions, and also (this part is not your comment, just my 2c) in a demanding tone like you owe them money. Allegedly they spend all their time in LLMs and lose the ability to gather information

I wonder what humanity will look like in 20 years if this doesn't stop.

Re: Everything I own, owned

#113
post #71

>I had Claude write a tool to patch out the table entry for camera activity, fix up the integrity hash, and flash it to the camera. A quick test showed that the green LED that normally illuminates while recording no longer turned on. Horrifying! Oof. Apple claims this is not possible for macbook cameras because the LED can't be controlled from software. Wish more manufacturers would do the same.

> the LED can't be controlled from software If you look at tear downs apparently it is connected to the webcam so it is energized when the webcam receives power making it nearly impossible to defeat. You can say a lot about Apple but the engineering is clever at the hardware level.

It's not even that clever, really. The camera power rail must be physically close to the camera, so it's trivial to hang an LED off it. A device manufacturer has to go out of their way to make it so the LED and camera function are independent, and I'm sure many do, for the worst reasons you can possibly think of.

Re: Everything I own, owned

#114
post #76
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it’s impressive work from the LLM and a TS implementation is novel, there’s at least a couple of pre-existing Python REs eg. https://github.com/jya-dev/supernote-tool :)

It seems like most of these "an LLM solved this in only X hours! " could have been "I found an open source solution that did what I needed with X minutes of web search." Which doesn't mean that the LLM definitely couldn't have accomplished it without the prior art (in either the training set or explicitly in a a web search). But it does seem to be a trend.

> Which doesn't mean that the LLM definitely couldn't have accomplished it without the prior art

It is definitely the case that people know less and less how to do research themselves though...

Re: Everything I own, owned

#115
post #7
post #5

I just reverse engineered the Supernote note file format with an agent a few weeks ago. For years the community had been asking for a document on the format. And in a few hours the agent, with 20 something file format example fixtures and 30 something prompts, was able to reverse out the format. It would have been completely not worth the effort to do this by hand for a niche device. Now, in a few hours of effort the…

I personally own a Supernote, but I'm not a heavy user of it. For the sake of my own curiosity, what benefits will you get out of having reverse engineered the Supernote note file format? It would be super rad to be able to move my notes between other devices, which is one big plus that comes to my mind.

I built a management website and plugin for Obsidian.

https://supernote.ifup.org/

https://youtu.be/ihRh_F43-iQ

Re: Everything I own, owned

#116
post #15
post #5

I just reverse engineered the Supernote note file format with an agent a few weeks ago. For years the community had been asking for a document on the format. And in a few hours the agent, with 20 something file format example fixtures and 30 something prompts, was able to reverse out the format. It would have been completely not worth the effort to do this by hand for a niche device. Now, in a few hours of effort the…

While it’s impressive work from the LLM and a TS implementation is novel, there’s at least a couple of pre-existing Python REs eg. https://github.com/jya-dev/supernote-tool :)

I know of the project but it doesn’t actually extract the stroke information. It converts the raster into vector.

My reverse engineering extracts each pen stroke directly into a svg vector.

Re: Everything I own, owned

#117
post #77

I can see the benefit of from-scratch personalized software, but in the spirit of open-source, how about all the world contributes to useful software for everyone else? Better than each person doing “4.2 hours of Claude churn, 32 prompts” for each device. And of course LLMs can help personalize existing things for your use case.

I'm starting to believe that bespoke, personalized software is the only way to combat feature bloat. Every software (proprietary or open source) I download and use has features I don't want getting in the way and bugs that the developers/maintainers are not prioritizing.

I ended up vibe coding my own Android TV media player because every single other one out there has too much feature bloat and show stopping bugs. My version has exactly the features I want and (very importantly) no more.

Re: Everything I own, owned

#118
post #76
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it’s impressive work from the LLM and a TS implementation is novel, there’s at least a couple of pre-existing Python REs eg. https://github.com/jya-dev/supernote-tool :)

It seems like most of these "an LLM solved this in only X hours! " could have been "I found an open source solution that did what I needed with X minutes of web search." Which doesn't mean that the LLM definitely couldn't have accomplished it without the prior art (in either the training set or explicitly in a a web search). But it does seem to be a trend.

If give an AI the full set of files it needs to RE a file format, and it's running xxd in tool calls in order to document the file format, I don't think it's cheating by copying it off the Internet.

Re: Everything I own, owned

#119
I posted [1] a few days ago my experience using LLM to reverse engineering an entirely undocumented device that was only supported by a (crappy) Windows application, and it was honestly remarkable how good Claude was at decompiling the Windows EXE and reverse engineering the protocol. Very exciting. "The developer refuses to write software for this device" is no longer as scary as it used to be.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49353141

Re: Everything I own, owned

#120
This looks like an ad for a bunch of products as "hackable". The Authors only other blog post is also about using Claude for similar ideas, without actually showing the end product from a kick skim.

Anthropic has been run "Use Claude for hardware" ads nonstop. Seems very suss.

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