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Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month

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Re: Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month

#241

Post by SXX »

mitxela wrote: post #208
SXX wrote: post #121

Dear fellow humans from "Hacker News". Hacking a driver that in itself documentation to black box Apple hardware is not any different from hacking $10 4G LTE modem. Fact that a person who was not previously driver developer can achieve this in a few weeks is pure wonder. No matter what tools are used. Leave legal questions to Linux Foundation laywers or whoever is responsible to accept or not accept the patches. If A…

AI reverse engineering can be an amazing jumping off point. It's not production ready and someone still has to go over it with a fine tooth comb before it can be called production ready. It is okay to publish things that aren't production ready and they are much better than nothing at all, and we shouldn't harshly criticise the best thing in a category unless we make something better. The difference between AI RE and…

  > It is okay to publish things that aren't production ready and they are much better than nothing at all, and we shouldn't harshly criticise the best thing in a category unless we make something better.
So much of this.

Production ready or not we should praise all people who made decision to try, put an effort and find a way to made any device more usable with Linux.

This isnt just another vibe coded rewrite of XYZ library in rust or vibe coded javascript framework. We dont have a queue of people to work on open source GPU drivers or RE in general. Even if its mostly prompting and testing.

I'm just a game developer and linux nerd and for me fact that something like this is now possible is ultimately best news ever. It means I now motivated to try it myself and work on devices I want. Most inspiring and amazing thing ever!

Re: Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month

#243

Post by voakbasda »

otterley wrote: post #153
voakbasda wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that money buys lawyers, and you need those to get justice. If the other side spends more, you are likely to lose.

Which of these parties doesn’t have lawyers? (I’m talking about bigcorps stealing from bigcorps here.) In a case where both parties have lawyers, having more and more expensive lawyers is not necessarily predictive of a case’s outcome. There are diminishing returns. What having more resources tends to do is force the poorer party to settle quicker. But that’s not necessarily a loss. Judges still have to approve settl…

Settlements are not justice.

Re: Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month

#244

Post by preisschild »

xyzsparetimexyz wrote: post #224
mitxela wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An AI doesn't magically add copyright but it also doesn't magically remove copyright except via diffusion of training data. It does not remove copyright from its input. Malus was a parody. If you machine-translate something from one language to another, copyright is retained no matter how sophisticated the translator is.

How is that any different from a clean room?

With clean room you just have access to the api specifications, not the internals.

Re: Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month

#246

Post by simoncion »

1dom wrote: post #166
cogman10 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because it doesn't matter how copyrighted material ends up in a project. If an LLM reproduces copyrighted material (which is very hard to verify) then the lawsuit from the copyright owner can still sink even robustly funded projects. The fact is, open source has much more liability than closed source software does. If copyrighted material ends up inside a private code base it'll be nearly impossible for the owne…

> If an LLM reproduces copyrighted material (which is very hard to verify) then the lawsuit from the copyright owner can still sink even robustly funded projects. Do you have many examples of this actually happening that you could share? I really don't see how this issue is going to be feasible for courtrooms to deal with in a world where big tech are bragging about large percentages of all their code being produced…

> Do you have many examples of this actually happening that you could share?

If by "this" you mean "an LLM [reproducing] copyrighted material", I have one here [0], with the challenge posed and plagiarized response at [1], found via [2].

One wonders how often the "Don't plagiarize, make no mistakes about this!" instruction fails and the LLMs include nontrivial chunks of other people's work into what they emit.

[0] https://infosec.exchange/@zzt@mas.to/117134157775929932>

[1] https://mas.to/@zzt/117122289150514171>

[2] https://infosec.exchange/@david_chisnall/117134446424182178>

Re: Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month

#247

Post by otterley »

ndriscoll wrote: post #226
otterley wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, what do you do for a living?

I write software for a living and think we should abolish software copyright, and furthermore, source availability should be a basic consumer protection requirement. Basically the free software definition should be law.

And you don’t think abolishing copyright would impact your career or your ability to feed your family?

Re: Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month

#248

Post by otterley »

mitxela wrote: post #217
otterley wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No judge I’ve ever met gave a damn how much a party spent on legal resources. With rare exceptions, they care a great deal about achieving justice, and often bend over backwards to help indigent parties avoid prejudicing themselves. Keep in mind that there are no indigent parties in this debate; both major IP rights holders and the frontier AI companies are well capitalized. (I worked in a federal district court for…

The judge doesn't directly care, but paying more for lawyers gets you better legal arguments that are more likely to win.

I don’t know. I’ve seen high quality work product from solo practitioners. Also, even the most expensive lawyer cannot make you win when the law isn’t on your side.

Re: Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month

#249

Post by simoncion »

preisschild wrote: post #244
xyzsparetimexyz wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that any different from a clean room?

With clean room you just have access to the api specifications, not the internals.

Yep. An entity in the "dirty room" reads the thing to be reimplemented and produces a document that thoroughly describes its behavior. That document is passed to the entity in the "clean room" whose only knowledge of that system is through that document. Reverse engineering is legal, plagiarism is not.

Despite the fact that the raw output of the system is incomprehensible to humans, scanning a photograph of Mickey Mouse and running it through a lossy compression system like JPEG doesn't suddenly make it not a picture of Mickey Mouse. Similarly, running the code for a system through the lossy compression system that is LLM "training" doesn't suddenly obliterate that data and make that LLM a "clean room". If one has any doubt of that, remember that they are known to reproduce their inputs, even after all these years of work to make them not do that. [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49727685>

Re: Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month

#250

Post by ndriscoll »

otterley wrote: post #247
ndriscoll wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I write software for a living and think we should abolish software copyright, and furthermore, source availability should be a basic consumer protection requirement. Basically the free software definition should be law.

And you don’t think abolishing copyright would impact your career or your ability to feed your family?

Of course I think it would change things. You think I haven't considered that? But I also think society would be a better place if we worked to produce new software that people desire instead of gatekeeping what already exists, and if the law banned this one-sided gatekeeping. The goal of all people should be to build lasting wealth for the next generation to inherit, not to hoard what is naturally infinite.

Plumbers don't extract subscription fees from your use of the toilet. Electricians don't get a fee for your use of a light fixture. They don't get a monopoly on fixing your things because you bought it through them. The whole idea of IP is absurd. It should be the opposite: anyone should always be free to go to someone else if they become unhappy with us, taking the work they bought from us with them. The law should bar any attempts to stop them/build roadblocks.

Happily, I see LLMs have great potential to make everything effectively FOSS now anyway, so all we really need is regulations against anti-competitive behavior like requiring signed firmware.

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