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FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me

vladimir.varank.in

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Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me

#121

Post by garciasn »

slopinthebag wrote: post #111
petcat wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly suspect that somebody with domain knowledge around Wi-Fi drivers and OS kernel drivers could prompt the llm to spit out a lot more robust code than this guy was able to. That's not a knock on him, he was just trying to see what he could do. It's impressive what he actually accomplished given how little effort he put forth and how little knowledge he had about the subject.

Someone with domain knowledge could also just write the code instead of trying to get the stochastic prediction machine to generate it. I thought the whole point was to allow people without said expertise to generate it. After all, that seems to be the promise.

Clearly there wasn't much appetite for someone to do that.

Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me

#122

Post by [deleted] »

einpoklum wrote: post #79

AI didn't write a driver for him. He ported the Linux driver to FreeBSD with some assistance from an LLM. What's more interesting to me is the licensing situation when this is done. Does the use of an LLM complicate it? Or is it just a derivative work which can be published under the ISC license [1] as well? [1] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISC_license

[deleted]

Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me

#123

Post by etcetera1 »

slopinthebag wrote: post #78

> I didn’t write any piece of code there. There are several known issues, which I will task the agent to resolve, eventually. Meanwhile, I strongly advise against using it for anything beyond a studying exercise. Months of effort and three separate tries to get something kind of working but which is buggy and untested and not recommended for anyone to use, but unfortunately some folks will just read the headline and…

> instead of software we will just have the LLM output bespoke code for every single computer interaction.

That's sort of the idea behind GPU upscaling: You increase gaming performance and visual sharpness by rendering games at lower resolutions and use algorithms to upscale to the monitor's native resolution. Somehow cheaper than actually rendering at high resolution: Let the GPU hallucinate the difference at a lower cost.

Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me

#124

Post by luckydata »

slopinthebag wrote: post #111
petcat wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly suspect that somebody with domain knowledge around Wi-Fi drivers and OS kernel drivers could prompt the llm to spit out a lot more robust code than this guy was able to. That's not a knock on him, he was just trying to see what he could do. It's impressive what he actually accomplished given how little effort he put forth and how little knowledge he had about the subject.

Someone with domain knowledge could also just write the code instead of trying to get the stochastic prediction machine to generate it. I thought the whole point was to allow people without said expertise to generate it. After all, that seems to be the promise.

It will be like that at some point soon, just not now. Are you trying to make the point that because this technology is not yet perfect the fact that it can already do so much is unimpressive?

Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me

#126

Post by boplicity »

slopinthebag wrote: post #78

> I didn’t write any piece of code there. There are several known issues, which I will task the agent to resolve, eventually. Meanwhile, I strongly advise against using it for anything beyond a studying exercise. Months of effort and three separate tries to get something kind of working but which is buggy and untested and not recommended for anyone to use, but unfortunately some folks will just read the headline and…

Programmers have always been in search of an additional layer of abstraction. LLM coding feeds exactly into this impulse.

Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me

#127

Post by vvpan »

Gigachad wrote: post #101
dumbfounder wrote: post #65

The future is that people stop buying software and just build it themselves. The spam filter in thunderbird was broken for me, I built my own in hours and it works way better. Oh that CRM doesn’t have the features you want? Build one that does. It will become very easy to built and deploy solutions to many of your own bespoke problems.

This feels like when 3D printers hit the consumer market and everyone declared that buying things was over, everyone will just print them at home. There's tons of benefits to standardised software too. Companies rely on the fact they can hire people who already know photoshop/xero/webpack/etc rather than having to train them from scratch on in house tools.

What ever happened to that?

Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me

#128

Post by jomohke »

slopinthebag wrote: post #78

> I didn’t write any piece of code there. There are several known issues, which I will task the agent to resolve, eventually. Meanwhile, I strongly advise against using it for anything beyond a studying exercise. Months of effort and three separate tries to get something kind of working but which is buggy and untested and not recommended for anyone to use, but unfortunately some folks will just read the headline and…

You're validly critiquing where it is now.

The hype people are excited because they're guessing where it's going.

This is notable because it's a milestone that was not previously possible: a driver that works, from someone who spent ~zero effort learning the hardware or driver programming themselves.

It's not production ready, but neither is the first working version of anything. Do you see any reason that progress will stop abruptly here?

Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me

#129

Post by slopinthebag »

luckydata wrote: post #124
slopinthebag wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone with domain knowledge could also just write the code instead of trying to get the stochastic prediction machine to generate it. I thought the whole point was to allow people without said expertise to generate it. After all, that seems to be the promise.

It will be like that at some point soon, just not now. Are you trying to make the point that because this technology is not yet perfect the fact that it can already do so much is unimpressive?

Will it happen before or after we get fusion energy? I heard that was coming soon too.

Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me

#130

Post by whackernews »

tkiolp4 wrote: post #119
whackernews wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren’t we kinda realising that disposable/throwaway stuff is, like, bad? Why do we have to go down this wasteful and hyper-consumptive route AGAIN. Can we try and see the patterns here and move forwards?

Agree in general. I don’t see how making an agent create software is more wasteful than making dozens of engineers create the same thing. The latter seems more wasteful. We have compilers creating binaries every single day. We don’t say thats wasteful.

Well ticketmaster (for example) is used by millions of people. It seems to me like spinning up millions of LLMs to produce a million different apps is way more wasteful than having a dozen developers produce one efficient app that everyone can use?
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