141–150 of 397 posts
> Instead of continuing with the code, I spawned a fresh Pi session, and asked the agent to write a detailed specification of how the brcmfmac driver works Planning markdown files are critical for any large LLM task.
The line between AI-assisted clean-room reverse-engineeing and open-source-license-laundering is a thin one, and I think the one described in the article crosses over to laundering. In classic clean-room design, one team documents the interfaces - not the code.
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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?
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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 w…
Not a huge fan of @sama, but he is quoted as saying: this is the worst these models will every be! Puts all criticism in a new perspective.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 w…
Not a huge fan of @sama, but he is quoted as saying: this is the worst these models will every be! Puts all criticism in a new perspective.
This is really neat, I'm glad it worked. This is atrocious C code.
Got a sample you think is particularly bad?
pcie.c
/*
* BAR0 register access
*/
uint32_t
brcmf_reg_read(struct brcmf_softc *sc, uint32_t off)
{
return (bus_space_read_4(sc->reg_bst, sc->reg_bsh, off));
}
All throughout this codebase variables are declared and not initialized. Magic numbers are everywhere AND constants are defined everywhere. Constants are a mix of hex and int for what seem to be completely arbitrary reasons. Error handling is completely inconsistent, sometimes a function will return 5 places, sometimes a function will set an error code and jump to a label, and sometimes do both in the same function depending on which branch it hits.
All of this is the kind of code smell I would ask someone to justify and most likely rework.
Or I'm just a dumbass, I suppose I'll find out shortly.
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> Do you see any reason progress will stop abruptly here? Yeah, money and energy. And fundamental limitations of LLM's. I mean, I'm obviously guessing as well because I'm not an expert, but it's a view shared by some of the biggest experts in the field ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I just don't really buy the idea that we're going to have near-infinite linear or exponential progress until we reach AGI. Reality rarely works like that.
So far the people who bet against scaling laws have all lost money. That does not mean that their luck won’t change, but we should at least admit the winning streak.
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This is also where I think we end up. If the behavior of the system is specified well enough, then the code itself is cheap and throwaway. Why have a static system that is brittle to external changes when you can just reconstruct the system on the fly? Might be quite awhile before you can do this with large systems but we already see this on smaller contextual scales such as Claude Code itself
The specification for most systems _is the code_. English cannot describe business rules as succinctly as code, and most business rules end up being implied from a spec rather than directly specified, at least in my experience. The thought of converting an app back into a spec document or list of feature requests seems crazy to me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 w…
> Do you see any reason progress will stop abruptly here? Yeah, money and energy. And fundamental limitations of LLM's. I mean, I'm obviously guessing as well because I'm not an expert, but it's a view shared by some of the biggest experts in the field ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I just don't really buy the idea that we're going to have near-infinite linear or exponential progress until we reach AGI. Reality rarely works like that.
I think of it as just another leap in human-computer interface for programming, and a welcome one at that.