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

vladimir.varank.in

151–160 of 397 posts

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

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You mean Moore's law? Which is now dead?

it's not dead. it's enough to look at GB200/GB300 vs Vera Rubin specs.

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

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's like Bill Gates saying XP is the worst Windows will ever be

Not Windows: Operating systems. We did get more capable operating systems. The point of the quote is "this is the worst the SOTA will ever be".

If Windows XP were fully supported today I still wouldn't use it, personally, despite having respect for it in its era. The core technology of how, eg OS sandboxing, security, memory, driver etc stacks are implemented have vastly improved in newer OSes.

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

#154
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like Bill Gates saying XP is the worst Windows will ever be

Not Windows: Operating systems. We did get more capable operating systems. The point of the quote is "this is the worst the SOTA will ever be". If Windows XP were fully supported today I still wouldn't use it, personally, despite having respect for it in its era. The core technology of how, eg OS sandboxing, security, memory, driver etc stacks are implemented have vastly improved in newer OSes.

You're just moving the goal posts unfortunately. The point is that positive progress is never actually guaranteed.

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

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You mean Moore's law? Which is now dead?

No I don't mean that. I mean the LLM parameter scaling laws. More importantly, it doesn't matter if I mean that or Moore's law or anything else, because I'm not making a forward looking prediction.

Read what I wrote.

I'm saying is if you bet AGAINST [LLM] scaling laws--meaning you bet that the output would peter out naturally somehow--you've lost 100% so far.

100%

Tomorrow could be your lucky day.

Or not.

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

#156
post #69

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.

Unlikely. The future will be some people will do this, but honestly I think it will largely be people who were already tinkering with building things, whether full on software development or not My mom and dad, my brother who drives a dump truck in a limestone quarry, my sister-in-law, none of them work in tech or consider themselves technical in any way. They are never, ever going to write their own software and wil…

> Unlikely. The future will be some people will do this, but honestly I think it will largely be people who were already tinkering with building things, whether full on software development or not

Billions of dollars of stock market value disappeared because of the concern AI can create core SaaS functionality for corporations instead of them spending millions of dollars in licensing fees to SAP, Microsoft, etc.

This not about tinkering.

SaaS As We Know It Is Dead: How To Survive The SaaS-pocalypse! - https://www.forrester.com/blogs/saas-as-we-know-it-is-dead-h...

Why SaaS Stocks Have Dropped—and What It Signals for Software’s Next Chapter - https://www.bain.com/insights/why-saas-stocks-have-dropped-a...

Jim Cramer says AI fears have made the stock market fragile - https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/23/jim-cramer-says-ai-fears-hav...

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

#157

> 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 w…

People abstract upon new leaps in invention way too early though. Believing these leaps are becoming the standard. Look at cars, airplanes, phones, etc.

After we landed on the moon people were hyped for casual space living within 50 years.

The reality is it often takes much much longer as invention isn't isolated to itself. It requires integration into the real world and all the complexities it meets.

Even moreso, we may have ai models that can do anything perfectly but it will require so much compute that only the richest of the rich are able to use it and it effectively won't exist for most people.

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

#158

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.

Definitely feels like that is the bigger take away. Not that it "solves all problems" or "isn't good enough to be merged". But that we are arriving to a place where solutions can be good enough to solve the problem you have. Reminds me of early Github when custom and unique software became much more accessible to everyone. Way less digging or going without.

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

#159
post #17
post #2

I feel like ubiquitous hardware support in every OS is going to be a solved problem soon. We're very close to just being able to set an AI coding agent to brute-force a driver for anything. The hardware designer would have to go well out of their way to obfuscate the interface if they really wanted to forbid it, instead of just not bothering to support an OS like BSD or Linux.

The primary reason why it worked is because Claude could rip off the Linux driver. Without any prior work to rely on, how will the AI figure out proprietary hardware?

It could be given reference material like documentation/datasheets and/or just be prompted as to how it should work.

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

#160
post #39
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're very close to just being about to set an AI coding agent to brute-force a driver for anything. That sounds quite naive and it isn't that simple. Even the author expressed caution and isn't sure about how robust the driver is since he hasn't seen the code himself nor does he know if it works reliably. Even entertaining the idea, someone would have already have replaced those closed source Nvidia drivers that h…

I'm not so sure that Nouveau is slower than the proprietary Nvidia driver. I didn't run benchmarks on my personal use case but my subjective experience is that Nouveau might be faster. It's a Debian 11, X11, NVIDIA driver vs Debian 13, X11, Nouveau on the same laptop with a Quadro K1100mq. The desktop of the newer system seems to be faster. Of course it could be the sum of the individual improvements of kernel, GNOME…

In my experience, the proprietary driver has always blown away nouveau at 3D rendering performance and featureset.
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