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

vladimir.varank.in

161–170 of 397 posts

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

#161
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author specifically said that they did not read the code or even test the output very thoroughly. It was intentionally just a naive toy they wanted to play around with. Nothing to do with AI, or even the capabilities of AI. The person intentionally didn't put in much effort.

> Nothing to do with AI, or even the capabilities of AI. The person intentionally didn't put in much effort. The part to do with AI is that it was not able to drive a comprehensive and bug free driver with minimal effort from the human. That is the point.

I’m not able to provide a comprehensive bug free driver.

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

#162

Had an experience like this recently. QEMU stopped compiling for old versions of MacOS (pre-13) w/M1 arch, due to it requiring newer SDKs which don't support older MacOS versions. I put Sonnet 4.6 on the case, and it wrote a small patch, compiled and installed it in a matter of minutes, without giving it any instructions other than to look at errors and apply a fix. I definitely would have just given up without the A…

Mind sharing that patch?

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

#163
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author specifically said that they did not read the code or even test the output very thoroughly. It was intentionally just a naive toy they wanted to play around with. Nothing to do with AI, or even the capabilities of AI. The person intentionally didn't put in much effort.

Seems like they did put in quite a bit of effort, but were not knowledgeable enough on wifi drivers to go further. So hardware drivers are not a solved problem where you can just ask chatgpt for a driver and it spits one out for you.

If you could write drivers in javascript, it probably would have done just fine /s

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

#164
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of course not. But I believe your Windows example was implying fundamental tech got worse.

The original "worst" quote is implying SOTA either stays the same (we keep using the same model) or gets better.

People have been predicting that progress will halt for many years now, just like the many years of Moore's law. By all indications AI labs are not running short of ideas yet (even judging purely by externally-visible papers being published and model releases this week).

We're not even throwing all of what is possible on current hardware technology at the issue (see the recent demonstration chips fabbed specifically for LLMs, rather than general purpose, doing 14k tokens/s). It's true that we may hit a fundamental limit with current architectures, but there's no indication that current architectures are at a limit yet.

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

#165
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Oh no Bain and Jim Cramer think software is dead. All that is is a signal to buy software stocks

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

#166
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think in the future (in 10 years?) we are going to see a lot of disposable/throwaway software. I don’t know, imagine this: I need to buy tickets for a concert. I ask my AI agent that I want tickets. The agent creates code on the fly and uses it to purchase my tickets. The code could be simple curl command, or a full app with nice ui/ux. As a user I don’t need to see the code. If I want to buy more tickets the same…

Or, and hear me out here, you go to the existing site or app which sells concert tickets, press the purchase button, and then you have your tickets. Like what are we even doing here...

It's more like:

- You have to work; you can't stay online all day waiting for the tickets to go on sale

- You have your agent watch for when the tickets go on sale

- Because the agent has its own wallet, it spends the 6 hours waiting for the tickets to go on sale and buys them for you

- Your agent informs you via SMS, iMessage, email, Telegram or whatever messaging platform of your choice

Yes agentic wallets are a thing now [1].

[1]: https://x.com/CoinbaseDev/status/2023893470725947769?s=20

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

#167

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.

You think all AI companies will never release a better model days after they all release better models?

That is a position to take.

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

#168
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think in the future (in 10 years?) we are going to see a lot of disposable/throwaway software. I don’t know, imagine this: I need to buy tickets for a concert. I ask my AI agent that I want tickets. The agent creates code on the fly and uses it to purchase my tickets. The code could be simple curl command, or a full app with nice ui/ux. As a user I don’t need to see the code. If I want to buy more tickets the same…

Or, and hear me out here, you go to the existing site or app which sells concert tickets, press the purchase button, and then you have your tickets. Like what are we even doing here...

You can already instruct AI to navigate the existing website for you and buy the tickets... OpenClaw is one such recent tool.

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

#169

> 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…

I don’t get this response. This is amazing! What percentage of programmers can even write a buggy FreeBSD kernel driver? If you were tasked at developing this yourself, wouldn’t it be a huge help to have something that already kind of works to get things started?

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

#170

> 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…

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