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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

#171

Post by azakai »

slopinthebag wrote: post #131
jomohke wrote: post #128

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.

At the very least, computers are still getting faster. Models will get faster and cheaper to run over time, allowing them more time to "think", and we know that helps. Might be slow progress, but it seems inevitable.

I do agree that exponential progress to AGI is speculation.

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

#172

Post by alwillis »

slopinthebag wrote: post #110
kami23 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would I do that if the gateway to the internet becomes these LLM interfaces? How is it not easier to ask or type 'buy me tickets for Les Mis'? In the ideal world it will just figure it out, or I frustratingly have to interact with a slightly different website to purchase tickets for each separate event I want to see. One of the benefits that I see is as much as I love tech and writing software, I really really do…

I'm sympathetic to this view too, but I don't think the solution is to have LLM's generate bespoke code to do it. We absolutely should be using them for more natural language interfaces tho.

> but I don't think the solution is to have LLM's generate bespoke code to do it

But if the LLM needed to write bespoke code to buy the tickets or whatever, it could just do it without needing to get you involved.

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

#173

Post by rayiner »

acedTrex wrote: post #104
petcat wrote: 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.

Why is that the metric? In my job, I get drafts from junior employees that requires major revisions, often rewriting significant parts. It’s still faster to have someone take the first pass. Why can’t AI coding be used the same way? Especially if AIs are capable of following your own style and design choices, as well as testing code against a test suite, why isn’t it easier to start from a kind of working baseline than to rebuild from a raf h.

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

#174

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#175

Post by dollylambda »

cortesoft wrote: post #135
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.

> Someone with domain knowledge could also just write the code instead of trying to get the stochastic prediction machine to generate it. Well, people with the domain knowledge exist, yet they have not yet written this driver... why not? Because there is other code those experts want to write, and they don't have time to write it all... but what if they could just give a fairly straightforward prompt and have the LLM…

> Because there is other code those experts want to write, and they don't have time to write it all... but what if they could just give a fairly straightforward prompt and have the LLM do it for them?

Then pretty soon they wouldn't be the experts anymore?

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

#176

Post by neocron »

wingmanjd wrote: post #46
05 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- have AI write a windows filter driver to capture all hardware communications - have AI reverse engineer Windows WiFi driver and make a crude prototype - have AI compare registers captured by filter driver with linux driver version and iterate until they match (or at least functional tests pass) not exactly rocket surgery, and windows device drivers generally don't have DRM/obfuscation, so reverse engineering them i…

So we send an AI agent to the French cafe instead of us? https://download.samba.org/pub/tridge/misc/french_cafe.txt

Shouldn't AI be able to take this one step further and just analyze the binary (of the samba server in this case) and create all kinds of interface specs from it?

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

#177

Post by ssl-3 »

mixdup wrote: post #80
slopinthebag wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I know people have done truly amazing things with AI lately, but I feel this in my bones. Almost every demo I see is like, uh, I don't need these extremely simple things in my life automated. I can just go to Delta and buy a plane ticket. I actually want to write my own email to my mom or wife. Of course a demo is just a demo, but also come on

It's easy to buy one plane ticket when a person has a specific plan -- to attend a meeting or a conference, or to match up with an airbnb timeslot or something.

It's harder to buy one plane ticket for the lowest cost amongst all the different ways that plane tickets can be bought, and harder yet to do so with a lack of specificity.

So, for instance: Maybe I don't have a firm plan. Maybe I'm very flexible.

Maybe all I want to do is say "Hey, bot. I want to go visit my friend in Florida sometime in the next couple of weeks and spend a few days there as inexpensively as I can. He's in Orlando. I can fly out of Detroit or Cleveland; all the same to me. If I drive to the airport myself, I'll need a place to keep my car at or near the airport. I also want to explore renting a car in Orlando. I pack light; personal bag only. Cattle class is OK, but I prefer a window seat. Present to me a list of the cheapest options, with itinerary."

That's all stuff that a human can sort out, but it takes time to manually fudge around dates and locations and deal with different systems and tabulate the results. And there's nuances that need covered, like parking at DTW is weird: It's all off-site, and it can be cheaper and better to rent a room for one night in a nearby hotel that includes long-term parking than to pay for parking by itself.

So the hypothetical bot does a bunch of API hits, applies its general knowledge of how things flow, and comes back with a list of verified-good options for me to review. And then I get to pick around that list, and ask questions, and mold it to best fit my ideal vision of an inexpensive trip to go spend time with a friend.

In English, and without ever dealing with any travel websites myself.

"Right. So I go to Detroit on Tuesday and check in at the hotel any time after noon, and take the free shuttle to the airport the next morning at around 0400 to the Evans terminal. Also, thanks for pointing out that this airport is like a ghost town until 0600 and I might want to bring a snack. Anyway, I get on the flight, land at Orlando, and they'll have a cheap car waiting for me at Avis. This will all cost me a total of $343, which sounds great. If that's all I need to know right now, then make it so. Pay for it and put it on my calendar."

(And yeah, this is a problem that I actually have from time to time. I'd love to have a bot that could just sort this stuff out with a few paragraphs.)

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

#178

Post by mschuster91 »

petcat wrote: 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.

> We're very close to just being able to set an AI coding agent to brute-force a driver for anything.

Yeah, but that only works for so long as the AI doesn't brute force a command that hard-bricks the device. Say, it causes a voltage controller to give out way too high voltages by a command, burns e-fuses or erases vital EEPROM data (factory calibration presets come to my mind here).

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

#179

Post by alwillis »

whackernews wrote: post #130
tkiolp4 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

All of the major LLMs have re-useable prompts now, so once someone makes a skill [1] that does it, anyone can use it.

Even now, with OpenClaw and all of the spinoffs, it's possible to have n agent do this today.

[1]: https://claude.com/blog/equipping-agents-for-the-real-world-...

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

#180

Post by skydhash »

jacobr1 wrote: post #116
slopinthebag wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have to hold the LLM's hand to accomplish a task, using human intelligence to do so, you can't consider the task performed by AI.

I half agree. But two points: 1) if you can formalize your instructions ... then future instances can be fully automated. 2) You are still probably having the AI perform many sub-tasks. AI-skeptics regularly fall into this god-of-the-gaps trap. You aren't wrong that human-augmented AI isn't 100% AI ... but it still is AI-augmentation, and again, that sets the stage for point 1 - to enable later future full automation…

> if you can formalize your instructions

Isn't that...code?

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