Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

vladimir.varank.in

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 397 posts

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

#181

Post by layer8 »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #56
integralpilot wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't use AI to help write code due to copyright concerns, it's against our policy. We obviously need to be very careful with what we're doing, and we can't be sure it hasn't seen Apple docs or RE'ed Apple binaries etc (which we have very careful clean-room policies on) in its training data. It also can't be guaranteed that the generated code is GPL+MIT compatible (as it may draw inspiration from other GPL only dr…

Given that literally no one is enforcing this it seems like a moral rather than a business decision here no? Isn’t the risk here that your competitors, who have no such moral qualms, are just going to commit all sorts of blatant copyright infringement but it really doesn’t matter because no one is enforcing it?

Morals seem like a very good reason to not join those infringers.

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

#182

Post by nitwit005 »

empthought wrote: post #148
slopinthebag wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 know some proponents have AGI as their target, but to me it seems to be unrelated to the steadily increasing effectiveness of using LLMs to write computer code. I think of it as just another leap in human-computer interface for programming, and a welcome one at that.

If you imagine it just keeps improving, the end point would be some sort of AGI though. Logically, once you have something better at making software than humans, you can ask it to make a better AI than we were able to make.

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

#183

Post by toomuchtodo »

neocron wrote: post #176
wingmanjd wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Make the LLM operate the hypervisor VM so it can observe a binary as it executes to write specs for it?

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

#184

Post by throwaway2037 »

shakna wrote: post #72
cryptonector wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPL is not a patent. It covers the work and _derivatives_; it does not cover ideas or general knowledge. The chip in question has docs. I fully expect that Claude wrote code that does not resemble that of the driver in the Linux tree. TFA is taking on some liability if it turns out that the code Claude wrote does largely resemble GPL'ed code, but if TFA is not comfortable with the code written by Claude not resemblin…

From the file headers: SPDX-License-Identifier: ISC Copyright (c) 2010-2022 Broadcom Corporation Copyright (c) brcmfmac-freebsd contributors Based on the Linux brcmfmac driver. I'm going to ahead and say there are copyright law nightmares, right here.

That headers looks pretty reasonable to me. I don't see anything misleading or ambiguous about it. Whenever I am heavily modifying some licensed code, I always make sure to include a similar header.

    > I'm going to ahead and say there are copyright law nightmares, right here.
I am confused. My first thought was maybe the original Linux driver was GPL'd, but it is not. It is ISC'd. Look here: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/net/wi...

    // SPDX-License-Identifier: ISC
    /*
     * Copyright (c) 2010 Broadcom Corporation
     */

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

#185

Post by skydhash »

alwillis wrote: post #179
whackernews wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

What to use? A website where you can quickly buy the stuff you want? Or an LLM where you specify how to buy the the thing you want, wait a while, then actually do the buying, and praying in the meantime, it's not throwing your money away?

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

#187

Post by jwatte »

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.

Tell me you've never developed a driver, without telling me you've never developed a driver.

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

#188

Post by jwatte »

bootwoot wrote: post #37
diath wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

True. But also -- how do humans do it? There are docs and there's other similar driver code. I wouldn't be surprised if Claude could build new driver code sight-unseen, given the appropriate resources

Humans do it with access to the register-level data sheets, which are only available under NDA, and usually with access to a logic analyzer for debugging.

Usually, the problem with developing a driver isn't "writing the code," it's "finding documentation for what the code should do."

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

#189

Post by vitorsr »

Nextgrid wrote: post #41
diath wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Trial and error? Just like it does when given an existing GPL’d source and dealing with its hallucinations, the agent could be operated on a black box (or a binary Windows driver and a disassembly)? The GPL code helped here but as long as the agent can run in a loop and test its work against a piece of hardware, I don’t see why it couldn’t do the same without any code given enough time?

Seems very promising but then you realize the LLM behind said agent was trained on public but otherwise copyright encumbered proprietary code available as improperly redistributed SDKs and DDKs, as well as source code leaks and friends.

In fact most Windows binaries have public debug symbols available which makes SRE not exactly a hurdle and an agent-driven SRE not exactly a tabula rasa reimplementation.

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

#190

Post by hahn-kev »

octoberfranklin wrote: post #27
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.

Hardware driver bugs frequently manifest as concurrency flakiness or heisenbugs. AI is notoriously bad at dealing with bugs that only cause problems every few weeks.

So are people
Post reply on HN