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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

#311

Post by Kbelicius »

shermantanktop wrote: post #250
delfinom wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The future is either a regression of society from the resulting riots and massacres when 3/4 of the population is unemployed. Or perpetual work camps for the masses.

Can you name me another time when humanity has run out of useful work to do? Was it when we tamed fire, invented the wheel, writing, or double entry bookkeeping? All of which appear more consequential than current AI. We’ll always have something to do. And humans like doing things.

> Can you name me another time when humanity has run out of useful work to do? > > Was it when we tamed fire, invented the wheel, writing, or double entry bookkeeping? All of which appear more consequential than current AI. > > We’ll always have something to do. And humans like doing things.

History doesn't predict the future. I can't tell you about another time when humans ran out of usefull things to do. What I can tell you is that we humans are biological beings we limited cognitive and physical abiloties.

I can also tell you about another biological being whose cognitive and phyisical abilities were surpassed by technology. Horses. What happened to them then wasn't pretty. The hight of their population in US was in 1915.

And sure, humans like doing things and so do horses, but you can't live by doing things that aren't useful to others, at least not in the current system. If technology surpases our abilities, the only useful things left to do for vast majority of humans is the same thing that was left for horses to do. Entertainment in various forms and there won't be enough of those jobs for all of us.

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

#313

Post by closewith »

samplatt wrote: post #270
alwillis wrote: post #156

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 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…

>Billions of dollars of stock market value disappeared because of the concern That's really the key, right there. The value disappeared because of concern, not of anything real. When ungodly amounts of money is governed entirely by vibes, it's hardly surprising they lose ungodly amounts of money to vibe-coding. The downside is the effects of all that money shifting is very real :(

> That's really the key, right there. The value disappeared because of concern, not of anything real.

The value also only existed in the first place because of belief, in future work, operations, profits, etc.

Like it or not, confidence in institutions is society. Concern that affects that confidence is as real as any other societal effect.

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

#314

Post by wiseowise »

shermantanktop wrote: post #250
delfinom wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The future is either a regression of society from the resulting riots and massacres when 3/4 of the population is unemployed. Or perpetual work camps for the masses.

Can you name me another time when humanity has run out of useful work to do? Was it when we tamed fire, invented the wheel, writing, or double entry bookkeeping? All of which appear more consequential than current AI. We’ll always have something to do. And humans like doing things.

> Can you name me another time when humanity has run out of useful work to do?

Can you name me another time when big swaths of highly paid population were laid off due to redundancy and how did it go for the population?

Also, another hint: I couldn’t care less what is going to happen to “humanity”. “Humanity” isn’t the one who pays my bills and puts food on my table.

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

#315

Post by wiseowise »

tehjoker wrote: post #286
scuff3d wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excluding the batshit insane political side, I don't actually think it's been as nuts as people think, or at least not uniformly so. I have a lot of friends in the tech sector, but outside the FANNG/silicone valley/startup bubbles. It's been largely business as normal across the board. Twitter and social media warps our perspective I think.

there was a whole pandemic

And there’s still biggest war in Europe since ww2. Israel and Gaza. Iran standoff. Tariffs.

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

#316

Post by ahoka »

petcat wrote: post #32
ahoka wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That pesky GPL does not stop us anymore, cool.

What would the GPL have to do with this?

In olden times someone trying to fix a BSD driver could have a peek at the GPL one, but that was gray area copyright wise (basically you would not admit it publicly for this reason). If a 850 billion USD company does it, then it's perfectly fine, it seems.

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

#317

Post by bonesss »

hahn-kev wrote: post #192
dumbfounder wrote: post #65

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.

What I want is to be able to use AI to modify the software we already have. Granted I've wanted to do that long before AI, but now maybe plugins will get more popular again now that AI could write them for us

I’m imagining a world where everyone was using emacs/lisp or Smalltalk VMs, and what kind of world-improving insanity we could be sharing through LLMs.

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

#318

Post by Vegenoid »

fschuett wrote: post #237
Vegenoid wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You haven't addressed the parent's concern at all, which is that what the LLM was trained on, not what was fed into its context window. The Linux driver is almost certainly in the LLM's training data. Also, the "spec" that the LLM wrote to simulate the "clean-room" technique is full of C code from the Linux driver.

Okay, so will companies now vibe-code a Linux-like license-washed kernel, to get rid of the GPL? > The Linux driver is almost certainly in the LLM's training data. Yes, and? Isn't Stallmans first freedom the "freedom to study the source code" (FSF Freedom I)? Where does it say I have to be a human to study it? If you argue "oh but you may only read / train on the source code if you are intending to write / generate G…

> Let's say I look (as a human) at some GPL source code. And then I close the browser tab and roughly re-implement from memory what I saw. Am I now required to release my own code as GPL? More extrtsembles what I saw back then, then I can, in your universe, be sued because only "libre programmers" may read "libre source code".

It's entirely dependent on how similar the code you write is to the licensed code that you saw, and what could be proved about what you saw, but potentially yes: if you study GPL code, and then write code that is very uniquely similar to it, you may have infringed on the author's copyright. US courts have made some rulings which say that the substantial similarity standard does apply to software, although pretty much every ruling for these cases ends up in the defendant's favor (the one who allegedly "copied" some software).

> So, for LLMs, even if the input is GPL, proprietary, whatever: if the output is unrecognizable from the input, it does not matter.

Sure, but that doesn't apply to this instance. This is implementing a BSD driver based on a Linux driver for that hardware. I'm not making the general case that LLMs are committing copyright infringement on a grand scale. I'm saying that giving GPL code to an LLM (in this case the GPL code was input to the model, which seems much more egregious than it being in the training data) and having the LLM generate that code ported to a new platform feels slimy. If we can do this, then copyleft licenses will become pretty much meaningless. I gather some people would consider that a win.

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

#319

Post by fragmede »

bot403 wrote: post #290
fragmede wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Harder, but not impossible. You 3d print a jig for a solenoid and a relay so you can warm/cold reboot the laptop, get a pizerow setup and configured to be a keyboard you can control over SSH, a webcam watching the screen, a hardwired Ethernet port, a second computer to manipulate the Device Under Test (aka the MacBook/laptop with a missing whatever driver). Even though waiting on Claude Code doesn't hit flow state if…

Or, for many things, a VM with hardware passthrough could work.

Very good point! Different busses are capable of different things. USB is great for that. Windows drivers, especially. Unfortunately laptop hardware is pretty hardwired in, so there's no escaping that there.

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

#320

Post by croes »

dumbfounder wrote: post #65

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.

Lots of unaudited and battle tested software. Sounds like a nightmare.
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