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[–] 1 point 1 day ago

The great weakness in getting ARM SoCs in Linux mainlined is how long it takes compared to x86. Wouldn’t it be great if AI dealt the deathblow to x86?

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  • [–] 5 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    Why have all of the LLM apologists come out of the wood work.

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  • [–] 19 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    claude aside, i am more interested in starting a project to reverse engineer the binary blobs that infect the linux kernel so it would finally be 100% free

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  • [–] 1 point 20 hours ago

    Do you mean the firmware blobs? If so, then be aware that the firmware doesn't run in the Linux kernel, and isn't part of it. They get uploaded to the peripheral devices, and run there. They are often encrypted and signed, so even if you reverse engineer them, and understand what they do, you also need the private keys of the vendor to sign and/or encrypt them before the peripheral hardware accepts them...

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  • [–] 45 points 3 days ago (1 child)

    Yes, this is what I got excited about upon hearing about the recent Adobe "open sourcing."

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  • [–] 15 points 2 days ago (9 children)

    I made the fingerprint sensor on my Lenovo 14s Yoga work thanks to Claude. It took 30 minutes.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 day ago (3 children)

    Please make it available for others to use and not have to spend resources to do it again, ideally upstream it.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    I did start a public a GitHub repo right after I made it work.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 days ago (4 children)

    I have been wanting my fingerprint device working too. Did it require a Claude subscription or would the free plan suffice?

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  • [–] 3 points 2 days ago (2 children)

    idk about claude but the free version of Kimi is capable of helping you here. I use it for my linux tech support and it's very helpful.

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  • [–] 22 points 3 days ago (3 children)

    It would be amazing if this could bootstrap RISCV drivers

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  • [–] 20 points 3 days ago (2 children)

    Or just drivers for existing abandoned but perfectly functional Qualcomm SoCs.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 days ago (1 child)

    Damn straight, an absolute shitton of Linux phones just waiting to happen...

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  • [–] 3 points 3 days ago

    For all the very real bad things AI is/can be used for. I really would love to see more uses like this. So long as the code generated is made to be easily auditable (clear comments and traceable code) by folks that know how to do it for other projects that have been trying to free as many left to rot devices. Obviously a lot of slop stuff will make things hard for finding the gems, and will be important to treat all things as "too good to be true" until verified.

    With the way that companies lock the shit out of modern devices with planned obsolescence. It would be great to repurpose those devices with as much of the hardware being accessible, unlike the current issues with major parts not working (not from lack of trying/caring to be clear). The breakthroughs that humans are able to figure out will still be more impressive, but there is a difference between folks like them clearly stating what parts they used tools to help with (if used at all) vs the no effort vibe-coder crowd. Will be also great if they are able to get results with small focused locally hosted AI instead of everything being on those "bubble" data centers.

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  • [–] 17 points 3 days ago (3 children)

    This is the repo that people are using, 270k stars

    https://github.com/morluto/rea

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  • [–] 4 points 3 days ago (2 children)

    Yea but you will also install other software like maybe gidhra.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 days ago (2 children)

    If I wanted a virus on my device, I'll just go to a malware repository rather than trust low quality slopware.

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  • [–] 23 points 3 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

    I am not going to defend the unacceptable external costs of LLMs here, namely the environmental destruction and the large-scale rug pull on social contracts for creative people.

    But adressing your argument, it is totally possible to rewrite the Claude slop to clean, easy to review software. I guess this would be far less work than to reverse-engineer a driver just from captured USB communication.

    (That is just my $0.05, but I think the main problem with AI slop in smaller software is not that the code they generate is completely unreadable, but that the LLM systems tend to break down after a few thousand lines, and that they produce architecturally unsound and often subtly wrong software, which leads to an exponentially increasing amount of technical debt if not continously corrrected by experienced people.)

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  • [–] 12 points 3 days ago*

    Good luck finding a malware repository for undocumented proprietary hardware

    Reverse engineering is actually a very good use case for LLMs. Its like using a black box to get a different black box to do a trick. It might not be epistemologically sound, but if it can boot the kernel, who cares?

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  • [–] 7 points 3 days ago (2 children)

    I would love if someone reverse engineered Logitech drivers and made them better as actual drivers instead of an annoying app

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  • [–] 4 points 3 days ago (2 children)

    Could this one day get us a second life for our echo flex units? They are phenomenal pieces of hardware.

    Meta portal TV are also excellent hardware units discarded by its mothership and ripe for reuse. They were so mired by controversy but the TV unit hardware was really great.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 days ago (1 child)

    You'll be playing doom on your toothbrush in no time.

    But yah maybe. There are mountains of "smart" hardware that demanded cloud, cloud went away, suddenly a brick. I'd love to wire some of that up and give Claude a shot at jail breaking and flashing that kinda thing.

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