It's amazing to see LLMs give us software and hardware freedoms that the open source movement has only ever dreamed about.

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layer8 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The flip side is that this might become a thing of the past for future hardware/firmware, if AI hardening becomes standard practice.

There’s no substitute for having open systems that aren’t cryptographically locked down by the manufacturer.

	▲	spaqin 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		We were already there. For most people, we are still there. For most devices (especially popular ones, with enough manufacturing volume) there's just enough hardening, downgrade prevention, encrypted or signed firmware blobs, on top of already rare reverse engineering skills and patience, to make it infeasible for most people to give it a crack. Using an LLM for that also isn't a mainstream idea either (plus you're unlikely to have a Claude subscription if you're not a software developer in the first place). Open systems are great and all in the idea, but the facts are that for profit companies do the research and produce most of the things.

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AshamedCaptain 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think that this is not true -- the achievements mentioned here are hardly ground breaking and mostly build on work that was already done years before LLMs were a thing.

There are things that the "open source movement" dreams about, and one just has to search around... E.g. like codecs, Qualcomm's aptX lossless, adaptative, and other more recent variations.

	▲	SchemaLoad 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's not new capabilities, it's new levels of access. Reverse engineering this stuff used to be a very tedious process which required a lot of specialised skill. Which is why most devices haven't been reverse engineered or hacked despite being full of low hanging fruit.

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apricot 5 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Enjoy it while it lasts.

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matheusmoreira 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Brings me a lot of joy to see these articles. They've inspired me to reverse engineer my laptop again.

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bigyabai 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"only ever" feels like a stretch. Libratbag, QMK, OpenWRT, Nouveau and Asahi all took up the task without much or any AI help. They're not all just dreamers.

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kibwen 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There's a difference between the people sitting at the table and the mice scurrying around catching the crumbs. Freedom is sitting at the table. The OP, sadly, is catching the crumbs.

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2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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