> The author was banned from Asahi Linux for hiding his extensive use of LLMs from us in another attempted contribution, and (more importantly) for concealing that he is a former Apple engineer with direct contacts to the people involved in Apple Silicon development. Make of this what you will.

ADevWithAnIdea 21 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> concealing that he is a former Apple engineer with direct contacts to the people involved in Apple Silicon development

This is false. I am a former Apple engineer. I did not conceal it (it's the top item of my resume and my LinkedIn and I made my PR from my public Github with my name attached, as opposed to a pseudonym which is expressly allowed by Asahi policy). I also had no exposure, at all, to any internal information or code about macOS, SPTM, or Apple Silicon during my time there.

I also don't have connections to people involved in Apple Silicon development (and I'd add that this does not mean someone cannot contribute, the question is were they exposed to tainted information, which is absolutely not true in my case). I have many friends who work for Apple (I'm a Stanford alum) but none in Apple Silicon directly.

I disagree with the phrasing of this entire thing, but this statement is demonstrably false.

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cromka an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I find it extremely ironic that big corp openly steals IP en masse to build their models but hackers are still concerned about using same models for their reverse engineering work.

I think at this point the hacking community needs to grow some balls.

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cogman10 6 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

It's because it doesn't matter how copyrighted material ends up in a project. If an LLM reproduces copyrighted material (which is very hard to verify) then the lawsuit from the copyright owner can still sink even robustly funded projects.

The fact is, open source has much more liability than closed source software does. If copyrighted material ends up inside a private code base it'll be nearly impossible for the owner to discover that and sue.

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doot 21 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Excited to see what you contribute to open source against one of the richest and most litigious companies in the world.

	▲	cromka 8 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Cool. Excited to see you on the pitch next time you comment on a football game.

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drnick1 39 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If Apple open sourced its drivers this issue wouldn't exist. AI at last gives the "community" a chance to use the hardware they bought the way they want. It's unreasonable to expect anybody to code this kind of stuff "by hand" when automated tools exist.

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SXX an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I certainly dont care about hiding LLM contributions and all crazy anti-LLM policies, but I really hope author can share process completely so this can be reproduced by someone not working for Apple.

	▲	Krssst 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> crazy anti-LLM policies Weird how justified reasonable policies get the "crazy" label.

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alightsoul an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Even if this is the case, this is still a valuable contribution to learn upon.

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MBCook 40 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

It’s taint. Anyone who looks at it can’t work on a real open source driver because they will have had access to information they’re not supposed to.

It won’t be clean room like the stuff Alyssa did.

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alightsoul 36 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Can't this be used to make a clean room implementation? Have someone write a spec then someone else who is unrelated, implement it from scratch?

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danielheath 25 minutes ago | parent [-]

"Person A was under NDA, so we got them to pass their knowledge to person B, then had person B do the work - that's clean-room, right?"

Judges, as far as I know, do not generally take kindly to such arguments.

	▲	ndriscoll 2 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Wouldn't B's publication of the information make it by definition no longer a trade secret? It is now public knowledge, regardless of whether the current or former engineers might be liable for the original leak. Any other interpretation would mean trade secrets have infinite protection.
	▲	alightsoul 6 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		So what if person a and person b are unrelated and person b found it on their own? There are countries in the global south that never had an industrial revolution and don't speak English and never had factories for export nor made anything in a factory industrially that isn't building material and food and maybe fuel for local consumption so they've never had an IP infringement case

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theoreticalmal 36 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

That’s the most abstract and esoteric argument I’ve ever heard I think

	▲	MBCook 28 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Wasn’t that exactly the legal standard Compaq had to prove when they did a clean room implementation of the IBM BIOS?

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an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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