5 ms·

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

layer8 24d ago
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 24d ago
  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.
  - rustcleaner 24d ago
    >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. This should be illegal. Any politicians who run on [economically, financially] doing to these companies what is being done to Russia and Iran, if they refuse to immediately publish their hardware private keys, I will vote for. Up to and including jailing boards, stiffing bond and equity holders, and selling their assets as scrap, if they choose to purge their keys to prevent disclosure or if disclosure is impossible due to technical design. Maybe if a few trillion dollars worth of businesses suddenly vaporize into legal smoke, the remainders will start behaving for the next hundred years...
AshamedCaptain 24d ago
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 24d ago
  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.
kibwen 24d ago
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.
bigyabai 24d ago
"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.
matheusmoreira 24d ago
Brings me a lot of joy to see these articles. They've inspired me to reverse engineer my laptop again.
deleted 24d ago
[deleted]
apricot 24d ago
Enjoy it while it lasts.
wartywhoa23 24d ago
Did the open source movement dream of outsourcing what they loved to do themselves for free, as in both beer and freedom, to products which are trained on the corpus of their own knowledge without any consent and sold by behemoth corporations on a subscription basis?
- compiler-devel 23d ago
  Local first models like qwen 3.8 are surprisingly capable even on an M1 MacBook Pro with 32GB of RAM. SOTA is not the only game in town

layer8 24d ago

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 24d ago
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.
- rustcleaner 24d ago
  >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. This should be illegal. Any politicians who run on [economically, financially] doing to these companies what is being done to Russia and Iran, if they refuse to immediately publish their hardware private keys, I will vote for. Up to and including jailing boards, stiffing bond and equity holders, and selling their assets as scrap, if they choose to purge their keys to prevent disclosure or if disclosure is impossible due to technical design. Maybe if a few trillion dollars worth of businesses suddenly vaporize into legal smoke, the remainders will start behaving for the next hundred years...

AshamedCaptain 24d ago

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 24d ago
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.

kibwen 24d ago

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.

bigyabai 24d ago

"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.

matheusmoreira 24d ago

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

deleted 24d ago

[deleted]

apricot 24d ago

Enjoy it while it lasts.

wartywhoa23 24d ago

Did the open source movement dream of outsourcing what they loved to do themselves for free, as in both beer and freedom, to products which are trained on the corpus of their own knowledge without any consent and sold by behemoth corporations on a subscription basis?

compiler-devel 23d ago
Local first models like qwen 3.8 are surprisingly capable even on an M1 MacBook Pro with 32GB of RAM. SOTA is not the only game in town