Thread

Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month

422 points · 290 comments · ADevWithAnIdea

MoltenMonster · 1789511027 · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/AsahiLinux/comments/1whecn1/comment/pa1spia/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/AsahiLinux/comments/1whecn1/comment...
> 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.
1. cromka · 1789512979 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. littlecranky67 · 1789541582 · focus · HN ↗
    Agree. Especially since even a tainted GPU driver (tainted as in, used former Apple Engineer knowledge) is usefull as we just throw another LLM onto it and tell it "rewrite in rust" and get an untainted version of it (at least that is the current judicial state, and the bigtech argues in this direction).
    mitxela · 1789559133 · focus · HN ↗
    An AI doesn't magically add copyright but it also doesn't magically remove copyright except via diffusion of training data. It does not remove copyright from its input. Malus was a parody. If you machine-translate something from one language to another, copyright is retained no matter how sophisticated the translator is.
    xyzsparetimexyz · 1789561850 · focus · HN ↗
    How is that any different from a clean room?
    preisschild · 1789568827 · focus · HN ↗
    With clean room you just have access to the api specifications, not the internals.
    simoncion · 1789570292 · focus · HN ↗
    Yep. An entity in the "dirty room" reads the thing to be reimplemented and produces a document that thoroughly describes its behavior. That document is passed to the entity in the "clean room" whose only knowledge of that system is through that document. Reverse engineering is legal, plagiarism is not.
    Despite the fact that the raw output of the system is incomprehensible to humans, scanning a photograph of Mickey Mouse and running it through a lossy compression system like JPEG doesn't suddenly make it not a picture of Mickey Mouse. Similarly, running the code for a system through the lossy compression system that is LLM "training" doesn't suddenly obliterate that data and make that LLM a "clean room". If one has any doubt of that, remember that they are known to reproduce their inputs, even after all these years of work to make them not do that. [0]
    [0] <<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49727685">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49727685>
    mitxela · 1789601331 · focus · HN ↗
    Plagiarism is legal, actually. Copyright infringement is not.
    simoncion · 1789609415 · focus · HN ↗
    Fair-ish point. I was considering plagiarism in the context of computer programs, which is -at best- dreadfully difficult to do without also violating copyright and/or software licenses.
    I'd also rephrase your first sentence as "Plagiarism isn't illegal, actually.". Unless you're rich and/or very influential, plagiarism is a seriously bad thing to do.
    mitxela · 1789637223 · focus · HN ↗
    Getting expelled from a university is legal.
    simoncion · 1789747029 · focus · HN ↗
    Sometimes. Other times is is most definitely not.
    xyzsparetimexyz · 1789644631 · focus · HN ↗
    One llm writes the api spec, another writes the api from the spec. No shared context. Easy.

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