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AI can speed up a lot of the manual labour needed to bring even an almost dead, 10-year-old device back to life. My Xiaomi Mi Max 2 (oxygen, MSM8953) was dead. With AI help and my own knowledge, I ported/rewrote the missing drivers, and it now runs Nura (postmarketOS) with working camera, torch, SIM, phone calls and SMS. Only the loudspeaker is still broken.
Everything is up for anyone who wants to install it, or to understand the changes and manually write the patches for mainline: https://github.com/sv1sjp/mi-max2-oxygen-msm8953-nura-drivers Testing, feedback and PRs welcome.
Yeah, I personally prefer the bug-free old version:
On a more serious note, we're still in a period where people are figuring out what AI can/cannot be used for and what the best practices are. Ironically, since it's better at reverse engineering and bug hunting than developing when compared to a human, it is more useful for hacker and open-source projects than enterprise.
Also Google destroyed a huge chunk of Swedish forest to build a data centers for more AI.... That's the main feature of AI. Figure that one out.
Well, we know the best practices for the Nura project:
It's literally the first sentence of their policy.
Citation needed.
Yes, but what about the 2nd sentence?
As you can see, it says nothing about researching, troubleshooting, reverse-engineering, etc. As long as you write and understand the code yourself AI is allowed for everything else. As long as you're not using generative AI it's fine.
My personal experience working with AI over the past year. And if that's not enough, here's also Linus Torvalds himself.
The arguments regarding resource use and profiting off of theft are valid. The arguments regarding the nature and capabilities of the tech are not. Developers ARE responsible for the code they submit, regardless of how it was created.
It's not a good tool for research, it will just generate a hallucination and you end up doing something which does not work or just works somehow, but is not done correctly and will break in the future.
I talked to quite a few people recently at the postmarketOS and Alpine Linux conference, it definitely was noticed that more contributions are now coming in that do things wrong or in a subtly broken way and the submitting people have no clue.
If you rely on a lying computer for research, then your code will lie to you.
I rely on it to scour the docs, the forums, the codebases for any and all potential solutions and neatly present them to me. I then validate and evaluate myself. Just going with the first thing the AI suggests is lunacy and is exactly what I meant by "people are still discovering best practices".
Or just use Ecosia or DuckDuckGo.
A search engine finds you places to look at and doesn't hallucinate incorrect details.
I know it's perfectly possible to do mainlining of a device and work on the kernel stuff simply by reading stuff, asking people and bouncing ideas while strengthening the community in the process and having fun with other phone hackers.
Υes good luck finding solutions with closed source drivers by using only Search Engines and not at the end of the day...reverse engineering... I mean, technically feasible, but I cannot understand why we skip the HUGE AMOUNTS OF TIME that this kind of work needs to be done. And expertise.
The repository is here with an auto-installer script for anyone interested, the research is here for anyone to study and try to manually implement them to main-line. That's the beauty of open source.
All in all, The device is alive again, so I would need to consume less new electronic devices in the feature so I will protect more the planet with not needing a new phone/smallserver than some data centers that I do not control!
Unless you're doing something extremely common with well-established patterns, search engines have sucked for the past 14 years and been unusable for the past 8. For most of that time I would just refer to official docs, and official code examples, avoiding stackoverflow and other forums since they were just filled with outdated or plain bad info.
Search engines like Kagi might still be decent, but they are few.
They have given five reasons for not using AI:-
Of these, the first is a result of using fossil fuels, the second and third are a result of capitalism, and the fourth is only a problem if you believe in the whole 'intellectual property' charade. Only the fifth is an actual issue with AI, and that can be solved by either mandating human review, or marking AI-generated code as such and letting users use or exclude it.
You are forgetting that basically everything is de-facto capitalism. If you use this in Christiania, you step out to Denmark and suddenly you are no longer ethical because you are contributing to capitalism.
Oh, and you are forgetting 6: can only be trained by data harvesting corporations. Open weight != open source.
Just that.
There is no true life within a false life.
The philosopher Theodor Adorno sums it up quite well.
Slavery, for example, wasn't solved by handing slaves over to nicer owners, but by ending it.
In a similar way, it's not possible to improve the world by using exploitative tools, you can't improve something while destroying it.
For example, not using text generators because of the fossil fuels that this will burn is a good point. Just because it could use electricity from sustainable sources, does not mean it won't hurt humanity to use it.
Just because it could be better does not mean it is.
I decided to not have a car, because while those can be made to hurt the planet less, they do hurt the planet a lot. And there's already public transport. Even electric cars aren't better than taking the train. And I live in a place where this works quite well, so I do that.
I can do better now, not in the future when LLMs might (or might not) better.
I don't buy products that will quickly be trash just because the companies could build bettee products. We have a choice.
(Footnote: Adorno wrote that sentence looking at the fascist terror in Europe in the 40s. What he is saying, basically: You can't do the right thing when you live in a system that punishes that. Try to start a protest against cruel Nazis and you're dead. You can't further understanding among nations under those circumstances.)
Sorry for the wall of text, having lots of thoughts.
I just hear "Let's exploit others, it's the fault of capitalism, not the fault of those driving exploitation".
That's not how you make the world a better place.
What a genuinely antithetical stance to take on a project meant to keep otherwise dying hardware alive, but that's the beauty of open source. You don't have to give a damn about upstream, just fork and rebase into your own little niche and move on.
You should read the reasoning for the AI policy that explains very well why the use of LLMs is the actually unethical thing here: https://docs.nura.eco/policies-and-processes/development/ai-policy.html#reasoning This thread by Casey goes more into the impact that allowing LLM usage would in her opinion have on the community/project: https://social.treehouse.systems/@cas/117347732017118902
The reasons stated are not immediate granted fact, nor are they all logical. Again, fork it and move on. Nura can have whatever policy they'd like, but it doesn't make sense not to use a tool, that it should be obvious by now can accomplish the prototyping work of entire engineering teams. In a good enough fashion to create software for revitalizing what would otherwise be ewaste. To me that doesn't sit well with their goals, at least as applied to this reality. You can have whatever opinion on it you'd like, I know there's a cult of anti ai on lemmy and in open source software, and I do sympathize with some of their viewpoints and the legitimate concerns.
The post from Casey, linked by lenni, addresses exactly those points. It's still extractive and hurts communities.
So is manufacturing new electronics. You don't get a perfect solution, and frankly, local ai already exists that's good enough for this type of prototyping. I've read through their reasoning and while I can sympathize, I do not agree with it. It's not realistic or accomplishing their goals imo, but I maintain that's the beauty of open source. Fork it. Move on. Thank them for their contribution.
Yes, new electronics are part of the problem, that's why the community brings Linux to old phones.
Except it doesn't bring it to all old phones, ai can massively help resolve this.
Buying a used phone that is already at least somewhat supported is better than slop-coding another phone and wasting resources in the process and then others having to clean up the code that nobody actually understands.
I don't subscribe to your personal purity tests or agree with the logic on that one. The resources involved can be minimal, and I don't really believe you have a ton of exposure to software engineering if you think all of the prototype code will need cleaned up or be entirely understood, especially with devices like these. There are significant amounts of binary blobs and drivers filled with post compiled obfuscated closed source code that nobody maintains or understands even in current Nura distributions, it's a design of ip protections popular hardware manufacturers use and nothing guarantees the quality or maintainability of that code. Just because you don't like or know how to use a tool does not invalidate it, and there's no reason for you to apply genuine concerns to a tools entire existence or output.
What? The issues by which I'm concerned are reason enough to be concerned.
I have no interest in furthering this conversation.