Posted by dmitrybrant 5 days ago
That's even before taking on the brutal linux kernel mailing lists for code review explaining what that C code does which could be riddled with bugs that Claude generated.
No thanks and no deal.
The last version of the driver that was included in the kernel, right up until it was removed, was version 3.04.
BUT, the author continued to develop the driver independently of kernel releases. In fact, the last known version of the driver was 4.04a, in 2000.
My goal is to continue maintaining this driver for modern kernel versions, 25 years after the last official release." - https://github.com/dbrant/ftape
I doubt it would have been significantly easier to start the porting effort from that vs. the original 2.4.x source.
Test coverage between subsystems in the Linux kernel varies widely. I don't think a lack of tests would prevent inclusion.
> No thanks and no deal.
I mean, now we have a driver for this old hardware that runs on a modern kernel, which we didn't before. I imagine you don't even have that hardware, so why do you care if someone else gets some use out of it?
The negativity here in many of these comments is just staggering. I've only recently started adopting LLM coding tools, and I still remain a skeptic about the whole thing overall, but... damn. Seems like most people aren't thinking critically and are just regurgitating "durrrr LLMs bad" over and over.
Even without that other article, this really reads like the author tried it for menial tasks on a neat passion project, and reports his success on it. (I'm a kernel developer, so I can empathize.)
Other people commenting about AI hype on the post isn't an indication that the post itself was created to hype AI, or that that the post itself is "bad".
Yes? The person who needs it is using it. Other people who need it (anyone who wants to archive tapes of that kind) now can, too.
> Second, another post on hackernews about how AI helps you code is not AI hype?
Do you think it was written with the intent to specifically hype AI, rather than to report on a passion project?
I suspect HN readers won't see enough value in your baked shit recipe for it to reach the front page - sorry. But bake away!
Learn to fucking read before writing lies.
Yes, you are wrong. And also, if you look around in these HN comments, there's at least one person here who says they have a bunch of these tapes lying around and would love to try the driver themselves. So that's two people!
> Second, any post on hackernews is made to generate hype.
Blanket generalizations like that aren't useful. You don't and can't know any random person's motivation for posting something here.
I don't even really understand why you're commenting. The things you are saying are either just rude or unnecessary. Honestly, if you are that cynical about things posted on this site, why even bother visiting it at all?