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.
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.