I don't think it makes much sense to expect such a cohesive/specific philosophy from an open source project like this.
The goal is "Linux on Mac". In a commercial product, specific details of what gets built usually stem from a more detailed vision that can be articulated as one. In open source projects those details are determined by what individual contributors are motivated to work on.
That doesn't means a cohesive vision can't emerge, there might be one for Asahi actually. But I think the default position is that it's kinda just a mob of people doing what they each feel like doing.
I don't think it matters that Asashi is a generation or three behind, because the moment you really need it is when Apple stops updating the OS for your hardware.
When M1 drops out of support I bet Asashi for the M1 machines will be pretty polished.
Another thing is, the M1 and later hardware is still years later some of the best arm64 hardware youre going to find. Combine that with the really affordable prices you can find on the used market and Linux arm64 on this kind of great hardware at a low price is quite appealing.
I think LWN is not just the best linux news site or the best tech news site, or the best new site. I think it's actually the best website. I just can't think of anything else that comes close in terms of quality of information.
If you have any professional connection at all to Linux then $11/mo is an absolute bargain!
The Asahi folks have been making really impressive progress on Polishing Cloth drivers so I'm optimistic that we'll at least have a community solution for the E-waste in future decades.
I came to these comments coz I was curious about the AI usage here, and FWIW I also thought it smelled AI written, but I didn't think it was slop. (IMO not all AI output is slop and not all slop comes from AI).
My main question was "did Claude do the investigation by itself or just write up the article from someone's notes?"
Also though, I'm quite willing to believe this is human written and the human just happens to have a Claudey style. The actual prose isn't that Claudey it's just the structure of how it presents ideas. But, Claude had to get that structure from somewhere. It's not that surprising to see people with that style of communication.
Nope, I'm one of those lucky folks who was privileged enough to be accused of writing in a weird and probably too mature for my high school English paper-way before the advent of gpt, lol. I've had to all but remove the em-dash from my vernacular, thanks to the ~ plague of inauthenticity ~ as I call it.
I did all the digging, researching, writing, etc myself. The reason the screenshots are from mobile is because I wrote a lot of it literally in my notes app, on my phone before I started putting together more dots. I eventually asked gpt if I was correct in my understanding about refrigeration controllers doing XYZ and if it was plausible for them to be hacked in this way, when looking for some docs I asked if it would be standard to have XYZ part of a contract public and XYZ private, and other singular questions like that. I also use a browser extension for spellcheck that (I think) uses AI to suggest phrasing improvements, which I used pretty nominally.
Is there any type of sidebar/footnote that you, as a reader, would like to see to denote AI usage during the writing and/or research process? Would you expect none? I don't plan to do many investigations such as this (literally started because I was personally impacted) but I do have a few potential article seeds about defense procurement tech I've asked a few definition/research questions to AI about and would like to make sure I'm keeping tabs on it since this is something I want to be perhaps hyper aware of moving forward. Keeping in mind this is my personal substack and I would like to maintain integrity, but also, not doing really any groundbreaking work here. Intended to be an outlet for my thoughts, not news.
> Is there any type of sidebar/footnote that you, as a reader, would like to see to denote AI usage during the writing and/or research process?
It's not something I expect, but I definitely don't see an issue with people putting a couple of sentences in an "expand to see AI usage notes" tab at the top or bottom of the page.
> Would you expect none?
As in, would I expect no AI usage? Coz no I absolutely expect people to use AI.
If you had got Claude to do this investigation for you then actually I think that would have been notable enough to include details of your AI workflow. But not because "it's cheating not to disclose it", rather because you'd probably have come up with quite a neat workflow that is interesting in its own right.
It's funny coz it seemed like they also cloned the confusion.
I don't really understand what Claude Cowork is. Sometimes I use it instead of plain Claude Chat for tasks that "feel big"? And when I've done that I've felt this was the right choice. But until I actually had that session up and running I would not be able to articulate what Cowork is or enumerate any specifics of how I expected it to behave. I just thought "maybe this is a Cowork task?"
(I have only used the cloud one. My understanding is the the local app is essentially Claude Code but for non-coders, which matches the description of the OpenAI equivalent).
Even as someone who's now used it a few times I wouldn't have been able to articulate as many details as Simon W does in this article, it's a weirdly shaped product structure.
Yeah I jumped on this quite excitedly but it's not prompt injection at all.
To be fair to the authors they don't actually say it is. But then they contrast it with the "0.00% prompt injection attack success rate".
The upshot is kinda the same - this is still evidence that we should be sandboxing our agents. But it doesn't actually challenge Anthropic's "our models are too clever to prompt-inject" vibe.
But Anthropic themselves are the ones who made the equivalence of "0.00% prompt injection attack success rate == auto-mode is safe"
The tweet literally says: "turns out you can get indirect prompt injection to ~0 on unseen attacks... auto mode is default in claude code as of next week"
Making the assertion, quite clearly in my opinion, that the reason auto mode is default is because he feels the lack of successful prompt injection attacks makes auto mode safe. This blog post proves that you can break auto mode's safety, even if it's not technically through a textbook indirect prompt injection attack.
Hmm yeah that's never really been my read on Auto Mode but I guess it's still worth pushing back on any messaging that seems to imply "Auto Mode is all you need".
I would reject "Auto Mode is safe" as a message but FWIW I am totally on board with "on aggregate, making Auto Mode the default improves the safety of Claude Code compared to the prior status quo". Coz I would say in the vast majority of cases the access classifier is doing a better job than the thing it replaced.
Anyway yeah. Like I said, conclusion is the same: we should be decoupling this from the harness. We ought to be sandboxing agents the same way we sandbox applications. I wish Claude Code would make this path smoother :(
Before I left Google recently there was a document going around called go/stake-your-reputation, basically saying "I'm happy to receive your AI generated code but the condition is that I will judge your capabilities by it, exactly as if you handwrote it, and I'll lower my opinion of you if it's slop (with the implication that if you don't improve I'll stop accepting your contributions)"
I think the term "stake your reputation" is quite good for this situation. I.e. "hi new contributor, please acknowledge that you Stake Your Reputation before we move ahead with this code review".
I am, for some reason, quite active commenting on Reddit. And lately the number of comments I see that are obviously Claude has skyrocketed. These are just engaging in normal innocuous comment threads about the day to day stuff I care about (tech, my local region, stuff like that). But obviously they are building organic-looking profiles that can then be exploited to push manipulative content later.
This scares me because the stuff that screams "THIS COMMENT WAS WRITTEN BY CLAUDE" has gotta be the tip of the iceberg. There must be much more of these comments that are better-prompted and using better-tuned model pipelines to make them less detectable. (Probably even just the lazy garbage is harder for me personally to detect if you just pass the prompt to GPT instead of Claude, it's just that I've read so much Claude output that I'm attuned to it).
So yeah suddenly dead internet theory is seeming a lot more real today than it did just a couple of months ago.
It's funny how so many of the Reddit bots - and actually the bots on X as well - are so bad at their job of looking real. When it's a short comment, they're so often using the "The real X is Y" format, or else "X really said Y", and just kind of repeating whatever the post was about.
It means you can comment on the problematic commits saying "please squash this". Then (if it works as well as Gerrit) you can compare the commit between the before and after squash state.
Basically it lets you treat the commits as part of the thing you are reviewing instead of just a minor detail that the UI doesn't care about very much.
I recently upgraded from a WiFi 5 router to a WiFi 7 one, and my bandwidth increase was a grand 0% (that's ok though I was actually just sick of my old router's shitty UI!)
There is about 10m and a brick wall between my AP and my desk so yeah, a fancy new MCS that can theoretically deliver 25Gbps was just never gonna be useful to me.
Also I've worked on (other non-WiFi) 802.11 products where our competitive edge was all about interference motivation. Our competitors at trade shows would see the demos and say "that's fake, you guys are cheating". So I have the feeling that in general there might be alpha in more resilient wireless links.
I saw a really good improvement through a floor for a device that has wifi 7 radio. Went from about 300mbps to 2000mbps. Going from 5Ghz 80Mhz channel to 6Ghz and 320Mhz was a big change. What has not worked with wifi 7 is MLO, openWRT doesn't really support it very well yet and neither did the original firmware but I have no one on 6ghz within range so its been stable and performant.
> What has not worked with wifi 7 is MLO, openWRT doesn't really support it very well yet and neither did the original firmware
I think this is spot on. On a Banana Pi Pro 4E, the vendor supplied image which carries custom patches supports MLD/MLO, yet when I try the latest upstream OpenWRT it doesn't work. I've not had too much time to investigate the reason(s) why.
Its not really implemented yet. The various router vendors are still working on fully implementing the chipset and there is trickle of patches still coming from Filogic development on the chipset making there way into the vendor firmwares and OpenWRT.
There is also the issue few client devices implement at this point as well and certainly nothing that is mobile in nature on the sales pitch of "it costs power".
For a while I had wireless mesh networking in my new house, until I finally got around to pulling fiber to get a proper 10Gbps backbone. Upgrading from my UniFi WiFi6E AP to a WiFi 7 doubled my effective throughput as measured by SpeedTest. This in a 1930s house with solid brick construction.
What kind of WiFi 7? (There are a lot that don't have 6GHz support).
You should get far better performance on 6GHz, though there are harsh power limits in most countries with various ways to enable it which may complicate things. But if you can get full power on 6GHz it should reach 10m no issues at all, and with 320MHz should be at least twice as fast.
If you can also get MLO working (which is not simple) you'd be able to bond another band with it.
I feel like this is the same problem USB and bluetooth have, where there are so many optional extras, that it's so hard to truly compare devices since a standard is actually like 100 standards packaged together.
Wouldn't it make more sense then to ask about high bandwidth channel support rather than frequency support? It's not the frequency that's important here.
Higher frequencies support higher bandwidths though.
I don't think the 2.4GHz band even has 160MHz free, for example. Literally impossible to support because 2.4GHz to 2.5GHz is all you get (100MHz or so).
5GHz isn't much larger than 160MHz. Like it can fit but some number of channels is better for everyone.
6GHz band is like 5.9GHz to 7GHz or something stupidly wide. Because of the new wider band, you can effectively have larger channels with fewer problems.
Well you can run any bandwidth at any frequency, I get that the WiFi specs define set bands which include both a center frequency and a bandwidth but it's a bit weird then to focus on the frequency when the bandwidth is what matters isn't it? I assume there are products which can operate on frequencies around 6GHz but which don't support the extreme wide band channels?
These bands have names. The 2.4 to 2.5 GHz band (100MHz bandwidth) is named the 2.4 GHz band.
The 5.4 to 5.7 GHz band is called the 5GHz band.
The 5.9 to 7GHz band is called the 6GHz band.
Anyone discussing the bands should know the relative bandwidths of each. And the size of the channels also matters but we all know the 6GHz band has larger channel widths, it's part of the point of upgrading
Yes exactly. Also with MLO (bonding eg 5GHz and 6GHz) together on WiFi 7 you could get 480MHz of spectrum, which would allow many gigabits quite "easily".
Only problem is firmware support etc is somewhere between non existent and very poor in general for MLO, which is a shame as it's definitely a great feature in theory.
For your brick wall home situation; polarization duplex combined with some amount of beam forming/spatial-multiplexing plus importantly directional antennas on both sides of the wall would give you substantial gains even without increasing EIRP.
Without EIRP increases it's the receiving side that needs the antenna to improve speed.
Yeah I was considering this actually, but then I realised that I really want a working LAN 100.0% of the time, so I'd only go tinker mode if I had a backup. So I was gonna be buying a router regardless.
Now I have a Ubiquiti one, it's antithetical to my DIY instincts but I think I'm OK with my router being one of the proprietary appliances in my life.
Plus now the wired section of my LAN is really fast.
Interesting, I don't really have downtime with my OpenWRT setup. Probably because I don't really touch the setup once it's there, other than occasionally doing the firmware updates.
Honestly, you got me on this one. I probably break my OpenWRT setup every three months or so on average.
I recently decided to stop running anything too fancy on it and keep the router itself simple: just secure, robust networking. All the tinkering has moved to chained network VMs in QubesOS instead.
It was definitely nice having different LAN ports behave differently, multiple VPNs, policy-based routing, filtering, monitoring, and all that. But yeah, every extra thing I add is another chance to break the whole network.
All that said, I could never imagine going back from OpenWRT. The answer to basically any networking idea is always “yes.” There are pretty much no limits. I especially like that it doesn’t try to hide networking terminology or abstract everything away. You really get to understand what you’re actually doing and can choose the exact configuration you need, down to the smallest detail. Everything is exposed.
I've just upgraded to an 8Gbit package (50 quid a month, rude not to). I'm having to use the provided router as my old one only has a 2.5Gbit port (still provides wifi however). I'd be keen to know of any fairly decent openwrt compatible routers with 10Gbit/wifi 7 at a reasonable price.
For what it's worth there are now mini PCs on AliExpress with SFP+ ports. I have one running OpenWrt along with some inexpensive SFP+ modules that's been working great. Although with my setup, I opted to have an external wifi AP connected to it instead of relying on an internal wifi card.
I had a TP-Link deco, which while great as mesh, you couldn't limit the speed of certain devices. Which was again fine, except when the PlayStation 5 in a room could literally saturate the whole 250mbs bandwidth of my internet and when it would do an update would make our whole houses internet unusable.
It's seriously impressive how it wasnt possible to set per device speed limits or even QoS which has been a thing since like 2007
Is your Deco in AP mode or router mode? Mine says QoS is only available in router mode. I just use my ISP router with the AP turned off and my Decos in AP mode. My ISP router is pretty full-featured so I don't really care to deal with whatever simplified management the Deco would give me if it was the router and firewall instead.
I have a multi AP setup for the same reasons as the parent - large thick internal walls (and a “long” home instead of evenly shaped), and frustratingly more than I want to is the answer…
Yeah I have tried it! It beats WiFi to some rooms, but to my office it's very slow.
You would never be able to predict this, which is an unfortunate thing about powerline IMO. You just have to buy the modems and see how they perform on your particular wiring.
And how stably. Ours works amazing if you ignore that it duplicates packets 2-3 times for no reason (netting a few hundred megabits, many times the speed that VDSL is able to deliver here), but then it will die for a few minutes roughly once or twice a day, unpredictably. Thankfully we only need it for the bedroom and everything else reaches from a centrally hung 'router'. When it's down again, we briefly switch to mobile data or the poor signal we get from downstairs or we, y'know, get out of bed or turn off the phone and go sleep, depending on the time of day :-)
It's a strange pattern and I'd be interested to solve the mystery. Not many powerline debugging tools available though, not to say none
Yeah I get occasional dropouts in the setup I installed at my mum's place too.
And yeah it's just a bit of a weird black box, and also fundamentally it's exploiting a nontrivial system to do something that had little relationships to its design goals. I don't know anything about electrical systems but I assume there is all kinds of random shit that can disrupt Powerline links while still being fully within the design envelope of the power system.
As is MoCA, which in my experience is a lot higher-speed and more reliably so.
People tend to want speed, speed, speed, but tons of use cases are totally fine with a reliable 100 Mbps. For a lot of remote monitoring stuff, even 1 kbps is enough if it works reliably. Not everything needs to serve up a webpage.
It’s been around for quite some time. I assumed it would be known around here. The lowest level is 100 Mbps and I keep telling people on Reddit that 100 Mbps is plenty for so many use cases. I wouldn’t install it on a new plant, but if it’s there, use it.
Just a bit of side opinion working rf and some electrical, and fully understand if that was the best you could get, but some outlets are wired on different circuits. Also, some rf devices get overloaded if you're too close and that can degrade performance. Not saying that's definitively what happened, but you could have been either too close or further than you thought
(Repeating myself coz I saw this after writing my sibling comment..)
It's highly variable in my experience. I've had it work pretty well in some situations and barely at all in others.
I have certainly never got 1000mbps. I think I have got 300 at best. In my office I can only get about 50 even though it works pretty well in other parts of the same small apartment.
... Which is kinda annoying coz they aren't really all that cheap for something you have to just buy and then find out later if it actually works!
The goal is "Linux on Mac". In a commercial product, specific details of what gets built usually stem from a more detailed vision that can be articulated as one. In open source projects those details are determined by what individual contributors are motivated to work on.
That doesn't means a cohesive vision can't emerge, there might be one for Asahi actually. But I think the default position is that it's kinda just a mob of people doing what they each feel like doing.