Comment by flax | Hacker News Reader

Comment by flax | Hacker News Reader

This smells like bullshit to me, although I am admittedly not experienced with Claude.

I find it difficult to believe that a sleep mask exists with the features listed: "EEG brain monitoring, electrical muscle stimulation around the eyes, vibration, heating, audio." while also being something you can strap to your face and comfortably sleep in, with battery capacity sufficient for several hours of sleep.

I also wonder how Claude probed bluetooth. Does Claude have access to bluetooth interface? Why? Perhaps it wrote a secondary program then ran that, but the article describes it as Claude probing directly.

I'm also skeptical of Claude's ability to make accurate reverse-engineered bluetooth protocol. This is at least a little more of an LLM-appropriate task, but I suspect that there was a lot of chaff also produced that the article writer separated from the wheat.

If any of this happened at all. No hardware mentioned, no company, no actual protocol description published, no library provided.

It makes a nice vague futuristic cyperpunk story, but there's no meat on those bones.

This isn't to the level of the OP, but I just asked Claude "Are there any interesting Bluetooth devices in my vicinity which aren't actually mine or ones I am connected to?" and it downloaded a tool called `blueutil` and identified a variety of things.

When I complained that the results were boring, it installed a Python package called 'bleak', found a set of LED lights (which I assumed are my daughter's) and tried to control them. It said the signal was too weak and got me to move around the house, whereupon it connected to them, figured out the protocol, and actually changed the lights while I was sat on her bed - where I am right now. Now I have a new party trick when she gets home! I had no idea they were Bluetooth controlled, nor clearly without any security at all.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/selepu/dreampilot-ai-gu...

Found that in seconds. EEG, electrical stimulation, heat, audio, etc. Claims a 20 hour battery.

As to the Claude interactions, like others I am suspicious and it seems overly idealized and simplified. Claude can't search for BT devices, but you could hook it up with an MCP that does that. You can hook it up with a decompiler MCP. And on and on. But it's more involved than this story details.

That appears to be more than a centimeter thick, and not particularly flexible. It's more like ski goggles than a sleep mask.

So yeah, a product exists that claims to be a sleep mask with these features. Maybe someone could even sleep while wearing that thing, as long as they sleep on their back and don't move around too much. I remain skeptical that it actually does the things it claims and has the battery life it claims. This is kickstarter after all. Regardless, this would qualify as the device in question for the article. Or at least inspiration for it.

Without evidence such as wireshark logs, programs, protocol documentation, I'm not convinced that any of this actually _happened_.

Claude, or any good agent, doesn't need MCP to do things. As long as it has access to a shell it can craft any command that it needs to fulfill its prompt.

There are no shell commands to do what is described. I could get Claude to interact with BLE devices, but it did it by writing and running various helper applications, for instance using the Bleak library. So I guess not an MCP per se.

They said access to a shell, not to shell commands. A shell can include a package manager.

Not really? I did something similar for a different device recently. It can make files and has access to bash. It's perfectly capable of installing packages and writing small scripts basically entirely autonomously. No MCP needed.

A lot of BLE peripherals are very easy to probe. And there are libraries available for most popular languages that allow you to connect to a peripheral and poke at any exposed internals with little effort.

As for the reverse engineering, the author claims that all it took was dumping the strings from the Dart binary to see what was being sent to the bluetooth device. It's plausible, and I would give them the benefit of the doubt here.

thread with claude: https://gist.github.com/aimihat/a206289b356cac88e2810654adf0...

I was originally going to ask something similar, but from a different angle.

These blog posts now making the rounds on HN are the usual reverse engineering stories, but made a lot more compelling simply because they involve using AI.

Never mind that the AI part isn't doing any heavy lifting and probably just as tedious as not using AI in the first place. I am confused why the author mentions it so prominently. Past authors would not have been so dramatic and just waved their hands that they had some trial and error before finding out how the app is built. The focus would have been on the lack of auth and the funny stuff they did before reporting it to the devs.

Claude could access anything on your device, including system or third party commands for network or signal processing - it may even have their manuals/sites/man pages in the training set. It’s remarkably good at figuring things out, and you can watch the reasoning output. There are mcp tools for reverse engineering that can give it even higher level abilities (ghidra is a popular one).

Yesterday I watched it try and work around some filesystem permission restrictions, it tried a lot of things I would never have thought of, and it was eventually successful. I was kinda goading it though.

Yes, it is very lacking in details. The Claude output would have been interesting, or a few logs or protocol dumps.

The lack of detail makes me suspect the truth of most of the story.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47020069

wow! Thanks for that.

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