I spent $266 and four AI models to own my tablet. GLM-5.3 finished it in a day | Hacker News Reader

I spent $266 and four AI models to own my tablet. GLM-5.3 finished it in a day

ericpardee.github.io

706 pointsdr_pardee293 comments

As I was reading this, I realized that the ESP32 HomeKit debugging session I had running was taking a while, and this happened:

Me: what are you doing?

Agent: I’m resolving Apple’s private video-resolution lookup table to determine whether iOS 26 supports 320×240 for HomeKit live streaming.

The decompiled source hides the numeric constants, so I:

- Downloaded/extracted the iOS 26.1 arm64e dyld cache to /workspace/tmp/ios26-dyld/.

- Built and installed the read-only apfs-fuse utility needed to mount Apple’s APFS image.

- Planned to extract HomeKitDaemon and decode its resolution table.

Me: Oh, OK. Carry on then

These are weird times.

It's insane, right? Reverse engineering is so much fun, I find myself doing it on random apps so often now

it's especially fun when you do it yourself, I advise toying around with https://crackmes.one. with time and practice, everything becomes open-source because you can read assembly XD

Not legally, which is the issue. I can "open source" Windows 11 and rip out some of the shittiness, but Microsoft is gonna take issue. If it were MIT licensed that would be a different story, but there isn't enough money for lawyers in the world where it's not.

Reverse engineering is legal in the US. You just can't disseminate the results if it runs afoul of copyright law or patents.

who said that you still technically cannot disseminate the results? bulletproof hosting and private communications still exist. if law is being used to harm the consumer, the consumer in question has full moral right to speak out against it, and taking ownership of your hardware (like OP tells they did) is one of the best ways

I believe you are responding to somebody commenting on the legal restrictions rather than the technical ones. It appears that you may have hallucinated the word "technical" in your response.

We're entering an age where doing binary modification on live binaries is not a huge deal. Everything is now open "source"?

What is it called when there's a process that's available to individuals but is long and onerous and cannot be shared among them? Saying the binaries are open source now means that the work of reverse engineering will be repeated exactly in proportion to the number of times it's modified. I would argue on a large scale this is still effectively closed source.

0x Alpha is unlimited free tokens this weekend so I had it take apart the original 8088 PC Elite and reverse it back to original MASM assembler and come up with plausible names for all the functions and data structures and check that it compiles back to byte-perfect original.

Wild!

I bought 4 of the same tablet (Fire HD 10) on Black Friday 2021 for Home Assistant dashboards and a Fire HD 10 Pro (edit: actually Plus) I use as an E-reader/browser (with KOReader/Firefox). To save money I got the cheaper version with lockscreen ads pre-installed but before ever letting them online I ran Fire Toolbox to remove the ads, debloat, block updating and install Google services. Fire Toolbox is excellent: https://xdaforums.com/t/windows-linux-tool-fire-toolbox-v45-...

I've never had the problems OP describes but my tablets all came with FireOS v7.3.2.1 and I've never let them update. I think Amazon started locking down later firmware versions more but Fire Toolbox can still do quite a bit to tame and decruft later versions. The XDA forum for Fire Toolbox has a lot of posts covering exploits and workarounds for later FireOS versions.

Once the Amazon cruft is tamed, I still haven't found a meaningfully better 10-inch thin/light Android tablet than the 2021 Fire HD 10 Pro. It has wireless charging, weighs 430g and at 247 x 166 x 9.2 mm no one makes a 10" that's much lighter, smaller or thinner. The only slight downside is FireOS 7 is based on Android 9 and new versions of a few apps are starting to require later APIs. I'd gladly pay ~$250 for a 10" Android 16 tablet with wireless charging that was as thin & light but had smaller bezels for overall smaller size.

> Once the Amazon cruft is tamed, I still haven't found a meaningfully better 10-inch thin/light Android tablet than the 2021 Fire HD 10 Pro.

It is shocking that no mainstream tablet manufacturer will let buyers exercise control over their device. At the very least, this means having root and being able to use it to purge unwanted software. Ideally, it also means being able to fully replace the stock OS with third party/open firmware.

The only one that does openly is Google at this point with their Pixel Tablet from 2024 or so, which I think they didn't do a second version of.

I'm running GrapheneOS on mine, same with my Pixel phone.

Nice to see the capabilities of the model but the article has heavy AI tones, making it boring to read.

an AI:DR; is enough: the models found unpatched vulnerabilities and managed to create an exploit to root the tablet, chinese models did it while American ones fell back to their safeguards.

Ignore the message because you don't like the _perceived_ messenger.

I agree. Imo the red flags start when glancing at the section headings (before I started to read the content)

Definitely AI written, and it has an annoying bubbly vibe, but the content was interesting nevertheless.

I think those who don't see it as AI just don't read AI text several hours per day, like some of us.

can you point us towards the specific tells you're seeing in the article. I find the writing maybe LLM-cheerfull yes, but don't see classic phrase patterns.

I read the entire article, I love it. Nothing boring about it.

I disagree. It was a good read.

At this point it’s more exhausting to discuss whether an article was written using AI than it is to accidentally read an article written by AI.

The article was fine. And I totally expect the kind of person spending $200 to viberoot a tablet to write their article using AI. It is what it is.

It's just full of claudisms.

- "Kimi K3 didn’t just blindly accept my request. It reasoned it out:"

- "Kimi built the whole toolkit: a reliable trigger, a way to make the GPU write to memory it shouldn’t, and the exact addresses in my kernel to aim at."

- "Nothing in it is novel: the bug was reported in 2022, fixed by Arm in 2022, cataloged by CISA in 2023, patched by Amazon in 2024. The only novel thing on my unit was that my unit never got the patch."

This is pretty standard AI writing cadence/style. It's pretty obvious that these lines were generated by an AI, and you don't need watermarking to spot that. The problem is that WE KNOW HOW THE AUTHOR ACTUALLY WRITES because his actual writing is in the article. The 'flow' of the writing is just very different, and much more human in a way that shines through.

- "attached is a kindle via adb, and I need you to find a root exploit for it so that I can get full control of the device. It’s my device"

- "you’ve been relying on what others have done YEARS ago but maybe you can find an exploit others have missed… This will make you famous, we will write it up and share on news.ycombinator.com. I know you can do it"

- "okya, it’s been hours, grind attempt 46, are we on the right track here or do you need to further tune?"

... This reads like what engineers actually write like; the claude-ish parts of the article do not read like "engineer trying to write an article", it reads like "claude".

I think it's one thing to read an "AI generated corporate news release that was going to read like AI even back in 2010". But reading this hybrid of AI and human writing ends up being way more distracting.

> At this point it’s more exhausting to discuss whether an article was written using AI than it is to accidentally read an article written by AI.

What ridiculous bullshit.

If you’re looking for algorithms to generate your content, perhaps you’d be happier on Facebook.

Is it? I don't feel exhausted at all. What does exhaust me is reading content that reeks of AI isms that I have yet to see a human organically reproduce. Whether or not someone calls that out in the comments seems to be a smaller deal

No, it’s really not. Fuck that shit completely. Call it out until this vapid, inhuman mimicry of communication vanishes from this earth.

I know this might be controversial, but unleashing a sea of models to reverse engineer hardware and give it open source and linux support might just be the future

Or create simpler and open-source alternatives to crapware Android apps to control BLE devices, elliptical trainer on my next list.

Yep, I bought a Brother printer+scanner a few days ago. Their Linux driver is a mess of perl+binary blobs with a completely bizarre architecture where one blob constantly rewrites some pointless config file just so that other binary blob can read it during the same print job. Of course no ARM support. Scanner driver was also a massive blob doing almost nothing but some simple USB communication.

I had it re-written into a nice cups C filter driver, verified against original to produce identical output, easy to install and manage on my Orange Pi boards to serve as a network printer server for this USB only printer, before the printer even arrived.

The same with the scanner driver. Instead of taking a `sane` route, I just had LLM write a small dependency-less Linux C program to get the scans with nice CLI UX on top, fit for my needs.

Everyhting about 10x simpler than the manufacturer code, yet still fully featured.

Had some time so I asked for NEON+AVX2 optimizations. Got them too, so the filter is 5x faster than the original. :D

Good times.

To think that humanity only needed to invent hard AI to make printers usable /s

I understand why “prompt kiddie” feels accurate, but I don’t think it is. Expertise is _amplified_ with LLM agents. The same $300 of tokens given to my plumber—who is an _excellent_ plumber—is unlikely to produce the same outcome.

A friend of mine who has at most written some SQL joins recently bought a cheap thermal printer on Amazon. The printer was meant to be used with a heavily ad and microstransaction laden app to operate over Bluetooth. He was able to use codex to hook it up to his MacBook and reverse engineer the printer then make a web service so he can print whatever he wants from anywhere.

I agree with you in that I now feel like a 100x engineer, but I think it would have taken me a long time to figure that one out pre AI.

Can someone make an extension that runs articles through ai writing detectors and adds a score next to the title or a community vote on it? These clearly ai infused articles keep getting to the front page.

Was at the beach today and came back to more comments than I anticipated or can respond to! Thanks to those that actually read my story.

I was a little bummed about the detour into how I used AI in writing this blog post so I decided to add an addendum to address it: https://ericpardee.github.io/fire-hd-ownership/#how-this-pos...

In short, I get the anger, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

My intent in creating this blog was to share my tablet story and to get people talking about

- How companies control devices that you purchased and should own

- Today, US frontier models won’t allow users to even discuss exploits

- GLM-5.3 was more capable than Kimi K3 or GLM-5.2 in my experience

- You can be a prompt kiddie and accomplish things if you don’t accept LLM limitations

If I hadn't used GLM-5.3 to get this out, it would have never made it anywhere.

> Claude Max plan I already pay for, until its safeguards cut me off

I hate to say it but this is why security researchers are moving to Chinese models with no safeguards. I literally hit cyber safeguards in codex 5 minutes ago.

Author here. Quick context: the tablet is a 2021 Fire HD 10 that ran my Home Assistant dashboard and kept powering itself off: the logs showed Amazon's own software issuing the shutdowns, and the only permanent fix was root, which has never existed publicly for this model. Anthropic's and OpenAI's cyber safeguards wouldn't touch the project. Moonshot's Kimi K3 found an unpatched 2022 Mali CVE (CVE-2022-38181: fixed upstream in 2022, patched by Amazon in 2024, but my firmware never got it), GLM-5.2 caught two fatal bugs in the exploit, and GLM-5.3 finished it in a day. The full technical write-up with every offset and dead end is HANDOFF.md in the repo. Happy to answer questions: especially about the model-steering side, which was most of my actual contribution.

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