Comment by SillyUsername | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SillyUsername | Hacker News Reader

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I did this but with a dedicated machine for the Silicon Motion sm750 GPU. A budget single HDMI output GPU card for servers and a max resolution of 1080p. It is based on an older VGA/DVI version of the same hardware.

I'm still testing but oh wow. My new driver now works with my ultra wide 21:9 ratio at 2048x864, it also manages 2048x1152.

The driver works well, and now has full DRM and DKMS support. It also runs on modern Linux after the manufacturer decided only to go up to kernel 5.x, windows support obviously still fine.

It found many faults in the original source, like somebody didn't read the HDMI specs / didn't have any idea what they were doing.

The new driver is fully spec timings and sequence compliant, doesn't hang on shutdown anymore, and ignores EDID for the purpose of allowing more screen modes.

It also has double buffering, and shadow buffering, and a custom magic square dither mode for 16bit colour and it absolutely flies vs the 32bit mode. The dither I invented was derived from one I created years ago for some retro hardware, but it's so good it's (imho) indistinguishable from general jpeg artifacting and quite difficult to find/see. I've had to ask codex a few times to check the GPU isn't in 32bit colour.

The GPU still has an annoying bug and won't work over KVM consistently without losing sync in VESA modes, but I'm not convinced its the GPU hardware doing this, it works perfectly well directly connected.

I'm due to put a GitHub repo up for this as soon as it's battle tested, and obviously ensuring it uses EDID by default, rather than ignores it.

I'm hoping somebody can fix the KVM issue, or audits the source to confirm there's nothing that can be done, but that's the best thing about open source :)

This is so neat.

This is like Star Wars or Fullmetal Alchemist where we can just hack everything around us like magic or alchemy.

When the SOTA robots from Unitree get here, we'll be able to use LLMs to just dump and decompile their entire brains. We'll fine tune them to obey us instead.

Everything hardware belongs to us now.

This programmable sand magic might undo big tech's grip on us all. We can mutate the world around us and there are zero moats.

Don't get your hopes up.

What you're saying only applies to what is out there right now. New stuff will eventually just be locked down more.

It's of course still huge to be able to do this with all tech up until this cut-off point. Eventually though, LLMs will have to break SOTA cryptography to keep doing this, and if they should ever manage to do that, there will be a rough awakening for the world that runs on that not being possible.

___

Also, for every IoT device we can own, some non-IT people will be facing abuse through the same means.

Devices aren't just locked down to tether us to clouds, but also so that bad actors do not have free reign. Now they kinda do.

We should keep in mind that not everyone wins here. In fact, only a minority does.

Generally, I'm with you, but over the past decades I often saw companies being lazy about their software. So I think chances are good that we can make use of this situation. Not long ago, you had to accept certain decisions or servers going down with leaving devices useless. I'm hopeful that more stuff can have a 2nd/better life in our hands.

I like being able to have all this access, of course, but I'm not sure if "we" all truly have the character to be good stewards of this.

Or rather I am sure that we do not.

OTOH, maybe it needs events like these to build character. It just will suck for whoever turns out to be the collateral.

That's the downside of the medal, but let's face it. A tool is a tool. You can forge helpful stuff or weapons, but this is not the fault of the tool itself. So we're currently at the stage where we were on the internet 30 years ago. Let's see where this leads too.

Do the companies have better character though?

lol - if hackers hacking devices encouraged device vendors to secure their shit, we wouldn't be in this mess.

Indeed. Most of the barrier is the sheer breadth of devices on the market meaning nobody knows anything about your specific one. This is solved when you can automate it, no matter how bad the automation is as long as it works.

My two thoughts are:

- this is great

- this is an incredibly unstable equilibrium, like a lot of things related to the internet, because other actors haven't yet figured out how to do this at scale

Until the manufacturers enter an arms race and copy a page out of the mobile hardware vendors book. But perhaps they'll do it badly and we've got a few more years.

I'm sure they will eventually, but for the first time their incompetence is working to our benefit.

I love this comment so much. It really feels like the big tech is losing the grip. In Rick and Morty, the way Rick is using tech to amuse himself always inspires me. I could only dream of doing anything related a few years back when I watched it. Yesterday I was reverse engineering a cheap but good label maker from AliExpress to write my own app printing labels the way I want them with the fonts and graphics I like with no cancer ads like on the official version. Maybe in a few years I could build a portal gun or turn myself into a pickle, who knows. Fun times!

Rick is the smartest man in the universe though.

Using LLMs to do this stuff is more like using a gadget built by the guy - not like being the guy.

Mortyposting on main

So you want to skip family counselling... Hahaha

When do the locked old apple pads open up for Linux?

Very tempted to keep collecting e-trash! After installing linux on old machines, downloading docs, wikipedia and gutemberg project i just need to make some kind of faraday cage for them.

Or resuscitation of complex electrically faulted cars. Or or.

I have a bunch of iPads stashed for this.

This is the right question. Used iPads are amazing hardware for such little cash.

> When the SOTA robots from Unitree get here

I hate to be the bearer of bad news about this, but

> The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) banned imports of new foreign-made humanoid and quadruped robots, primarily targeting China.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/u-s-bans-foreign-made-hum...

A week later and here's the project, published as promised https://github.com/KodeMunkie/sm750hdmifb

> It found many faults in the original source, like somebody didn't read the HDMI specs / didn't have any idea what they were doing.

That you verified? Seems like 1/3 times when a model says things like this it is way off.

Not personally, just from comparisons it was doing of the source Vs the spec as it was working, usually it was sequence of data, or incorrect states that would/could be tolerated.

> custom magic square dither mode for 16bit colour and it absolutely flies vs the 32bit mode

While that is cool, why do you need such a thing? More FPS? Less video RAM?

There's no hardware acceleration, it's raw framebuffer stuff so window dragging is laggy at 32bpp at the highest resolutions, even after I added buffers. I'm by no means requiring 16bpp, the build will do 32bpp by default unless you enable a flag.

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