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Discussion (53 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
> The author was banned from Asahi Linux for hiding his extensive use of LLMs from us in another attempted contribution, and (more importantly) for concealing that he is a former Apple engineer with direct contacts to the people involved in Apple Silicon development. Make of this what you will.
I think at this point the hacking community needs to grow some balls.
It won’t be clean room like the stuff Alyssa did.
There's also ongoing issues around Codex for this sort of thing, given Apple is suing OpenAI over stolen trade secrets[2]. And nobody knows whether training data in other models is similarly tainted.
[1]: https://codyho.dev/documents/cody_ho_resume.pdf
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/10/apple-sue...
Basically, aren’t we facing a situation where LLM-assisted knowledge laundering is becoming a thing?
Nobody has been held accountable for AI selecting a grade school as a bombing target on the first day of America and Israel’s strikes on Iran. 100+ school girls killed, and no accountability.
The problem with this driver is not licensing or code quality; I assume it's under a threat of receiving C&D letter, or maybe also a legal suit for breaking some NDA.
Including the proprietary GPU drivers. If this MacBook driver end up out of tree, so be it.
I didn't mean that I understand the actual intricacies of the legal situation.
Sorry for my confusing wording.
I mean you can get good stuff out of it if you know what you are doing and guide it, but if you just say “here’s a regression suite. Write an implementation that passes” you will get something that works for a while but ages quickly and will need to be thrown away.
However, Asahi Linux has a strictly no-AI policy [1]. So this great work can't be upstreamed. I expect to see a bunch of AI-assisted forks that get things working smoothly on newer hardware to dominate as most people just care about getting stuff working, while only a handful of purists stick to the non-AI version running on ancient hardware.
[1] https://asahilinux.org/llm-policy/
I assume I’ll get used to it, but my mental model of what’s possible hasn’t been fully rewired yet.
- During my time at Apple I never saw any of the macOS source code, at all, even for userspace components. I had not even heard of things like SPTM.
- I have not worked there since June 2025
I don't believe that there's any risk due to my former Apple employment. As another example, WINE does not ban all former Microsoft employees, they just ban anyone who has ever looked at the Windows source code. If I felt there was even a chance that my employment at Apple may have exposed me to relevant internal secrets, I would refrain from contributing to community projects.
There plenty of us not working at Apple who can reuse the same approach for M5 and next generations of hardware.
I just think one good part of Marcan's work is that they streamed a lot of their workflow with all kind of problems occured along the way and you could see how to solve them.
And please so not let anti-llm crowd discourage you. People like me who want to use good hardware and already choose to pay for Apple one just need drivers that work good and feature complete - code purity and "quality" is secondary.
1. We want to guarantee our work is not a "derivative work" of anything Apple wrote.
2. If we look at any Apple binaries, there's no way prove that our code didn't borrow from Apple.
3. Since we didn't look at any Apple binaries, then there's no way our work can be a derivative work-- we didn't even look at their stuff.
The legal framework around all this is way too immature to make a definitive statement one way or the other. Anyone who says otherwise is speculating.
The only way to clarity will be legislation or court cases, because it really could go either way.
Furthermore, given that Asahi Linux, the biggest game in town when it comes to running Linux on Apple silicon, is trying to be cleanroom, it is incredibly rude of you to not mention LLMs until after showing a page full of LLM-derived firmware ABI. This is a trap for anyone who's trying to be cleanroom.
Perhaps before Astra was nerfed. It is now the dumbest model right after Gemini. Sol still holds up.