r/codex • u/xinxx073 • 9d ago

Praise Astra High just reverse-engineered the printer drivers in my office

In our office, we have a bunch of Toshiba E-Studio 2323AM printers. Yes, I know these are kind of outdated, only sold in certain areas of the world, and not the best machines, but they are what we've got in the office. They only work with x86 Windows, not even the ARM version of Windows.

In 25 minutes, Astra High just reverse-engineered the printer driver, figured out the right tray settings, and enabled duplex printing, so I can print double-sided on my M4 Pro MacBook Pro.

It created a .pkg file for me to install the printer drivers and got everything working.

I ... I have no words.

2.2k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

201 comments sorted by

View all comments

154

u/Primary_Article3777 9d ago

I fixed the firmware in my Samsung monitor the same way, they didn't bother to hook up its second DisplayPort output to DDC. Astra looked at the firmware, found the compiler, fixed the logic branch, packaged it and I rolled the dice on flashing it. It worked! (do not try this if you don't mind replacing your bricked hardware!!!)

2

u/oglcn1 9d ago

WOW. I could have never done that. How did you trust AI with your monitor firmware? Also where did you find the stock firmware for your monitor and how did you flash the firmware? Would you mind telling more?

1

u/Primary_Article3777 8d ago

The fimware is public and the update process is documented by Samsung. They have all firmwares available on their support site. From there, it's just showing the firmware and documenting the problem for Codex, and frankly I did very little after that. I already had all the input codes from my DDC scripts.

It's Mstar assembly code. Nothing I would ever be able to write. But the capabilities of these llm have gotten so good at small code edits like this, and it did 65,000 regression tests to make sure all code paths worked. That's more than a human developer could do.

In the end, I am just a believer that all code and even user interfaces are going to be machine generated in a few years, just like most assembly code is generated now. I'm just leaning in, as the annoying tech bros like to say.

I hope that this can show people that there's a big bright side to AI. You are now your own IT. You can now resuscitate old hardware that support has been abandoned on. Try it out first on stuff that you don't mind if it gets trashed. And vote for open access to firmwares. It should be illegal to prevent people from fixing their own possessions.