Introducing a ddu-alike for Tribblix

Introducing a new feature in Tribblix m36. There's a new ddu subcommand for zap.

In OpenSolaris, the Device Driver Utility would map the devices it found and work out what software was needed to drive them. This isn't that utility, but is inspired by that functionality, rewritten for Tribblix as a tiny little shell script.

As an example, this is the output of zap ddu for Tribblix in a bhyve instance:

jack@tribblix:~$ zap ddu
Device acpivirtnex handled by acpinex in TRIBsys-kernel-platform [installed]
Device pci1af4,1000,p handled by vioif in TRIBdrv-net-vioif [installed]
Device pci1af4,1001 handled by vioblk in TRIBdrv-storage-vioblk [installed]
Device pci1af4,1 handled by vioif in TRIBdrv-net-vioif [installed]
Device pciclass,030000 handled by vgatext in TRIBsys-kernel [installed]
Device pciclass,060100 handled by isa in TRIBsys-kernel-platform [installed]
Device pciex_root_complex handled by npe in TRIBsys-kernel-platform [installed]
Device pnpPNP,303 handled by kb8042 in TRIBsys-kernel [installed]
Device pnpPNP,f03 handled by mouse8042 in TRIBsys-kernel [installed]

Simply put, it will list the devices it finds, which driver is responsible for them, and which package that driver is contained in (and whether that package is installed).

This, while a tiny little feature, is one of those small things that is actually stunningly useful.

If there's a device that we have a driver for that isn't installed, this helps identify it so you know what to install.

What this doesn't do (yet, and unlike the original ddu) is show devices we don't have a driver for at all.

Is all this thing called AI worthwhile?

Before I even start, let's be clear: there are an awful lot of things currently being bundled under the "AI" banner, most of which of neither artificial nor intelligent.

So when I'm talking about AI here, I'm talking about what's being marketed to the masses as AI. This generally doesn't include the more traditional subjects of machine learning or image recognition, which I've often seen relabelled as AI.

But back to the title: is the modern thing called AI worthwhile?

Whatever it is, AI can do some truly remarkable things. That isn't something you can argue against. It can do some truly stupid and hopelessly wrong things as well.

But where does this good stuff fit in? Are businesses really going to benefit by embracing AI?

Well, yes, up to a point. There's a lot of menial work that can be handed off to an AI. It might be able to do it cheaper than a human.

The first snag is Jevon's paradox; by making menial tasks cheaper, a business simply opens the door to larger quantities of menial tasks, so it saves no money and its costs might even go up.

To be honest, though, I would have to say that if you can hand a task off to an AI, is it worth doing in the first place?

That's the rub, yes you might be able to optimise a process by using AI, but you can optimise it much more by eliminating it entirely.

(And you then don't have to pay extra for someone to come along and clean up after the AI has made a mess of it.)

It's not just the first level of process you need to look at. Take the example of summarising meetings. It's not so much that you don't need the summary, but to start with you need to run meetings better so they don't need to be summarised, and even better, the meeting probably wasn't needed at all.

Put it another way: the AI will get you to a local minimum of cost, but not to a global minimum. Worse, as AI gets cheaper and more widely used, that local optimisation makes it even harder to optimise the system globally.

So yes, I'm not convinced that much of the AI currently being rammed down our throats has any utility. It will actively block businesses in the pursuit of improvements, and the infatuation with current trendy AI will harm the development of useful AI.