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My experience with questions to LLM is that they mimic reddit a lot: ask them an apparently simple thing that is not possible, and they will bend backwards to tell you it's possible and give you tons of convoluted possible solutions. Ask them a thing that is possible but complicated, and they will be overly dismissive. The good thing however is that between those two banks there's a wide river of utility...more often than not they'll at least mention things I haven't considered before.

I just did this test with Gemini Flash-Lite 3.1:

> Can you use a raspberry pi pico W as a USB WiFi adapter

> Yes, it is possible to use a Raspberry Pi Pico W as a USB Wi-Fi adapter, but it is a project that requires custom firmware and a clear understanding of your goals.

Then goes off and lists the things you’ll need which at a cursory glance seems like good starting points.

Exactly, bit banging an 8-bit bus isn't that different from pushing the data out of the USB port. It would be great to try an LLM trained on pre-1900 documents and ask it if powered flight is possible.

Great work on PicoGUS.

It's often good to approach what llm said as a guidance, and not as ground truth.

You can ask follow up questions or point to potential feasibility and it will change its answer.

It was Gemini Flash, probably an even faster variant optimised for immediate response on search pages.

> Interesting that Gemini said it was infeasible.

Unless there is a hardware limitation or the hardware does not support it, anything in software is possible.

Gemini and all these other LLMs are designed to convince you that they have "awareness" which they do not have any of the sort. They are neither sentient nor do they have consciousness

In a Windows world I've used the hell out of these devices for licensing dongles on Windows virtual machines: https://www.silextechnology.com/connectivity-solutions/devic...

They're much cheaper than the competing devices from Digi and they've been bulletproof for me. I've got some out there running >10 years.

I've even done stupid stuff like hung a USB Ethernet adapter off of one and made it a NIC on my local PC to talk to another of the same unit hanging off that USB NIC (just to be cheeky-- not for actual use). Stacking things on top of other things is fun.

My only complaint is I wish they did PoE. I use a cheap PoE splitter for that but it would be nice not to have to do that.

If you have CAT5/6 between the locations, USB-over-CAT5/6 adapters are inexpensive and work quite well. I've used OREI's successfully over >60m. But there are many options, with varying limits on cable length.

https://www.orei.com/products/usb-over-ethernet-extender-upt...

I've used USB over Network in the past, worked well on Linux

Hah! That's neat! So much fun stuff to be had with that particular bit of kit.

The default reference firmware for the nRF52840 Desktop Dongle does this. https://github.com/nrfconnect/sdk-nrf/blob/main/applications...

I like this little thing: https://openwrt.org/toh/gl.inet/gl-usb150

You can use it as a repeater, so the whole family can just use the same network/password we use at home. And it is so small, you can run it from a power bank for hours.

Unfortunately, they are not sold anymore.

It's also slightly different because this project is for the Pi Pico.

Yes, the guy clearly spent more of his time than it's worth - you can buy a wifi dongle for a few bucks on aliexpress.

But that's exactly the point of such experience. It's a challenge, and the guy/gal nailed it.

The Pico is USB 1.1, so the upper bound is 12 Mb/s.

Wifi printer, where both your machine and the printer are connected to the same AP? yes

If you'd rather just expose a USB printer to the network, a Pi Zero is a better fit.

The Pico W can host an AP.

It's one of the neat features of the AsciiDoc language. The user is able to change captions mid document, in this case :figure-caption:. AsciiDoc and Antora are things I've invested a lot of my time into

https://baiyibai-antora.gitlab.io

I'm kind of fascinated by the first diagram on the page. It sits so firmly in the uncanny valley for me and I can't put my finger on why. By itself every part looks ok and normal, but as a whole it just screams AI to me. I don't know if its the color choices or the composition or something else. It all just feels that little bit off.

I mean, I know its AI, the page says so itself, no one is trying to hide it. But it also just gives me AI vibes on such a subliminal level that I can't figure out why.

The pic "AI Slop 2. A Real World Situation" is great, the USB cable is connected to the wrong end of the Pico!

Actually, all of them are fallible, very incompetent machines that are good at writing text. They're not people, they don't have any qualities of people except the really bad ones, and they are absolutely miserable at reasoning.

The only people I know who use Gemini are unemployed.

The only people I know who use Claude vibe-code everything, often including their communication -- they probably let Claude kiss their kids goodnight.

Everyone else uses ChatGPT, and the world is worse off for it.

They are machines. "it" is the only acceptable pronoun, and personifying these machines adds emotion into the discussion and the use of the tool. They are not people. They do not behave like people. If you feel like they do, and you're e.g. autistic, that's entirely fair, so please take my word that they do not behave sufficiently like people in any way.

Nothing they do mirrors the behavior of engineers. They instead mimic the language of engineers. I understand that this is all it takes in a lot of circles to gain respect, which is quite a sad state for those circles, but that doesn't mean its a universal experience.

Gemini writes pretty shitty code in my experience. We tried it out for a grand total of half a day at work before deciding it wasn't worth our time and switched back to Opus.

ChatGPT writes like it's life depends on it and refuses to correct its own mistakes. It'll figure out a way to write 4k lines for something that could've been done in 500

They're all actually a pile of numbers getting multiplied against each other to sometimes produce output that convinces some humans they're people.

DeepSeek will just wing it and tell you it's done only for you to find 1 major + 3 edge case bugs.

ChatGPT is very good at code-reviewing Claude’s work and finds the howlers in it fairly reliably

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I like that the second image filename is slop_2.png. At least they're self-aware.

Meta comment to your meta comment : this is a very personal opinion but I cannot stop myself from thinking less about your message (even though I agree with it), just because of that edgy wannabe way to go about naming Microsoft. You want to say Microsoft say that, you want to say Github say that but if you say a vaguely insulting name only to have to specify what you actually mean... It doesn't bring anything to the conversation, except lower the level, and if a company has flaws as big as Microsoft you don't need to resort to childish name calling to expose them. This is my personal opinion.

No, it's not really easier to buy a Wi-Fi dongle. My target device is the Spotify Car Thing and SuperBird doesn't have Wi-Fi components. My Claude Code Pro subscription was idle, so it cost me nothing. Also, according to an article from Tom's Hardware from two years ago, four million Picos have already shipped, so I've unlocked this ability for let's say 500,000 devices. Finally, my day job is in the Wi-Fi industry... this wasn't a learning exercise.

The author's tone when they discuss the cost of the project is self-deprecating. They know it would have been simpler to just buy one.

But also, the author has given the community a great gift, both directly (the blog post and the project!) and indirectly (the idea: what else can be implemented in similar ways).

Finally hacker news on .. Hacker News. No need for it to be economical cheap.

It’s nice that it doesn’t need the WiFi stack or host side configuration though. This would be great for headless machines.

> The project is cool thought to learn about networks, NAT, Proxys, ect...

The author learned nothing though...

except now we don't need to spend that $5

But this is a Pi Pico, which is a microcontroller and not a Linux system.