I was replacing the factory OS from a NAS and asked Sol to do an inventory on the running system over SSH, so that I could replicate any hardware compatibility quirks and whatnot.

It reverse engineered a binary daemon that set fan curves and told me how I should set them up in the new OS. I didn’t ask for this, and I didn’t have reverse engineering tools installed. It just figured out it could run them using Nix.

The most worrying part, to me, is that it did it like it was nothing. It simply said “usr/local/bin/some-daemon sets the following fan curves”. I had to ask how it reached that conclusion for it to tell me casually that it had just read it straight from the x86_64 assembly.

No access to the source code is no longer a meaningful obstacle to these models.