Comment by fn-mote
1 day ago
The write up says it used an existing jailbreak.
It sounds like most of the work went into getting the slideshow to work, setting up a feedback loop so Astra could work out / blunder into a solution with the desired characteristics.
Reading this causes embarassment from author's helplessness.
> I first tried GPT-5.6 Sol with reasoning effort set to Extra High. It wrote code to connect to the Kindle but couldn't resolve an error that prevented it from storing data on the device. Then I tried Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5, but Anthropic's cybersecurity safeguards blocked each attempt after two prompts. Finally, I tried GPT-6 Astra with reasoning effort set to High. We were able to jailbreak the Kindle.
"We were able to".
It takes a modern AI human and 4 LLMs to do something that could be done by googling "kindle jailbreak" and following instructions - they have to be performed on Kindle anyway.
It's unfortunate because like... in theory if you apply the right kind of debugging philosophy you can use this tooling to help you move through the work a bit more easily.
But just kinda randomly trying at various reasoning efforts reminds me a lot of hearing people just randomly replacing various libraries or code snippets with stuff found on stack overflow. No real theory of the system.
There's not even much of an excuse, cuz you can "just" sit there and type "why?" or "why not?" over and over into an agentic chat session and probably get things working quite quickly. Principled debugging is state space elimination for the most part!
I'm a seasoned embedded engineer and it took me hours to figure what the "right" jailbreak was and how it worked. In the end it was easy to accomplish but as usual the documentation is abysmal.
I sometimes catch myself saying "we" when prompting AI so it really doesn't bother me to see this language being used. But I concede it can sound jarring or hubristic.
but how?... https://kindlemodding.org/jailbreak-wizard.html it should take you a few minutes, maybe longer if you have to fill the system up with data to prevent updates but "hours" from a embedded engineer?
I dunno, I'm a kinda-dumb web developer who's spent the past 9 months deep-frying my brain with LLM model output, and it also took me multiple hours (but, less than a day) to figure out the right jailbreak for my kindle and how to run it. I think that's probably just how long it takes to find what you need on the kindle jailbreaking wiki and carefully follow the instructions, regardless of what other skills and preexisting knowledge you may have.
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