jbarrs

>Where is... the vibecoded OS

This perhaps isn't an issue at any meaningful industry as I think there is little room in the space for a new OS to take off, but within hobbyist circles it seems it's becoming a problem. On subreddits such as r/osdev, a lot of interesting-looking projects are being called out for their code having a lot of AI hallmarks: commit history showing an entire OS with a shell and GUI being written in a week, almost exclusively very large, non-atomic commits, comments that randomly include words from a different language, and snippets of code that are blatantly plagiarised from well-known projects in the community.

It's such a strange thing to see, because it's an area of programming that has almost zero practical need these days. We already have three big desktop operating systems that cover 99% of use cases, and there are already projects that fill most other gaps. Unless you have a really specific problem that can't be solved by patching Linux, writing a whole new OS and everything that comes with it is unlikely to be worth the time. IMHO, the only reason to write an OS in current year is for the hell of it; if you're really interesting in programming and computers, you like solving problems, and you like building large, complex systems, writing an OS can be a really fun long-term project. If you do none of the work and simply leave an LLM to plan out the system and solve all the problems, you gain absolutely nothing from it.

This drove me insane a little while ago. Every single "personalised" Spotify playlist that got shovelled my way had a bunch of songs on it from Olivia Rodrigo's latest album, regardless of whether they fit the playlist theme or not. I don't listen to Olivia Rodrigo, and consistently skip her songs when they come up because they just aren't my cup of tea, but Spotify continued to shoehorn them into every playlist I listened to.

Same thing with the AI DJ. There are some days where it just never misses, and I can listen for hours without skipping a single song. Other days, it feels like every other theme is "here's an artist we've been paid to advertise", and I end up getting tired of it pretty quickly.

What's a computer?

This might be wrong, but based on my own experience of Ubuntu effectively uninstalling itself when I tried to remove a single package.

I think most of the default software gets installed as one large package group, rather than as individual pieces of software. Only the group is marked as manually installed, but the individual programs pulled in by that group are marked as automatically installed. If you try to apt install something you already have as part of the default distro software, you'll usually see a message saying something like "marked as manually installed."

When you go to uninstall one program from the group, that one program is uninstalled as requested, but the group itself has to be marked as uninstalled, since you've removed one of that group's "dependencies" and thus can no longer satisfy that group's installation requirements. You now have a load of software that was automatically installed as dependencies of another package, but are no longer dependencies of any manually-installed packages. The next time you run apt autoremove, it'll remove all of those automatically-installed components and leave you with an almost bare system.

I've wondered whether this is connected to the olfactory system. Real books have a discernible smell about them, especially older books, and smell is said to be one of the best senses for memory recall. Do you remember less from an ebook because your ebook isn't smelly?

>The universe is infinite.

Whether or not this is true, it's somewhat irrelevant, as the observable universe is finite, meaning there's a finite amount of "stuff" that can causally influence us. What happens far beyond the observable universe is not worth dwelling on, as we will never see it or be otherwise influenced by it.

Not sure if this is the same product, but in my job I've met one of the researchers working on this tech. The screens they were able to produce had refresh rates high enough to watch a movie.

I find it amusing that the table published a conservative cutoff year and an optimistic cutoff year. Based on the trends I've seen, most non-critical software would probably have made the switch in time for the conservative year, whereas anything security-critical like a bank would probably use the optimistic year.

Not the original commenter, but Go programs are all statically-compiled, with everything needed at run time bundled into the executable. Go does use a runtime, but that's incorporated into the exe, so no external libraries required. As such, you can get a program written in Go running on a new machine just by downloading it :)

For machines where you may actually have a Go installation already, the majority of programs now can also be installed from source via Go's built-in package manager, which installs it to your home directory. A lot of dev utils, like go-imports, the language server, etc. are typically installed this way. It's usually just a single command (though the exact command can vary between projects, but is usually signposted fairly clearly).

Because Microsoft almost have a monopoly on the OS market. Pretty much the only alternative for users who aren't tech savvy enough to comfortably use Linux is to buy a Mac, which will price out a lot of people. Even if you are able to use Linux (or can afford a Mac), the popularity of Windows means that you will eventually run into a piece of software you need that isn't available for your OS and won't run in Wine, forcing you to use Windows by some other means.

Alas this has now been fixed

I've used LibreOffice Calc for plenty number crunching, with a lot of conditional formatting, dropdown data entry, complex cross-sheet formulae, etc. and I've never run into any issues with unsupported formulae or anything like that. Usually any issues I have are just menu features being in different places, or their usage not being entirely clear, but that's easily resolved with a quick Google search.