This sounded really interesting... till I read this:
> It’s an AI-native operating system. Artificial neural networks are built in and run locally. The OS understands what applications can do, what they expose, and how they fit together. It can integrate features automatically, without extra code. AI is used to extend your ability, help you understand the system and be your creative aid.
(From https://radiant.computer/system/os/)
That's... kind of a wierd thing to have? Other than that, it actually looks nice.
What clashes for me is that I don't see how that has anything to do with the mission statement about getting away from social media and legacy hardware support. In fact it seems kind of diametrically opposite, suggesting intentionally hand crafted, opinionated architecture and software principles. Nothing about the statement would have lead me to believe that AI is the culmination of the idea.
And again, the statement itself I am fine with! In fact I am against the culture of reflex backlash to vision statements and new ventures. But I did not take the upshot of this particular statement to be that AI was the culmination of the vision.
I'm not a fan of all the LLM and image generator usage either, though.
I was thinking the same thing. Out of curiosity I pasted it at one of those detection sites and it said 0% AI written, but the tone of vague transcendance certainly got my eyebrow raised.
I also understand that the old BBS way of communicating isn't perfect, but looking into web browsers seems to just be straight up insanity. Surely we can come up with something different now that takes the lessons learned over the past few decades combined with more modern hardware. I don't pretend to know what that would look like, but the idea of being able to fully understand the overall software stack (at least conceptually) is pretty tempting.
R is a language for statistics and data analysis, I can't understand why they chose it for low-level systems programming having modern alternatives like Go or Rust. Maybe it has to do with the AI integration.
It seems interesting enough to follow, but I'm uncertain about its actual direction.
Edit: Thanks to people in this thread for pointing out that it's not R, but R'. The language they're creating is called Radiance, so it may be that R' is a subset of it.
> Radiance is a small statically-typed systems programming language designed for the Radiant platform, targeting the RISC-V RV64GC architecture. Radiance features a modern syntax and design inspired by Rust, Swift and Zig.
> what personal computing could be when designed from first principles.
It bugs me because deriving first principles is an extremely complicated task. Its also a very beneficial exercise, especially when trying to build things from the ground up. Constantly asking yourself how this can be broken down even more. First principles are not where you start. Having them should demonstrate a large amount of work having already been done and deep thought into what you're doing.
When clicking on that section I see nothing that looks like first principles. I see really a manifesto and much of which is actually difficult to distinguish from current computing.
It's a nice manifesto, but also seems too vague and naïve. Though the latter is generally a feature of manifestos, not exactly a fault
[0] to me, AI being built in should look more like AI being used like physics informed networks. Which are more using the NN for optimization. You could definitely abstract out more and this would be cool and interesting to see. But from the sound of it, it seems more like they're just putting LLMs in
I don't think anyone denies the current utility of AI. A big problem of the current OSes is that AI features are clumsily bolted on without proper context. If the entire system is designed from the ground up for AI and the model runs locally, perhaps many of the current issues will be diminished.
I do. "AI" is not trustworthy enough to be anything but "clumsily bolted on without proper context."
I haven't read all of the documentation around this project but I hope it's in the same vein as the cannon cat and the apple-apple//gs (and other early computer systems with quick and easy access to some kind of programmable environment). (as an aside I think apple tried to keep this going with applescript and automator but didn't quite pull it off)
I think there is a weird trick though. General purpose computers a great and they can do anything and many people bog down their systems with everything as a result. I feel like past projects like Microsoft's Bob and the Canon Cat were also in this general thought pattern. Strip it back, give them the tools that they need and very little else.
I try and follow that pattern also on my work macbook. I only install what I need to do my job. Anything I want to try out gets a deadline for removal. I keep my /Applications folder very light and I police my homebrew installs with a similar zeal.
I don't see that in this project. This isn't defined by a clean slate. It is defined by properties that it does not want to be.
Off the top of my head I can think of a bunch of hardware architectures that would require all-new software. There would be amazing opportunities for discovery writing software for these things. The core principles of the software for such a machine could be based upon a solid philosophical consideration of what a computer should be. Not just "One that doesn't have social media" but what are truly the needs of the user. This is not a simple problem. If it should facilitate but also protect, when should it say no?
If software can run other software, should there be an independent notion of how that software should be facilitated?
What should happen when the user directs two pieces of software to perform contradictory things? What gets facilitated, what gets disallowed.
I'd love to see some truly radical designs. Perhaps model where processing and memory are one, A:very simple core per 1k of SRAM per 64k of DRAM per megabytes of flash, machines with 2^n cores where each core has a direct data channel to every core with its n-bit core ID being one but different (plus one for all bits different).
A n=32 system would have four billion cores and 4 terabytes if RAM and nearly enough persistent storage but it would take talking through up to 15 intermediaries to communicate between any two arbitrary cores.
You could probably start with a much lower n. Then consider how to write software for it that meets the principles that meets the criteria of how it should behave.
Different, clean slate, not easy.
There are reasons that current architecture are mostly similar to each other, having evolved over decades of learning and research.
> Perhaps model where processing and memory are one, A:very simple core per 1k of SRAM per 64k of DRAM per megabytes of flash,
To serve what goal? Such a design certainly wouldn’t be useful for general purpose computing and it wouldn’t even serve current GPU workloads well.
Any architecture that requires extreme overhauls of how software is designed and can only benefit unique workloads is destined to fail. See Itanium for a much milder example that still couldn’t work.
> machines with 2^n cores where each core has a direct data channel to every core with its n-bit core ID being one but different (plus one for all bits different).
Software isn’t the only place where big-O scaling is relevant.
Fully connected graph topologies are great on paper, but the number of connections scales quadratically. For a 64-core fully connected CPU topology you would need 2,016 separate data buses.
Those data buses take up valuable space. Worse, the majority of them are going to be idle most of the time. It’s extremely wasteful. The die area would be better used for anything else.
> A n=32 system would have four billion cores
A four billion core system would be the poster child for Amdahl’s law and a great example of how not to scale compute.
Let’s not be so critical of companies trying to make practical designs.
> Fully connected graph topologies are great on paper, but the number of connections scales quadratically. For a 64-core fully connected CPU topology you would need 2,016 separate data buses.
Nitpick: I don't think the comment you're replying to is proposing a fully-connected graph. It's proposing a hypercube topology, in which the number of connections per CPU scales logarithmically. (And with each node also connected to its diagonal opposite, but that doesn't significantly change the scaling.)
If my math is right, a 64-core system with this topology would have only 224 connections.
I think you're missing the point, and I don't think OP is "being critical of companies making practical designs."
Also, I think OP was imagining some kind of tree based topology, not connected graph since he said:
> ...but it would take talking through up to 15 intermediaries to communicate between any two arbitrary cores.
NCube. 64 to 1024 CPUs in an N-dimensional cube.[1] I played with one a bit when Stanford got one surplus from an oil drilling company. Not very useful.
It's straightforward to build non-shared-memory MIMD machines, but they are not historically successes and are very difficult to program. Classic example: Sony PS3. Unless the problem is very well matched to the architecture, which we might see for backpropagation and such.
When Apple was looking for its "next generation" OS, everyone assumed that Gassé and BeOS were going to be it, but they chose Jobs and the legacy (FreeBSD-based) NextOS.
I know that "old is bad," in today's tech world, but, speaking only for myself, I'm glad they made the decision they did. BeOS was really cool, but it was too new.
I absolutely love BeOS - it remains the pinnacle of user-focused computing for me - but I think it would have been a tough job to base another commercial OS on it. We'll never know what could have happened, but Apple probably made the right choice in buying NeXT.
I'm interested to hear about the plans or capabilities in R' or Radiance for things like concurrent programming, asynchronous/scheduling, futures, and invisible or implied networking.
AI is here and will be a big part of future personal computing. I wonder what type of open source accelerator for neural networks is available as a starting point. Or if such a thing exists.
One of the opportunities for AI is in compression codecs that could provide for very low latency low bandwidth standards for communication and media browsing.
For users, the expectation will shortly be that you can talk to your computer verbally or send it natural language requests to accomplish tasks. It is very interesting to think how this could be integrated into the OS for example as a metadata or interface standard. Something like a very lightweight version of MCP or just a convention for an SDK filename (since software is distributed as source) could allow for agents to be able to use any installed software by default. Built in embeddings or vector index could also be very useful, maybe to filter relevant SDKs for example.
If content centric data is an assumption and so is AI, maybe we can ditch Google and ChatGPT and create a distributed hash embedding table or something for finding or querying content.
It's really fun to dream about idealized or future computers. Congratulations for getting so far into the details of a real system.
One of my more fantasy style ideas for a desktop uses a curved continuous touch screen. The keyboard/touchpad area is a pair of ergonomic concave curves that meet in the middle and level out to horizontal workspaces on the sides. The surface has a SOTA haptic feedback mechanism.
For the AI/OS intersection, it is indeed a very interesting design space. The key insight really is that the better the AI knows you, the more helpful it can be to you, so the more you give it access to, the better. However, to be safe, the OS itself needs to be locked down in such a way that personal data cannot leave your device. This is why capabilities-based security is an interesting direction: software should not have access to more than what it needs to operate, and you need fine grained control over that.
If you have more ideas, please write us!
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_transactional_memory
https://github.com/ablevm/able-forth
https://xorvoid.com/forsp.html
https://antelang.org/blog/why_effects/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43419928
REPLs make computers feel like magic to me.
It never took off for various reasons. For one, the language was a bit like lisp, but with brackets. More importantly, it was commercial and then closed source for too long when Perl was really taking off.
Long story short though, whatever language you implement should have extremely high level primitives for simple GUI widgets. Forget Qt and Windows Forms...there HAS to be an easier solution. I can see how Rebol did it and surely you can make something like that possible.
Also the website is very low contrast (brighten up that background gray a bit!)
The whole 'Real artists ship' thing in action.
Somehow this makes me immediately not care about the project; I expect it to be incomplete vibe-coded filler somehow.
Odd what a strong reaction it invokes already. Like: if the author couldn’t be bothered to write this, why waste time reading it? Not sure I support that, but that’s the feeling.
It’s every engineer’s dream - to reinvent the entire stack, and fix society while they’re at it (a world without social media, sign me up!).
Love the retro future vibes, complete with Robert Tinney-like artwork! (He did the famous Byte Magazine covers in the late 70s and early 80s).
https://tinney.net/article-this-1981-computer-magazine-cover...
I think those principles would embody the notion that the same thing cannot serve all people equally. Simultaneously, for people to interact, interoperability is required. For example, I don't think everyone should use the same word processor. It is likely that blind people would be served best by a word processor designed by blind people. Interoperable systems would aim to neither penalise or favour users for using a different program for the same task.
I'd like to think that prioritizing early phase momentum of computing projects leads to more flowers blooming, and ultimately more accessibility-enabled projects in the long run.
What is a screen reader but something that can read the screen? It needs metadata from the GUI, which ought to be available if the system is correctly architected. It needs navigation order, which ought to be something that can be added later with a separate metadata channel (since navigation order should be completely decoupled from the implementation of the GUI).
The other topic of accessibility a la Steve Yegge: the entire system should be approachable to non-experts. That's already in their mission statement.
I think that the systems of the past have trained us to expect a lack of dynamism and configurability. There is some value to supporting existing screen-readers, like ORCA, since power users have scripts and whatnot. But my take is that if you provide a good mechanism that supports the primitive functionality and support generalized extensibility, then new and better systems can emerge organically. I don't use accessibility software, but I can't imagine it's perfect. It's probably ripe for its own reformation as well.
Good screen readers track GUI state which makes it hard to tack on accessibility after the fact. They depend on the identity of the elements on the screen so they can detect relevant changes.
It is said if we live long enough, we all will be disabled at some point.
The image on this page is wild: https://radiant.computer/principles/
Of course, I am intrigued by open architecture. Will they be able to solve graphic card issues though?
If your question is about the general intricacies in graphics that usually have bugs, then I'd say they have a much better chance at solving those issues than other projects that try to support 3rd party graphics hardware.
And as with the text, the art feels AI generated. In fact I even think it's quite beautiful for what it is, but it reminds me of "dark fantasy" AI generated art on Tikok.
I have nothing against an aesthetic vision being the kernel of inspiration for a computing paradigm (I actually think the concept art process is a fantastic way to ignite your visionary mojo, and I'm flashing back to amazing soviet computing design art).
But I worry about the capacity and expertise to be able to follow through given the vagueness of the text and the, at least, strongly-suggestive-of-AI text and art, which might reflect the limited capacity and effort even to generate the website let alone build out any technology.
Ironic for a project claiming to be rooted in human creation
If anything is already working, where’s the code? Can people contribute yet?
Not trying to nitpick, but it’s hard to tell what’s real vs. vaporware (beyond the author’s very impressive abilities for systems/language design and writing)
The website also mentions a device but I get that’s many years away too, right? I mean how long will it take to actually develop everything that’s described in the website?
This sounds a lot like a Smalltalk running as the OS until they started talking about implementing a systems language.
> Hardware and software must be designed as one
In here, they describe an issue with computers is how they use layers of abstraction, and that actually hides complexity. But...
> Computers should feel like magic
I'm not sure how the authors think "magic" happens, but it's not through simplicity. Early computers were quite simple, but I can guarantee most modern users would not think they were magical to use. Of course, this also conflicts with the idea that...
> Systems must be tractable
Why would a user need to know how every aspect of a computer works if they're "magic" and "just work"?
Anyway, I'm really trying not to be cynical here. This just feels like a list written by someone who doesn't really understand how computers or software came to work the way they do.
Yes, but also I think it can also have a kind of liminal impression of an internal logic.
It's not that the system doesn't come with a browser. It's that the browser is apparently built into the operating system. Remember IE 6?
If you're going to rethink computing devices, the next thing is probably a big screen, a camera, and a good microphone array. No keyboard. You just talk to it and occasionally gesture, and it organizes and helps you.
I've programmed for a long time, but always struggled with Assembly and C, so take my views with a grain of salt.
They want to implement custom hardware with support for audio, video, everything, a completely new language, a ground-up OS, and also include AI.
Sounds easy enough.
The task that has been set is gigantic. Despite that, they've decided to make it even harder by designing a new programming language on top of it (this seems to be all the work done to date).
The hardware challenge alone is quite difficult. I don't know why that isn't the focus at this stage. It is as-if the author is suggesting that only the software is a problem, when some of the biggest issues are actually closed hardware. Sure, Linux is not ideal, but its hardly relavent in comparison.
I think this project suffers from doing too much abstract thinking without studying existing concrete realities.
I would suggest tackling one small piece of the problem in the hardware space, or building directly on some of the work others have done.
I don't disagree with the thesis of the project, but I think it's a MUCH bigger project than the author suggests and would/will require a concentrated effort from many groups of people working on many sub-projects.
Whether the project is bigger than I think or not is not so relevant for me personally, I will attempt it because I don't see a future in personal computing that I want to be a part of otherwise.
I just kind of want to see what comes out of this.
RISC-V ftw and if they got lightweight, local-first AIs with a decent site-map of each program; that could be really unique and fun; if not annoying to use in practice.
I see the future they want so badly.
I wonder why the Unix standard doesn't start dropping old syscalls and standards? Does it have to be strictly backwards compatible?
But why? We use virtual address spaces for a reason.
Why does it always need to be so difficult? We already have the tools. Our methods, constantly changing and translblahbicatin' unto the falnords, snk snk... this kind of contrafabulation needs to cease.
Just sayin'.
IPFS+Lua. It's all we really need.
Yes yes, new languages are best languages, no no, we don't need it to be amazing, just great.
It'll be great.
I think it could be great. The challenge for me has always been getting other people to use things I've built.
But why not try it?
[1]: https://github.com/cloudhead [2]: https://cloudhead.io/
This just reads like complete BS vaporware.
Why should any of us take it seriously?
They haven't done their due diligence: there's already a well-known language named R: https://www.r-project.org/. The prime isn't sufficient disambiguation.
Edit: where did you see it's called "R"? It looks like they call the system language "Radiance" : https://radiant.computer/system/radiance/
What an airball. Social networks are the single most valuable aspect of computers and the internet. It is a dark world where we all just talk to LLMs instead of each other.
An admirable goal. However putting that next to a bunch of AI slop artwork and this statement...
> One of our goals is to explore how an A.I.-native computer system can enhance the creative process, all while keeping data private.
...is comically out of touch.
The intersection between "I want simple and understandable computing systems" and "I want AI" is basically zero. (Yes, I'm sure some of you exist, my point is that you're combining a slim segment of users who want this approach to tech with another slim segment of users who want AI.)
I even tried to search it on distrowatch with the negate option in their search but it seemed to be broken.
I needed it once to build my own "studyOs" , and in the process I went down a deep rabbit hole on about the hobby-ist distros of linux and their importance.
I then settled on MXLinux because of what I wrote below
People recommend cubic etc. but personally I recommend MXLinux. Its default linux snapshot feature was exactly what I was looking for and it just worked.
I glanced over this and I was excited thinking oh great this could be a linux iso with no browser and similar to tiny core but I found out through the comments that its focus on LLM's etc. is very vague and weird for what I am reading.
I just feel like its seriously not getting the idea. I want to effectively dissect this post's tenants from a Linux user for just a few years.
My first experiences was positive, then negative and now its mixed really.
I feel like this is intending on become so hardware focused that I am not even sure what they mean by this. From my limited knowledge, Linux tries to do a lot of things simply to boot up into a predictable environment on every computer device most likely to the point that there are now things like nix that can arise your system in a determinist system.
I still think that there is a point in making something completely new instead of Yet another Unix from what I can tell, but my hopes aren't very high, sorry. You would have to convince me from why the world would be better off with this instead of Linux aside and their notes on why not linux is still absolutely mixed thoughts in my opinion
> Linux is a monolithic kernel. All drivers, filesystems, and core services share the same privilege space. A single bug, eg. a bad pointer dereference in a GPU driver can corrupt kernel memory and take down the entire system.
Can't drivers be loaded at runtime and there are ways to isolate the taking down of entire system imo. I think this is just how a monolithic kernel should work, no?
I read more discussions on mono-lithic kernel and micro-kernel on Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate wiki [1] and here is something that I think to be apt here
> Torvalds, aware of GNU's efforts to create a kernel, stated "If the GNU kernel had been ready last spring, I'd not have bothered to even start my project: the fact is that it wasn't and still isn't."
Some other person on the usenet group also called gnu hurd a vaporware and well I think there is some factuality to it and gnu hurd team was working on hurd far longer than linux was working at linus (an excerpt? from the same wikipage)
Another line I want to share is this from the wiki: Different design goals get you different designs
I think I was going to criticize the radiant computer but hey, its open source,nobody's stopping you from doing work on it. And this line was said defending linux earlier, so it sure can defend this
But at the same time, my concerns regarding this or any project is regarding it becoming vapor-ware. Linux is way too big and actually good enough for most users. I don't think that the world can have a perfect os. It can have a good enough tho and from the end user, Linux is exactly that. The fact that its open source and is genuinely good at what it does, and there is absolutely no denying about it. You could live your whole life using linux Imo. Its beautiful.
I used to defend NetBsd etc. or hate systemd etc. but the truth of the matter is that nobody's forcing you to use systemd or netbsd, you damn well could use a server without it but I have found that the mass adoption does make me convince that a sys-admin level, linux, maybe even debian or systemd in general would have its gains.
I think linux is really really really good, its just the best imo but I will still try out things like the freebsd,openbsd etc. . I genuinely love it so much. Its honestly wild / even a fever dream when you think about it that something like linux even actually exists. Its so brilliant and the ecosystem around it is just chef's kiss.
One can try and these are your developer hours but I just don't want to see things turn into vaporware, so I will just ask you a question on how do you prevent this project from becoming a vaporware. I am sure this isn't the first time someone has proposed the ideal system and it wouldn't be the last either.
Edits: Sorry this got long. I got a little carried reading the wiki article, its so good.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_deb...
I do think Linux is good enough (it's what I use daily), but I'm a software person. I don't think linux is good enough for the average person or for kids learning how to use computers. It's hard to use and quite unfriendly, even distros like Ubuntu.
The second point is simply that I think we can do better. Progress does not stop here, but most people are afraid to take on big problems, so they never try.
I am no fan of Ubuntu. But I'd wish to know. more in detail what you mean by this stuff if possible.
Regarding the point on how linux isn't good enough, I think that the reason its not being used is because of the power of defaults
Chromebooks technically ship linux iirc and nobody's complaining about linux there. Android is also technically linux and the same goes there
Theoretically I feel like Modern Linux is still the same, but there are still some problems which might require going into a terminal
The problem with the terminal is that I think people fear it. maybe because its the unknown, people usually don't interact with terminal and as such it becomes 2nd nature, heck for some 1st nature, to interact with terminal when they embrace it
It's a very blurry chaotic line between making a full hardcore linux or switching back to windows and being a "normie" in this sense.
I don't know if there is something that linux could measurably do without affecting one set of users with another.
I'd say the person born during times of terminal wouldn't feel very uncomfortable with terminals simply because that was what was familiar to them
The Key concept is the sense of unknown and familiar which stresses to even us right now
I am familiar with linux and so I feel a little resistive to the unknown, in the same way that minix creator might've felt towards the creation of linux at the time as from the previous comment
We have tried creating movements to gather attention but it seems that maybe selling a message could be hard when eyes are being gathered and taken away by algorithms which scroll. Some meme like 67 would get more attention than linux in mainstream media by a huge margin lol
I personally feel like more eyeballs need to be on linux and a place to actually summarize the benefits of linux but to each their own and there are many ways that people explore the unchartered territory of unknown for the first time
> The second point is simply that I think we can do better. Progress does not stop here, but most people are afraid to take on big problems, so they never try.
I do think that maybe we can do better but also that maybe modern linux might be an idea similar to stable equilibra. I am not competent enough right now to comment on that
> but most people are afraid to take on big problems, so they never try.
I would say even after all this, go for it, Linus himself might have felt the same way towards GNU hurd not doing any job and decided to take things in his own hands to make our squishy penguin boy known as Linux. This is your developer time and effort and the best we can do is give feedback, I hope you take both negative and positive feedback in positive ways since the only thing in our hands is the intepretation.
Maybe there can be some fair critiques too in the process where you get the process of improving the things so that is always something that is really nice.
I personally feel like we can do nothing and everything to change our society at the same time in a weird super-position state and the only way to find out our change in the society is to actually try it but one can try to look as far as he could something similar to what robert frost said in "the road not taken"
Good luck.