I see the 9front guys still love flirting with "nazi for laughs and giggles" esthetic...
It seems really weird and misplaced for OSS
pil, 7 seconds, dead kennedies, black flag, husker du, bad religion, bad brains, off, crass -- everyone in the 70s and 80s had a band logo that would've looked just fine on a red arm band.
thinking about it, kinda sucks the nazi got the branding and aesthetic permanently attributed to them , the punks have been employing it for way longer -- and I like them.
Or maybe ask Ori Bernstein (the contributor of gefs for 9Front) if he see that too, or maybe you are just an incredible hypocrite.
Hey 9Front! See what your wannabe LGBTQ/Palestine/Wokerism/BLM-flattery does? You get yourself into a Purity Test of insanity, and you can only please those people if you take their exact and most extreme position.
This is what Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson did to fix the faults in the Unix design.
Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and all the other FOSS Unix-like OSes are community recreations of the flawed AT&T Unix.
9front is the continuation of the OS that came next.
Recently, Pike commented that he designed Plan 9 so he could build the windowing system he wanted. (edit: oops, link) https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/T4fec171fec7e3845-M2...
I do know that in Plan9, 'everything is a file' is literally correct. So owning a mouse would mean reading from /path/to/mouse. But what I've also read is that every process can do so believing they own it - it's theirs exclusively?
For anyone reading this comment in future please do not trust it, I don't know what I'm talking about, except that standard references I've found don't fully explain.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs#Graphica...
I think, though, that one of the vastly underestimated aspects of Plan 9/9front is its simplified C.
AIUI one of the biggest differences is that a file is not allowed to `#include` anything that has already been #included in a parent project. You are not allowed to nest #includes.
The result is vastly reduced compile times. I have read claims of over 1000x fewer lines of code going through the compiler.
(Sure, disk caching helps a lot, but it still has to go through CPU.)
Cleaning up a codebase is a massive PITA but it's a one-time job and I have read comments that once you learn this, it quickly becomes habit.
Imagine if that was put into C29 as an advisory.
Decades and centuries of compute-time saved.
This is standard in Go, which is of course Pike's more recent baby.
ANSI C let you get away with this, which sounds like one of the more epic mistakes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Outer_Space
A theme in the film is the waking of the undead, and I'm wondering if this is a message from the original gang.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/PlanNine...
The historical emergence answers here are fine as far as they go, but they're a bit like saying that Linux is an OS developed by Linus to help him learn x86.
IMO 9front is an exposé of what an OS can look like when it's written for and by hackers with a focus on simplicity. The YouTube channel adventuresin9[0] parades some nice examples of what real world usage looks like.
For example, since everything is just a file, you tunnel traffic with a simple bind mount. Since everything is just text, small regexes suffice to route mouse clicks to UI actions. Since windows are just buffers, grepping history is grepping the window's text buffer; taking a screenshot is just cp-ing the window's draw buffer.
Oh, and 9front C diverges from the standard intentionally in some nice ways: evaluation of function args is sequenced, anonymous unions like
struct {
int a;
union {
uint i;
int j;
};
}
do what you want, the libc is a lot leaner and cleaner, etc.[0]:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7qFfPYl0t8Cq7auyblZqxA
> Unofficial development for the system also continues on the 9front fork, where active contributors provide monthly builds and new functionality. So far, the 9front fork has provided the system Wi-Fi drivers, audio drivers, USB support and built-in game emulator, along with other features.
0.1.3 − Is Plan 9 a cult run by scam artists?
From a newcomer's perspective, it feels like dealing with a cult run by scam artists. It seems someone wants to profit from me by selling books on Amazon, like a multi-level marketing group. People say others here are on a spectrum, but it feels more like psychosis, with a loss of contact with reality. I really feel like I'm being gaslighted. I might seem like a troll, but you don't understand how you appear to others.1. Search engines, LLMs and the homepages of these sites are right there
2. Why would you announce your first thoughts to the world instead of actually engage with what was posted in the right context?
Yeah, and it’s an awful attitude.
Honest questions are hardly ever an issue.
I had a conversation with some 'educated' people about the war in Ukraine. After about ten minutes, I told them if we please can stop and if we could change the topic.
They were incredibly uneducated, I would even say disinterested in the history as we ~know it.
They saw everything in black and white, with no shades of grey.
Long story short, I told them to please educate themselves on what happened from 2013/14 until today and make their own observations (just so they can sprinkle a little grey to their world view, NOT change it just add some nuances to it).
Their answer? No time, also not that interested.
I was a little bit sad to say at least.
Maybe has something todo with that:
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-dynamics/articles...
>>From searching to asking: knowledge and authority in the age of Generative AI
3. Cognitive consequences:
The difference lies in how the information is encountered. Search-based learning requires effort. Users must sift through multiple sources, evaluate relevance, and integrate partial information into a coherent whole. These activities promote deeper cognitive processing.
I don't see merit to discounting this, even though cheap deflections to authority do bother me too.
Edit for clarity: The biggest part of the "You're too stupid..." thing I mentioned is that we are being led to believe we can't even determine who is and isn't credible in any given field, so we must solicit claimed authority and then blindly obey whoever shows up first. Sometimes this solicitation is in the form of a post, but increasingly it's an AI-generated "web" search response where the index/training data has been torqued to direct people toward economic outcomes desired by the AI/search engine's owners.