I went through a similar "thought process" to build this: https://www.endbasic.dev/endbox.html last year. I originally wanted to "just" launch my binary right after the kernel started... but in the end settled for a full NetBSD base system to get things like network and WiFi configuration to work with ease. (That said, I still hook very early in the boot sequence to launch my own program and take over the console so that the rest of the system is invisible and initializes in the background.)
Thanks. I haven't documented it (yet?) but I did give a talk last year on the process that got me there and the internals behind this system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZFYTInWAqc
I remember this was the time when Google started pushing the Chromebook idea and highlighting how it could boot in "just a few seconds". One of the earliest models I got as a dogfooding device probably needed 20 seconds to boot or so. Nice, compared to the awful boot times of machines with HDDs... but not stellar.
But then, in 2011, my wife bought a MacBook Air with an SSD and I was blown away. That thing booted to a full desktop (and not the joke that ChromeOS was) in... 5, 6 seconds? It was ridiculous.
And we have lost all of those gains. I find it painful to witness how a recent Mac chews through I/O during boot or doing any sort of software update (iStat Menus is great to watch this sort of thing), and how these feel slower to that early experience of 15 years ago :-/
I visited a long-time friend recently and was surprised that they were using modern LP player for music. But the surprise itself actually turned into curiosity. I got the urge to buy one too, if only to go back to the more-dedicated experience of choosing a disk from a catalog and playing it with explicit intention.
Maybe LPs are too much, but trying physical CDs again sounds like a cool idea. Especially because they can easily be rewritten and maybe I could get kids to create their own "mix tapes".
Shameless plug for my https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/beyond-the-1-mb-barrier-i... article from a couple of years ago. You'll find a deep dive on unreal mode (I just learned it's also known as "vodoo mode") and some hands-on code to play with it ;-P
I'm sorry but the landing page at fuzix.org (the top page nonetheless) is terrible as it does not even try to explain what FUZIX even IS. I went to the GitHub project page, which contains some more details, but it still doesn't answer the question and only talks about how FUZIX differs from UZI.
To be honest, I still have no idea what I'm looking at.
"Munitions"? "Intelligent distribution panel"? Look, the UNIX part might not be obvious at all, but if you somehow didn't have enough of a rough idea after seeing that many retro CPUs and systems listed below, that might say more about you than the author.
That wasn't ever in doubt. That's also not the relevant piece of information - people looking for a summary want to know why the thing is worth paying spending time on, not random attributes
You do realize when you say that you do assume they know it's an OS and by that you effectively have to regress into using the same level of argument as me just like how I assume they don't know it's an OS, right?
LLMs definitely can do this. The output tends to be overly positive though, claiming that any sort of rough draft you give them is "great, almost ready for publishing!". But the feedback you can get on clarity, narrative flow, weak spots... _is_ usually pretty good.
Now, following that feedback to the letter is going to end up with a diluted message and boring voice, so it's up to you to do with the feedback whatever you think best.
I never ask the LLM to evaluate my text in terms of being good or bad. Instead I try something like this:
"In this section I tried to explain X, I intended to sound in Y and Z fashion, and I want a reader to come out with ateast W impression. Is the text achieving these goals? Do I communicate my ideas clearly and consisely, or are they too confuse and meandering?"
I typically get useful feedback. I preface specifically asking it to not rewrite, simply pointing the bits that it finds faulty and explaining why.
Of course the prompt is different is I am writing, for example, technical documentation, or if it is an attempt at creative writing.
reply