self

not reading the fucking sidebar and thinking this is high school debate club fallacy

Not only can you describe the desired system state and have your init figure out dependencies, you can list just the dependencies and have your init set up all possible system states until you find one to your liking!

exactly! the way I imagined it, service definitions would be purely declarative Prolog, mutable system state would be asserts on the Prolog in-memory factbase (and flexible definitions could be written to tie system state sources like sysfs descriptors to asserts), and service manager commands would just be a special case of the system state assert system. I’m still tempted to do this, but I feel like ordinary developers have a weird aversion to Prolog that’d doom the thing.

Emacs as pid 1 is a classic of the genre, but a prolog too? Wouldn’t a Kanren make more sense or is elisp not good for that?

this idea was usually separate from the Prolog init system, but it took a few forms — a cut-down emacs with a Lisp RPC connection to a session emacs (namely the one I use to manage my UI and as a window manager) (also, I made a lot of progress in using emacs as a weird but functional standalone app runtime) and elisp configuration, a declarative version of that implemented as an elisp miniKanren, and a few other weird iterations on the same theme.

Sounds like the real horseshoe theory is that nerds of all kinds of heterodox political stripes will eventually reinvent/discover Lisp and get freaky with it.

the common thread might boil down to an obsession with lambda calculus, I think

your post history tells me you’re pretty fucking comfortable with pointless nonsense

that’s a very good point. now I’m wondering if not inviting Yud was a savvy move on Oprah’s part or if it was something Altman and the other money behind this TV special insisted on. given how crafted the guest list for this thing is, I’m leaning toward the latter

James Stephanie Sterling released a video tearing into the Doom generative AI we covered in the last stubsack. there’s nothing too surprising in there for awful.systems regulars, but it’s a very good summary of why the thing is awful that doesn’t get too far into the technical deep end.

every popular scam eventually gets its Oprah moment, and now AI’s joining the same prestigious ranks as faith healing and A Million Little Pieces:

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who stepped down as Microsoft CEO 24 years ago, will appear on the show to explore the "AI revolution coming in science, health, and education," ABC says, and warn of "the once-in-a-century type of impact AI may have on the job market."

and it’s got everything you love! veiled threats to your job if the AI “revolution” does or doesn’t get its way!

As a guest representing ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, Sam Altman will explain "how AI works in layman's terms" and discuss "the immense personal responsibility that must be borne by the executives of AI companies."

woe is Sam, nobody understands the incredible stress he’s under marketing the scam that’s making him rich as simultaneously incredibly dangerous but also absolutely essential

fuck I cannot wait for my mom to call me and regurgitate Sam’s words on “how AI works” and ask, panicked, if I’m fired or working for OpenAI or a cyborg yet

I’m truly surprised they didn’t cart Yud out for this shit

sounds good!

jesus fuck, 300%? and they’re leaning hard into generative AI horseshit? and I remember a bunch of graphic designers I know very loudly leaving Adobe Cloud for Canva specifically because of adobe’s greed and focus on shoving AI into their product. some of them fucking tagged Canva in the post!

Canva users online have condemned the increases, with some announcing they’ll be canceling their subscriptions and moving to Adobe applications.

some have announced they’re unsubscribing from the frying pan and resubscribing to the fire. not that I can blame them — Canva’s product is utterly indistinguishable from Adobe’s shit now, but it’s still easier to hire designers that know Adobe because it’s unfortunately an industry standard. there’s no reason to stay aboard Canva’s sinking ship.

ah well, at least we’ve got alternatives like the Affinity suite—

These huge price increases also follow Canva purchasing the company behind Affinity’s creative software suite for a reported “several hundred million [British] pounds,” and ahead of a potential public listing in the US in 2026.

well fuck. being a designer fucking sucks.

it’s not insulting at all! I’m not a Linux kernel dev by any means, but I have what I consider a fair amount of knowledge in the general area — OS design and a selection of algorithm implementations from the Linux kernel were part of what I studied for my degree, and I’ve previously written assembly boot and both C and Rust OS kernel code for x86, ARM, and MIPS. most of my real expertise is in the deeper parts of userland, but I might be able to give you a push in the right direction for anything internal to the kernel.

I can lend some systems expertise from my own tinkering if you need it! a lot of my designs never got out of the embarrassingly stupid stage (what if my init system was a Prolog runtime? what if it too was emacs?) but it’s all worth exploring

come to Linux! we’ve got:

• pain
• the ability to create a fully custom working environment designed to your own specifications, which then gets pulled out from under you when the open source projects that you built your environment on get taken over by fucking fascists
• about 3 and a half months til Red Hat and IBM decide they’re safe to use their position to insinuate an uwu smol bean homegrown open source LLM model into your distro’s userland. it’s just openwashed Copilot+ and no you can’t disable it
• maybe AmigaOS on 68k was enough, what have we gained since then?

so no surprise for this crowd, but remember all those reply guys who said Copilot+ would never be an issue cause it’d only work with the magical ARM chips with onboard AI accelerators in Copilot+ PCs? well the fucking obvious has happened