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- Hacker News
- This is a lot like One Laptop Per Child, but more vague. What is it supposed to do? Why have one?
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.
by Animats - >"It's a tool for personal computing where every application and every surface, exists as code you can read, edit, and extend. It's a system you can truly own"
This sounds a lot like a Smalltalk running as the OS until they started talking about implementing a systems language.
by 7thaccount - The whole thing feels like it's generated by LLM. Some interesting sounding titbits here and there, no specifics ever, weird trance images.by postexitus
- I do like the style of the images, though. Does anybody know how this style is named?by edding4500
- It's always cool to see people playing around with ideas about how to make better computer systems from first principles. On the other hand, it's hard to turn a project into a real system that solves real problems for people.
Can I use it to chat on Discord with other people I know who use Discord? If not, then I'm gonna need a computer for that, in addition to this thing. I do not like Discord, but nonetheless it has a network effect and it's what a lot of people I want or need to communicate with have standardized on, and until I can compel all of them to stop using it, I need to be able to run the software somehow.
by JuniperMesos - Chatting on Discord is not actually your problem. Communicating with your friends and with random strangers who have the same parasocials as you is your problem. And the latter is artificial anyway.by immibis
- This looks like an advertisement for a new season of Severance or something.
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?
by system7rocks - Maybe they are building AI centered cult!by npodbielski
- Am I hallucinating or is that black diamond in the sky a little malproportioned?by analog8374
- my outie enjoys trying experimental operating systemsby edm0nd
- That image is giving me some Evangelion vibes: https://wiki.evageeks.org/Ramielby flobosg
- You won't be bringing your own graphics card to RadiantOS. According to one of the pages, they want to design their own hardware and the graphics will be provided by a memory-mapped FPGA.
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.
by d-us-vb - The thing that always worries me about these clean-slate designs is the fear that they'll ignore accessibility for disabled people, e.g. blind people, and then either the system will remain inaccessible, or accessibility will have to be retrofitted later.by mwcampbell
- For all the complaints leveled at Apple, their accessibility on their OS's is astounding.
It is said if we live long enough, we all will be disabled at some point.
by PeaceTed - Yeah, this is concerning. Although, if the system is architected well, accessibility features ought to be something that can be added as an extension.
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.
by d-us-vb - I'm actually ok with that if it truly serving the purpose for what a computer should be.
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.
by Lerc - It's funny you mention that because the first thing I thought when viewing this page was "is this a loading state? why is everything grey?".by nicksergeant
- I love these guys for trying to do this. I just hope they’ve already made their money and can afford to continue doing this.
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...
by JSR_FDED - Thanks for the encouragement!by cloudhead
- The landing page reads like it was written with an LLM.
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.
by moconnor - It seems be popular here because of the ideas it proposes.
- I don't think it feels particularly LLM-written, I can't find many of the usual tells. However, it is corporate and full of tired cliches. It doesn't matter if it's written by an LLM or not, it's not pleasant to read. It's a self-indulgent sales pitch.by Antibabelic
- What's odd is how certain people seem to be about their intuition about what is and isn't written by an LLM.by cloudhead
- I am very concerned about the long term effects of people developing the habit of mistrusting things just because they’re written in coherent English and longer than a tweet. (Which seems to be the criterion for “sounds like an LLM wrote it”.)by wrs
- Like clockwork every year or so someone emerges and says "I'm going to fix computing" and then it never happens. We're as mired in the status quo in computing as we are in politics, and I don't see any way out of it, really.
Also the website is very low contrast (brighten up that background gray a bit!)
by efficax - Gotta keep trying then!by cloudhead
- I have been having a lot of fun with PicoCalc. It's not targeted at end users but is fun for developers alike who want a taste of developing things from first principles. More than anything it can live independently from your other devices.by benob
- Pretty much. I mean, best of luck to them. One has to try if anything is to change but I have seen this kind of thing so many times. Filled with enthusiasm but lacking in execution.
The whole 'Real artists ship' thing in action.
by PeaceTed - Very interesting and ambitious project and nice design. I hope the author will be able to comment here.
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.
by ilaksh - Thanks for your comment! In terms of concurrent programming in Radiance, it's likely I go for something inspired by Go's simplicity and Haskell's power with STM[0]. Actors are also on the table, but likely as a library on top of the native system, whatever it is. The important thing is that everything that involves "waiting" be composable in this system: timers, network i/o, IPC, file i/o, etc.
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
by cloudhead