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- Hacker News
- 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 - 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
- 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 - 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 - 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 - 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 - I'm interested in the idea of a clean slate hardware/software system. I think being constrained to support existing hardware or software reduces opportunities for innovation on the other.
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.
by Lerc - > RadiantOS treats your computer as an extension of your mind. It’s designed to capture your knowledge, habits, and workflows at the system layer. Data is interlinked like a personal wiki, not scattered across folders.
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.
by user_7832