Birbla

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  • Hacker News
  • This didn't get a lot of traction the other time I saw it, but one easily imagines this as part of a a game to teach operating systems, starting from no MMU all the way to how we manage distributed supercomputers like a DGX GB300, or Google's borg.
    by fragmede
  • Tangentially reminds me of https://deadlockempire.github.io/ where you play the role of the scheduler, but your job is to make vulnerable programs misbehave.
    by Retr0id
  • Education is the space that I'm hoping AI with unearth, and games like this could become a common part of the education. I totally see kids playing something similar for hours, learning core CS concepts and benefiting. Perhaps making a shooter would be awesome too: reclaiming memory, collecting cycles and energy and resources to train the model.

    Another hope I have that we could learn math/physics that way. Having a better more visual and intuitive understanding of some math concepts would be great. Perhaps having a truck go through the plot of a function and learning about limits and maxima and minima would be great etc. Same story: playing something like this for several hours could burn in kid's/adult's mind a pattern of undersatnding calculus that would last a lifetime.

    by wkoszek
  • This is not quite as exciting as psDooM [1]

    [1]: http://psdoom.coffeefish.org

    by swiftcoder
  • Reminds me of psDooM

    https://psdoom.sourceforge.net/

    by monkpit
  • Does this game make me MCP? Can I battle Jeff Bridges with discs?
    by SomeHacker44
  • Get Tron to Sark so he can communicate!
    by edoceo
  • I love this idea! I totally see it in the classroom or being played by someone who's trying to learn how to make an OS (which is on my personal bucket list)

    What I didn't like, is the tutorial is separate from the game. It would be awesome imo, if there's a tutorial stage where the game is explained hands-on (maybe pausing the game with explainers, until I start to get how to play) Otherwise I have to memorise the instructions before trying the game.

    Regardless, amazing little game.

    by phaser
  • Fabulous concept, but personally I did not find very fun actually playing.
    by advisedwang
  • OTOH I now have a lot more sympathy for my cpu's, I should give them some slack
    by internet_points
  • A lot of these puzzle/micromanagement games are very similar to stuff folks do for work. I stopped playing an entire category of puzzle games once I realized it was basically programming, which I do all day for a living anyway. Gamified programming is still programming.
    by loloquwowndueo
  • Fun fact: operating systems were originally programs intended to replace most of the work of a human job description, that of computer operator.
    by monocasa
  • Computers were first marketed into replacing the work of humans that had a job called "computer" (what spreadsheets finally did)... Operating systems were create to replace computer operators (what they didn't)... For a while some people called compilers "automatic programmers".

    The marketing and management of IT always had this fixation with replacing people. It always has been the wrong answer and the real value always came from making people better.

    by marcosdumay
  • This was fun to play...for about 2 minutes before all the manual work of moving processes around got very tedious, which may be the point of the game. What I would like is a little code edit window where i could code simple routines to handle the scheduling, then be able to watch the result.
    by donpdonp
  • This is why we must daily thank the elves inside our machines. It's tough work!
    by lelandfe
  • Rebooting could be a mini-game where you dodge the user's BIOS keystrokes a few times before they give up
    by petee
  • The absolute bane of my existence, I had a time a week ago repairing my bootloader after I (stupidly) did 3 months of windows updates after running a bunch of disk repairs and other recovery based things after I (again, stupidly) fell for a fake repo for deepseek tui and infected myself
    by AgentMasterRace
  • I'm pretty sure this is exactly what is happening in real life. I pressed F12 damnit! Go into the bios already!!
    by lofties
  • This would be huge if it was « rogue like », where you could buy new more performant components that allow you to reach further into the game. The game makes you naturally lose, and there are milestones that you can reach (bosses, or loot that stays throughout sessions). For instance you could unlock GPUs, docker containers, another SSD, antiviruses…
    by GL26
  • Obviously needs to be Turing Complete as well.
    by conception
  • Or a bitburner-like game, where scripting the solution is required.
    by peddling-brink
  • Also consider RTS elements, like assigning certain schedulers to handle workloads which are swappable and tuneable, maybe with some skill tree unlocks.
    by sudoshred