"Powered by Jekyll w/modified Slate+Simple theme."
Kind of funny seeing that at the bottom of this article. Especially given that static site generators are probably one of the biggest roll-your-own categories of software.
A desktop made for one
211–220 of 281 posts
Re: A desktop made for one
#212This appears to be a harbinger of a Plastic-era of software. A miracle product that's used for everything, and will turn up everywhere before we've had the chance to consider the wider impact. Learning to write software in a generation will be a royal mess, as will be finding clean training data, and software discovery.
AGI or bust
Re: A desktop made for one
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
I shudder to think about the security implications of everyone rolling thier own software. I trust my OS/browser/file system is secure because thousands of people are invovled in a complex network of interests in keeping it secure, from the kid contributing his first bit of code to the PHds at NSA writing encryption standards. The idea that any one person can replace that network is laughable.
Just to be contrarian, perhaps some measure of risk is reduced by the scale of one. Identifying a vulnerability that can be exploited against many thousands or millions of targets is perhaps more attractive than a single one of individually low value. This of course would assume that vulnerabilities are in fact unique (which is admittedly questionable).
To take this further, don't LLMs justify lowering the "barrier to attention"; i.e., if it only takes Claude's and not the hacker's eyeballs on the software, won't people find vulnerabilities in custom software for one too?
Besides that, one could easily imagine software created for similar purposes ("make me a file editor") by the same tool or handful thereof (claude and a very small "etc" for completeness) might share similar vulnerabilities, so this kind of broad net might be even cheaper to cast than one might imagine at first.
Re: A desktop made for one
#214I (and I'm sure many others) have been thinking about this a lot over the last couple of months. I called it "Extremely Personal Software" in a blog post a few months ago ( https://redfloatplane.lol/blog/14-releasing-software-now/ ) but there are lots of names and concepts floating about for the same basic idea. I think it's possible the amount of new software that will be written for an audience of 1-10 will be grea…
I called it "software". It's so strange to me that since the 1960s with BASIC then later on dozens of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_educational_programmin... including Logo by Feurzeig/Papert/Solomon there is effort to precisely help beginners program software. The effort was not to onboard future professional software developers but rather to make the personal in personal computer, or PC, meaningful. It's YO…
With the current situation on the hardware market, it makes me sad the we discover it only now. If things continue the way they are, there will be no Personal Computer any longer.
Re: A desktop made for one
#215I (and I'm sure many others) have been thinking about this a lot over the last couple of months. I called it "Extremely Personal Software" in a blog post a few months ago ( https://redfloatplane.lol/blog/14-releasing-software-now/ ) but there are lots of names and concepts floating about for the same basic idea. I think it's possible the amount of new software that will be written for an audience of 1-10 will be grea…
Interesting points. With the extreme cheapening of the cost (time/skill) for software production, we can have "Extremely Personal Software", as you mention and as demonstrated by the source. I wonder if we will reach a stage where "software" is written by a computer for an audience of 1 and for a single task, to be run once only- via an interface that works for all tasks. The very concept of software as something tha…
LLMs seem to be great for speeding up the creation of things that aren't all that hard to write in the first place.
They don't seem to be helping much with difficult tasks.
Text editor? Easy. That used to be a rite of passage. Lots of people have written their own basic text editor.
3d solid modeler? It's always been difficult and AI coders aren't (yet?) up to the task. Most open source CAD projects that show up here are layers on top of OCCT (Open Cascade) which is pretty far behind what commercial geometry kernels are capable of.
Re: A desktop made for one
#216While I wouldn't do asm, I love the approach and do much the same myself but in Ruby instead. My wm, shell, terminal, editor, file manager, pop-up menu (dmenu-like) are all pure ruby (including font rendering and X11 bindings). These all started before I started using Claude to improve them, so they're still mostly hand-written, but that is changing. They're messy, they have bugs and "misfeatures" that works for me b…
Hey I remember already reading you about this on HN, yes way before LLMs were unleashed to general public. So just a kind message to tell you that quietly in some corner of my head, there is a place holding the idea "that’s the kind of humble hero worth being secretly remembered."
Cheers :)
Re: A desktop made for one
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
OSS/Linux is "our" software. It's made by us for us (or others if you don't contribute). Your software can be made by you, for you. It can be open source/free software if you want. Others can contribute to it, if you want but it can be open source without accepting external contributions also. My point was to highlight that having software made by you for your machine is not new. Arguably the way to do so changed but…
> OSS/Linux is "our" software. It's made by us for us If by "us" you mean big bucks corporations, then yes: ~80% is big corporations [0]. Unfortunately, it does not look like it's a personal OS. And we badly need the personal platform with the personal OS. 0 - https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/za564c/is_i...
It would be bad if there weren't a significant number of companies paying for work on Linux to continue, because so many of them are benefiting from it, and at least some of them realize that ensuring sustainability into the future is a good idea and worth investing a salary or two. (As in, paying some of their employees to work on Linux).
Don't fall into the trap of assuming "A big company did it / paid for it to be done, therefore it must be bad". I see that mindset (which I'll call anti-corporatist) on HN from time to time. Companies are made up of people, and it's the people that make the decisions. Some people are good-natured, some are greedy and grasping. And the company that acted one way one decade can turn around and act completely differently the next decade, because a different person was at the helm.
Fundamentally, it's about the people, not the companies. The anti-corporatist mindset is prone to forgetting that.
Re: A desktop made for one
#218For those who may be interested - I broke down some numbers for my CHasm and Fe2O3 efforts in a new blog post: https://isene.org/2026/05/Audience-of-One-Numbers.html
You’ve reduce the memory requirements so much that it could all run on an early 90s computer easily. When I see such extreme examples I think back to the OLPC machines and this idea of how can extremely cheap but with useful software computers be available in very impoverished areas. I understand this has nothing to do with your argument or anything you’re writing about. It just made me think if LLM assisted software…
I fuckin love this.
It points toward the parts of "reduce, reuse, recycle" that capitalism has demonstrated no interest in serving
Re: A desktop made for one
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
OSS/Linux is "our" software. It's made by us for us (or others if you don't contribute). Your software can be made by you, for you. It can be open source/free software if you want. Others can contribute to it, if you want but it can be open source without accepting external contributions also. My point was to highlight that having software made by you for your machine is not new. Arguably the way to do so changed but…
> OSS/Linux is "our" software. It's made by us for us If by "us" you mean big bucks corporations, then yes: ~80% is big corporations [0]. Unfortunately, it does not look like it's a personal OS. And we badly need the personal platform with the personal OS. 0 - https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/za564c/is_i...
Random number from a Reddit thread isn't a great source but even then I agree with some of the comments, it might even be 99% nowadays.
The question is what does it change? Are the contributions from those corporations irreversible or are they targeting their own products for e.g. virtualization for cloud computing which doesn't affect the typical personal OS user?
Anyway the kernel itself was still started by a random student in his dorm. GNU was just started by another student. That possibility still exists today. It's also possible to trim that kernel with e.g. Linux-libre or even run Hurd.
One can use Debian with KDE today and see nor be subject to any corporate impact in terms of arbitrary limits to their usage. If they decide to not personalize it more it is most likely because they didn't consider it, not because they can't.
Re: A desktop made for one
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
This just doesn't matter for a lot of us. We have LLMs that can tweak it and the tools work as intended. The whole point of this sentiment is that the personal tools wouldn't EXIST due to the time sink needed. The tradeoff makes sense for a lot of people even if it's not a good fit for you.
I don’t think the time sink is that significant with many tools, especially since you can take existing projects and change them. And it’s fun to hack!
It is significant if you don't want to sit at a computer all day just to MAYBE get basic functionality, then find you've backed yourself into a corner because you didn't know some esoteric detail and have to spend another day doing a refactor, etc etc
I don't want to sift through docs and man pages and debug cryptic compiler and runtime errors in my spare time.
There are far richer things for me to do with my life.
I want to use my computer to get my tasks done and be done with it. Slogging through technical details an LLM could crush in minutes is a much better use of my resources.