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John Carmack is reading and contributing to OpenBSD source code

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Re: John Carmack is reading and contributing to OpenBSD source code

#161

Post by pedrosorio »

cameronfraser wrote: post #119
sailingparrot wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [know that AGI] is centuries or even further away (basically some indeterminate time frame because we don't even know if we're on the right path). How can you, in the same sentence, say the time frame is indeterminate and that it is 100+ years away? We just don't know, period.

Well what we do know is that current AI methods are very task specific and there is nothing that generalizes well to many tasks. If it was happening in the next century we would at least have some idea how to start generalizing to many tasks with a single model or something comparable to that. We had the analytical engine in 1830s and we didn't see a turing machine or lambda calculus until the 1930s

> If it was happening in the next century we would at least have some idea

Just like at the beginning of the 20th century we knew ~0 about quantum physics and less than 50 years later A-bombs were getting dropped.

Or how, at the same time no plane could achieve sustained/controlled flight (and the goal was merely to stay above ground) and less than 70 years later not only were we leaving Earth's atmosphere: a man was walking on the moon.

We have no idea how long it will take to achieve AGI, let's leave it at that.

Re: John Carmack is reading and contributing to OpenBSD source code

#162

Post by jquast »

dylanz wrote: post #134
jquast wrote: post #67

My favorite developer contributing to my favorite operating system! This is like Christmas. I’ve been contributing $ to OpenBSD since 3.x release days, and reading John carmack’s “.plan” file since Doom 2, when they ran digital Unix! Did you know: you have John Carmack to thank for first porting X11 to OSX? Thank you John!!

I share your excitement! I've never contributed to OpenBSD but have been running and following the distro for ages. I have a few mugs and t-shirts and support when I can. I'm hoping this may bring some fans of his over to the distro who wouldn't have run into (or contributed to) it before.

I tried many source contributions to OPENBSD when I was in school, but only one was accepted—-to fix a “house purchase overflow bug” in the command-line monopoly game from the BSD games collection, lol :)

I stopped hacking on it some years ago, but always contribute $$ when I’m well employed (currently not, sigh)

I’ve yet to work at a $JOB with anyone else who wishes to use OpenBSD, even in the places it is most appropriate, my most recent employer had someone under qualified as the devops lead so we had to use pfSense, an endless source of frustration of issues that couldn’t be addressed, but that I knew exactly how to address with OpenBSD, but, such is life. The most experienced people seem to have the least control, a common complaint in all industries, I’m sure.

I always encourage everyone to use many different Unix’s, it provides a much deeper understanding of everything you use, even if you end up only using Linux, anyway, it provides a much better perspective of what a distribution is and how to select the correct one even if you end up being forced into Linux anyway.

But just like how I always end up using python and JavaScript and Ubuntu Linux everywhere —- unless you’re in charge, it’s much like school, the whole team has to succumb to the lowest common denominator, the lowest also often being the boss or lead, who does very little hands-on work but feels making decisions of which Linux and which Language to use is their best contributing factor, lol

Re: John Carmack is reading and contributing to OpenBSD source code

#163

Post by jaquers »

larrydag wrote: post #146
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did you know: you have John Carmack to thank for first porting X11 to OSX? Thank you John!! Is there anything written about the background to this? Wikipedia doesn't talk about him ever working for Apple (although maybe that's just not mentioned).

OSX roots are in BSD https://www.wired.com/2013/08/jordan-hubbard/

Also id ran software on NeXTSTEP, itself a precursor of OSX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#Legacy

Re: John Carmack is reading and contributing to OpenBSD source code

#164

Post by dijit »

justin66 wrote: post #149
dijit wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bsds are actually less stable than Linux. Stable meaning changes, in this context, right? freeBSD changes ABI compatibility with every version. If you mean that they have old software (and old==stable if you think Debian) then that’s because of BSD licensing vs GPL. GPL can take from BSD but the other way around is not possible. Stability of uptime? Yeah, they’re rock solid.

> The bsds are actually less stable than Linux. > Stable meaning changes, in this context, right? freeBSD changes ABI compatibility with every version. Every major version, right? From becoming -Stable to ending its support lifecycle, I'd think a FreeBSD version and its ABIs are supported as long as many Linux distro LTS releases.

The major difference being that if you have a statically compiled binary from linux 2.4 it will work on linux 5.5

The only difference will be any shared libraries and potentially the libc. But if we're speaking from a pure technical perspective, the libc is not linux.

Re: John Carmack is reading and contributing to OpenBSD source code

#166

Post by jquast »

rvz wrote: post #109
rhacker wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me this kind of stuff is fan junk news. I get that even hackers need celebrities, but front page of HN is a little extreme for a thing like this without context. If there was more context like, John C has re-written half of BSD, then we're talking - but this is very celebrity grocery list to me.

I'd bet everyone on this thread will be grabbing their cheerleading squad and their pom-poms everywhere if John Carmack visited them in person. They won't be able to contain themselves and start bursting into tears of joy. 'Extreme' maybe an understatement here but it seems like HNers here love seeing the second coming of King Midas when everything he touches turns into gold.

I’m sorry you feel this way, maybe if you could try contributing more positively to FOSS in some way and receive some accolades for yourself, you would not feel so spiteful about the attention Carmack receives.

I think you will find Carmack has contributed more to the hacker ecosystem than anyone else if you just take a very shallow peek.

I would suggest to start by reading the source code to Doom, it is surprisingly approachable and educational in several fields of math, geometry, data structures, and computer science. There are even books to help you understand it, heck, there are a dozen or more books about Id software and John Carmack, so there are many authors and readers who feel very differently from you, maybe you could consider the reason. There are many things in our field that would have happened eventually, no matter who did it, but much of Carmack’s contributions really would not have happened without him, he really is in a league of his own.

It’s really amazing to me that you feel so negatively towards people who have endearment for one of the hacker community’s greatest contributors. I can only guess that you might be very unhappy, for that I’m very sorry and I hope it turns around for you very soon.

Re: John Carmack is reading and contributing to OpenBSD source code

#167

Post by wolrah »

mouldysammich wrote: post #83
mcepl wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me *BSD is like Plan9 or ZX Spectrum emulator … guilty pleasure with absolutely no practical use whatsoever.

Seems a little dismissive of BSD systems given how widely deployed the are in comparison to plan9 or zx spectrums. As far as I understand Netflix uses freebsd fairly extensively, and there are powerful tools like pfSense built on BSDs too, which are also used fairly extensively as far as i know. I would describe that as having practical use.

I think there's a difference between using BSD to build an appliance and running BSD as a day-to-day system.

pfSense is a wonderful firewall appliance. FreeNAS is a wonderful storage appliance. If you need pf or native ZFS, a BSD is probably your best way to get it.

If you want to run a random headless server to mess around with, you are probably going to have a harder time with any of the BSDs than you would with even bleeding-edge Linux distros. If you want to run a graphical desktop with 3D acceleration and HD video you will almost certainly have a harder time than any Linux user.

---

There are, of course, people who are happily using BSD-based desktops right now and I am certainly not denying them anything, but even they'd have to admit they would have been able to get most of the same experience with a lot less effort on a modern Linux.

Re: John Carmack is reading and contributing to OpenBSD source code

#169

Post by deckard1 »

jaquers wrote: post #163
larrydag wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OSX roots are in BSD https://www.wired.com/2013/08/jordan-hubbard/

Also id ran software on NeXTSTEP, itself a precursor of OSX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#Legacy

yep, was going to say that this is probably the real source behind the mystery. Early OS X is basically NeXT when Jobs came back to Apple. Doom was developed on NeXT, so id Software and Carmack already had a history of using BSD. They also released Quake for Linux around 1996, which may have used X11 (I cannot recall, maybe it just depended on 3dfx/nvidia without X11 at the time... it's been so long)

Re: John Carmack is reading and contributing to OpenBSD source code

#170

Post by loeg »

erk__ wrote: post #143
loeg wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, the factual parts of that are accurate. Your opinion colors some of the adjectives. OpenGL works well, for example. No CUDA, no NVENC/DEC.

Well it is a bit of a grey zone but I have gotten Vulkan to work and I think at least NVENC works as well. The solution is rather hacky though. It extracts libraries from the Linux driver and loads them when you run programs. A look at the code make it seems like cuda is getting loaded as well so it may work. https://github.com/shkhln/nvshim

Nvshim is an amazing project, but it is a far cry from official Nvidia support for CUDA/NVENC/NVDEC.

(All Nvidia would have to do is build another binary; it's still chatting with the same driver blob internally so it's not really clear to me why they don't bother compiling it for FreeBSD.)

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