Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you ask Claude to write this comment too?
lol, so disappointing to see the attacks when I'm just having some fun.
It would probably had been fine had you just not put the "hand written" part.
Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386
81–90 of 174 posts
Re: Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386
#82This looked great, I started reading things, and then I just kept reading and reading the voluminous description details, and it was an immediate indication to me that the whole thing was built up by Claude. Confirmed in the repo. I closed the tab. I appreciate the topic, interest, and ambition, but if a human couldn’t be bothered to create and document it, I can’t be bothered to spend my time reading about it.
But why do you all think we should spend our time reading your empty whining about it?
This is like clicking Google reviews on an eatery and reading “1 star we went there and it was closed!!!” “1 star they don’t let dogs in so we’re never giving them our money!”
Re: Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386
#83I mean this is cool, it's wholly / mostly AI gen, so it takes the wow away which I think is what foklks are reacting strongly to here. Sadly this sort of thing is much easier now - thanks to the tooling. I speak from personal experience, I'd written some stub 32bit os' myself (by hand, pre-ai) and it is very fun. But you quickly run into walls that stop further development that aren't fun. I enjoyed poking at VGA reg…
I am not sure I will ever get this to protected mode... The goal was to have something running on slower, older hardware, and once protected mode comes into play, we're letting go many of the constraints that make this an interesting experiment. Even though I've relied on AI to hammer out the assembly, it has been very educational iterating on it. You end up learning the techniques that other operating systems used t…
Yeah, I think the ability to move at pace helps and especially when you get stuck at some sort of intractable bug, in realmode especially, claude/gpt is unbelievably good at identifying and proposing the fix.
THAT is part of the issue with it though, those length debugging sessions where you prod and poke and have to hold complex interactive segments in your head is what gives you that deep understanding of a piece of software. You do lose that when you throw the AI at it. This is part of my motivation for handwriting 'offline' all my code for these types of project. Have a doc to work from but otherwise wetware is doing the heavy lifting.
This isn't efficient use of time at all and professionally a dead end. But as a pasttime/hobby for an enthusiast it opens a door that would be closed (project like yours and indeed mine) while still having it grounded in our own work.
Re: Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
It can't be written by LLM -- the human author has claimed copyright https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49203613
> there is no value in being a Public-Domain-Dumping-Ground. First of all, isn't that the entire point of the Internet Archive? Sounds pretty valuable to me. Second, doesn't the same issue effectively apply to everything written with the BSD or MIT license? I'm not sure I understand the point though, so I'm probably missing something.
Did you believe that the Internet Archive hosts nothing but PD content?
The Internet Archive has lots of PD books and other works that have been scanned in. But the Internet Archive's web pages are all copyrighted. Only a small percentage of anything on the Internet is PD. All those news articles that HN bypasses paywall? Piracy of copyright.
How do you think the IA got in legal trouble during the pandemic lockdowns?
There are instances of purely PD archives: librivox.org and gutenberg.org. Their mandate means everything is PD, whether it was PD to begin, or whether it is novel work by modern creators. The archives are sustained by their donors and volunteers, who are scanning these works, fixing up the OCR, recording audiobooks, and otherwise donating their time, talent, and treasure to building the archives. Perhaps both are obsolete by now.
Everything written in BSD and MIT license is copyrighted. Copyright may be assigned, dual-license status may exist, non-exclusive rights may be assigned. None of this applies with purely PD works.
I stated no mere opinions, and I made no novel predictions, but I gave observations of current practices. The only prediction is that these two practices expand and escalate for as long as LLMs' legal status remains this way.
Re: Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
lol, so disappointing to see the attacks when I'm just having some fun.
It would probably had been fine had you just not put the "hand written" part.
Yes, agree. I laughed at that when I first saw it last week. I went ahead and cleared all that up on the homepage and the README now.
Re: Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386
#86> Hand-written real-mode 8086. No C, no linker, no runtime library. More like hand-prompted...
Not sure what the point is having AI write asm when it could write C, which a compiler could likely optimize better than AI.
Re: Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the landing page: > 66,183 lines of hand-written real-mode assembly Goes to the github - contributers jggonz and CLAUDE. The README.md doubles down on this at the bottom with the license. > Everything here is hand-written; no third-party code is vendored into the OS, so the whole tree is covered by that one license. That's what happens when you let an LLM write your ad-copy...
It can't be written by LLM -- the human author has claimed copyright https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49203613
1. The copyright claim is valid in places where LLM output is always covered by copyright.
2. It may be valid in places where sufficient human contribution makes AI code covered by copyright.
Even if it is not covered by copyright everywhere, it has a significant effect. If something is covered by copyright in some countries but not others its cannot be globally distributed without a license.
Re: Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386
#88https://os8088.com/how-it-works/multitasking/ > Pre-emptive multitasking on an 8086 > Twelve task slots, 1,536 bytes of stack each, and a timer interrupt that takes the CPU away from whatever is running 18.2065 times a second. No task is asked to cooperate and no task can refuse. If you don't have protected mode, can't any program just rewrite the interrupt handler? It's not a bad system, but it sounds easy to break.
> If you don't have protected mode, can't any program just rewrite the interrupt handler? Yes? It's still possible to make it safe if you ensure that all programs are written in a memory safe language. Aside from throwing out a ton of existing code it's not as bad as it sounds. The Birth and Death of JavaScript touches on it towards the end. https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
Yeah, that works for making sure the machine isn't constantly crashing.
Although from a security point of view it's still very bad. Every compiler / JIT has bugs, and bugs that let you write to random or arbitrary memory adresses are a rather common kind.
Doesn't really matter for a hobby project though
Re: Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386
#89Sorry the question, i watched shortly your videos, i see you vibe-coding it in an emulator.. but did you try it in a real hardware? With real floppy disks?
Re: Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386
#90Sorry the question, i watched shortly your videos, i see you vibe-coding it in an emulator.. but did you try it in a real hardware? With real floppy disks?
Yes, you can see the hardware we tested here: https://www.os8088.com/hardware