alt Hacker NewsWhat even is an OS now?
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The more AI is wideapread and is used by power users to build apps, the more devices will be locked from running any custom ("non-certified / non-licensed") software. For your safety and security, of course.
this sound like omarchy mobile
A few lines before the reveal I thought of this a a product sold by business, then right after resuming reading again felt the old "ahh, missed the chance again" when you laid out you're already planning it...
But really, a platform that allows one to do all levels off apps in this way where one can cleanly reset their side effects and effect on the system, and the app is exposed just as an icon, not a folder of source files, could already be possible and could lower the bar of starting vibe coding to the bottom
Your post basically is Alexa.
What I did on my computer, any power user can do on theirs.
Back when Google was the newest thing, I would Google all the obscure things that I could think of, trying to fill in gaps in my knowledge. Trying to verify urban myths but usually debunking them, etc.
Any power user or even any user, could have done that. But most people who considered themselves critically thinkers actually did the opposite, digging deeper into all the harmful rabbit holes we see today.
A lot of things can done "with just a few steps" with AI but I think it's underestimated how hard it is to come up with those steps.
Not that the article isn't interesting otherwise.
I agree with the gist of how weird everything is going to get, and how we are living in a time where people haven't come close to internalizing the shift.
IMO even this AI phone is doomed in the slightly longer run.
One more step into the weirdness and people will just be working with AI to build their own bespoke phone with the specs sent over to a manufacturer that is "like PCBWay, but spits out whole devices".
I have no idea what this does to society, the economy, etc when we reach a point where nobody really "needs" any kind of middleman for almost anything (well, except for things they actually really need, like food and shelter), but it looks like I'll see it happen for a bit before I die.
> It’s not simply to “provide access to hardware resources”; plenty of embedded systems do that with runtimes that have no business calling themselves an “OS”. No, the core purpose of a modern operating system is to partition different applications off from each other, and carefully control how they can communicate.
First of all the initial definition is totally correct, and if your embedded function needs to call an intermediate layer to access the hardware that layer is an OS. Second of all, all those "purposes" are exactly achieved by providing _managed_ access to hardware resources.
And that is valuable in whatever world we end up living in. Sure, 10 years from now my bank app and my Hacker News browser may both be written by "my LLM" and tailored to my use cases and desires. Will I want them to share memory? I don't think so.
This reminds me of WWDC 2010 when Steve Jobs said developers using private APIs 'know exactly what they're doing'. Good luck with your project, but I think you're vastly underestimating the problem. And many OSes are already integrating user generated AI apps.
Not really related except the title: Its time for operating systems to rediscover hardware - USENIX 21: https://youtube.com/watch?v=36myc8wQhLo
If you give an ape a slingshot he might think he can take over the entire world. But he doesn't even know what rubber bands are, or what it takes to make them.
I kind of agree with the premises of the author.
Software in the future will have to be building blocks for agents to extend. For my projects I decided to generate LLM targeted guides in the docs/ folder, to teach agents quickly "how to" use the project as a framework.
How to implement an MVC view, where to place the files, a guide how to write a good backend route, how to extend the schemas, and other articles like that.
In my opinion we've already reached "Star Trek like computers". Our OS will have to accommodate for better sandboxing and better permission management and better role separation policies, because currently that whole security sector assumes that programs will be static and won't change before/after an approval.
We need to figure out how to better sandbox programs in terms of not only control flow, but also in terms of access to _data_ on a user's behalf.
A solution in search of a problem already solved that no longer exists.
This seems to be only thought out after a day of vibe coding apps that no-one uses.
Taking it at face value, it seems to me this will also collapse and get folded into the model.
Unclear what will be left next to it. It will just live on your phone and take care of everything. The apps will be markdown files describing what they do, probably compiled ahead of time for latency.
But the model will be in control, so what else is left to implement besides giving it bash, a compiler and a display?
I guess there is value in the year before that happens.
A bunch of dot files, obviously.
> Consider: what does computing look like in a world where many (maybe most) applications have an audience of just 1-2 people? How is software distributed? What does it run on?
The same. The slop apps remain just that. They may do something useful for you, but that's it. A bit like a branch in a repository.
So - yet another way to turn a computer into a subscription service (to pay for the AI providers). No, thanks.
>yet another startup nerd talking about “the future of programming” before announcing that I’ve joined, like, Sri Lanka’s answer to Uber or something.
not just startup nerd, he also make gas town and drunken rant
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Interesting times! What a time to be alive! This is the device I have always wanted! Founders are living in the future! This is Star Trek level! Drop whatever you are doing right now and join this movement!
>What I did on my computer, any power user can do on theirs. Will do on theirs. It’s fucking inevitable.
Hubris detected.
In all seriousness though, I'm not so sure.
Power users are lazy users.
And we're not all serial entrepreneurs with 400k karma points on HN, remember.