Notices by jjg (jjg@sunbeam.city), page 18

@ND3JR @kelbot @haitch @vertigo

I should have known I'd bump-into someone on Mastodon who could have the Minicomputer/Mainframe debate... 😂

@kelbot

Right, don't get me wrong, I don't *regret* Linux, I just think it's time for something new.

We're running a mainframe operating system on our phones, it's kind of nuts.

@haitch @vertigo

@kelbot @haitch @vertigo

Agreed (I should have mentioned that I was assuming that an O/S like this would require new hardware as well :) )

@kelbot @haitch @vertigo

Also there's Unix architecture things that I don't think are necessary for a personal computer, for example all the stuff that goes into multi-user/timesharing.

@kelbot @haitch @vertigo

If you didn't have to support Linux, and you didn't have to support the "modern web", you could make computers a lot less complex, a lot more energy efficient and a lot more open.

@kelbot @haitch @vertigo

There's some fundamental stuff that limits Linux to fairly complex CPU's (@vertigo could explain this in more detail than I can). This makes it a lot harder to use on synthesized CPUs, which have a lot more potential for being open.

@kelbot @haitch @vertigo

I'm not aware of something better that currently exists, but I can imagine something a lot simpler, with much lower resource requirements and complexity.

@vertigo @haitch

I don't have any engineering problems with SiFive but I'm not so sure about the company, and frankly they are just hard to get your hands on.

@haitch @vertigo

Agreed all around.

I'm starting to think I need to focus my work around very large, high-performance computers and around very small, low-resource designs.

Linux is great, but I question its use for personal computers. The result is a pretty steep price across many vectors.

@haitch @vertigo

Oh wait, I thought this was a RISC-V core synthesized on an FPGA running Linux. Turns out it's a SiFive FPGA core (or rather, 4) running linux with some FPGA fabric on the side.

Still cool, but I was hoping for something that didn't rely on SiFive :)

@haitch @vertigo

This is so cool I'm willing to suppress my hatred of "worlds first"-ness 😆

@OmnaBrain @piponfishing I’ll be reading some of this soon :)

@OmnaBrain @piponfishing that’s a very interesting point.

Personally I’ve struggled to understand why peoples identity is deeply bound to a place (although I suppose there is a difference between natural physical places and man-made constructs like cities/states/countries/etc.)

@piponfishing @OmnaBrain

I’ve studied plain cultures (Amish, Mennonite, etc.) for similar reasons (although more focused on autonomy). I see a lot there that could be useful in a socialist/anarchist sense if you can subtract the harmful stuff and still preserve the community, autonomy, etc.

I think you can do it, you just need a shared value system, but it doesn’t need to be religious/hierarchical/etc.

@StuC @aral @Purism @gnome

Has anyone written or analyzed this risk? When you put it in these terms it sounds terrifying to someone who knows about these things but I’m curious if there is some media that explains it well that I could share with laymen.