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Comment by okdiendiendjefn | Hacker News Reader

What it has always been. Nothing has changed in this regard.

Oh, ok. I guess computer science is finished, then. I should have known. It's not like there's any evidence that it's been blown wide open recently.

(The irony is that all the reading that's gone into our design is like, old CSAIL papers. Maybe it's true! Maybe everything we're doing is just crate-digging through old settled computer science. That would be on brand. I should find a way to work Athena into it. Maybe we'll use Zephyr for messaging.)

Are you reducing computer science to… just OSs?

I guess it really is over if this is what professionals (supposedly) seem to think.

OP is right though, an OS remains an OS, same as it’s always been. What’s changed is how we interact with it and what we lay on top of it. Nothing magical or philosophical about it.

I didn't say there was no such thing as an OS.

This is by and for people who do not distinguish between the UI and the OS, like how "MSIE" is "The Internet" for them.

I think operating systems have changed. They don't interact directly with hardware much anymore, and the hardware is filled with SoCs all running systems of their own, sometimes with entire network stacks, communicating with devices and each other, collecting and processing data, often totally invisible to the operating system the user gets to work with. The operating systems most people use have gone from giving users control over their computer to being a sandboxed interface to manage files and some of what their computer is doing.

Could you elaborate on what you mean by "don't interact with hardware much anymore"? If you compare modern drivers with similar ones from 20 years ago, for example, you'll find the modern ones tend to be quite a bit more complex.

No directly anyway, for the OS it's all abstractions and isolation. There was a time when the OS could basically see and control everything, but now there are subsystems all over the place with their own memory, their own software, all outside of the control of the OS. CSME runs while the computer is powered off.

My most charitable reading of that is

https://www.usenix.org/conference/hotosxiii/mind-gap-reconne...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36myc8wQhLo

This is by and for people who do not distinguish between the UI and the OS, like how "MSIE" is "The Internet" for them.

There could be some interesting actual OS design innovations for new permissions, access control, and sandboxing systems that are designed from the ground up for these "conjurable" experiences (or even OS components themself).

Finding some balance between access and safety for vibe-conjuring parts of the OS in a way that's still powerful but won't accidentally nuke or corrupt itself.

I do think there's some interesting space to be explored in capability-based systems, but even then I think it would mostly end up looking similar to how existing systems are, just with one more element added

The historical baggage is so heavy I don't think anyone can realistically throw it away, so what we'll end up getting are almost certainly incremental improvements to existing foundations.

I've heard very competent people claiming similar things. I think there's an abstraction I'm missing. I know they don't mean it literally.

The most recent was Loris Degioanni yesterday in a conference talk.

I think saying " This dumb dumb doesn't know what a device driver is" is a very incorrect read since you know, he's written a bunch of them

I mean it literally.

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