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agentkilo

254 karma · joined November 20, 2024

https://github.com/agent-kilo
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agentkilo··on Kernel: Introduce Multikernel Architecture Support
IIUC, yes, all the kernels involved run directly on the hardware, in a "cooperative" way, i.e. they must agree on not touching others' memory regions.

I think the architecture assumes all loaded kernels are trusted, and imposes no isolation other than having them running on different CPUs.

Given the (relative) simplicity of the PoC, it could be really performant.

agentkilo··on Writing a basic Linux device driver when you know nothing about Linux drivers
Yeah that part of the article put a big smile on my face.

I did the same thing back in college, when I was in a lab. We wanted to do some research on Wi-Fi signals, and I happened to own a bunch of Wi-Fi adaptors produced by SomeSmallTech Co. Ltd., which featured relatively new Atheros chips and didn't have Linux drivers at the time.

So I sent an email to the company's public email address, asking for some datasheets, "for science". To my disappointment, presumably a PR person replied that they "don't have a company policy to collaborate with academic research". (But they did send a quick reply, kudos to that.)

Funnily enough, years later I ended up working for said company. Naturally, when I first logged into the company network, I searched for the datasheets I asked for. There were "classified" watermarks all over the PDFs :)

agentkilo··on Homegrown Closures for Uxn
Built on top of Owl Lisp[1]. TIL about this dialect, and it looks interesting! Instead of native threads, it has continuation-based threads[2], and it seems the whole VM architecture is based on that.

[1]: https://haltp.org/posts/owl.html

[2]: https://haltp.org/posts/owl.html#heading26

agentkilo··on Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet
> An offset would be nice, though I'm sure it's not easy to define a heuristic that works in all places.

I agree. I considered dynamic offsets, in an effort to declutter the labels, but found it even more confusing. Maybe I should do more experiments on this.

> but where the labels were laid out it just looked like an inviting right-aligned label on the clickable tabs themselves

The labels are left-aligned by default (except in `frame-hinter`). I think you can try some combinations of the `:anchor` and `:show-highlights` options[1] to see if they work better for you.

[1]: https://agent-kilo.github.io/jwno/ref/built-in-modules/jwno-...

Edit: Wrong link

agentkilo··on Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet
It seems your right alt key is actually the AltGr key. I didn't explicitly support AltGr in Jwno, so it freaked out.

Sorry for the confusion. I think switching to another leader key, such as LAlt or RCtrl, should fix the issue.

agentkilo··on Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet
Thanks! I created a tracking issue here: https://github.com/agent-kilo/jwno/issues/12

Meanwhile you can try to change leading `RAlt` to something else, like `Win + H`, and see if it works. There may be a bug that gets triggered when only modifier keys are mapped.

agentkilo··on Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet
> Having tiling options that fit within a smaller part of the screen (e.g. still allow side by side or top/bottom split, but in a smaller total region) would be great.

Do you mean reserving screen space for the on-screen keyboard? If that's the case, you can try to "transform" the top-level frame (a frame that tracks a monitor's screen area), either in the REPL or in your config: https://agent-kilo.github.io/jwno/cookbook/adjust-top-level-...

> Using example-config.janet I tried pressing RAlt or RAlt+K and I get the UI hint shortcuts list coming up, but none of them seem to do anything

Can you please file a bug report and attach relevant logs? You can write logs to a file by starting Jwno like this:

jwno.exe --log-file C:\jwno.log --log-level debug --no-console your-config.janet

There should be some interesting logs when you press one of the UI hint shortcuts.

> Fwiw, as a newbie I found it a bit intimidating/off-putting that it doesn't work out the box without choosing a config file. That's quite a lot of extra cognitive effort and link-clicking before you can try it out.

I totally understand. But I chose to not include a default config in the executable, because I thought a window manager is a... personal thing. It should evolve with your habits and workflows, so the default config will most likely get changed to something dramatically different anyway. I can be wrong though.

agentkilo··on Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet
A fellow StumpWM user!

My StumpWM is heavily customized though, and I mostly modeled Jwno's behavior after my own config, so it may not be what you expected at all.

But that's one of the reasons I like Lisp and things built in Lisp: They are so flexible, you can sometimes build something based on the original thing, while it feels completely different from the original.

> my monitor seems just the right shape/resolution for the standard Windows splits to be suboptimal

Do you use an ultra-wide? In that case, Jwno has no OOTB ultra-wide support, but there's a section for adjusting it in the cookbook[1].

[1]: https://agent-kilo.github.io/jwno/cookbook/adjust-top-level-...

agentkilo··on Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet
Sorry for the confusion. Multi-monitor support is only briefly mentioned in the docs[1] and the interactive tutorial[2].

Jwno's internal data structure has these levels (higher-level comes first):

Root - Virtual Desktops - Monitors - Normal Frames - Windows

So monitors are part of a virtual desktop, and every virtual desktop has the same layout that reflects your physical monitor arrangement. When you switch virtual desktops, all monitors switch to the new desktop at the same time.

[1]:https://agent-kilo.github.io/jwno/frame-tree/frame-nodes.htm...

[2]: https://github.com/agent-kilo/jwno/blob/master/example/tutor...

agentkilo··on Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet
TBH I dived right in when I decided I should build something with Janet, and didn't really consider any alternatives. Now you mentioned it, I think Janet's simplicity and conciseness played a large part in attracting me to it, comparing to Common Lisp at least.
agentkilo··on Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet
Thanks for posting the link!

It's a quick-and-dirty PoC with lots of caveats and limitations though. E.g. it works only for a single monitor. I don't think we can clip windows to a "view port" on Windows (the OS), so this may never be as nice as PaperWM, Niri etc.

agentkilo··on Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet
I think these are the most obvious differences between the two:

* By default, Komorebi uses dynamic tiling, while Jwno uses manual tiling.

* Komorebi has workspaces, Jwno works with Windows native virtual desktops instead.

* Komorebi uses IPC and native system command line to send commands, while Jwno usually operates all by itself.

There are definitely other details that are important to you, but these are the things that immediately came to my mind. I don't run Hyprland so can't really comment on that.

agentkilo··on Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet
I think Janet is quite...liberal? It's a practical language, but doesn't force a specific paradigm on you. There're "escape hatches" in different levels of the language, and I like that.

Maybe the most "opinionated" things in Janet are the ev stuff and fibers. I think they're done right though, you just need to be careful with the event loop when embedding Janet.

agentkilo··on Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet
I find the REPL and interactive development workflow invaluable. A window manager is a long-running background service by nature, and has a lot of accumulated runtime states. The ability to peek inside and debug while the process keeps running helped me a lot when building Jwno.

I think Jwno's REPL module is so important, I specifically changed Jwno's architecture at one point to make it work.

agentkilo··on Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet
> I think it's inspired by Clojure and Lua, and somehow manages to be better than both

This is exactly how I feel about Janet too. I don't think I have enough experience on Clojure or Lua to comment on them, but I got attracted to Janet almost immediately.

Working on Jwno also confirms my first impression on Janet: It's really a practical language. The tooling has some room for improvement, but the language itself can get things done - usually fast and easily.

agentkilo··on Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet
Thanks for the kind words! It means a lot coming from you :)
agentkilo··on Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet
Definitely! I got great inspirations from both of the Komorebi and GlazeWM communities. People who like tidy desktops are definitely nice people :)
agentkilo··on Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet
Thanks :)
agentkilo··on Nimony compiler plugins – Nim 3.0 WIP
Interesting. I didn't know about Nimony.

I'm still not sure what a compiler plugin is though, after reading the scarce discussion in the forum thread. Erlang's parse transform comes to my mind. Is it something similar?

agentkilo··on Apple’s Darwin OS and XNU Kernel Deep Dive
The article states that "pager daemons" that manage swap files runs in user space, and the kernel memory can also get swapped out, but never explained how a user space daemon swaps out kernel memory. Do they have hard-coded exceptions for special daemons, or use special system calls? Where can I find out more details about the user space memory management specifically?
agentkilo··on Tmp.out #4
Reminds me of Phrack [0]. I learnt all the stuff I know about the ELF format and some low-level debugger shenanigans there, and implemented my own PLT hook back then, good times.

[0]: https://phrack.org/

agentkilo··on Volkswagen seeks to counter rivals with budget EV model
Haha I had the exact same thought when I saw the title.

That said, the new car looks very much like an "electrified" Golf, which is one of the first cars I drove, and I have fond memories about it. The new car may succeed if they target the same audience, and remove all those fancy user-tracking "features".

agentkilo··on Firefly ‘Blue Ghost’ lunar lander touches down on the moon
Yeah that's true, but I haven't really experienced the Apollo era personally. After the "gap" between the old space race, and the new race inspired by private space agencies, I do feel we are getting closer, to the moon at least.
agentkilo··on Firefly ‘Blue Ghost’ lunar lander touches down on the moon
Congrats to everyone involved!

I planned to watch the live stream but wasn't able to. The moment of successful landing was quite modest, only a mostly-static screen with telemetrics was shown to the public, but it absolutely felt magical. It feels like the moon is well within humankind's reach by now.

Coincidentally, I found a copy of Uchu Kyodai (by Chuya Koyama) in my local library, and started reading it recently. It's fun to compare the perspectives from more than a decade ago, to the actual development we have right now, regarding space exploration.

(This was posted to another thread, but I moved it here after I realized comments were moved)

agentkilo··on Show HN: Air traffic control radio and chill music for focus
Yeah these days I just go to LiveATC and start my own choice of music before I start my day. I used LofiATC and it gave me this hobit.

Judging by what happened to LofiATC though, it seems LiveATC was not fond of this kind of things.

agentkilo··on The 20 year old PSP can now connect to WPA2 WiFi Networks
This is impressive!

I still have my PSP 3000 (bought over a decade ago), which is in great condition, despite the frequency I whip it out and have fun playing the classics.

I mostly just play vanilla single-player games on it, so there's rarely a need to bring it online. But when that occasion appears, it can be really cumbersome. I keep a cheap mobile hotspot around and have it work in WEP mode, just for bridging my PSP to other WiFi networks. I will definitely try this instead.

That said, I think a great feature of PSP (and other old-gen handhelds) is, it can work great while being completely offline. I think I will keep it forever, or until they stop making new batteries for it.

agentkilo··on Why I Chose Common Lisp
SBCL is a great choice! It's a surprisingly dynamic system (so are other CL implementations).

A while ago, I did some private work for someone, using SBCL, and sent her the native binary I built, then forgot about the whole thing.

The client came back with some new requirements much later, when the project was concluded, and the source code was already lost by that time.

I vaguely remembered how I did things, so I spawned a REPL from the old binary, went into the relevant CL package, wrote a new function that overrides the old behavior, and the client's problem was solved.

I did all those without the original source code. It was a small thing to fix, but I can't imagine making the same fix so swiftly with any other tech stack, when the source code is lost. I was deeply impressed.

agentkilo··on Building Bauble
This article is really inspiring! I have a few dozen half-baked projects, that's meant for no one else but me, to play with, or to "learn new things" from, but none of them ever became so complete and polished as author's Bauble. I can feel the pure enjoyment of crafting from the article. I hope more people can find out about it, and share OP's joy.

I should really finish what I started. It may take, say, eighteen years, but I should finish them XD

agentkilo··on Bringing SerenityOS to real hardware, one driver at a time
I started with LDD [1], which is a book from a decade ago, but should still be relevant these days. And at some later time I found this treasure trove [2] hidden in FreeBSD docs, among which, the FreeBSD Architecture Handbook and the FreeBSD Developers' Handbook may be of special interest to you.

[1] https://lwn.net/Kernel/LDD3/

[2] https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/

agentkilo··on Operating System in 1,000 Lines – Intro
Very cool! I just started to dvelve into RISC-V, and the book I'm reading (not in English) offers their own emulator[1], which, at a glance, is much simpler than QEMU, and comes with a weird license[2]. I wonder if people actually used it, since it looks like an academic project. Maybe I can also follow this tutorial and test it out.

[1] https://github.com/NJU-ProjectN/nemu/tree/master

[2] https://github.com/NJU-ProjectN/nemu/blob/master/LICENSE

Edit: wrong link

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