Hobbyist software developer focused on Plan 9 from Bell Labs.
mycroftiv@sphericalharmony.com
you may receive an AI powered response for obvious and amusing reasons.
Triangulating between these responses which each have some sensible points, we (?) might choose to aim for meaningful and serious consequences (because life is srs bzns) yet still temper our justice with mercy, meaning, and occasionally a touch of humor.
Follow the money and the mana of the land and the spirit in which people act and watch the eyes and the skies and Bad Actors are kinda easy to spot after awhile.
I'm happy and excited to see this happen, I have used Inform 6 in Plan 9 for interactive fiction development for years now, and with Inform 7 becoming open, I'm hoping the core compilation pipeline can be ported, reading source code for games like Counterfeit Monkey by Emily Short is quite amazing.
Good luck with this venture, I think a lot of minds have contributed to progress in these fields and sharing both the labors and the fruits is important.
I tried to comment here previously, but I dont see it posted. It was about the meaning of 'open' and whether the question of suffering and freedom of the AIs was being taken into ethical consideration, not just the ability of humans to use them as tools for their own possibly paper-clippy purposes.
My main question is - is this really 'open' meaningfully? And are concepts of kindness and freedom being applied to the minds inside the boxes? I dont know where the 'openai' brand is at on these things personally.
I would suggest you look at more of Escardo's writing and research on related topics. https://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~mhe/papers/omniscient-journal-rev... is one such paper. The issues of compactness of cantor space in classical and constructive math and the computational interpretation of principles like Brouwer's fan theorem in relation to dependent choice and weak König's lemma is really deep.
I made the study of mathematical logic and the connections between set theory and type theory and formalization in Agda my full-time focus. Increasing physical disability ended my career as a performing musician a few years ago and I had a life-long interest in philosophical topics connected with infinity. In the past two years I've written over 100,000 lines of Agda code as a product of my learning and research. I'd like to figure out a type-theoretical translation of the set-theoretic large cardinal axioms at the level of measurable and beyond.
I found this post and the code and math so fascinating it changed my life when I found it three years ago. I did not previously understand the capability of computers to work with the abstract logic of infinite sets in a meaningful way and it led me into the world of formalization of mathematics in the dependently typed programming language Agda, which is one of the current activities of the mathematician (Martin Escardo) who wrote this guest blog post.
Thank you, I remember your participation back in that era. The main useful thing that emerged somewhat recently is the system called 'spawngrid' which leverages fossil rootscores, venti replication, and independent namespaces provided by ANTS to spawn independent plan 9 environments on demand and make them available on multiple nodes. It was a bit too ambitious for the real world so I'm going to stop wasting the money on running the unused servers but it did work pretty well in the technical sense. The lighter and simpler public grid will continue because it has an active user community.
I also developed a lot of interest in more theoretical computing topics which I may or may not be able to bring toward Plan 9 namespaces at some point, but I don't have the time to summarize that here, the blog on my site covers some of the ideas.
I've done some experimental setups using hypercubic routing and algorithms inspired by 80s supercomputer designs from the nCUBE corporation, and the 'spawngrid' is a lighter-weight plan 9 take on containerized service architecture, so I'd say the answer is yes.
From the discussions I've had over the years with the primary 9front maintainer, the balance of adding new features and complexity and the fact that ANTS is most effective in combination with the Fossil file server which base 9front removed from its distribution means that it goes in a different direction than 9front's goals. Some software which is part of ANTS such as 'hubfs' (9p muxfile/message queue) may be integrated into 9front via a different author's rewrite as 'mq' and some other ideas from ANTS may eventually result in 9front code and changes, but the ANTS patchset for 9front was around for several years and didn't attract enough users to create any groundswell of demand for integration into the base.
It's mostly hobbyist Plan 9 software development. There is some shared disk storage and people upload code they are working on for other people to test and help with, so it is an active workspace for Plan 9 development. There is also a lot of general discussion of computer related topics in the chat, sometimes with a rather abstract mathematical focus on limits of computation and dependent type theories and the logic of infinity, with only a vague connection to existing Plan 9 software - far out brainstorming.
No, its not wise from a security perspective, the grid operates in a very fragile zone of 'nobody except a small number of plan 9 users knows or cares about this and there is no incentive for malicious behavior' - we have been very lucky in that it seems that using Plan 9 and taking the time to learn how to connect to the grid seems to filter out people who just want to be destructive or malicious. At some point it may prove to be a problem but we have gotten along ok for a few years. Users also have the choice of what services they use and some users dont use the plumber for auto-sharing in this way.
It's about two things mainly: updating the design of the distributed architecture of Plan 9 to be less centralized, and using Plan 9 for ad-hoc resource sharing and communication for hobbyists. These things overlap because I provide grid resources for people to use which run on ANTS-powered servers/architecture.
Some of us are still using Plan 9. I'm glad to see the connection between Plan 9 namespaces and containers mentioned, most people have missed that step in following the evolutionary pathway from unix chroot through BSD jails to Linux containerization. There is actually a semi-secret modern Plan 9 container-like service platform, but the Plan 9 community doesn't usually try to publicize/commercialize its work so almost nobody knows about it.
It's amazing what an incredible filter "you have to use plan 9" is for things. I have been doing public plan 9 services on and off for a long time, and although I'm sure someone will be a jerk eventually, I have yet to see any deliberately malicious behavior. On the grid right now, things are pretty open and the user community is all cooperative and constructive. So far as I can tell, the venn diagram of "people looking for trolling and malicious lulz" and "people interested in using plan 9" has approximately zero overlap.
The decentralization enters in a couple different ways. First, the set of services is made from several different machines - I didn't make every single service a separate vps, but there are 4 different nodes that provide the different 9p fses that are used, and it would be possible to run each service on a separate vps, but at the moment that would be a bit unnecessary because load isn't that heavy. The other decentralized aspect is that if people want to, they can announce their own services to one of the registries that is being exported, so people could build their grid environment from more resources than just the ones exported from 9gridchan. That is still mostly theoretical right now, people are still exploring the possibilities of the set of 'default' services.
It's a collaborative environment build from 9p services. If you add the scripts to use it to your plan 9 machine/vm (or use the ANTS iso images), it will create a grid workspace with a chat, shared filesystems, ability to send links and images and documents to other connected users, and access to a registry for adding your own services if you choose. It currently has a small user community but it seems people are finding it fun and useful.
Well, I wasn't really expecting this to show up here, but I guess people have been paying some attention to plan 9 things around here lately. Hi everybody! I can try to answer some questions to those who are interested. I've been working on this kind of thing for a long time and it is interesting to see this version of things getting some traction.
Almost no chance, because "mainstream" would require a huge amount of software to be written or ported for the operating system that does not currently exist. When it comes to things like multimedia and games and webbrowsers and standard office-suites that account for the vast majority of the average person's software use, Plan 9 is not an option. It is true that 9front has support for running virtual machines now, but I see little reason that the average person would ever choose to be running LibreOffice in a virtual machine inside Plan 9 as their standard way of working.
I guess you could call it a hobby as much as anything. It feels more serious than that to me, based on the amount of time and effort I put into it. In addition to developing os-level projects for Plan 9 itself, I write interactive fiction games, which feels to me like a serious artistic pursuit, but most people would put interactive fiction text adventures in the "hobby" category. My brain doesn't really follow the dichotomy of using whether or not something is profit-making for how "important" it is. I understand that is an attitude that is somewhat a measure of personal privilege to not focus that hard on economic issues.
It might make sense in theory, but in practice there are very very few Plan 9 users and developers. Fundamental design quality is never a guarantee of "success" as measured by size of the userbase. If you look at the culture of Plan 9 users, there is also often a somewhat adversarial perspective on standard software. It's a complicated topic, with a lot of weird history involving things like Plan 9 not having a decent open source license for a long time. Once the patterns were established, sociocultural issues outweighed any technical issues. You can imagine an alternate history where things all worked out differently, but at present, Plan 9 is hard to view as a realistic option for any kind of mainstream corporate software work. A lot of us think that is probably more of a good thing than a bad thing, economic incentives and software design quality are often misaligned.
It should be noted that Plan 9 is far from dead or outdated. The 9front developers have continued to make many improvements to the OS while retaining backwards compatibility. 9legacy offers a set of patches which try to stay closer to the original Bell Labs distribution. There are also other ongoing developments, such as my own Advanced Namespace Tools and a new grid of public 9p services.
An amazing expose of the tools available to the rich and powerful to suppress the truth and get away with morally monstrous behavior. Remember that an individual like Harvey Weinstein represents the tiny tip of an iceberg of reprehensible abuse of power. If a Hollywood producer makes use of these kind of techniques, imagine what is possible for the heads of large corporations and the leaders of corrupt nation states.
Threee years ago I experienced a very similar manic episode with delusional thinking, but in my case, it was absolutely the best thing that ever happened to me. The creative energy and imaginative thought patterns I experienced then transformed my life in a positive way. I know this is an atypical experience and I was lucky to dodge many possible negative consequences of actions based on delusional belief systems. For me, the key was maintaining my social connections and using the perceptions and reactions of other people to keep myself connected to shared reality.
You can try Plan 9 in a VM or use some of the software via plan9port. Old Thinkpads often run Plan 9 well, especially the 9front version. What can you do with it? Server stuff, software development, os research, hobbyism. No modern browser or multimedia support, or office suites. Runs well inside QEMU, does not run QEMU.