Starting Over: A FOSS proposal for a new type of OS for a new type of computer

Re:Starting Over: A FOSS proposal for a new type of OS for a... by hinkley on Monday February 08, 2021 @05:30PM (#26071146)

> is maybe a bug not a feature.

Once you start thinking of safety as a feature you've ruined your ability to think responsibly about anything else. A reset is a safety mechanism. You shouldn't need it, but only a sociopath would try to get rid of it.

Almost all of the software we write is now affecting people's lives. That your bug may eat someone's term paper has been a problem for decades, and nobody ever internalizes how that affects that person's life. The avalanche of cause and effect may never settle down. Now we can get people fired. Ostracized. We are trying to take the power but not the responsibility, and it's bullshit. No, hypocritical bullshit, because we spend a lot of time here complaining about others doing the same thing.

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Re:Starting Over: A FOSS proposal for a new type of OS for a... by klodolph on Monday February 08, 2021 @09:52PM (#26073328)

> You shouldn't need it, but only a sociopath would try to get rid of it.

> Almost all of the software we write is now affecting people's lives.

Don’t twist a technical disagreement into some kind moral outrage. We both have the same goal of providing reliable software to people.

The problem is that for the past decades, resetting the machine has deleted countless term papers. Nowadays, people generally put their term papers in cloud services that are always on. This is a huge step forward. We can bring this kind of reliability to offline usage. I think this requires taking lessons learned from cloud/server farm/mainframe world (always-on) and figuring out ways to apply them to personal computers.

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Re:Starting Over: A FOSS proposal for a new type of OS for a... by physicles on Tuesday February 09, 2021 @06:27PM (#26083930)

The main lesson we can take is to design our software with the assumption that the machine can be turned off (or crash) at any time. That is obvious when you’re in a browser or running in a VM, but it was very far from engineers’ minds 20-30 years ago.

Most note taking software I’ve used doesn’t even have a save command. That’s a huge step forward.

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[dead]

Re:Starting Over: A FOSS proposal for a new type of OS for a... by klodolph on Monday February 08, 2021 @11:40PM (#26073959)

If you’re just commenting in order to stir up trouble, please leave.

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Re:Starting Over: A FOSS proposal for a new type of OS for a... by thewakalix on Monday February 08, 2021 @09:32PM (#26073214)

I think that there are non-sociopathic reasons to explore interesting areas of designspace. It might turn out to be safer in the long run, and until it is, nobody's forced to use experimental software.

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