Amiga Unix, Again

jchw•9 minutes ago

My eternal advice to anyone doing heavily LLM assisted projects is to do them a bit less LLM assisted. You should still use LLMs, in my opinion, they're wonderful tools. But I know reading this page that this text is mostly LLM-generated, and that leaves there to be little hope that much else of the project isn't.

It's one thing if your code is really truly "co-authored by" Claude. It's another thing if it isn't even really co-authored by you.

Evidently the majority of people see no problem with LLM prose, but me and many others think it is some of the most annoying crap possible. Please consider speaking in your own voice.

I know this gets repetitive, but it is important.

breput•23 minutes ago

I ran NetBSD 0.8 on my Amiga 500 (with a 68030 w/MMU, 68881, and SCSI hard drive sidecar), which co-existed in the same timeframe as Commodore's release.

Other than just than "we can" and historic interest, I can't imagine why anyone would choose to run System Vr4 over 4.4BSD, especially since the latest NetBSD 11 release still fully supports Amiga[0]

[0] https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/amiga/

teddyh•about 3 hours ago

I mean, Debian 3.1 (sarge) supported Amiga hardware. The support was dropped in 2007 (the next release), because not enough people were maintaining it. I would assume that it would be easier to re-start that effort, unless compatibility with actual Amix was important for some reason?

rjsw•about 2 hours ago

NetBSD still runs on Amiga.

nullc•about 3 hours ago

I get pet-cemetery vibes from these AI powered resurrections.

As in ... "the AI brought it back to life, but it came back /wrong/".

spijdar•about 2 hours ago

I've used LLMs to get the distributed Sprite OS running again, though I've yet to release it, and I'm not sure what that release will look like, if it ever happens.

One thing I really don't get, and I really hope I never do, is leave the front page/README/etc so ... Claude-ified (or GPT, plausibly, I guess):

  native SCSI and ethernet drivers, proven on real hardware

  Quake — runs; a benchmark more than a game, for now

  running under emulation, real hardware next

  The grimoire records both, confidence-tagged

I am becoming probably too okay with LLMs, and I'm probably about as "forgiving" of this stuff as anyone, but man, it's disheartening to see that for something as much of a passion project as "Amiga Unix", seemingly no-one bothered to write a page in a human voice for it. Maybe it's LLM-written, maybe a hybrid thing, I dunno. But at best it sounds like "Apple product release", IMO.

I know others will say the same about seeing LLM usage at all, and yeah... I don't really have a defense. It just feels like the "bare minimum of decency" to, well, at least make the front page less LLM-sounding.

hexapus•42 minutes ago

Can't argue with you there. There's a ton of cool projects that people have vibecoded, and exist in domains where the fact that it's possibly insecure/poorly optimised/unmaintainable by humans doesn't really matter much. e.g. porting retro systems to, or writing new utilities for MiSTer FPGA. I love the platform, and the more stuff I can run on it, the better. Bugs are annoying, but not critical. The community gets software that may have never existed otherwise.

But still, somehow, when I see a Claudish README, it instantly gives me the ick. Write about your project. Tell us why you built it. Talk about the problems the bot helped you work through. I'm not going to judge you for not being able to code it all up yourself - but at least write the README in your own voice and tell me why you cared enough to do it.

jmspring•about 2 hours ago

Your pet cemetery reference made me recall reviving puffy the dog in Something about Mary - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzgrVW2uZWE

CursedSilicon•about 2 hours ago

I mean, that Peri Fractic clown "owns Commodore" now and tried to sell people a phone that was rendered entirely using AI.

Maybe Amiga people are ready to drink from that chalice too?

Amiga Unix, Again

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