What even is an OS now?

You were the exception. Most kids felt awe. We started learning BASIC and creating "dumb games". That's the origin story of most people my age who ended up in this doomed industry.

> Is there a meeting happening anywhere right this minute that I’m supposed to be in?

> You can go on and on like this. These all sound trivial. That’s the point. They’re normal-life problems nobody would have built serious programs around, because the audience sounds too small.

Waze and Calendars. Both have huge audiences.

All you need to do is look at history to realise that. We had things like BASIC, HyperCard, and the early web that attracted droves of people who were excited by the opportunities. While a lot of those people went into industry to write software for other people, a lot did not. Most people, I suspect, didn't even explore the potential because they simply don't think of computers as programmable machines -- even if they were aware that there are people who program computers for a living.

If I'm running software written by an LLM, even if I was the one who prompted the LLM, I would still want my OS to treat it as if written by a stranger.

I know he's not necessarily talking about relaxing security models here, but he's not being very specific about his vision otherwise.

And to them software is generally a not much more than a home-screen bookmark to some client that could be a website.

Looking towards macOS and iOS for example, an underrated feature for the “it just runs your web browser” crowd is all of the system-provided databases. These turn rather specialized systems - photo libraries, music streaming, calendaring, contacts management, and mail into shared databases that link applications together.

On iOS it goes much further - because of HealthKit, my Withings scale, my Garmin (when I had one), my MyNetDiary nutrition tracker, my continuous Glucose Monitor, and my third-party analytics apps share the same access to my data. And it is done securely - I can choose exactly which part each sees. This is a tremendous resource for both developers and LLMs.

My calendar, hosted on a personal server but available through Calendar, is transparently available to my to-do list app - so I can see my appointments, my tasks, and even my workouts (thanks to health kit) in one view.

Weather is a system service on iOS. Calendar is a system service. Contacts is a system service. Health data is a system service. Even music - third-party apps can control and consume your music library on iOS - is a system service (if you use it).

My Mac knows how to develop RAW files out of the box, and it can connect with integrations to get them printed, and use my library metadata to sync my favorites to my phone. I have a third party app that syncs my Apple photos library to my NAS.

A good OS, like iOS or macOS, could be the fabric that holds all your vibe-coded and ephemeral LLM apps together. I see it making a whole new category of things possible.

I am at a job where I am paid well to build software to do things in a distributed system that processes information across various external systems (some with physical world impacts). The outcome of that computing is revenue for the company. Using agent-wrapped LLMs makes the software authorship component of the job really fast. The rest is virtually the same speed.

For Thomas's mobile computing examples, these are done really well by my phone's operating system's built-in voice command system, mature for a decade by now.

At home, I use software that is well-crafted to do some thing. Or I write a series of scripts to do narrow things that for some reason aren't in Aptitude or Snap, for example "copy all the photos off my iPhone and rename them and sort them by date in my filesystem".

Perhaps I have no imagination, but I don't feel like having an LLM make applications on my phone. I want good software that someone that I trust wrote.

Thomas has been a successful cryptographer, vulnerability analyst, and entrepreneur, so he probably knows what he's doing. I just don't get it.

Then the AI will just create the image that resembles a spreadsheet or whatever on the fly and write straight to the framebuffer.

All other tasks that go with the spreadsheet will also be done on the fly.

But I could imagine our language will change and certain words will basically act like macros and create a set of assumptions and specifications for the prompt that you're using.

Most of these problems the slop apps can solve are dependent on gathering information to answer questions. If no one ever visits weather.com to get weather information, ad revenue will completely dry up and the site will go under. Then the slop stops slopping and I can’t get my hyper local weather app to work.

I’m not going to go as far as to say this article is wrong, in fact in this cursed timeline it’s probably right. I just don’t see how it’s good.

Back when Google was the newest thing, I would Google all the obscure things that I could think of, trying to fill in gaps in my knowledge. Trying to verify urban myths but usually debunking them, etc.

Any power user or even any user, could have done that. But most people who considered themselves critically thinkers actually did the opposite, digging deeper into all the harmful rabbit holes we see today.

A lot of things can done "with just a few steps" with AI but I think it's underestimated how hard it is to come up with those steps.

Not that the article isn't interesting otherwise.

This seems to be only thought out after a day of vibe coding apps that no-one uses.

It's the thing that runs your AI agent, that runs your AI pocket bot (AIBI looks cute btw), that runs the software doing the training of AI models, that runs the datacenters doing the inference, etc.

There's still data. There are still bits moving. Filesystems and networking aren't going anywhere.

In a charitable reading the title is something like "what is even a desktop OS now?" or "what is even a consumer OS now?".

As for the new project, I've got one bet: there's Linux involved to host it.

Linux is an OS.

P.S: as a sidenote the entire "users don't install apps anymore" was already true to some extent. A shitload of users are totally fine with an OS that runs a browser and that's it. And they're fully operational. And we still all know what an OS is, even for, say, a Chromebook. Heck, I'm not even sure "installing apps" as ever been, except during the first install of the OS, what an OS was ever about.

Unclear what will be left next to it. It will just live on your phone and take care of everything. The apps will be markdown files describing what they do, probably compiled ahead of time for latency.

But the model will be in control, so what else is left to implement besides giving it bash, a compiler and a display?

I guess there is value in the year before that happens.

IMO even this AI phone is doomed in the slightly longer run.

One more step into the weirdness and people will just be working with AI to build their own bespoke phone with the specs sent over to a manufacturer that is "like PCBWay, but spits out whole devices".

I have no idea what this does to society, the economy, etc when we reach a point where nobody really "needs" any kind of middleman for almost anything (well, except for things they actually really need, like food and shelter), but it looks like I'll see it happen for a bit before I die.

The same. The slop apps remain just that. They may do something useful for you, but that's it. A bit like a branch in a repository.

not just startup nerd, he also make gas town and drunken rant