Being somebody whose absolute favourite book is The Computational Beauty of Nature by Gary William Flake (1998), this is the kind of stuff I come here for. So much more interesting than shop talk about the framework of the week, blockchain hype segueing into AI frenzy, and making fun of people who get stuck in VIM (I once got stuck in nano when for some reason the Control key became unmapped for unknown reasons eventually solved by spawning a new shell, killing the killalling the process, and resetting the terminal, so yeah — I might be an old hand but making fun of people is so not funny).

I’m glad the real hacker ethos of making stuff arbitrarily convoluted by mixing and matching various computational-equivalent substrates results is some truly bizarre results. An instant classic of the genre.

I have a 2010 Toshiba Regza TV that has never been connected to the internet and is from the time when “1080p” was the new hotness and there was a kerfuffle going on about 3D televisions. Lots of HDMI 1.2 (?) ports, and a lot of legacy connectors including a SCART for when I want to bring a tear to my eye by watching VHS tapes from my youth. Attached to a 3rd generation AppleTV that could take a round and not drop the line; a device still supported but also too ancient for the flamboyant new Liquid Glass UI. Also attached: a Raspberry Pi 4 with an external 8TB HD. Amongst other things it’s the authoritative node for my Resilio Sync mesh of media and ebooks across all my devices.

I’m a happy camper. Newer stuff would feel like a downgrade. Couldn’t care less about 4K video. Never wilfully seen sought it out, unimpressed when I see it.

I still go to the cinema regularly, alone. Something very deliberate about going to a place to pay a price to go into a specific space to do a specific thing. Pandering to second screen audiences has produced some of the most profoundly insulting media in living memory.

Amazingly rugged design that somehow places man and machine on equal footing by throwing us back to the time of casette futurism.

Amazingly poor choice of logo.

It’s turtles all the way down.

Those turtles are not highlighting a saying; they're having sex. They should be at a 0 degree angle on top of one another to represent the saying.

The turtle lives 'twixt plated decks

Which practically conceal its sex.

I think it clever of the turtle

In such a fix to be so fertile.

Yeah they go down so deep they start appearing from above.

Have it in print. Fondly remember BeOS in the second half of the nineties; still have second-generation BeBox. I was amongst those who were dismayed when Apple “didn’t choose Plan B” and instead acquired NeXT (that I also had experience with, and whose hardware and software I adored, but that just didn’t “feel right” for the whole “multimedia convergence” visible on the horizon ahead). Guess I was wrong, but I still dote on my Batmobile, and the interface is so perfectly “nineties zany grunge” in retrospect: as chiselled as Motif but with a define nod to Keith Haring.

Anyway, an awesome and prescient book.

Anathem, Cryptonomicon, The Baroque Cycle… Neal Stephenson is an absolute master of his craft, though he is famous for failing to stick the landings sometimes.

BeOS was so amazing; I ran it for a while on x86 hardware. Ahead of its time. But I always loved NeXT. (I'd go down to the local university computer store to drool over them. The staff all knew me by name.) And now, I carry one around with me everywhere I go. Living in the future...

Have you tried Haiku recently?

Yes, I’ve been watching them and running their builds for… fifteen to twenty years now. It’s gone from an effort to reimplement a fairly prescient OS to basically an exercise in software archeology, since even achieving the project’s goals of a fully compatible reinplentation will be so severely limited compared to modern-day OSes it won’t be in any way ‘competitive’ with what is broadly available now, for free (free Linux tanks now have railguns as artillery, antigravity regulators instead of tracks, are built out of magical titanium foam alloys that can protect better while weighing less… you get the point). They have all the sci-fi tech of the erstwhile Batmobile and are on the lot with the keys in the ignition and a sign that reads “take me”.

Well at this point the BeOS (binary) compatibility is incidental. It is it's own system, and daily drivable for a great number of people. (admittedly not for gamers, but there are working nvidia drivers (not public (yet))), Firefox and derivatives have been ported, as well as most of the big name foss apps (libreoffice, etc) have been ported.

Yeah Haiku is its “own thing”… but only up to a point. After all you’re the one mentioning it on a thread ostensibly about BeOS.

Indeed. The influences are prominent, but it is BeOS modernised, not BeOS reimplemented.

It's hardware requirements are little, even overlapping with BeOS on the low end. I have personally run Haiku beta5 on a 666Mhz Pentium 3 with 256MB of RAM (normally, I run BeOS on that machine, with 512MB of RAM). I'm not sure what I'm trying to say here, besides a general call to give Haiku a try on that old thinkpad, in a VM[0], or anywhere else really.

[1] If you're using virtualbox don't give it more than 1 cpu, virtualbox has a bug which makes haiku slow with multiple CPUs.

Not sure BeOS source was ever released (YellowTab never had the source code IIRC), but several Windows versions were leaked. I wonder if LLMs picked those up, therefore being poisoned, as well as the legal result (is it clearroom enough?) Who owns the rights to BeOS these days? IIRC it was acquired by Palm, then LG (WebOS).

Hard pass on that; I’m much happier with software written by fallible humans with a mind than word salad devices.

Interesting, but the element of survivorship bias is inevitable: any evidence that they were lighting fires later than our hypothesised first date passes unremarked, so only previous dates raise eyebrows and are ‘surfaced’.

You built Janes’ bicameral mind.

That just made my day, thank you

You’re most welcome. This reads like an epistolary sci-fi origin story.

“Remember the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”

I in no way want to underplay the seriousness of child sexual abuse, but as a naturist I find all this paranoia around nudity and “not safe for work” to be somewhere between hilarious and bewildering. Normal is what you grew up with I guess, and I come from an FKK family. What’s so shocking about a human being? All that stuff in public speaking about “imagine your audience is naked”. Yeah, fine: so what’s Plan B?

I’m the insufferable Apple fanboy that chimes in to mention Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. I have a personal subscription to Office 365 for interoperability but I’ve been annoyed by their inescapable AI price hike and now this. I might as well just cancel my subscription. Excel for Apple doesn’t even have PowerQuery and PowerPivot, so it’s already a diminished experience.

I last used Publisher way back in the late nineties to lay out the school newsletter, later I graduated to PageMaker because I found Publisher easy to use but ultimately quite limiting. Fun memories, I hadn’t even realised Publisher still existed, and I’m the most elder of elder millennials.