What even is an OS now?

okdiendiendjefn

What it has always been. Nothing has changed in this regard.

chroma_zone

> That makes a lot of sense in a world where we’re importing all our software from strangers. It makes less sense in the world we’re heading to, where most of the software we’re carving up fiefdoms for has the same provenance. 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.

t1234s

Kernel + Shell + Slop

pjm331

Adult Roblox

NoDodgeQuestion

>yet another startup nerd talking about “the future of programming” before announcing that I’ve joined, like, Sri Lanka’s answer to Uber or something. not just startup nerd, he also make gas town and drunken rant

PaulDavisThe1st

Why does this article have this title? I could see nothing in it at all that relates to the question posed by the title.

einpoklum

> Consider: what does computing look like in a world where many (maybe most) applications have an audience of just 1-2 people? How is software distributed? What does it run on? 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.

georgemcbay

I agree with the gist of how weird everything is going to get, and how we are living in a time where people haven't come close to internalizing the shift. 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.

dist-epoch

Taking it at face value, it seems to me this will also collapse and get folded into the model. 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.

Xirdus

In my opinion, this post misses the forest for the trees. Yes, the model of an OS running various off-the-shelf apps for various tasks will soon become obsolete. But it's not the idea of the OS that's outdated - it's the idea of apps. Why would you ever want to ask an AI to make an app for you to complete some task, if you can instead ask the AI to complete the task directly? The future isn't a bunch of extremely personalized apps - the future is a single AI assistant doing all the work.

copperx

A bunch of dot files, obviously.

coaltree

Is this how the internet finally dies? Not with a bang but with the whimper of thousands of AI slop apps scrapping websites into oblivion? 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.

TacticalCoder

> What even is an OS now? 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.

Artoooooor

So - yet another way to turn a computer into a subscription service (to pay for the AI providers). No, thanks.

edelbitter

The OS is the distilled wisdom of other experts. Wisdom that neither I, nor the current generation of next-word-guessers, could possibly keep pace with; no matter how many reddit bots the frontier lab operates in its attempt to extract complex concepts into simpler vectors. It will be the collection of things that are so unbelievably expensive to reinvent and re-learn for each machine and user, that they are not subject to to the market forces that come with making the slop cheaper. Any well-maintained OS will maintain that role. And be ever more important in the future, as apps diverge into even lower quality and even less shared benefit from improving them (for the other approx. 2 users).

chr15m

I think people will still buy templated software - applications that come with source your AI modifies or plugins your AI writes. Most people need Excel, not a badly written clone, but they may want a bunch of custom plugins that can deeply modify the UI for their use case.

smcleod

Surely it's simply software that has its own kernel, that could be booted to from BIOS/uEFI or any other low level hardware initialisation process.

meredithbloom

> "But it booted straight into BASIC. That’s all it did. I was, like, 8 years old. I wasn’t about to learn BASIC. What I learned instead: computers were not as awesome as I’d imagined." 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.

nxc18

I don’t think the post has a lot to offer, but I will share thoughts on how a modern operating system can add _a lot of value_ both for non-agentic users and for agents. 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.

c-hendricks

> Forget the map, just tell me if I should get off the Eisenhower Expressway and take Roosevelt, Madison, or Lake back home? > 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.