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   寮 (ryo@social.076.moe)'s status on Friday, 06-Jan-2023 12:53:32 JST 寮

   in reply to

   • Terminal Autism
   Yes, it's true.
   While the advantage of a single DICKtator is that it's next to impossible to subvert him/her, but if he/she gets subverted, it's over.
   
   As for people making their own OSs, I guess that will become possible only after RISC-V becomes common use.
   Back in the 90s it was still possible, which is why so many different OS's existed back then.
   But then IntHell and AMD on the CPU front and IntHell, ATI (now AMD), and Nvidia on the GPU front NDA'd the crap out of their architecture, and the only survivers were Windblows, macOS, Linux, and BSD, because making your own OS was simply made impossible (perhaps except for things like TempleOS, React, Haiku, and MikeOS, but those who made it are/were VERY dedicated).
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     Terminal Autism (terminalautism@social.076.moe)'s status on Friday, 06-Jan-2023 12:53:33 JST Terminal Autism
     The only problem will be when those guys inevitably bite the big bazooka, kick the bucket, whatever amusing euphemism for dying you prefer. Or when they themselves go in a bad direction. Like, imagine if Theo becomes a tranny and goes completely insane. Pretty sure I joked about that somewhere before.
     
     Then you have the entire project run 100% by someone that you dislike, instead of arguably just a loud minority plus people that just don't want drama and don't want to get involved with other people, and a bunch of soyboys that are just afraid of saying anything.
     
     At this point, I have accepted that I just generally don't like tech people (which shouldn't be surprising, I don't like most people, and all tech people are people). Almost all of them are wimpy conformists that don't know anything other than a very specific skill, and they think that being able to do that one thing makes them smart when it really does not.
     
     There are few people that I know a significant amount about and that I still respect. It's a small group. One is definitely Terry Davis, he deserves all of it and was the hero that humanity needed but didn't deserve, and another example of someone of a prophet or wise man archetype, that was killed by his own civilization, that then collapsed shortly afterwards. Other than him, maybe people that designed old systems and languages, but I don't actually know much about them.
     
     Chuck Moore also comes to mind, the creator of Forth. I read some of his writings and watched some interviews and I like him too. Really, he took simplicity in computing to an extreme that I don't think anyone else ever did, and I heard tales (from things written by old people) of how absurdly skilled he was, how he would take other people's programs and make them massively smaller and simpler in a very small amount of time.
     
     Also Gary Kildall is another likely candidate, if the accounts of what he was like are correct. Some other designers as well, I'm sure, but once something is done by a team, you really don't know who did what. Generally one guy takes credit for managing the project, but it wasn't something that a single person could ever take credit for, it was a combination of ideas from different people.
     
     Of course, this is now impossible, because every system has to be connected to enormous, endless layers of complexity. It's very unfortunate, I would like to live in a world where everything is simple and it's normal for people to make their own OSs, but we're about as far from that as we could possibly be.