I'm having a hard time following the through line on these first principles. Likely it's just a "me" problem because I have status quo system designs set in my head, but here are some ideas that seem conflicting to me:
> Hardware and software must be designed as one
In here, they describe the issue with computers is how layers of abstraction in order to create a composed system actually hides complexity. But...
> Computers should feel like magic
I'm not sure how the authors think "magic" happens, but it's not through simplicity. Early computers were quite simple, but I can guarantee most modern users would not think they were magical to use. Of course, this also conflicts with the idea that...
> Systems must be tractable
Why would a user need to know how every aspect of a computer works if they're magic?
Anyway, I'm really trying not to be cynical here. This just feels like a list written by someone who doesn't really understand how computers or software came to work the way they do.
Very interesting and ambitious project and nice design. I hope the author will be able to comment here.
I'm interested to hear about the plans or capabilities in R' or Radiance for things like concurrent programming, asynchronous/scheduling, futures, and invisible or implied networking.
AI is here and will be a big part of future personal computing. I wonder what type of open source accelerator for neural networks is available as a starting point. Or if such a thing exists.
One of the opportunities for AI is in compression codecs that could provide for very low latency standards for communication and media browsing.
For users, the expectation will shortly be that you can talk to your computer verbally or send it natural language requests to accomplish tasks. It is very interesting to think how this could be integrated into the OS for example as a metadata or interface standard. Something like a very lightweight version of MCP or just a convention for an SDK filename (since software is distributed as source) could allow for agents to be able to use any installed software by default. Built in embeddings or vector index could also be very useful, maybe to filter relevant SDKs for example.
If content centric data is an assumption and so is AI, maybe we can ditch Google and ChatGPT and create a distributed hash embedding table or something for finding or querying content.
It's really fun to dream about idealized or future computers. Congratulations for getting so far into the details of a real system.
One of my more fantasy style ideas for a desktop uses a curved continuous touch screen. The keyboard/touchpad area is a pair of ergonomic concave curves that meet in the middle and level out to horizontal workspaces on the sides. The surface has a SOTA haptic feedback mechanism.
I'm interested in the idea of a clean slate hardware/software system. I think being constrained to support existing hardware or software reduces opportunities for innovation on the other.
I don't see that in this project. This isn't defined by a clean slate. It is defined by properties that it does not want to be.
Off the top of my head I can think of a bunch of hardware architectures that would require all-new software. There would be amazing opportunities for discovery writing software for these things. The core principles of the software for such a machine could be based upon a solid philosophical consideration of what a computer should be. Not just "One that doesn't have social media" but what are truly the needs of the user. This is not a simple problem. If it should facilitate but also protect, when should it say no?
If software can run other software, should there be an independent notion of how that software should be facilitated?
What should happen when the user directs two pieces of software to perform contradictory things? What gets facilitated, what gets disallowed.
I'd love to see some truly radical designs. Perhaps model where processing and memory are one, A:very simple core per 1k of SRAM per 64k of DRAM per megabytes of flash, machines with 2^n cores where each core has a direct data channel to every core with its n-bit core ID being one but different (plus one for all bits different).
A n=32 system would have four billion cores and 4 terabytes if RAM and nearly enough persistent storage but it would take talking through up to 15 intermediaries to communicate between any two arbitrary cores.
You could probably start with a much lower n. Then consider how to write software for it that meets the principles that meets the criteria of how it should behave.
> RadiantOS treats your computer as an extension of your mind. It’s designed to capture your knowledge, habits, and workflows at the system layer. Data is interlinked like a personal wiki, not scattered across folders.
This sounded really interesting... till I read this:
> It’s an AI-native operating system. Artificial neural networks are built in and run locally. The OS understands what applications can do, what they expose, and how they fit together. It can integrate features automatically, without extra code. AI is used to extend your ability, help you understand the system and be your creative aid.
I actually don't mind it necessarily. I wonder if the medium-far future of software is a ground-level AI os that spins up special purpose applications on the fly in real time.
What clashes for me is that I don't see how that has anything to do with the mission statement about getting away from social media and legacy hardware support. In fact it seems kind of diametrically opposite, suggesting intentionally hand crafted, opinionated architecture and software principles. Nothing about the statement would have lead me to believe that AI is the culmination of the idea.
And again, the statement itself I am fine with! In fact I am against the culture of reflex backlash to vision statements and new ventures. But I did not take the upshot of this particular statement to be that AI was the culmination of the vision.
Same. I was super excited until I saw the AI stuff you pointed out. I'll have to read more about that. I like the idea of a new OS that isn't just a Linux clone, networking stack that is old school and takes computing in a different direction. I don't have a lot of need for the AI stuff outside of some occasional LLM stuff. I'd like to hear more from the authors on this.
I also understand that the old BBS way of communicating isn't perfect, but looking into web browsers seems to just be straight up insanity. Surely we can come up with something different now that takes the lessons learned over the past few decades combined with more modern hardware. I don't pretend to know what that would look like, but the idea of being able to fully understand the overall software stack (at least conceptually) is pretty tempting.
Most of the text on the site seems LLM written as well. Given that the scope of the project involves making their own programming language, OS, and computing hardware, but they don't seem to have made very much tangible progress towards these goals, I don't understand why they decided to spend time making a fancy project site before they have anything to show. It makes me doubt that this will end up going anywhere.
>Most of the text on the site seems LLM written as well.
I was thinking the same thing. Out of curiosity I pasted it at one of those detection sites and it said 0% AI written, but the tone of vague transcendance certainly got my eyebrow raised.
There are lots of systems that have tried to do something like the first quote. They're usually referred to as "semantic OSes", since the OS itself manages the capturing of semantic links.
I don't think anyone denies the current utility of AI. A big problem of the current OSes is that AI features are clumsily bolted on without proper context. If the entire system is designed from the ground up for AI and the model runs locally, perhaps many of the current issues will be diminished.
> I don't think anyone denies the current utility of AI. A big problem of the current OSes is that AI features are clumsily bolted on without proper context.
I do. "AI" is not trustworthy enough to be anything but "clumsily bolted on without proper context."
Why isn't AI just another application that can be run on the device? Surely we expose the necessary interfaces through the OS and the application goes from there?
The thing that always worries me about these clean-slate designs is the fear that they'll ignore accessibility for disabled people, e.g. blind people, and then either the system will remain inaccessible, or accessibility will have to be retrofitted later.
I'm actually ok with that if it truly serving the purpose for what a computer should be.
I think those principles would embody the notion that the same thing cannot serve all people equally. Simultaneously, for people to interact, interoperability is required. For example, I don't think everyone should use the same word processor. It is likely that blind people would be served best by a word processor designed by blind people. Interoperable systems would aim to neither penalise or favour users for using a different program for the same task.
Yeah, this is concerning. Although, if the system is architected well, accessibility features ought to be something that can be added as an extension.
What is a screen reader but something that can read the screen? It needs metadata from the GUI, which ought to be available if the system is correctly architected. It needs navigation order, which ought to be something that can be added later with a separate metadata channel (since navigation order should be completely decoupled from the implementation of the GUI).
The other topic of accessibility a la Steve Yegge: the entire system should be approachable to non-experts. That's already in their mission statement.
I think that the systems of the past have trained us to expect a lack of dynamism and configurability. There is some value to supporting existing screen-readers, like ORCA, since power users have scripts and whatnot. But my take is that if you provide a good mechanism that supports the primitive functionality and support generalized extensibility, then new and better systems can emerge organically. I don't use accessibility software, but I can't imagine it's perfect. It's probably ripe for its own reformation as well.
> What is a screen reader but something that can read the screen?
Good screen readers track GUI state which makes it hard to tack on accessibility after the fact. They depend on the identity of the elements on the screen so they can detect relevant changes.
You won't be bringing your own graphics card to RadiantOS. According to one of the pages, they want to design their own hardware and the graphics will be provided by a memory-mapped FPGA.
If your question is about the general intricacies in graphics that usually have bugs, then I'd say they have a much better chance at solving those issues than other projects that try to support 3rd party graphics hardware.
Look, if someone hasn't done it already, I see absolutely no reason not to build a Lua-based IPFS process, port it absolutely everywhere, and use it to host its own operating system.
Why does it always need to be so difficult? We already have the tools. Our methods, constantly changing and translblahbicatin' unto the falnords, snk snk... this kind of contrafabulation needs to cease.
Just sayin'.
IPFS+Lua. It's all we really need.
Yes yes, new languages are best languages, no no, we don't need it to be amazing, just great.
>"It's a tool for personal computing where every application and every surface, exists as code you can read, edit, and extend. It's a system you can truly own"
This sounds a lot like a Smalltalk running as the OS until they started talking about implementing a systems language.
The landing page reads like it was written with an LLM.
Somehow this makes me immediately not care about the project; I expect it to be incomplete vibe-coded filler somehow.
Odd what a strong reaction it invokes already. Like: if the author couldn’t be bothered to write this, why waste time reading it? Not sure I support that, but that’s the feeling.
Out of curiosity- there's a focus on local llm then talk about no GPU, only FPGA. Those feel- at odds. But maybe I'm out of the loop for how far local LLMs on custom hardware has come?
I don't understand why they're particular about writing their own esoteric language. If they want people to buy and engage with it, software has to be the gateway, and that's easier to write in a language people know.
It's prob a balance. Sure, C is king....but if you are starting from scratch...do you REALLY need it or could you design something even better? Maybe, maybe not.
I've programmed for a long time, but always struggled with Assembly and C, so take my views with a grain of salt.
You wouldn't I don't think (assuming this thing ever got off the ground - huge assumption), but is that really a problem? I think the web page is more to make normalish people aware that this hypothetical ecosystem would be out there. From within that ecosystem they could have a different page.
> They're just now implementing the implementation language, R'.
They haven't done their due diligence: there's already a well-known language named R: https://www.r-project.org/. The prime isn't sufficient disambiguation.
I assume they know but don't care. Either way, that is a bad choice. I think "Rad" would be a good name, but maybe they already are using that for something else.
> Computing machines are instruments of creativity, companions in learning, and partners in thought. They should amplify human intention.
An admirable goal. However putting that next to a bunch of AI slop artwork and this statement...
> One of our goals is to explore how an A.I.-native computer system can enhance the creative process, all while keeping data private.
...is comically out of touch.
The intersection between "I want simple and understandable computing systems" and "I want AI" is basically zero. (Yes, I'm sure some of you exist, my point is that you're combining a slim segment of users who want this approach to tech with another slim segment of users who want AI.)
I'm having a hard time following the through line on these first principles. Likely it's just a "me" problem because I have status quo system designs set in my head, but here are some ideas that seem conflicting to me:
> Hardware and software must be designed as one
In here, they describe the issue with computers is how layers of abstraction in order to create a composed system actually hides complexity. But...
> Computers should feel like magic
I'm not sure how the authors think "magic" happens, but it's not through simplicity. Early computers were quite simple, but I can guarantee most modern users would not think they were magical to use. Of course, this also conflicts with the idea that...
> Systems must be tractable
Why would a user need to know how every aspect of a computer works if they're magic?
Anyway, I'm really trying not to be cynical here. This just feels like a list written by someone who doesn't really understand how computers or software came to work the way they do.
Very interesting and ambitious project and nice design. I hope the author will be able to comment here.
I'm interested to hear about the plans or capabilities in R' or Radiance for things like concurrent programming, asynchronous/scheduling, futures, and invisible or implied networking.
AI is here and will be a big part of future personal computing. I wonder what type of open source accelerator for neural networks is available as a starting point. Or if such a thing exists.
One of the opportunities for AI is in compression codecs that could provide for very low latency standards for communication and media browsing.
For users, the expectation will shortly be that you can talk to your computer verbally or send it natural language requests to accomplish tasks. It is very interesting to think how this could be integrated into the OS for example as a metadata or interface standard. Something like a very lightweight version of MCP or just a convention for an SDK filename (since software is distributed as source) could allow for agents to be able to use any installed software by default. Built in embeddings or vector index could also be very useful, maybe to filter relevant SDKs for example.
If content centric data is an assumption and so is AI, maybe we can ditch Google and ChatGPT and create a distributed hash embedding table or something for finding or querying content.
It's really fun to dream about idealized or future computers. Congratulations for getting so far into the details of a real system.
One of my more fantasy style ideas for a desktop uses a curved continuous touch screen. The keyboard/touchpad area is a pair of ergonomic concave curves that meet in the middle and level out to horizontal workspaces on the sides. The surface has a SOTA haptic feedback mechanism.
I'm interested in the idea of a clean slate hardware/software system. I think being constrained to support existing hardware or software reduces opportunities for innovation on the other.
I don't see that in this project. This isn't defined by a clean slate. It is defined by properties that it does not want to be.
Off the top of my head I can think of a bunch of hardware architectures that would require all-new software. There would be amazing opportunities for discovery writing software for these things. The core principles of the software for such a machine could be based upon a solid philosophical consideration of what a computer should be. Not just "One that doesn't have social media" but what are truly the needs of the user. This is not a simple problem. If it should facilitate but also protect, when should it say no?
If software can run other software, should there be an independent notion of how that software should be facilitated?
What should happen when the user directs two pieces of software to perform contradictory things? What gets facilitated, what gets disallowed.
I'd love to see some truly radical designs. Perhaps model where processing and memory are one, A:very simple core per 1k of SRAM per 64k of DRAM per megabytes of flash, machines with 2^n cores where each core has a direct data channel to every core with its n-bit core ID being one but different (plus one for all bits different).
A n=32 system would have four billion cores and 4 terabytes if RAM and nearly enough persistent storage but it would take talking through up to 15 intermediaries to communicate between any two arbitrary cores.
You could probably start with a much lower n. Then consider how to write software for it that meets the principles that meets the criteria of how it should behave.
Different, clean slate, not easy.
Love ambitious projects like this!
I wonder why the Unix standard doesn't start dropping old syscalls and standards? Does it have to be strictly backwards compatible?
I love these guys for trying to do this. I just hope they’ve already made their money and can afford to continue doing this.
It’s every engineer’s dream - to reinvent the entire stack, and fix society while they’re at it (a world without social media, sign me up!).
Love the retro future vibes, complete with Robert Tinney-like artwork! (He did the famous Byte Magazine covers in the late 70s and early 80s).
https://tinney.net/article-this-1981-computer-magazine-cover...
> RadiantOS treats your computer as an extension of your mind. It’s designed to capture your knowledge, habits, and workflows at the system layer. Data is interlinked like a personal wiki, not scattered across folders.
This sounded really interesting... till I read this:
> It’s an AI-native operating system. Artificial neural networks are built in and run locally. The OS understands what applications can do, what they expose, and how they fit together. It can integrate features automatically, without extra code. AI is used to extend your ability, help you understand the system and be your creative aid.
(From https://radiant.computer/system/os/)
That's... kind of a wierd thing to have? Other than that, it actually looks nice.
I actually don't mind it necessarily. I wonder if the medium-far future of software is a ground-level AI os that spins up special purpose applications on the fly in real time.
What clashes for me is that I don't see how that has anything to do with the mission statement about getting away from social media and legacy hardware support. In fact it seems kind of diametrically opposite, suggesting intentionally hand crafted, opinionated architecture and software principles. Nothing about the statement would have lead me to believe that AI is the culmination of the idea.
And again, the statement itself I am fine with! In fact I am against the culture of reflex backlash to vision statements and new ventures. But I did not take the upshot of this particular statement to be that AI was the culmination of the vision.
Same. I was super excited until I saw the AI stuff you pointed out. I'll have to read more about that. I like the idea of a new OS that isn't just a Linux clone, networking stack that is old school and takes computing in a different direction. I don't have a lot of need for the AI stuff outside of some occasional LLM stuff. I'd like to hear more from the authors on this.
I also understand that the old BBS way of communicating isn't perfect, but looking into web browsers seems to just be straight up insanity. Surely we can come up with something different now that takes the lessons learned over the past few decades combined with more modern hardware. I don't pretend to know what that would look like, but the idea of being able to fully understand the overall software stack (at least conceptually) is pretty tempting.
Most of the text on the site seems LLM written as well. Given that the scope of the project involves making their own programming language, OS, and computing hardware, but they don't seem to have made very much tangible progress towards these goals, I don't understand why they decided to spend time making a fancy project site before they have anything to show. It makes me doubt that this will end up going anywhere.
>Most of the text on the site seems LLM written as well.
I was thinking the same thing. Out of curiosity I pasted it at one of those detection sites and it said 0% AI written, but the tone of vague transcendance certainly got my eyebrow raised.
There are lots of systems that have tried to do something like the first quote. They're usually referred to as "semantic OSes", since the OS itself manages the capturing of semantic links.
I don't think anyone denies the current utility of AI. A big problem of the current OSes is that AI features are clumsily bolted on without proper context. If the entire system is designed from the ground up for AI and the model runs locally, perhaps many of the current issues will be diminished.
> I don't think anyone denies the current utility of AI. A big problem of the current OSes is that AI features are clumsily bolted on without proper context.
I do. "AI" is not trustworthy enough to be anything but "clumsily bolted on without proper context."
Why isn't AI just another application that can be run on the device? Surely we expose the necessary interfaces through the OS and the application goes from there?
Sounds like it's vibe-coding your entire software stack (data, apps, OS) in real time.
Was hoping this was an evolution on the daylight computer.
The thing that always worries me about these clean-slate designs is the fear that they'll ignore accessibility for disabled people, e.g. blind people, and then either the system will remain inaccessible, or accessibility will have to be retrofitted later.
I'm actually ok with that if it truly serving the purpose for what a computer should be.
I think those principles would embody the notion that the same thing cannot serve all people equally. Simultaneously, for people to interact, interoperability is required. For example, I don't think everyone should use the same word processor. It is likely that blind people would be served best by a word processor designed by blind people. Interoperable systems would aim to neither penalise or favour users for using a different program for the same task.
Yeah, this is concerning. Although, if the system is architected well, accessibility features ought to be something that can be added as an extension.
What is a screen reader but something that can read the screen? It needs metadata from the GUI, which ought to be available if the system is correctly architected. It needs navigation order, which ought to be something that can be added later with a separate metadata channel (since navigation order should be completely decoupled from the implementation of the GUI).
The other topic of accessibility a la Steve Yegge: the entire system should be approachable to non-experts. That's already in their mission statement.
I think that the systems of the past have trained us to expect a lack of dynamism and configurability. There is some value to supporting existing screen-readers, like ORCA, since power users have scripts and whatnot. But my take is that if you provide a good mechanism that supports the primitive functionality and support generalized extensibility, then new and better systems can emerge organically. I don't use accessibility software, but I can't imagine it's perfect. It's probably ripe for its own reformation as well.
> What is a screen reader but something that can read the screen?
Good screen readers track GUI state which makes it hard to tack on accessibility after the fact. They depend on the identity of the elements on the screen so they can detect relevant changes.
It's funny you mention that because the first thing I thought when viewing this page was "is this a loading state? why is everything grey?".
Ahem. It's _radiant_ grey.
This looks like an advertisement for a new season of Severance or something.
The image on this page is wild: https://radiant.computer/principles/
Of course, I am intrigued by open architecture. Will they be able to solve graphic card issues though?
That image is giving me some Evangelion vibes: https://wiki.evageeks.org/Ramiel
You won't be bringing your own graphics card to RadiantOS. According to one of the pages, they want to design their own hardware and the graphics will be provided by a memory-mapped FPGA.
If your question is about the general intricacies in graphics that usually have bugs, then I'd say they have a much better chance at solving those issues than other projects that try to support 3rd party graphics hardware.
my outie enjoys trying experimental operating systems
Am I hallucinating or is that black diamond in the sky a little malproportioned?
Look, if someone hasn't done it already, I see absolutely no reason not to build a Lua-based IPFS process, port it absolutely everywhere, and use it to host its own operating system.
Why does it always need to be so difficult? We already have the tools. Our methods, constantly changing and translblahbicatin' unto the falnords, snk snk... this kind of contrafabulation needs to cease.
Just sayin'.
IPFS+Lua. It's all we really need.
Yes yes, new languages are best languages, no no, we don't need it to be amazing, just great.
It'll be great.
>"It's a tool for personal computing where every application and every surface, exists as code you can read, edit, and extend. It's a system you can truly own"
This sounds a lot like a Smalltalk running as the OS until they started talking about implementing a systems language.
The landing page reads like it was written with an LLM.
Somehow this makes me immediately not care about the project; I expect it to be incomplete vibe-coded filler somehow.
Odd what a strong reaction it invokes already. Like: if the author couldn’t be bothered to write this, why waste time reading it? Not sure I support that, but that’s the feeling.
Out of curiosity- there's a focus on local llm then talk about no GPU, only FPGA. Those feel- at odds. But maybe I'm out of the loop for how far local LLMs on custom hardware has come?
I don't understand why they're particular about writing their own esoteric language. If they want people to buy and engage with it, software has to be the gateway, and that's easier to write in a language people know.
It's prob a balance. Sure, C is king....but if you are starting from scratch...do you REALLY need it or could you design something even better? Maybe, maybe not.
I've programmed for a long time, but always struggled with Assembly and C, so take my views with a grain of salt.
I don't think C is king anymore. They could use Rust with nostd, or Zig, or C++. Anything (low level enough) is better than an entirely new language.
I missed this earlier: "Radiance features a modern syntax and design inspired by Rust, Swift and Zig."
If it doesn't have a browser, how will you visit radiant.computer on your Radiant Computer?
You wouldn't I don't think (assuming this thing ever got off the ground - huge assumption), but is that really a problem? I think the web page is more to make normalish people aware that this hypothetical ecosystem would be out there. From within that ecosystem they could have a different page.
The AI art makes it look like vapor.
So does the AI text.
They want to implement custom hardware with support for audio, video, everything, a completely new language, a ground-up OS, and also include AI.
Sounds easy enough.
Why does the website look like my monitor is dying? Black on dark grey, seriously?
Indeed. Not very.. radiant.
So what does its UI look like?
Based on its /log page, it doesn't look like it has one yet. They're just now implementing the implementation language, R'.
> They're just now implementing the implementation language, R'.
They haven't done their due diligence: there's already a well-known language named R: https://www.r-project.org/. The prime isn't sufficient disambiguation.
I assume they know but don't care. Either way, that is a bad choice. I think "Rad" would be a good name, but maybe they already are using that for something else.
Edit: where did you see it's called "R"? It looks like they call the system language "Radiance" : https://radiant.computer/system/radiance/
well-known "language" (air quotes)
> Computing machines are instruments of creativity, companions in learning, and partners in thought. They should amplify human intention.
An admirable goal. However putting that next to a bunch of AI slop artwork and this statement...
> One of our goals is to explore how an A.I.-native computer system can enhance the creative process, all while keeping data private.
...is comically out of touch.
The intersection between "I want simple and understandable computing systems" and "I want AI" is basically zero. (Yes, I'm sure some of you exist, my point is that you're combining a slim segment of users who want this approach to tech with another slim segment of users who want AI.)