If you read the whole post you would see the disclaimer that it was written with the help of AI.
So folks are using AI to help them cope about AI. LLMs "stole" pending results is just another cope. Im sure quasi riemann was about to be proved if it wasnt for those pesky AI models. Jeez.
I feel for these people, certainly. There is no point lying to them though. We cant tell them everything is going to be alright just going to be how it used to be. That would be highly deceptive and immoral.
"Can't even match GNU's coreutils"? Care to elaborate? Last time I checked OpenBSD is pretty much in line with Posix and there are plenty of us that consider many of the GNU extensions to be anti-features.
I use a Mac, so the CLIs are the BSD versions. I don't have any opinion on which is better, but it's just annoying that it's different from GNU, so a lot of my work ends up being on a Linux VM or server instead. POSIX compliance doesn't seem to buy me anything. I like the BSD license though.
That's a brand new excuse, Apple refused to distribute GPLv3 when GPLv3 was first published, 20ish years ago. How is GPLv3 incompatible with their system volume, yet GPLv2 is still fine?
GPLv3 added language which specifically requires that GPLv3 software embedded in products be distributed with "Installation Information" explaining how modified versions of that software can be installed. It is not at all clear how this would apply to software in an immutable, signed system volume. This language was not present in GPLv2.
You're entitled to your opinion, but that doesn't change the fact that the situation is "Apple can't distribute them", not "Apple doesn't want to distribute them".
Continuing to "correct" "want" to "can't" doesn't make sense, even under your interpretation of the situation. Even assuming the GPLv3 requires all software on the machine to ship under a compatible license (it doesn't), they can do that. They don't want to.
Of course, but any script meant for Mac is going to assume Mac core utils, even assume zsh instead of bash. You don't want to be the one person on the team with a non-stock setup.
> The GNU versions work fine in macOS. Apple doesn’t want to distribute them, but that’s mean you can’t use them.
We also test GNU coreutils on macOS. It is a bit tricky since the other maintainers and I don't own any macOS machines for testing. But we seem to do well enough with a shared system that Adélie Linux kindly allows the compile farm [1] to use, along with some additional CI machines.
I don't know how compatible my Mac will really be with a Free/OpenBSD machine. Last time I tested this theory, some C code I was building on Mac clang didn't build on FreeBSD clang cause I was unknowingly using some extension enabled by default. But that was about 12 years ago.
I'm not trying to. And it's not even like GNU/Linux/whatever is a superset of POSIX and I'm using the extensions. There are mutual differences in basic functionality.
"[Doesn't] get the job done"? Well, it gets my job done. You are welcome to use whatever you subjectively prefer (I use GNU's date(1) for a few scripts, but would prefer the English date grammar parsing as a tool of its own), but if you are unable to talk about anything in concrete terms there is not point in trying to discuss in good faith and I will just roll my eyes and move on.
I am not the parent commenter, but I have the same sense that the GNU ones are better.
But the only concrete example I can think of is that `cat -n a b`, if `a` doesn't end in a newline, produces something that is obviously not what the user wanted. GNU cat does it right.
I didn't report it to the openbsd people because I didn't want them to yell at me that `-n` is nonstandard anyway with no "right" behavior, so I should STFU. Which would be what I'd expect from having reported problems in the past.
I think the behavior in the GNU clone is more consistent with "we added line numbers to the concatenation tool" while whoever added it to OpenBSD's ancestry was probably more concerned with generating listings for printing.
Personally, I'd remove even the POSIX [-u] flag from all cat versions because all of them are un-UNIX-like.
Some GNU tools are particularly ridiculous with the Easter egg features I only know about because LLMs use them all the time —and I have been using Linux for 30 years.
Because you don't like the design(I don't either) but it carries information.
Someone could have thought it was a good idea and no one was willing to audit all of UCB's scripts to fix the "bug" even if it had been the result of a lazy implementation because ed(1) on a terminal.
My choice of wording is from my assumption that nobody, at any point, actually wanted that behaviour. And I stand by that being a pretty safe bet.
So I wouldn't refer to it as "the design". It's not that the methods are unsound, it's that I don't see any method at all.
As for not wanting to break existing scripts, OpenBSD is not even remotely as concerned about backwards compatibility as Linux is. I don't mean that in a derogatory way. It's a perfectly cromulent choice.
It is, but an already niche operating system that refuses to leverage the advantages of LLMs is only going to fall further and further behind. I say that as someone who has actively contributed to the BSDs since the 90s and would hate to see that happen.
The slop problem is very real. People are spewing reams of bad code that generates entropy faster than humans or LLMs can clean it up. LLM best practices are not yet obvious, and we're still figuring out how best to leverage them while maintaining code quality and human understanding.
... but LLMs are coming whether we want them or not. Models keep consistently improving, the slop keeps getting better, and human-only development is going to struggle to keep up.
In my day job, I'm driving an enormous number of tokens at Astra+Ultramax solving problems in Lean 4 that previously we never would have attempted simply due to the incredible human engineering cost; we review the high-level lemmas and let it prove the rest.
LLMs are the only solution I've seen over these decades that could finally close the feature/usability gap between mainstream and more niche operating systems -- software support, features, drivers, and other broad usability barriers. All of that has historically been far too much work for a much smaller developer community to reasonably undertake.
one of the reasons that BSDs are less popular is because of the community advice of "The best supported machine is a ten + year old thinkpad."
so yeah you're right there isn't a finish line, but you do need to keep up with current stuff enough to give a possible fan base a decent selection of hardware to run the thing on.
in other words : if the companies that the BSDs already had a hard time keeping up with hasten development via LLMs the gap will grow ever wider until a critical point is hit and the thing becomes irrelevant.
if linux is the only show in town that supports flashy-hardware-Z then it's going to drive audience migration.
the thing that has allowed openbsd to adopt new things so slowly is a rock-solid set of core competencies; the amount that bsd is entrenched into the internet itself makes irrelevance hard to imagine -- but it's still a facet.
I still hear people bitch that BSDs don't support WiFi, and that hasn't been true in years and years.
If you follow the provided link, you'll see that the objection is about copyright, not quality: https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=177411620801633&w=2 As someone who has certainly had his work sucked up into LLMs without consent or compensation, this seems like a reasonable stance to me.
Think about how far Linux has/hasn't come in the last 10 years. The user experience is nicer, drivers "just work" more, there's more support for more stuff...but at the end of the day, the actual computing experience is mostly the same today as when I installed Debian back in 2016. It's polish, interoperability, etc that's improved.
Maybe VR takes off and takes over the desktop, and then openBSD can't keep up with that, but I don't think that's likely. So what are they trying to "keep up" with?
The number of OpenBSD contributors, since 2017 is going down. For all the praise the system gets here, the developer team is small. And feature-wise the system is a toy compared to Linux. It's like comparing DigitalOcean with AWS.
Ppl praise the stance of OpenBSD/NetBSD and what-not. That's commendable, but then close the tab, open their spotify and get back to agentic programming for their proprietary company source. But God-forbid if OpenBSD turns anything more than a museum OS, full of purity but with a user-base of five. Because the GPU doesn't work properly, the sound drive is clunjy, wifi might work, etc.
LLMs could port huge amount of drivers to both system with a fraction of the effort. Specs can be implemented easily and properly. Then of course, you need to test and that takes time, but it's technically easier and more ppl could contribute.
I get the feeling, but they're not OpenBSD a favor, if anything else I feel the exact opposite is happening.
Ironically with sloppy code we will be back to 2001 with non-concurrent OSS and shitty sound daemons as esd/arts, now merged into pipewire but with crappy patches around.
Meanwhile OpenBSD will get 9front's GeFS stabilized and it will work on a fraction of what BTRFS needs to function, and don't let me start on ZFS.
In this case, reading the link you're replying under, it's being able to mount a disk formatted with a popular filesystem. The alternative here is waiting for a human to type this relatively "solved" problem, as a procedural requirement, more than anything.
So, it can easily mean "things won't work in this OS". But, that's to be expected with FreeBSD, for legitimately good (from the perspective of FreeBSD) reasons.
Bugfixes, feature implementation, and hardware support will not be able to be added to OpenBSD with the speed that they are added to Linux.
Whether you like this new reality or not, it is an objective fact that LLMs are the silver bullet Fred Brooks told us didn't exist—multiplying development speed by 10x or more—and that if you're not using them you are hobbling yourself. This especially goes for a "security-focused" OS like OpenBSD, because AI is more diligent about finding vulnerabilities and can do so without rest. Meaning that if you're serious about security, you are using AI to harden your software... and if not, someone else is using it to hack you.
I'm sitting here watching astra do in a day what would have taken me at least 3-6 months. The code is verified correct. The model finds, reads, understands, and then integrates the latest literature into its designs and plans. It implements the code, proves it correct, and has come up with its own novel solutions on top of the state of the art. It then refines its implementation to hit the performance goals I give it. This is the reality today.
That it would've taken you 3-6 months because you're bad at what you do and don't know much. Being 10 times faster and better than 0.05 isn't particularly impressive.
I work in formal verification at a company whose products you've definitely interacted with today. On an average day, I throw thousands of dollars worth of tokens at the SOTA models and have them produce tens of thousands of lines of both proofs and code (alongside proofs of correctness).
We're solving problems now that we never even would have attempted previously. We couldn't have even staffed them if we wanted to. Even if we had the people, it would be years of development before we saw usable results.
If you can't understand how this kind of work would take a human with a few decades of experience 3-6 months, you're the 0.05 developer in my world.
As one example I can think of, there are a ton of devices that only work on Windows (or Windows and MacOS). The audio interface I have is one example: its "official drivers" are Windows and MacOS only. I know that someone is trying to make Linux drivers for it, using LLMs, because if there's one thing LLMs are very good at, it's RE and figuring out how hardware works. One of my other friends made an accessible equivalent to the Razer app for his Razer headphones because the official app is complete shit.
honestly LLMs could probably write drivers in CompCert C or some other formally verified dialect. having AI discharge proof obligations seems like a terrific use for all this newly-developed mathematical process.
you could have the driver code prove it implements a spec, that there's no UB, that hardware invariants are maintained, that routines take a fixed time to execute.
the formal driver spec must still be written by sober, well-caffeinated humans of course.
his reasoning is sound. no pc no vulns. this is simple logic. its maybe not practical, but that wasnt being debated. OpenBSD isnt very practical either. It is pretty securable though for an ring0/3 system.
Well, they were always slow. But they made a stand
against AI slop, which is great. Look at how AI slop
infiltrated the ruby core team. You even get slop-spammed
down when you try to interact with e. g. Hiroshi Shibata,
who suddenly has ... perfect english language skills. A
few years ago his command over the english language was rather
weak (which is fine by the way, I much prefer broken
english from a real human than AI slop spam text as filter acting in between humans).
If you don't break the law you do indeed fall further behind people who do.
Nothing in that post is against using an LLM. It's all about copyright:
>Since every file in OpenBSD has been continually verified to ensure
correct Copyright, and we've even deleted code which has incorrect
Copyright, the chances of us accepting such new code with such a suspicious
Copyright situation is zero.
Once the current bubble pops we're going to see a lot of litigation over copyright enfringement by LLMs. Currently no one wants to rock the boat because everyone hopes to make a trillion dollars from AI, Oracle included, once they see they can't the knives are going to come out and I wouldn't want to be Linux at that point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America
Also my personal opinion about copyright _in the FOSS domain_ is that I simply dont care. Copyleft as the GNU folks like to call it is just using the copyright laws to achieves certain free software objectives. If that doesnt work anymore there will be another fix
So long as there's big money interests around copyright, I assure you it will not die. And all the predictions about the knives coming out after the AI bubble pops are spot on.
It took a while for the DMCA to happen after Napster. But it indeed happened, and we all know the saying about history repeating itself.
> It took a while for the DMCA to happen after Napster.
By the time they came for Napster technology had already moved on. I can still download entire albums and movies in minutes 2 decades later. Heck, Usenet is still a bastion of piracy and that's been around for 46 years.
> I can still download entire albums and movies in minutes 2 decades later.
Yeah, but you cannot do so legally; you can't build a business of it. The AI companies are trying to build a business, not download movies for their kids to watch during school holidays!
The DMCA was passed in 1998. Napster didn't really hit big until 1999.
The 90s young people are familiar with are... way different from the 90s I remember. Their understanding of it is like... if someone asked to AI-gen the decade.
Wow, you're right. The DMCA happened while I was out of the country doing something very not-tech-scene related, so I completely missed that it passed way the heck back then.
I suppose my point still stands if you are willing to stretch back to Usenet, BBSs, etc. as an inflection point in mass copyright infringement.
There's only two ways for copyright to go, either by being tightened up or by being loosened.
When has copyright protections ever loosened? We've got hundreds of years of copyright laws in multiple different jurisdictions, and I can't think of when they were, for all practical purposes, loosened.
If they are loosened, then sure, the AI companies win big here. If they are tightened, AI itself becomes almost useless (derivative of current works).
So folks are using AI to help them cope about AI. LLMs "stole" pending results is just another cope. Im sure quasi riemann was about to be proved if it wasnt for those pesky AI models. Jeez.
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