It helps that it's not very big. In the working demo, the image is 132x26, and the actual JPEG file size is about 2-4 kB (depending on the text).
So even on a 56k modem, it might take less than 1 second to load each image.
You could also optimize it so it skips intermediate images if the user types fast. Suppose the user mashes "12345" in a fraction of a second. You start loading "1.jpg" on the first keypress. When you've finished loading "1.jpg", the field contains "12345", so skip straight to loading "12345.jpg".
The demo page's JS doesn't seem to include any optimization code like that. It just updates the img src whenever the text changes. Yet my browser seems to do it automatically! If I mash several keys, the console network log shows only some intermediate images get loaded.
I guess the browser is smart enough to know that, by the time it would have started the download, the resource no longer exists in the page. I'm not sure if browsers ~20 years ago did this, but it would have been worthwhile given how slow networks were.
Practically speaking, I might just allocate an array of 100 pointers. That's only 400 bytes. Then as you encounter each filename, allocate just enough memory for the actual length of the string (plus null terminator) and store the pointer in the array.
> it’s more efficient because it reduces the amount of calls into the file system
OK, but isn't the kernel keeping the directory listing in the disk cache? Won't that prevent extra physical I/O if you do just read the directory twice?
If so, then in the second pass, it's all cache hits, and you're just paying the cost of calling into the file system. Hopefully that's pretty fast. But even if not, it's still absolutely dwarfed by the physical I/O required for the first pass. Windows XP era storage was spinning hard drives, not flash.
And if not, then I'm probably going to put my user icon coding task on the back burner and go ask the kernel team why a seemingly very common usage pattern isn't optimized.
(I realize he's not claiming the performance benefit was significant. I'm just trying to see it in the right perspective.)
It took me a while to figure out I had to click "Explore" to get to the specs, so I'm saving you the trouble.
As long as I'm griping about the web site... Apple, when you introduce a phone with a new and different form factor, please just tell me the dimensions straightaway. This one is shorter and wider than most phones. Is it too wide to fit in my pocket? I need the dimensions to answer that question.
It's a bit disappointing that it's 50g heavier than the Z Fold 8, and similar to the Pixel 9 Pro fold in weight and thickness, at 254 g / 5.2 mm / 11.3 mm.
This is a great rhetorical question. Can you believe that an LLM user is responsible for what the AI does but a self-driving car (SDC) user is not responsible for what the AI does? It doesn't seem very logically consistent.
In both cases, the company operating it promises they did lots of things to make it safe. SDC companies talk about testing, redundancy, simulations, and statistics. LLM companies talk about alignment, sandboxes, defense in depth, and restricting access to dangerous capabilities.
The one substantial difference I can see is that LLM chats are (nominally) passive but SDCs are active. In a chat, you're just having a conversation and then you're choosing how to act. When riding in a car, you the user are not in the loop between AI and taking action that affects the world around you. So they might be designed and engineered a bit differently. A SDC can't get you to agree to review the steering and braking decisions before they're put into action. Since you're not being asked to take that responsibility, it's more defensible to infer that the service has done whatever is necessary to make it safe.
> The graphical operating system that could have been for the IBM XT
Visi On[1] was a graphical operating system for the IBM PC that actually existed as a commercial product, though definitely not a very successful one. It was made by VisiCorp, the same company that created VisiCalc (the first spreadsheet for a personal computer).
It was demoed at COMDEX in 1982, before the Apple Lisa was released. It came out after the Lisa but slightly before the Macintosh.
Fun fact: Bill Gates saw the demo at COMDEX, and at first he was skeptical that it was really running on an IBM PC. But ultimately he was so impressed he decided[2] to start developing a product called Microsoft Windows.
This kinda almost makes it sound like VisiOn introduced Gates to the GUI which is not true. They were already using and developing for Macintosh machines at Microsoft and had hired Charles Simonyi from PARC with his expertise in GUI systems before Comdex 1982.
The story seems to be more that seeing VisiOn gave MS the nudge to get into action on the GUI due to a sense of competition/urgenbcy from VisiOn rather than learning about the GUI from VisiOn.
Stories about Xerox PARC aside, the Apple Lisa was released to the market at the end of January 1983, and I would be surprised if Microsoft wasn't big enough/rich enough at that point to acquire at least a couple of units from the very first batch to mess around with. Windows 1.0 RTM was November 1985.
I'm curious about your goal in purchasing this project.
You don't get any peer recognition. You don't gain any special skill. You can't copyright it. You can't sell it. You can't use it for anything useful. You can't use it as a learning exercise. It can't really be built on. It can't serve as a tutorial for others to learn.
You don't get the satisfaction of a job well done (well, no more than the satisfaction you get from buying a toaster on Amazon).
Pre-LLM, something like this was a huge achievement. Now it's the equivalent of a 1st-grader showing off their finger-painting like it was the Mona Lisa.
The goal is just to have the thing exist, I expect. Perhaps you might wonder to yourself: in some alternate timeline, where things played out somewhat differently, could the crappy old IBM PC have been coaxed into running an OS that was massively better than what we actually got? I suppose that won't appeal to everybody, and I suppose the idea of having the code largely auto-generated won't appeal to everybody either, but I think there'll be a few people left, and, for them: here it is.
In practical terms it's so useless that there's no point having a person spend time creating it, but, with AI changing the tradeoffs, now you can just have it created for you.
^ This... I am the "llm-driver"/"creator" for os8088 and my goal is this. Just to have some fun and make something useful for people (like me) that have dozens of old computers sitting in a room.
And...I do know how to write in assembly, VHDL, and higher level languages, but I also have a life, and I much rather have an LLM write out the assembly for a hobby like this one where I wanted something in 6 days, not 6 months.
That’s all fine and I don’t think anyone can malign you for that.
What we take exception to is how your project’s landing-page misrepresents the project by saying it’s “hand-written”, for example, and lacks any clear up-front AI-use disclosure.
I've removed the "hand-written" language that the LLM added. I added some information to the "What it is" section on the homepage that reads "The source is real-mode NASM assembly, written with AI, and it is on GitHub."
I thought about having a big flashing heading about the use of AI, but at that point, I think it was becoming more of a warning to AI triggered people than anything useful.
When people write things like this I wonder if they just haven't used AI coding agents. You don't simply write a prompt and walk away and have a complete program written when you get back. You still have to put a fair amount of effort in description often many times, not unlike the sort of work you'd have to put in if you were supervising a group of junior developers as a systems analyst. It's still work, just at a higher level. And until (and if ever) we get AGI humans will still have to do this.
Let’s say you’re a musician and pay to go to a concert. What do you get out of it? Profit can come in many forms, including simply seeing that a thing is possible.
The worst part of this, is that projects that present themselves like this, poison the pool for everyone else. I imagine that many people are now disinclined to ever publish a hand-coded project in this genre (retro-computing), because people might assume that this was a trivial project (e.g. what are you so proud of, my baby 12-year-old nephew did something similar two weekends ago, just by yapping at his phone, while waiting for level-loading-screen to finish).
The Haiku project (an OS based on BeOS), is a remarkable achievement. It is sad that we may never see such things again, because people want their achievements to mean something, and, increasingly, intellectual achievements are becoming (unjustly and misleadingly) trivialized by the LLM hype machine.
It feels like humanity is deliberately making itself colorblind.
I went to Amazon the other day and ordered a fully custom piece of software. I chatted with the seller about exactly what I wanted, what areas to focus on, and they ended up teaching me a thing or two about the domain. Very similar emotional experience to using a language model, which I’ve totally done before.
If you think LLM's allow you to wave a magic wand and anything gets done then you really are so anti LLM that you're now technically way way behind and just irrelevant.
Making software like this person has achieved is not just saying "do it" to an LLM and waking up in the morning.
Your anger towards LLMs has blinded you and set you back whilst everyone else moves ahead.
> If you think LLM's allow you to wave a magic wand and anything gets done then you really are so anti LLM that you're now technically way way behind and just irrelevant.
Honestly, I probably use 'em more than you.
> Your anger towards LLMs has blinded you and set you back whilst everyone else moves ahead.
If it makes you sleep better at night believing that, then sure, go ahead.
The reality is that most people lose any sort of status or respectability when they try to pass off difficult work as their own. This was true before LLMs, and will continue to be true, no matter how often someone shows us their equivalent of finger-painting.
That's also when the partnership with Rivian really takes off. Uber clearly wants its own fleet of robotaxis; they already unsuccessfully burnt a lot of money on it years ago. Looks like they're content letting other companies take the risk while helping fund them.
Uber also partners with Zoox and Lucid on self-driving, missing this wave may be an existential risk, so they aren't putting eggs in one basket. Nevermind a level of duress due to the Uber/Waymo partnership being (almost certainly) part of a settlement agreement regarding alleged IP theft from Google by way of Anthony Levandowki.
> ...they already unsuccessfully burnt a lot of money on it years ago
It was for the best; the Kalanick-era company culture wasn't (/isn't?) compatible with the levels of public trust required for successful self driving.
It creates a new chat which has the conversation up to that point and a link to the conversation you branched it from.
The UI isn't tree-like, though. It's more like Git where each branch name is just mixed in with the rest of the soup of references.
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