Amiga Unix, Again (amigaux.org)

21 pointsby doener3 hours ago7 comments

teddyh 2 hours ago

I mean, Debian 3.1 (sarge) supported Amiga hardware. The support was dropped in 2007 (the next release), because not enough people were maintaining it. I would assume that it would be easier to re-start that effort, unless compatibility with actual Amix was important for some reason?

rjsw 2 hours ago

NetBSD still runs on Amiga.

nullc 2 hours ago

I get pet-cemetery vibes from these AI powered resurrections.

As in ... "the AI brought it back to life, but it came back /wrong/".

CursedSilicon an hour ago

I mean, that Peri Fractic clown "owns Commodore" now and tried to sell people a phone that was rendered entirely using AI.

Maybe Amiga people are ready to drink from that chalice too?

jmspring an hour ago

Your pet cemetery reference made me recall reviving puffy the dog in Something about Mary - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzgrVW2uZWE

spijdar an hour ago

I've used LLMs to get the distributed Sprite OS running again, though I've yet to release it, and I'm not sure what that release will look like, if it ever happens.

One thing I really don't get, and I really hope I never do, is leave the front page/README/etc so ... Claude-ified (or GPT, plausibly, I guess):

  native SCSI and ethernet drivers, proven on real hardware

  Quake — runs; a benchmark more than a game, for now

  running under emulation, real hardware next

  The grimoire records both, confidence-tagged

I am becoming probably too okay with LLMs, and I'm probably about as "forgiving" of this stuff as anyone, but man, it's disheartening to see that for something as much of a passion project as "Amiga Unix", seemingly no-one bothered to write a page in a human voice for it. Maybe it's LLM-written, maybe a hybrid thing, I dunno. But at best it sounds like "Apple product release", IMO.

I know others will say the same about seeing LLM usage at all, and yeah... I don't really have a defense. It just feels like the "bare minimum of decency" to, well, at least make the front page less LLM-sounding.

hexapus 16 minutes ago

Can't argue with you there. There's a ton of cool projects that people have vibecoded, and exist in domains where the fact that it's possibly insecure/poorly optimised/unmaintainable by humans doesn't really matter much. e.g. porting retro games and computers to MiSTer FPGA. I love the platform, and the more stuff I can run on it, the better. Bugs are annoying, but not critical. The community gets software that may have never existed otherwise.

But still, somehow, when I see a Claudish README, it instantly gives me the ick. Write about your project. Tell us why you built it. Talk about the problems the bot helped you work through. I'm not going to judge you for not being able to code it all up yourself - but at least write the README in your own voice and tell me why you cared enough to do it.