Comment by user_7832
7 hours ago
> 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.
They've written an R' compiler in C, and ported its order and parser to be self-hosted, with source code for those included in blog posts.
I'm not a fan of all the LLM and image generator usage either, though.
>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.
> Radiance compiler targetting RISC-V ISA. Involves writing an R' compiler in C and then porting it to R'.
R is a language for statistics and data analysis, I can't understand why they chose it for low-level systems programming having modern alternatives like Go or Rust. Maybe it has to do with the AI integration.
It seems interesting enough to follow, but I'm uncertain about its actual direction.
Edit: Thanks to people in this thread for pointing out that it's not R, but R'. The language they're creating is called Radiance, so it may be that R' is a subset of it.
> Radiance is a small statically-typed systems programming language designed for the Radiant platform, targeting the RISC-V RV64GC architecture. Radiance features a modern syntax and design inspired by Rust, Swift and Zig.
I think R’ is completely separate from R-the-stats-language and more like a cut down version of their Radiance language. Pretty common way to bootstrap a self-hosted runtime.
Yes, R' is "R prime", unrelated to the statistics language. Honestly didn't think about it that much.
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?
People had similar fears about OLE in Windows 95.
That’s kind of where my mind went too. They’re pitching this functionality for use by AI, but if it’s actually something like OLE or the Smalltalk browser or something like that where you can programmatically enumerate APIs, this has a lot of potential for non-AI use cases too that I generally find lacking in conventional platforms.
Good luck running your super-necessary local models without nvidia drivers
I think it's fine if all the 'ai' is local.
I haven't read all of the documentation around this project but I hope it's in the same vein as the cannon cat and the apple-apple//gs (and other early computer systems with quick and easy access to some kind of programmable environment). (as an aside I think apple tried to keep this going with applescript and automator but didn't quite pull it off)
I think there is a weird trick though. General purpose computers a great and they can do anything and many people bog down their systems with everything as a result. I feel like past projects like Microsoft's Bob and the Canon Cat were also in this general thought pattern. Strip it back, give them the tools that they need and very little else.
I try and follow that pattern also on my work macbook. I only install what I need to do my job. Anything I want to try out gets a deadline for removal. I keep my /Applications folder very light and I police my homebrew installs with a similar zeal.
Sounds like it's vibe-coding your entire software stack (data, apps, OS) in real time.