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smorrow

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What is Plan 9? 6 months ago

The most "research" thing I'm aware of 9front (since you're speaking in present tense) doing is that GEFS needed to work out a lot of things for itself that weren't in the Bε-tree proof-of-concept FS that came before.

I dunno how "close to the metal" you'd consider that.

("GEFS" being a disk filesystem that's been discussed on HN.)

What is Plan 9? 6 months ago

9P is a protocol, FUSE isn't.

"Plan 9 praisers who don't actually use Plan 9" have a tendentious way of speaking, that's actually a lot like "AI slop", that Plan 9 users can instantly recognise. Telltale signs include speaking about Plan 9 in the past tense, and a belief that with Plan 9 you can somehow just strap all your computers together to get more performance or something. Because "you have 9P".

What is Plan 9? 6 months ago

Plan 9 does that, e.g. dial(2) to do the /net dance. ("2" here actually means something like "3plan9".)

Scwm had animations, which went in sometime before the ~2001 Usenix paper, due to a need for them. I don't think there's anything out of place about needful animations.

1. You can't pick and choose your monitor like this on laptops.

2. I like my "window/s of interest" (the current "task") to be front and centre; I would like my window management when task switching both to do this for me and to set the previous current task aside for me. It seems to me this would require some kind of undiscovered paradigm that isn't tiling or stacking. Ultrawide is just forcing me to direct my attention to a specific off-centre region for extended periods. This feels like holding breath, except psychological - I can only take it so long, then my eyes, by themselves, are going to look at other areas, whether I like it or not. Which is also one reason why tiling is an absolute non-starter for me.

Some clues:

The mk paper (and Unix man page) doesn't mention rc.

Plan 9 existed since the mid-80s.

This sentence in the Unix rc(1) sure makes it seem like rc was Plan 9-first:

Environment entries for variables are kludgy for UNIX compatibility.

I've been seeing people, never ones who were actually there, make this claim in the last five to ten years. Rc was on tenth edition Unix. I've seen no evidence that it originated on Unix. The manual calls it the Plan 9 shell.

I'm curious why private school? The usual reason people don't unschool is they haven't really heard of it (or they've heard of it but believe some boomer conventional wisdom like muh socialisation or it's just for extreme Christians). You obviously have, so like... what evidence are you seeing that's convincing you of school?

What I find interesting is that Plan 9's "who" did not. It's just

ls /proc | sed '{grep out usernames}' | sort -u

so it's pretty specific to whatever machine it runs on, as opposed to who's logged into the installation you've run it on.

On another note, on Tenth Edition Unix, when you logged in from a Blit, something would get pipefiled[1] over your tty and wrap writes from new opens in something that puts it to a window-manager window. Possible because of not having name spaces for files.

[1] 'Mounted stream' in http://man.cat-v.org/unix_10th/2/fmount

and the rest of the gang that I don't know the name of are part of such an incredible part of CS history.

For CS-historic significance the ones I would add would be Aho and Steve Johnson.

You don't need to "put" people places - they do that by themselves (and better than you can centrally plan - I know you don't want to hear that).

You don't need to make them go on the internet either.

And apparent "success", in the sense you mean it, isn't, either. It's just kicking the can down the road. Real progress would be the seemingly unproductive, a-month-for-every-year-in-school deschooling period like that of "the sleeping student" at Sudbury[1].

People had the chance this year and the last[2] to let children be free and they blew it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=si0PPv-7yWo&list=PLBC7021B61... [2] We've known since April 2020 that kids don't spread it. Icelandic contact-tracing study.