Amiga Unix, Again

(concurring opinion)

LLM generated text lacks a certain "soul" to it, and it becomes more and more empty the more places one reads it.

It has a certain quality to it that, when read again and again, feels hollow. That hollowness comes not only from the text itself and the same sentence structures and turns of a phrase, but also (and yes, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing#... ) that it suggests that the author didn't do more than massage the text with their eyeballs (as my high school Latin teacher accused me of doing).

And so, why should I (a human mind running on wet stuff and fueled with caffeine and various sugars from my morning soda and breakfast roll) pay any significant amount of my limited attention during a day on something that shows no indication that it was ever had its human co-author think about a single word that was put into the page?

And sometimes, the text belies that it wasn't written by a human as it misses things that are part of the human experience (or adds things that are not). "Keymap, disk, partition sizes, package set — then it shows you what it is about to do. Real time, with the long waits taken out." No human would write that. No human proofread it.

There is a deluge of content out there. Far too much for me to read everything that might be interesting. Text that looks like it's written entirely by an AI is more likely to be uninteresting than something that was crafted by a human.

If the page itself hasn't shown indication of a few seconds or minutes of a human touch... how much time should I spend reading it to see if it might be interesting to read more or look into the project?

FWIW by this point, many of us are in deep symbiosis.

Useful or not, another Amiga / Unix fan probably had fun and some learnings too.

At the very least, the real-world impact is that tokens have been spent, the outputs open sourced.

It would be nice to hear their voice survive the loops of agentic abstraction of course but I don't know if that is even possible at that higha level.

Maybe it's that, maybe it's "just another issue of alignment"? Potentially serious in aggregate and over time..

I personally don't mind the imo little "neuralese" (is that what we call it now?) here specifically. In any case it's good for you that you can (still?) tell?

Why not applaud the playground time/energy/token budget directed? Especially as a decades long NetBSD (and Amiga:) fan I do appreciate multitudes; maybe here not exactly the case in tone of writing but in relatively cheap, fun experiments / projects during the agentic take-off of 2026. The whole trend reminds me a bit of remix/DJ culture; the "producing DJ"?

Also, to congratulate the author feels like congratulating a tech savvy manager for a project rather than the skills and knowledge of a programmer

It’s cool they’ve managed various agents to get their end result but I’ve always been interested in coding, computer science and maths rather than tech savvy management

And perhaps tech savvy manager will replace programmers but if I wanted to get into management and business analysis then I would have done so

This is the 3rd time I am reading such a comment on HN within a day and I absolutely agree. It comes off as instantly disingenuous and a ‘turn off’ for someone to use an LLM for basic writing stuff. Not to mention it ends up being distracting in a meta sort of way.

As I’ve also repetitively said, it’s simply dishonest and plagiarizing to offload most of the work you (explicitly or lying by omission) claim as "yours". I can’t understand people who think it’s just fine.

It's not important at all and I wish people would stop mentioning AI. If you have criticisms on the docs or code, by all means make them but they shouldn't concern "AI vs human" considerations. Humans have written plenty of bad and documentations, too, it really doesn't matter who wrote what to what extent, what matters is whether it's the right quality.

I don't think its important. I think these comments are more annoying than ai prose. You are fighting a losing battle and annoying everyone in the process. Adapt.

> Other than just than "we can" and historic interest, I can't imagine why anyone would choose to run System Vr4 over 4.4BSD

Nostalgia is my guess.

SVR4 on Amiga was the first SVR4 commercial release IIRC. Solaris 2.x came later, but not much later.

At Sun we had a saying for referring to garbage from the SVR4 that we had to fix, rewrite, or terminate with prejudice over time (think STREAMS, XTI, and all that, but also much of userland): 'it came from New Jersey'. So, yeah, I wouldn't want to run SVR4 for any reason other than nostalgia, and honestly not even nostalgia. For me nostalgia is for OpenSolaris and such.

> I can't imagine why anyone would choose to run System Vr4

With X, using an Amiga 3000/4000 as a daily driver is possible. I did use an IBM PowerPC 43P as a daily driver under AIX 3.1 for a long while (until I gave up on having ssh working on it).

The 43P was, however, paired to a humongous Intergraph CRT that I can't move across a national border because of the amount of rare earths used to make it, and was a very ample desktop for the 2010s. Until the advent of 4K monitors, I didn't have anything beating that - on a VGA connection. The Amiga is far more limited than that.

In terms of vintage Unix desktops, it's hard to beat Acorn's RISC/iX with its IXI desktop. I believe Atari Unix also had something similarly cool.

I tried to get NetBSD on an Amiga way back as well and that was supposed to be my gateway from home computers to a real OS, but there was some problem with getting enough or working hard drive space or something that I can't recall exactly anymore.

So close, but still so far. It took several more years before I got some hardware that would run either NetBSD or Linux.

As an Amiga user, I don't even get the nostalgia for Amiga Unix. I don't have nostalgia for early versions of the various Unix versions I've used. It doesn't hit nearly the same as using AmigaOS on the Amiga did. Partly, I guess, because it's not different enough from what I use now.

Your 500 had a 030?

NetBSD still runs on Amiga.

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.

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

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?

Do you think an AMIX owner is going to surface?