144 points•doener•10 days ago•67 comments•

67 comments

jchw10 days ago
My eternal advice to anyone doing heavily LLM assisted projects is to do them a bit less LLM assisted. You should still use LLMs, in my opinion, they're wonderful tools. But I know reading this page that this text is mostly LLM-generated, and that leaves there to be little hope that much else of the project isn't.

It's one thing if your code is really truly "co-authored by" Claude. It's another thing if it isn't even really co-authored by you.

Evidently the majority of people see no problem with LLM prose, but me and many others think it is some of the most annoying crap possible. Please consider speaking in your own voice.

I know this gets repetitive, but it is important.

musha68k10 days ago
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"?

Brian_K_White10 days ago
They can have all the fun they want however they want, but it's not interesting or valuable to anyone else.

It's annoying how many people think they have discovered the cheat code to collect Manhattens for trinkets.

tarkin210 days ago
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

rbanffy10 days ago
> feels like congratulating a tech savvy manager

Never underestimate the impact of a good, tech savvy, manager.

ilt10 days ago
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.
seba_dos110 days ago
It's simply a pretty good proxy for lack of quality and care.
shagie10 days ago
(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?

Sharlin10 days ago
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.
breput10 days ago
I ran NetBSD 0.8 on my Amiga 500 (with a 68030 w/MMU, 68881, and SCSI hard drive sidecar), which co-existed in the same timeframe as Commodore's release.

Other than just than "we can" and historic interest, I can't imagine why anyone would choose to run System Vr4 over 4.4BSD, especially since the latest NetBSD 11 release still fully supports Amiga[0]

[0] https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/amiga/

cryptonector10 days ago
> 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.

rbanffy10 days ago
> 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.

a9610 days ago
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.

vidarh10 days ago
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.
icedchai10 days ago
I have nostalgia for early SunOS 4 because that was the first Unix system I got access to!
jimjimjim10 days ago
Your 500 had a 030?
code_duck10 days ago
You could buy accelerator boards for the 500 and 2000.
nullc10 days 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/".

spijdar10 days 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.

hexapus10 days 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 systems to, or writing new utilities for 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.

jmspring10 days ago
Your pet cemetery reference made me recall reviving puffy the dog in Something about Mary - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzgrVW2uZWE
CursedSilicon10 days 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?

qmr10 days ago
Why do you feel he is a clown?
samplatt10 days ago
Wait, what? I'm on the waitlist for that phone as I thought it was a great idea in general, regardless of the renders. Have I been had?

I've never (ever) bought a phone because of what it looks like in marketing material.

OCTAGRAM10 days ago
Being an owner of Apollo V4 ITX UEB, I wondered what about 68080. With 64-bit and AMMX vector extensions. But the website briefly mentions "and on today's accelerator hardware". MiniMig is also not mentioned, but at least PiStorm is.

With regards to 68080, the toolchain that can make use of all features of 68080, is based on some old GCC and currently hosted on Linux amd64 which is a shame. And if original Amiga target is desired, this toolchain can do it too, and it is told to be more optimal than other compilers, especially self-hosted ones. GCC first lost ability to run on Amiga, then lost ability to generate m68k code.

teddyh10 days 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?
rjsw10 days ago
NetBSD still runs on Amiga.
mrweasel10 days ago
Other than for the fun of it and the possible identification of obscure bugs, is running NetBSD on an Amiga actually useful? I love that they still support it, but once you've installed it, what would you do with NetBSD on an Amiga.

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