Rust wgpu now has a
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@mcc (the mega65 is my example because it is nicely done physically, fully open, and has swappable fpga cores, you can run an amiga core on it instead of c65/c64/c128)
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I am not the only person who wants what I want: Software by humans for humans, the ability to "use a computer" without participating in this horrible thing that AI companies are trying to build out of what used to be society. Everybody's grabbed the task closest to them. I know of a slopfree book ereader. I know of a slopfree password manager. We're all dependent on stuff further down the stack, and the stack became tall at some point, and only a few items in the stack have a slopfree principle.
@mcc the bit of the stack currently causing me anguish is text shaping. HarfBuzz is the One True Library for this and the maintainer is pretty all-in on Claude. This transitively effects... all web browsers (including Servo), most TeX variants (including typst), and every major OSS GUI framework 🫠
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@mcc for completeness, i already had a PoC of this btw that i'm planning to revive https://mntre.com/media/reform_md/2022-09-29-rkx7-showcase.html
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@mcc the bit of the stack currently causing me anguish is text shaping. HarfBuzz is the One True Library for this and the maintainer is pretty all-in on Claude. This transitively effects... all web browsers (including Servo), most TeX variants (including typst), and every major OSS GUI framework 🫠
@sapphire In my notes for my long, longer than a human lifetime, todo list for a one-person slop escape is porting Servo to run atop a fork of Harfbuzz 12. At some point I had a conversation with the Harfbuzz maintainer where they gave me the number of the last version they wrote without "code assistants" and what I have written down suggests that was 12. This step scares me much less than the idea of forking wgpu.
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@spawnie I was surprised and impressed with how far along Redox is. I hope to install it sometime this month.
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@mcc@mastodon.social this is most likely true, but even so, the firmware of your computer is being slop coded by random corporate engineers
I think to truly adhere to this you'd require open hardware and open software for that hardware which also isn't GenAI enabled
to be entirely honest I've been thinking about this a lot and I have no solutions -
@lispi314 @froge i am writing this on a computer from 2016 and i cannot imagine wanting a better computer than that. i don't know what the point would be. if any computer i purchase after this is from later than 2016 it will be for the sole reason that computers from 2016 are not being made anymore.
in fact, if i could, i'd probably go further back, to 2014, when S3 sleep still existed, and it was therefore possible to run Linux.
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@mcc Genuinely, something I hope we get someday is an FPGA-implemented open source GPU. I've wanted that for a long time, because I think graphics APIs are broadly a mistake, and instruction sets are better, and the reason we're in The Bad Place about this is vendors being protectionists about IP. But lately, I'm seeing additional benefits to making GPU simple and open enough that there's no excuse to slopping it.
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@poetaster @MaddieM4 i am at a point in my life i will go to enormous lengths to not write opengl. i think if we decided to create an entire new universe from scratch and the two things we brought along with us were C and OpenGL that would be such a sad outcome
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@MaddieM4@raphus.social @mcc@mastodon.social I’m waiting on my ULX3S board to ship and this is the main reason I ordered it, to become the video card of a microcontroller-based personal computer theoretically
@djsundog @mcc @MaddieM4 https://radiona.org/ulx3s/ that's a nice piece of kit!
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@poetaster @MaddieM4 i am at a point in my life i will go to enormous lengths to not write opengl. i think if we decided to create an entire new universe from scratch and the two things we brought along with us were C and OpenGL that would be such a sad outcome
@poetaster @MaddieM4 "joy was too big so instead we carried misery"
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@mcc Genuinely, something I hope we get someday is an FPGA-implemented open source GPU. I've wanted that for a long time, because I think graphics APIs are broadly a mistake, and instruction sets are better, and the reason we're in The Bad Place about this is vendors being protectionists about IP. But lately, I'm seeing additional benefits to making GPU simple and open enough that there's no excuse to slopping it.
@MaddieM4 @mcc sadly i suspect for most casual people (not nerds like us, like the average person you'd see elsewhere and to be very clear i am VERY supportive of this goal of a proper open sourced GPU) unless it's at feature parity with NVIDIA (which i hear those kinds of drivers and underlying firmware/ISAs are nightmares to develop and maintain) i doubt much outside nerd-sphere would care enough to even gain significance
that + the fact that i also hear it's apparently ruinously expensive to develop GPUs (like everything about them i hear is only getting more expensive by the day, especially on the performance side) that a serious one would likely have serious maintainability issues i fear
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@poetaster @MaddieM4 "joy was too big so instead we carried misery"
@mcc @poetaster Agreed about OpenGL. As for C... well, I always feel about complaints about C the way I did complaints about Biden during his presidency. Sure I got complaints of my own, but I can't always tell off the top if someone else complaining is doing so because they want a better version of the thing, or they're fundamentally opposed to the goals of the thing, and if it's the latter, we probably won't see eye to eye about it.
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@MaddieM4 @mcc sadly i suspect for most casual people (not nerds like us, like the average person you'd see elsewhere and to be very clear i am VERY supportive of this goal of a proper open sourced GPU) unless it's at feature parity with NVIDIA (which i hear those kinds of drivers and underlying firmware/ISAs are nightmares to develop and maintain) i doubt much outside nerd-sphere would care enough to even gain significance
that + the fact that i also hear it's apparently ruinously expensive to develop GPUs (like everything about them i hear is only getting more expensive by the day, especially on the performance side) that a serious one would likely have serious maintainability issues i fear
@amarioguy @MaddieM4 Should reaching every person on earth be the goal? If we make "reach everyone on earth" the goal are we being egalitarian or just massively overestimating our own abilities? I think my goal is something like "make something I can use, make something a large enough community wants to use the community is self sustaining, make something anyone on earth with $1000 *could* use if they decided they really wanted to" in that order
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@poetaster @MaddieM4 i am at a point in my life i will go to enormous lengths to not write opengl. i think if we decided to create an entire new universe from scratch and the two things we brought along with us were C and OpenGL that would be such a sad outcome
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@poetaster @MaddieM4 I continued writing OpenGL in C *from* the 1990s all the way up until last year and I would like to stop now.
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@sabrina Yes, exactly. This is exactly the question I am posing. But here is the hard part:
Imagine identifying the operations you need for a fast 2D desktop. Can you implement those operations in FPGA? Trivially. This would be a fun, fast project. *The software you want to run would not be written to use those operations*. Modern software is doing its 2D by sitting atop OpenGL or Vulkan. So the difficult part is *identifying parts of Vulkan and OpenGL* that in practice a 2D program uses.
@mcc @sabrina does "fast 2D desktop" include something like video playback at modern screen resolutions, or is a desktop stack from, say, the late 90s acceptable? I've been putting a little time here and there into rewriting Window Maker, and it seems to work perfectly well with only a few calls to the X server, which could do everything in software and probably work fine. But modern Web browsers and media players ask for a lot.
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@MaddieM4 @mcc sadly i suspect for most casual people (not nerds like us, like the average person you'd see elsewhere and to be very clear i am VERY supportive of this goal of a proper open sourced GPU) unless it's at feature parity with NVIDIA (which i hear those kinds of drivers and underlying firmware/ISAs are nightmares to develop and maintain) i doubt much outside nerd-sphere would care enough to even gain significance
that + the fact that i also hear it's apparently ruinously expensive to develop GPUs (like everything about them i hear is only getting more expensive by the day, especially on the performance side) that a serious one would likely have serious maintainability issues i fear
@amarioguy @mcc I mean I feel about modern GPUs and their intentionally prohibitive feature span the way I do about web standards: "that's a nice miracle you destroyed the ecosystem with. Undoing the damage is probably a multi-decade job and none of the normal folk will understand why feature reductions are needed. Won't stop me from patiently pushing in the right direction, though."
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@mcc my fantasy is something a bit like the mega65, or other retro fpga things (mister), in the reform next shell, and with quickly swappable cores that can share files, so you can try many different old/new/homebrew computers/os on the same set of (your) data. i think linux is mostly not really fun on simple hardware, so i agree with your desire of adopting sth like redox. personally i'd try to do sth as simple as possible but with memory protection (the one thing 90s OSes weren't great at)
it is not possible within the confines of the activitypub protocol to represent how much I love this post
this is a good post and I like this post a lot
CC: @mcc@mastodon.social
