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This unpaid team of volunteers is composed of some of the best and most productive hackers in the world.

• Cyph0n 3y ago
  If there ever was a team of 10x OS devs, this would definitely be one of them.
  • solardev 3y ago
    I look at some of this code and can't imagine even being a 0.1x OS dev. How do people learn this stuff? It's incredible. I'm just glad and grateful there's super smart people out there volunteering their time on worthwhile causes.
    • viraptor 3y ago
      Every specialisation is specialisation. It's just that more people are into (for example) web apps than OS development. If you spend some time in embedded dev land, things like that make sense. You just get better at thinking at hardware level / synchronising devices, etc. I mean, they're still super clever, but people learn that stuff by reading about it and practicing. You could go that way too, it's not black magic.
      • omgmajk 3y ago
        > it's not black magic. Then why do I have "black magic" on my LinkedIn profile???
        • robertlagrant 3y ago
          My guess is you invented the ATEM Mini.
          • geerlingguy 3y ago
            Heh, I got the joke, at least.
      • solardev 3y ago
        Sure seems like it to me, lol. I learned web dev first by using Geocities and Frontpage, then Dreamweaver. These days I actually get paid to write Javascript (something young me would've found unbelievable enough already), but to me that's still a huge difference from "real" programming, especially in C or assembly. Web dev (at least the kind I do) is mostly still just declaring UI in a XML like syntax, then wrapping it up in some events and state management. It's not that different from, say, Visual Basic. At its core it's a bunch of event driven reactions and API calls based on UI clicks. Once upon time that was Perl or PHP or jQuery, now it's usually React, but the fundamental process of "declare UI, add event handlers, send to APIs" hasn't changed much IMO. But an OS? Man, how do you work with memory access? Overflows? Garbage collection? Device drivers? Caching? Graphics pipelines? USB? Lightning? I don't even know where to start with any of that, and an OS is ALL of that and then some. Mad props, is all I'm sayin'.
        • SonOfLilit 3y ago
          It's almost exactly the same, except the building blocks are much simpler (=more primitive) so you have to spend more time per useful thing you want to get the machine to do. If you want to get a taste of what that means that is definitely 100% within your abilities, try to write a Brainfuck interpreter in JS, and a Brainfuck to JavaScript compiler (that yields a string that you can eval() to run the program). Then try to write some simple Brainfuck programs, then try to write a Brainfuck interpreter in Brainfuck. At this point you won't yet know how to write an operating system, but you'll definitely know how it feels to write one.
          • solardev 3y ago
            Heh, that seems like a perfect weekend project for whenever I feel like I'm missing a swift kick in the nuts.
            • SonOfLilit 3y ago
              Not sure why I'm getting such negative reactions. I've given these exercises to many developers, some of them very junior, and seen them complete them successfully. It's not that hard to do each step after the previous ones, and very rewarding to complete the entire thing.
      • TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
        > but people learn that stuff by reading about it and practicing. You could go that way too, it's not black magic. It is black magic to people who read and don’t understand a thing. :|
        • izacus 3y ago
          Remember, so is centering a div.
          • bmicraft 3y ago
            I thought flexbox pretty much fixed that
    • junon 3y ago
      osdev.org and lots and lots of reading code and manuals.
  • deleted 3y ago
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  • jojobas 3y ago
    And here they are, doing charity work to the benefit of the largest corporation in the world.
• microtonal 3y ago
  I don't understand why they don't just pay them to work on Asahi and then they can learn directly from all their findings?
  • stuaxo 3y ago
    Apple would want them to sign an NDA and that would be incompatible with them doing as much as they do in Linux.
    • microtonal 3y ago
      Apple can decide to not let them sign an NDA and just pay them for the excellent work that they are doing now and give them a good priority channel for reporting issues.
      • dmonitor 3y ago
        why would apple pay them to do something they already do for free?
        • danShumway 3y ago
          I very much doubt the math for the PR-to-cost ratio works out to justify hiring them, but presumably the reason would be so that Apple wouldn't have to see articles like this or to have the top comment on tech threads be "this is a huge embarrassment for Apple". Similar reason as to why companies have bug bounties; they want to incentivize hackers to report bugs through official channels early enough in development that they can get patched before release and before tech journalists write articles about them. They don't want to find out that their products have bugs via social media. Even if that process happens out in the open via a Github issue, getting giant problems like this caught before release and quickly escalated internally through official channels would go a long way towards mitigating article titles like this. Having said that, does Apple care about the Register or HN? Probably not? And assuming that Apple did care about bad PR among extreme power-users, would Asahi Linux want to be paid by Apple to do testing on their releases? That's also not necessarily a given, the team would have to decide if they wanted to have a more official relationship with the company or not.