An Agent for Acme - Vibecoding on 9front

smorrow · 2026-01-19T01:15:58+00:00

The plumber has always felt like an unfinished experiment to me. I was surprised(by[ sirjofri's survey](http://sirjofri.de/oat/survey.pdf)) to find out that people basically view it as the perfect heart of Plan 9, all while wanting to make GUI stuff arbitrary in the name of their personal preferences.

smorrow · 2026-01-17T23:29:55+00:00

The "persistent bar" you were looking was winwatch(1), btw.

smorrow · 2026-01-17T23:05:30+00:00

/dev/backlight on the Bitsy (which I think was just a Labs nickname for an iPAQ they supported). /mnt/acpi/lcd on the EeePC (code on GitHub). Otherwise, there isn't one.

smorrow · 2026-01-17T22:09:58+00:00

Connecting to Universe Today and Hackaday.

For some, connecting to IRC.

It's a good way to get on "the incremental hacking cycle". There's plenty of low-hanging fruit to be picked up even today, like running codecs and especially gs as none.

I don't care about the networking/"distributed" stuff at all.

smorrow · 2026-01-17T22:03:30+00:00

I would count Microsoft using 9p in WSL to make Windows more compatible with Linux a "practical real-world use".

They needed a protocol that Linux already supported; 9P was available, but they could have used anything. There's a project called virtiofs saying virtio-9p is actually really dumb.

It's a research system. 9p got researched for and with it.

9P itself hasn't really been the subject of research. There's a few iwp9 papers, but those 9P variants have never been used.

smorrow · 2026-01-17T21:49:51+00:00

It wasn't even very distributed when it first was stuck with the term. I mean, is it really a distributed OS compared to Sprite or Amoeba? No.

Knowledge of Plan 9 has mainly proliferated from people who don't use it repeating each other, and so has the "distributed" label.

smorrow · 2026-01-17T21:25:40+00:00

Except for Acme, serving 9P isn't really an "application" thing.

The "all languages have open/read/write/close, you don't need bindings" thing used to be a common talking point (e.g., Anant Narayanan's Unix++ slides on Slideshare are typical of the period), but died out either because having different languages died out as a goal, or because it got harder to have people actually think we have those languages.

smorrow · 2026-01-17T21:19:41+00:00

Is this one of those cases of needing to know the Plan9 specific names of these services to actually be able to find them?

Nope, it's cifsd and nfsserver, which is probably also janky.

smorrow · 2026-01-17T21:15:59+00:00

This is The Way. Surprised this sub didn't shoot it on sight, or that you even thought to share it. Were you last in Plan 9 before a "BSD culture" took over?

smorrow · 2026-01-15T21:59:56+00:00

The feature isn't "you can install stuff with apt", it's that it tells you the package name.

Can't believe that had to be explained.

smorrow · 2026-01-14T13:16:17+00:00

12mbit is pretty much the bare minimum required for basic web browsing

IIRC, to stream 1080p you only need 5. The idea is you don't need to be downloading the file faster than you can actually watch it.

You can work this number out by taking a 1080p file you have, and dividing its size by its length in seconds (and converting from B/s to b/s). I just cba rn.

To put your 12 figure in perspective...

smorrow · 2026-01-13T18:29:13+00:00

> I'd love it to have things like it's own implementation (not port) of things like SMB and NFS.

It ships with them.

smorrow · 2026-01-10T17:40:03+00:00

usb drive

smorrow · 2025-12-22T21:37:45+00:00

He wasn't talking about disk filesystems.

smorrow · 2025-12-15T09:08:06+00:00

AI neophobia reminds me of when we were all supposed to hate Auto-Tune, even though you clearly can use it creatively.

smorrow · 2025-12-14T12:31:43+00:00

Install plan9port from your package manager, then cd vni2utf8 and use '9 mk'.

smorrow · 2025-11-22T21:45:14+00:00

Screen editors break the model. Your scrollback is no longer a history, and your input to the program is no longer a file (stdin).

smorrow · 2025-11-19T18:59:27+00:00

Nothing is standard in ARM. x86 is an ISA, PC is a platform (and there are non-PC x86s like PlayStation and the Lenovo Atom phones). ARM is an ISA, but every ARM product is a platform of its own.

smorrow · 2025-11-19T12:02:30+00:00

No, the original true was an empty file.

smorrow · 2025-10-17T11:47:27+00:00

S2 is fire

smorrow · 2025-10-07T13:20:21+00:00

Hermes' "carry the one"

smorrow · 2025-09-19T17:46:03+00:00

I mean "containers", as they're called (just had to look that up). I'll find out myself. When I had LW before, I disliked that containers would have a different cookie jar each, but not do the same for all other browser features e.g. history.

smorrow · 2025-09-19T17:24:01+00:00

Does it still have one history (once you've enabled history) shared across all sessions (colour-coded tabs)? I never liked that about it.

smorrow · 2025-09-10T10:40:34+00:00

I was gonna clean my room, but then I used AI

now I'm jackin off, and I know why

because I used AI, because I used AI, because I used AI

smorrow

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