I agree. I would switch to an open source spiritual successor to even Tiger in a heartbeat if it were available.

The difficult part is replicating the ecosystem of applications. From a technological standpoint I would prefer a modern Linux distribution with KDE or Cinnamon over using 2005-era Mac OS X Tiger, though I’d gladly use a version of Tiger that was retrofitted with a modern Darwin core, modern libraries for security purposes, and an up-to-date web browser. However, Linux does not have Microsoft Office, the Adobe Creative Suite, Preview.app, Keynote, Dictionary.app, and other pleasant Mac apps. The FOSS alternatives are not as polished. Even venerable Office 2008 for Mac feels nicer than LibreOffice, and it’s compatible with the XML-based Office formats.

I guess for now I could run Tiger in an emulator, though admittedly current operating systems serve my needs, even if I prefer the polish of Tiger and Snow Leopard. I get really good performance running PowerPC Tiger inside QEMU on my base M4 Mac Mini and on my Ryzen 9 3900 desktop, definitely not as snappy as running Tiger on actual contemporary PowerPC hardware, but fast enough to actually be productive.

I think this is one of those cases where “build it and they will come” applies.

The corporate giants are their own thing, but indie/small Mac devs are among some of the most steadfast early adopters in the software world. They routinely have new releases leveraging whatever new things were added at WWDC in the span of a few weeks or months. Many would be thrilled by a project that promises to bring back what they loved about OS X and would be happy to contribute.

The only problem is that the “it” that needs to be built is a set of frameworks that’s as robust as Cocoa/AppKit is, is flexible with language use (Mac apps have long rolled in C, C++, Ruby, and Python alongside Objective-C or Swift for UI), and isn’t afraid to be opinionated (a single well-supported “happy path” to do something is better than a dozen halfassed ways). That’s really the hardest part.

As for Tiger, on the Ryzen box you might get better performance from a hackintoshed x86 build (especially if you’ve got a spare PCI slot for passing through an old supported GPU for UI acceleration).

This summer I’ve been investigating agentic coding with local LLMs, and while I’m far from an expert, one thought that has been on my mind is leveraging techniques from “old-school” AI such as heuristic search to guide agents when it comes to planning. The use of Datalog in this article resonates with me, since logic programming was a major part of old-fashioned symbolic AI. I’m very curious about this combination of “old-school” AI and LLMs.

I'd love for Apple to bring back the Mac Pro, but Apple hasn't had an affordable Mac Pro tower since the 2012 model. Apple got rid of the tower in 2013 in favor of the "trash can" model. When the trash can languished for years without updates due to limitations with its design, Apple brought back the tower Mac Pro in 2019, but at a dramatically higher entry MSRP, which priced out many users of tower and trash can Mac Pros (I have a "trash can" and was very disappointed by the 2019 Mac Pro's entry MSRP). The introduction of the Mac Studio revealed a large price gap between similarly-specified Mac Studio and Mac Pro models. Given the lack of expandable RAM in Apple Silicon Mac Pro models, and also given the lack of support for NVIDIA GPUs in macOS, there weren't a lot of customers for Apple Silicon Mac Pros when the Mac Studio was available at a lower price, and thus the Mac Pro got discontinued.

In many ways, the Mac Studio is the spiritual successor to the trash can Mac Pro. Apple Silicon's architecture solved the thermal problems that limited the trash can Mac Pro.

Last week I purchased a MacBook Pro M1 Max from www.macsales.com, which is owned by Other World Computer, a maker of Mac peripherals. My computer comes with a 1-year warranty. It was my first time purchasing from them.

Yup. Yesterday it was $799 for the base Mac Mini M4, a $200 increase from the original MSRP before June’s price hikes.

I paid $499 for my M4 back in April with the academic discount since I predicted the next generation base model would cost more. Sadly my prediction was correct: $599 to $899 is steep. I understand why; the prices of DIMMs, GPUs, and SSDs have also skyrocketed. But $899 for a base Mac Mini is painful, even if the alternatives on the current market are also painfully expensive.

Russ Cox is one of the persons behind Xv6 (https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2011/xv6.html), an x86 port of Version 6 Unix, which is the version of Unix described in the famous Lion’s book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Commentary_on_the_UNIX_Opera...). Xv6 was prepared for MIT’s 6.828, an undergraduate operating systems course. In this syllabus from 2018 (https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2018/overview.html), students are expected to write significant subsystems in Xv6.

I think many good computer science programs offer a similar course where students make modifications to an open source Unix-like OS like Xv6, Minix, Linux, or one of the BSDs. I took such a course at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in 2008.

However, I don’t know of any undergraduate programs where students are required to code an entire OS from the boot loader all the way up to basic drivers. Building an OS is part of the final chapter of From NAND to Tetris, so perhaps there might be some universities out there that do require their students to write an OS from scratch as part of the larger curriculum.

I’m not a political conservative and I personally wouldn’t move to Idaho, but Idaho has a lot of appeal. There are plenty of conservatives who used to live in California who moved to Idaho in the past decade due to a combination of California’s high housing prices and wanting to move to a more politically compatible state.

Additionally, Idaho has a lot of beautiful natural scenery.

I’m quite optimistic about the long-term future of local LLMs for privacy and cost control reasons. An LLM running on my own hardware, even if it’s not a laptop but a home server, is one where I don’t need to worry about token limits, token fees, privacy, and “rug-pulling” from the vendor.

In the short term, the big challenge is being able to afford hardware that can run a ~30B model. Last month I got to experiment with LLMs on a NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation as a visiting researcher during my summer break. I see the power of local LLMs for agentic coding; they’re no Claude, but they are quite useful. I wish I had gotten into local LLMs before hardware has gotten prohibitively expensive and in some cases unavailable; Apple discontinued certain Mac Minis and Mac Studios with high amounts of RAM due to the RAM shortage.

Hopefully high RAM prices don’t become a new normal, though the next year or two doesn’t look good.

I also enjoy my Blackwings, though my normal pencil of choice is the Mitsubishi Hi-Uni HB, which is cheaper than the Blackwing but is still an awesome pencil. I think my supply of pencils will last at least a decade. I take a lot of handwritten notes when doing research, and I prefer pencil over pen when working in computer science and math.

This. When in Japan for work, I always buy a couple of boxes of Hi-Unis (mostly 2H for me, HB for the kids)

I started using them a couple of decades ago, but things escalated once my kids started school, seeing as I just sent them off with a couple of Hi-Unis.

Teacher noted she hardly ever had to help my kids sharpen their pencils, wondered why, asked me if I could get her those for the entire class...

Next thing I knew, I peddle in the pencil business - currently bringing in ~240 pencils a year...

(The lead is nigh on unbreakable, and it holds its point very well.)

Around here, similar to the Bay Area, community college and K12 pay is around $65k, and your typical new mortgage is $45k annually.