Guix maintainers Janneke Nieuwenhuizen @janneke and Ludovic Courtès @civodul have announced just today that their "seed" C compiler "Mes" is now in production in Guix OS. Mes can, after several boostraping stages eventually compile GCC which in turn compiles Linux, Guile, and Guix. The bootstrap program (as I understand it) is written in Guile Scheme, and compiles to a 357 byte binary. Now when you do guix pull you will see that the entirety of the core operating system (some 22,000 expressions) all depend on that single 357-byte bootstrap program. The idea is to eliminate the footprint of trusted binaries that build the software for the OS and compiler toolchain -- the famous "Trusting Trust" problem outlined by Ken Thompson which he presented while receiving his Turing Award. Thanks to their hard work, we now have an operating system for which every stage of the build can be verified by a human. https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-building-from-source-all-the-way-down/
Nix OS people do not need to feel left out, a new issue on the Nix OS GitHub page has announced that they will begin a similar project. https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/227914
I would appreciate it if people could help me get more federated on my new instance. Please boost this post if any of the following tags apply to you so I can follow!
Hello Everyone! I'm a #computerscience professor at Baldwin Wallace University with research focusing on #mobile#iot and also #privacy. I am interested in how we can use #computing to make the world a better place. I am a member of @ACM and several SIGs including @sigcas
@swagpussc The basic thing to understand is that this is not a world of Windows.
There have always been other operating systems, and in particular there has been, since the late 1960s, a large class of operating systems that are: Unix; one of the many flavours of Unix that #Unix split into in the 1970s; or someone creating an operating system that's very much like Unix, from the ground up, a decade or 2 later.
#Linux is (the kernel of) the last sort of operating system.
@swagpussc (...continued)
Aside: There's a whole explanation about #Linux only being a kernel, not the whole of an operating system. The "kernel"/"shell" thing is a metaphor.
As someone who has used neural nets and self organizing maps in a research project about a decade ago, I found this history of artificial neural networks fascinating. I had no idea of the 70+ years of history of AI exploration.
Naive question (maybe): Is there a definition of 'computation' akin to the mathematical definition of information (entropy/MI)? I don't mean Turing machines. e.g. something that could determine the extent to which a group of neurons/synapses are signalling versus computing? #computation#computerscience#informationtheory#machinelearning#neuroscience
“Give someone a program, you frustrate them for a day. Teach them how to program, you frustrate them for a lifetime.” – David Leinweber, Mathematician and Berkeley Computer Science Professor #computerscience#programming
I'm Jochem. I have a Computer Science MSc and am a Game Tech Programmer at Guerrilla in the Netherlands working on [redacted]. My header image is my cat Pepper. And yes, I'm a Twitter refugee. 😅
I'm trying to find fellow game devs, computer/technology enthusiasts, cat owners, queer people 🏳️🌈 or otherwise kind people on this platform.
#introductions I've never been any good at Twitter so I'm unlikely to be any good at Mastodon, but I'm happy to be here. Happy to diversify a little. I hope I picked the right server to join.
It is going to take some getting used to not having to thread things, I can tell you that right now for free.