I think it is best to have some understanding of how an OS works, and how Python works, before asking whether you can write an OS in Python.

Python is basically a scripting wrapper around a bunch of C functions (“builtins”) and there are means of installing additional C functions if you need them. Without any of the builtins, you really can’t do much of anything. For example, “print(2+2)” computes the string “4” (by adding 2+2 and converting the result to decimal), then calls a builtin to actually print the string on the console.

For an OS, you will need quite a few more C functions, mostly to control timers and task switching, the main functions of an OS. Given enough C functions though, in principle you can write an OS.

Nice try, Special Agent Hnp.

This just isn’t general interest technology news, especially since it’s for a vaporware (crowdfunding) product. Might be ok on /arduino or something.

Here’s USB PD to 12 volts (other voltages available too), just wire it to the breadboard:

https://www.adafruit.com/product/5450

I know perfectly well what breadboards are. I even remember the Continental Specialties brand. They have power supply strips, like the ones on the edges in this pic. You connect power there.

This is spammy and there are already plenty of USB-C power conversion gadgets, e.g. on Adafruit. No crowdfunding needed.

You mean RPL? There are lots of interpreters for that already. That’s the sort of thing to write because you want to write it, not because other people want it, unless you’re part of a community that is asking for it.

If you just want to implement an interpreter because language implementation interests you, I suggest Lisp or Scheme rather than something like RPL. The book “Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs” explains how to do that and it is great. You can read it online at mitpress.mit.edu/sicp .

Sorry, that makes no sense.

IDK, I’m here on Lemmy basically as a refugee from Reddit, but the federation angle doesn’t seem to help much from what I can tell. Look at how fast Bluesky overtook Mastodon. Anyway, anyone putting up new fanfic servers without understanding the politics and drama behind the existing ones is probably in for some pain. There used to be a saying “you’re looking for a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem”.

Yes I use lemmy.ml sometimes, but stay mostly on .world by inertia. It doesn’t make much difference. It does matter where the communities are. c/vegan is big and active and it’s on .world. The catfood incident there didn’t affect me directly (I’m not a subscriber) but it affected all the participants, many of whom are on other servers. So it’s not enough for users to move from .world. Communities would have to move or split as well. The federation model is that .world exports its censorship to every server that federates with it.

In fact, community fragmentation is already a huge fediverse fail even without censorship causing even more fragmentation.

This false equivalency pains me to my core. I don’t really have anything to say about the rest of your comment, but ffs can people stop with this nonsense take? You’re implying that the difference between centralized corporate authoritarianism and decentralized grassroots democracy is negligible.

It might very well be that the corporate censors are worse human beings than the Lemmy censors. That is completely independent of which platform experiences more censorship. It’s literally against the Lemmy World terms of service to discuss unsanctioned brands of cat food without supplying scientific sources. That nailed Lemmy’s coffin shut for me. There is nothing like that on Reddit. It’s ok, I’m not trapped in here with you. You’re trapped in here with me.

If you really think this and don’t think Lemmy will get better then you should be using Reddit instead of Lemmy.

I explained that Reddit is better for most people, though there is a fringe minority that chooses Lemmy for various idiosyncratic reasons. I’m part of that minority and so are you, ok? That doesn’t make the rest of the world likely to migrate here.

Lemmy is a failure at being like centralized social media

It’s also a failure at being like Usenet, which was far less centralized than Lemmy. I’m unfamiliar with Beehaw.

@Teknevra, you’ve posted a number of ideas like this which seem based on the premise that all it would take to make them happen is writing the software and keeping the servers running. In fact those are really the easy parts.

Any above-ground platform involving user to user payments (Patreon, Paypal etc.) has to devote a ton of energy into anti-fraud, anti-money-laundering, trade in illegal goods, etc. AO3 isn’t just file hosting for fanfiction, it’s explicitly political in that it aims to give a safe space for works that would be banned on other platforms due to subject matter that draws disapproval. That takes a lot of ideological commitment and some level of moderation, legal backing, etc. Pulling non-fediverse sites into the fediverse when they desire to run their own walled gardens for whatever reasons is another set of battles to fight. So in each case, the obstacles to your idea involve conflicts between humans, not just lack of the right software.

Why do you find the fediverse so great anyway? Lemmy is basically a failure IMHO. Instead of having one giant jerk censoring things like on Reddit, there are instead dozens of little petty ones wanting to defederate from other instances. Reddit is mostly a superior experience for users, with just a few of us fringe types staying on Lemmy because of priorities that almost nobody else cares about. Mastodon gained some popularity when Twitter became an intolerable hellhole, but Bluesky ended up recapturing a lot of those departing users.

I appreciate your good intentions and willingness to help out with various annoying situations, but I think it’s important to stay clear-headed about exactly what you are trying to do.

Why would you want that? What is the attraction? “Federate all the things” isn’t really an answer. Why would authors or readers prefer it over AO3?

It’s not on trillions of devices, just billions. But e.g. a typical android phone has 1000s of sqlite db’s for different purposes.

Thomas Jefferson was before my time but was supposed to also be pretty good.

We need browser extensions to kill those tags automatically.

Old joke: Conspiracy theorist Ted Tinfoil dies and goes to heaven and gets to meet God. God welcomes Ted to the afterlife and asks if he has any questions. Ted wants to know who killed JFK. God says “it was Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone”. Ted says “oh no, the cover-up goes all the way to the top!”.

Writing a book when you don’t know the subject matter doesn’t sound likely to result in a good book. Even more so for a language like Rust, which (short of Haskell) is the closest thing to a mainstream language that is informed by a lot of pointy headed PL (programming language) theory. A book about programming in Rust doesn’t have to go into the theory per se, but the author should be familiar with it, just like someone who writes an introductory calculus or statistics text really needs a much deeper mathematical background than the book itself will convey.

If you want a Rust-related hobby, first of all, why not do Advent of Code in Rust, or otherwise make a study of Rust? And then if you’re interested in PL theory, that’s another area to study. Harper’s book PFPL is a good place to start: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/pfpl/

wtf.