Abdelkader Boudih

Things the OS authors don't want you to know:

• The #FreeBSD logo is Beastie, because it reminds you to dare, hack, and stop praying.
• The #Linux logo is Tux, because even penguins know what it is like to freeze with amdgpu.
• The #Windows logo is a window, because that is where you throw the PC goes after the third BSOD.
• The #OpenBSD logo is Puffy, because it’s the only fish that takes security more seriously than being edible.
• The #NetBSD logo is a flag, because if it boots on your hardware, they claim it as territory.
• The #DragonFlyBSD logo is a dragonfly, because every time you explain HAMMER2, people suddenly find somewhere else to be.
• The #macOS logo is an Apple, because one bite costs 999$, no 1999$, no 4999$. They soldered the RAM to keep the worms out.
• The #ChromeOS logo is #chrome because the operating system is just the browser admitting it won.

Here is my completely unscientific linguistic theory. Europe got cold weather. The rule became: speak less, do more. Standing outside giving a 40-minute speech was a suicide act. The Middle East got sun. Lots of it. So they invented stories, poetry, debates… and eventually holy books that people have been arguing about for thousands of years. A European proverb is basically: "Don’t be an asshole." A Middle Eastern version starts with the genealogy of the guy who wasnt an asshole, introduces twelve characters, three metaphors, a camel, a mountain, and by the end you have forgotten what the original question was. I grew up in France and learned Arabic much later. It felt like mental gymnastics. Now imagine training an LLM on that. People complain that today's AI is verbose because it learned English. I'm just glad the first generation didn't think primarily in Arabic. We will spend half the context window arguing over which of forty equally correct words for 'door' best captures the mood. 😄

I have open source code I pushed 10 years ago. PR reviews asking me to remove verbosity before they were merged. Comments full of em dashes because typing -- automatically turned into —.

All of that predates GPT. It predates me using Google Translate.

You will recognize what people now call the 'AI tone,' but the grammar is often completely broken. That is because it isnt AI. It is just how we think.

For many Africans, English is the second or third language. The sentence structure from our native languages leaks into English.

For example, in Morocco:

• 1 drink: Give me one Fanta.
• 3 drinks: Give me three Red Bulls.
• 2 drinks: We literally say, "Give me one-two Cokes."

That last one sounds bizarre in English, but it makes perfect sense if you know Arabic.

Arabic has a dedicated grammatical form for exactly two things (the dual), separate from the singular and the plural. That structure survived into Moroccan Darija, and then leaked into French and English when we speak them.

So yes, sometimes our English has what people now label as an AI style.

The irony is that much of it existed long before AI. It is simply the result of translating how our brains organize language or tokens :).

If you go to #Africa, you will notice that many educated people speak the way people now call #AI language. Not because ChatGPT taught us to speak like that. ChatGPT learned it from us. Take a university lecture from before the AI boom, transcribe it, and you will find the same formal structure, careful explanations, and academic tone. Maybe a bit more verbose and a little less confident, but the style is remarkably similar. The reason is simple: most educated Africans speak at least two languages, often three or four. The way we organize our thoughts makes perfect sense in Arabic, Swahili, Zulu, Wolof, French, or Darija. But when we switch to English, some of that structure comes along for the ride. For example, when an African says, The thing is…, Basically…, or So…, it isn't because we are trying to burn more tokens. It is often just a tiny pause while our brain assembles the next sentence. That previous sentence was one of those pauses, by the way. So the A in AI stands for Africa. The I stands for #india Remember when politicians wanted to keep Africans and Indians out from some countries? Well… now you have invited both into your hardware. They are there every time you press Enter.

@geerlingguy@mastodon.social I bought for half this price an Intel Nuc 8 Gen with 24gb ram.

Today, #Coreboot met #FreeBSD. https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/commit/?id=5f74217c05a99f38a31a6e4950220964595d4ac8 When I started writing FreeBSD drivers, a friend told me: So you’re just copying Linux drivers and rewriting them for FreeBSD ? Sounds like script work. I explained that it doesnt work like that. First you understand the hardware. Sometimes you have to reverse engineer it. Then you test it. Only after that do you submit a driver. He replied: Fine. Then write a driver that doesn’t exist in any operating system. That turned into a 500 MAD bet. (MAD is Morocco’s currency, not a measure of my sanity.) The challenge is harder than it sounds. Almost every piece of hardware already has a Windows driver, a MacOS driver, a Linux driver, or follows a standard interface. You dont invent hardware. You find a missing need. So I wrote a driver for Coreboot. Normally, the kernel log starts when the kernel boots. Everything that happened before that is a mystery. You can make educated guesses, but thats all they are. With this driver, FreeBSD can read the Coreboot log. You get to see what happened from the very first moment the machine powered on. That is exactly how I tracked down systems where RAM training was taking far too long because of defective memory chips. None of this would have been possible without the amazing work of the Coreboot team. As far as I know, FreeBSD is now the first operating system with this driver. DragonFlyBSD is next.

@trouble@masto.ai Thanks ❤️ I'm not in the US but which devices are we talking about ? You can ship them to @erikarn@mstdn.social ... We work together in the stack. But only if we don't have them... Else you can use them. (we merged the drivers 😀 )

@grant_h@mastodon.social Your chipset should be supported. I bought most chipset and tested them personally. @erikarn@mstdn.social tested few others.

@dalias@hachyderm.io FireWire has direct DMA access to the host’s memory (up to the 4 GB address space on most implementations), which is why it earned that reputation. In many ways, it became the scapegoat. You know what else has DMA? PCI Express. Every GPU, NVMe SSD, NIC, and Thunderbolt device. The real issue was that, at the time, IOMMUs either didnt exist or werent widely deployed or enabled. The driver will use the IOMMU after few round of refactoring. My priority was to get the driver correct and working on real hardware first. And get it out the deprecation list.

Now let me tell you about the 87th commit. It was about FireWire. https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/commit/e7efe2f059a474f8f8e14393713071761a633e65 Most people think FireWire died when USB became famous. It didnt. Its still used by professional audio interfaces, DV camcorders, industrial and scientific cameras, and plenty of legacy equipment that continues to do its job every day. Audio equipment don't need upgrades if they are still operating correctly. A firewire cable is superior to a new USB cable. That where i tested it. The users just kept using old version of MacOS that don't even have updated SSH. Together with Adrian Chadd, we dusted off the stack, rediscovered how it worked, cleaned it up, and refactored years of accumulated code. And we didnt stop there. We also added three new drivers: • fwcam - Firewire webcams • fwisound - Apple FireWire audio interfaces. • fwdv - DV camcorders, including many classic Sony, Canon, Panasonic, and JVC models. That means #FreeBSD can now talk directly to equipment that many operating systems have quietly abandoned. Someone in reddit used it to dump 50 tapes of childhood to digital format. I used it to have a zoom call with FreeBSD wifi group. :)

One year ago, AWS deleted my 10-year account over a disputed $100 bill. That day I learned something uncomfortable: unless you are a customer capable of causing a PR disaster, your monthly bill doesn’t buy much leverage. That same week I noticed something else. Vendor lock-in isnt just a cloud problem. Its a hardware problem too. Here in Tangier (Morocco), there are warehouses filled with computers that Europe has already written off. Machines with 2-8 GB of RAM and 64-256 GB SSDs, sold by the pallet for almost nothing after being discarded by companies upgrading their fleets. The hardware wasnt broken. The software had simply moved on. The OS kept nagging users to upgrade, only to tell them afterward that their computer was too old to run the upgrade. That is software gaslighting hardware into becoming e-waste. LOL. So I started buying them. In the past months I have bought over 5,000 discarded computers, not to build a datacenter, but to understand them, resurrect them, and eventually donate many of them. That project became ChaosBSD. In just six months, ChaosBSD has landed 87 upstream commits (it is not a AI number, lol). Ironically, after I started buying old hardware, the prices of SSDs and RAM even DDR2 went through the roof. 😄 Drivers are unlike almost every other subsystem. Frameworks get rewritten. Filesystems get replaced. APIs evolve. But silicon doesn’t get updates. A driver is either correct, incomplete, or it never gets merged. Once it is upstream, it often stays there for decades. I updated drivers that were not touched for 24 years. Losing my AWS account taught me not to trust a single cloud provider. ChaosBSD was my answer to the same problem in hardware. The project was never just about my machines. The drivers went upstream, so every FreeBSD user benefits from them. If you have an Intel Apple computer, you can install FreeBSD 16 or DragonFlyBSD on it. The computer will feel snappier than it original OS.

@bagder@mastodon.social Excuse me... I fixed 847 vulnerabilities today with Fable 5 that i introduced myself with Haiku and Found with Sonnet 5 Opus deleted my workspace, so i can't provide screenshots.

@oxy@social.bsdlab.au @stefano@mastodon.bsd.cafe you are pitching it to the wrong audience. Italians want coffee that survived extreme pressure, excessive heat, and visited hell. You are trying to replace a Bialetti with a speaker ?

FreeBSD 16 will have a complete driver set for every Apple intel computer.

My goal is to have everything in the machines with a driver in mainline.

2006-2011 -- Done
2011-2017 -- Few drivers left
2017-2020 -- New objective.

The hardware is pretty good quality for a 20 year old tech.

@fosdembsd who use Firefox anyway ? Sent from my curl 8.7.1

I forked FreeBSD. Not to compete. Not to build a distro. To break things. ChaosBSD is a driver proving ground - a place for half-working hardware, reverse-engineered drivers, vendor trash, and speculative hacks that upstream can't (and shouldn't) accept. amd64 only. Blobs allowed (marked). Panics expected. The goal? Get drivers working, clean them up, upstream them, delete them from ChaosBSD. Success == code deleted. ChaosOS will keep it upstream sync but will have extra drivers, uncompleted, unstable. I have build a bunch of drivers recently, either by porting or reverse engineering, but they are unstable. Broadcom Wifi that reset after 18h ( probably forgot to add some hook), Bluetooh dongles from aliexpress that need exotic delays... ChaosBSD is the place where we merge and work togheter, once the driver is civilized , we open a DIFF upstream. This will avoid losing time and eventually burning out the maintainers. https://github.com/seuros/ChaosBSD-src