YHK - yet another hacker news clone

AlpineBSD

49 points bradley_taunt 2 hours ago 47 comments

holistio 1 hour ago | parent

This AI policy is so utterly backwards and stupid I don't even have a nicer way of saying it.

0c3ca83 1 hour ago | parent

Interesting response in light of your previous post, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48197191

You complain an the shit future we're building. Someone says fuck you to your dystopia and starts explicitly weeding it out, and you call it backwards.

rfgplk 1 hour ago | parent

I'm a hardcore LLM booster but I agree that there's a place for LLM-free projects. In fact human generated code is still superior to even frontier LLM generated code, as long as you're willing take a massive productivity penalty.

rootnod3 1 hour ago | parent

Gotta give the AIs some new original material to learn from, eh?

rfgplk 1 hour ago | parent

Tbh it makes sense if you want a truly LLM-output free project. I can respect it.

g-b-r 1 hour ago | parent

Just vibecode your own OS no?

Why do vihecoders still care of other people's software?

aloisdg 1 hour ago | parent

Why do they still care of software at all?

0c3ca83 1 hour ago | parent

I don't think they do. They just care about owning shiny things.

If you care about software (or math, or art, or literature, or any other aspect of human creativity), AI is at best like hiring someone to solve jigsaw puzzles for you.

cturner 1 hour ago | parent

After reading the web page, I am left with some questions unanswered,

* Is it a goal for AlpineBSD to run on native hardware, or is it intended for containers (a major use-case for Alpine itself)?

* For users who want to avoid AI-generated code, why run this rather than netbsd itself?

If the team want to attract interest, they should give more context.

The mission is unclear. The team could address this by stating goals and milestones on the front page.

There is a link to a tool s6 on the page. The description of that tool opens with a circular definition. It would be clearer if it stated why it exists in the opening paragraph. Near the bottom it talks about "One of the design goals of s6-frontend". It would be better to state all of the design goals.

gabrielgio 1 hour ago | parent

Alpine is really nice host OS for daily drive. Simple and small. Given that Drew is leading it my guess would be it is meant for native hardware.

> For users who want to avoid AI-generated code, why run this rather than netbsd itself?

Alpine userland is nice.

ibn_khaldun 48 minutes ago | parent

> * For users who want to avoid AI-generated code, why run this rather than netbsd itself?

To start a community.

hoppp 1 hour ago | parent

The whole "as little AI code as possible" is tribalism.

I want software that is brilliant and well audited, no matter who or what produced it.

No AI guarantees nothing, especially if it's a C codebase like netbsd, why not also join the rust tribe then?

123ajhz 1 hour ago | parent

The AI tribe backed by $billions of influencer money calls others "tribal".

Can the AI people even devise an original argument by themselves or do they always just plagiarize and flip them?

surajrmal 1 hour ago | parent

Look, I'm not an AI supporter, but you can't put your head in the sand about things it does well. Even if you don't use it to produce production code, using it for research, prototyping, etc is still incredibly useful.

cvbakj 22 minutes ago | parent

This thread is specifically about "as little AI code as possible". And you use the "head in the sand" platitude about other uses of AI!

Can AI people even think any longer? You can peck on the downvote button like a hen, that's it.

canelonesdeverd 32 minutes ago | parent

What makes their position tribialism and not yours?

craftkiller 1 hour ago | parent

Neat project. One thing I don't see covered: is everything going to be statically linked like it is on Alpine Linux? Is statically linking libc advisable on a NetBSD kernel? I know (unlike Linux) the FreeBSD kernel ABI can change every major release, but I'm not familiar with NetBSD's approach.

rjsw 1 hour ago | parent

NetBSD retains the old ABI as well if anything changes to a syscall.

Intralexical 1 hour ago | parent

Alpine Linux is not statically linked. It provides a musl environment which makes it easy to statically link your own builds, but software shipped as part of the distro is usually dynamically linked.

  $ docker run -it --rm alpine

  / # apk add cmd:ldd
  / # ldd $(which ash)
          /lib/ld-musl-x86_64.so.1 (0x7f4cb4d1d000)
          libc.musl-x86_64.so.1 => /lib/ld-musl-x86_64.so.1 (0x7f4cb4d1d000)

  / # apk add cmd:python3
  / # ldd $(which python3)
          /lib/ld-musl-x86_64.so.1 (0x7fd630cab000)
          libpython3.12.so.1.0 => /usr/lib/libpython3.12.so.1.0 (0x7fd63069a000)
          libc.musl-x86_64.so.1 => /lib/ld-musl-x86_64.so.1 (0x7fd630cab000)

craftkiller 27 minutes ago | parent

Woah, TIL! My Alpine Linux world view has just been shattered. Static linking was frankly *the* selling point of Alpine Linux for me and it turns out I was just plain wrong.

123ajhz 1 hour ago | parent

Great website, great AI policy. The two are probably related.

efficax 1 hour ago | parent

Ok so it's "AI free". But why? It doesn't justify the decision but just assumes you will understand the reasoning. I have to say: I don't. For example they are pinning binutils, gcc, and gdb to the last version they know does not have LLM generated code. I assume this means they will not be able to accept any upstream patches, but instead have to take over maintenance of those packages themselves for the forseeable future, effectively meaning development on those will stop for the purposes of AlpineBSD. Seems stupid, to me.

iamnothere 1 hour ago | parent

Interesting to watch the rapid fragmentation of FOSS into “hard” anti-AI, AI-neutral-to-discouraged, AI-supplemented, and AI-driven camps, akin to the early GPL vs BSD wars. Suddenly I don’t see as many complaints about licensing, and some of the die-hard GPL stans are silently dropping that position as Linux adopts AI-supplemented development.

On one hand it’s unfortunate, because it hypothetically dilutes developer efforts, but on the other hand the most extreme groups already had incompatible personalities and weren’t working well together. This self-sorting may actually result in a better cadence and less energy wasted on arguing.

The downside is that a lot of loud and annoying people seem to be converging on BSD land. I am AI-nonaligned (I just care about Quality) but I’m very much in favor of OpenBSD’s heads-down focused dev culture. I hope that doesn’t change.

lionkor 1 hour ago | parent

> akin to the early GPL vs BSD wars

It's more akin to copy-pasting from stack-overflow versus people writing code, or code written by engineers vs code written by outsourced "code monkey" farms/contractors/consultants?

It's not about freedom, which is what GPL vs BSD is fundamentally about.

iamnothere 1 hour ago | parent

I wasn’t referring to the specifics of the disagreement, I meant the level of vitriol.

mrbn100ful 1 hour ago | parent

Most of what you use is built by "code monkeys" and is on the way to being vibe coded.

g-b-r 59 minutes ago | parent

Projects that decided to welcome AI of course don't care of its possible licensing problems.

Linux, for one, for what I can tell never cared too much about the GPL.

iamnothere 50 minutes ago | parent

It’s possible that they have different interpretations of how generated code affects licensing, but I think in general everyone is now abandoning old positions on licensing. It’s an exciting time for those of us who dislike copyright, something is bound to shift soon.

Whatever its stance towards the GPL, Linux has become the default home of GPL land with the exception of the few dedicated souls still working on Hurd. (I hope they keep making steady progress.)

g-b-r 22 minutes ago | parent

The prospect of being sued because the LLM outputted training code you're not allowed to use, or to relicense, is exciting?

Or to be forced to change license to large portions of your project?

With Linux I meant the Linux kernel

soperj 26 minutes ago | parent

> Linux, for one, for what I can tell never cared too much about the GPL.

The reason that Linux actually succeeded where BSD didn't is because of the GPL. MIT licensed stuff(if it's any good) just ends up being incorporated into someone else's commercial product, with no contributions.

craftkiller 5 minutes ago | parent

That's just obviously not true. Check out the commit history on FreeBSD and look at all the contributions from Netflix. Off the top of my head they contributed kTLS and asynchronous sendfile which made it such that a single syscall could send the full contents of a file over a socket even with TLS.

bityard 1 hour ago | parent

> NOTICE: The NetBSD kernel has spotty hardware support, much less so than Linux. You cannot necessarily expect AlpineBSD to work on any random computer you have lying around.

Huh. I feel like the author has their BSDs mixed up! NetBSD's main claim to fame is that it runs on practically everything, even lots of platforms no longer supported by mainstream Linux distributions. The page links to the laptop wiki, which is about AMD64 laptops and their finicky peripherals and driver support. A better place to start for hardware support is https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/.

rjsw 1 hour ago | parent

As a NetBSD developer, I wouldn't claim that it works on everything.

CodeCompost 1 hour ago | parent

The impression I get is that NetBSD has just enough code to get it up and running on a machine but there is not enough development and testing to get it to run well on a machine.

ranger_danger 1 hour ago | parent

"runs on practically everything" I take to mean the main CPU and general machine architecture, not every possible peripheral driver one might need.

whalesalad 54 minutes ago | parent

yeah. it'll boot. want wifi? you need a virtual machine running linux to contain the driver lol

sspiff 1 hour ago | parent

That was true 20 years ago, but not really today. Today's hardware is much more complicated and I wouldn't expect NetBSD to work well on anything but the most basic hardware.

against_epistem 1 hour ago | parent

I can respect this. Looks like AI auditing code is fine and I can't imagine why auditing would ever be a con. As for the lack of reasons given I guess they leave that for the users which seems completely fine to me. If you are chimping out over not getting a justification then you should probably do some soul-searching.

mrbn100ful 1 hour ago | parent

>A small amount of essential software is pinned to the last version which is not tainted. We pin software as a last resort, preferring to find alternatives or move the package into the tainted repository. The current list of pinned software in “base” and “main” is:

>binutils gcc gdb libffi perl xorriso

Good luck replacing those ...

thenthenthen 46 minutes ago | parent

Alpine is also the codename of the first iOS, hence the default root pwd ‘alpine’. https://mashable.com/archive/apple-ios-codenames#9.CLuUuywuq...

proxysna 42 minutes ago | parent

> NetBSD kernel has spotty hardware support

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Still remember the times when the meme was that the NetBSD was running on absolutely anything.

phendrenad2 34 minutes ago | parent

I don't think NetBSD has ever had a reputation for what they mean by "spotty hardware support" here, which is apparently uh... power management on laptops. Their links take you here: https://wiki.netbsd.org/laptops/

g58892881 20 minutes ago | parent

yes! "of course it runs netbsd" just checked, it's gone on their website. probably gone for 10 yrs alread, that's roughly when i checked last

Gualdrapo 39 minutes ago | parent

I so wish Gentoo/BSD still was a thing.

craftkiller 21 minutes ago | parent

One thing I'm cautiously watching is NixBSD. With nix you can trivially compile all your software from source and modify it (both of which I do on the Linux-based NixOS). So I think that would cover the main selling point of Gentoo, though naturally it adds the Nix layer that you may either love or hate. The only reason I haven't dived into it yet is my FreeBSD machines are all foundational parts of my infrastructure so I don't want to take a gamble on such a young project. So for now I just load it up into a virtual machine and poke at it longingly from time to time.

https://github.com/nix-community/nixbsd

proton_9 16 minutes ago | parent

while sitting on a cab a few weeks ago, i was watching other large trucks passing through, and i was wondering about what it would be like if these trucks were entirely made by bots, would travelling on roads feel less safer? when you know that the existing old stuff is made by humans and most humans who are good at their work genuinely put in effort and care in their craft, can we say the same about work generated by clankers? Really got me wondering, still split on if all this AI hype will be a net good in the long run. Sure you're more productive and end up spitting out more code, as long as its non critical SaaS stuff, who cares if things go wrong right? for crucial, mission critical stuff, relying only on AI autonomously, especially when they are still prone to make errors, seems like a very dystopian reality. Just today claude code hallucinated the first name of a person because in the username the first name was one letter.