NeuraLinux Bringing GenAI to the Linux desktop
To those who think Linux users are eccentric and their software is archaic, I couldn’t agree more; non-profit work from disparate programmers generally cannot match the polish of Big Tech products. They're powered by the industry’s best engineers and colossal neural networks, and this gap is only widening due to demand for the latter. The fact that Linux servers power those colossal networks and yet Linux users don't see a lick of it is possibly the worst trade deal of the Unix epoch. Nonetheless, we have entered a democratizing era of computing, and I'm only going to continue using Linux if it takes advantage of this. So I will bridge this automation gap by first articulating specific usability problems I encounter in James Mickens-style, and second proposing simple yet cutting-edge solutions that combine underutilized OS features with generative AI models.
This blog is the culmination of my first two years of college, written because I'm bored of the traditional way humans use computers, and I see a clear path to making it seamless. It is a living document of my discoveries and insights across a wide breadth of computer science diciplines to give my thoughts and philosophies a rhetoric home. I tried to write it such that curiosity is the only prerequisite to comprehension. I hope reading it provides you with fresh perspective on problems, or recreates an "aha!" moment I had. If you disagree with something I said or find a project that piques your interest, please consider reaching out and contributing!
Note: This site is under construction. The content that you see is incomplete and will change at any time.
Regulators can dull, but never declaw GenAI due to Moore’s law
Aspiring programmers seem to perceive programming like a playing the guitar to serenade your love at first sight, in that they think of a fun song, immediately start writing, and play it. But in reality, its a concert. You have to collaborate with other musicians, secure a venue and setting (devops), convince people to come (marketing) and tell them how to get there (documentation), and hold dress rehearsals (testing). Otherwise, you’re just a bum playing your trombone in the streets with no one listening, except for the disgruntled apartment residents above you that are the source of the tomatoes.Identity digital biases and misinformation by augmenting your news with context
Plus, The engineer's guide to fallibilism and pragmatismscaling and selection Scribe is a transformer that takes a segment of a song on YouTube and generates sheet music for any desired instrumentation. The model is trained on YouTube song - MuseScore sheet music pairs. The syncronization is achieved using techniques from ___ paper. Music arrangement is gated behind...
A labor-market approach to model inference scheduling in soft-real-time systems
Plus, The beauty of algorithmic transferabilityNow that I’ve elaborated how society is screwed due to generative AI, here’s a way to speed up the process via optimal resource utilization! I will show a reduction from model scaling/selection policy to the well-known labor economics problem, for which humanity has fantastic algorithms. But first, I have some...
The desktop is missing crucial quality-of-life features
It was after I asked myself “why does setting the second bit of the keyboard controller’s port to high enable 21-bit physical addressability in x86 real mode?” that I realized my academic education had sunk too deep into the details. I know we need the nitty-gritty architects to construct a solid foundation of knowledge and best practices, but more so we need fresh dreamers to drive innovation beyond the conventional boundaries and find better ways to solve old problems. It’s the reason Nintendo banked on Miyamoto in 1977, a complete outsider to the gaming industry, and now the world has...Enable the perfect virtual assistant by capturing your life in real-time
Plus, Designing an effective dataset with OS principlesAs an iPhone user who talks often about wanting to switch to Android, Apple’s new Journal app has both amazed and terrified me. What a seamless integration of my GPS location, photos, and messages that makes it feels like my phone understands me. It made me remember forgotten but cherished...
Start working instantly through smart, persistent workspaces
Plus, Why the desktop metaphor would make for a terrible computer architectureLife happens in the browser. For better or worse, user space has evolved past the neolithic era of files and native applications in exchange for cloud storage and web apps. They may have poor memory usage and performance, but at least we don’t have to install a melange of bloated...
Save an hour of battery by dimming the screen when you look away
Plus, Optimizing local vision through compression and sleepHow often do you look at your phone or talk to your friend while your laptop is open? That’s battery down the drain, meaning you’ll have to charge it more often. However, putting it to sleep often is a big inconvenience because it takes time to turn on and to...
Organize your Downloads into smart subfolders and archives
Plus, How ChatGPT makes for the best digital housekeeperDirty Rotten Cleaners follows a team of expert cleaners tidying the most cluttered, messiest houses you’ve ever seen. But they would probably pursue a career change after seeing your Downloads folder. It is only natural that we horde everything we come across for the distant day we might need it,...
System package managers abstract too much from enthusiasts
People are so detached from the software they use that it reminds me of the American meat industry. No one cares about the chicken who lived for 6 weeks when you’re eating your breaded Dino nuggets. Similarly, no one cares about the long hours of non-profit programming and culture wars when you’re telling ChatGPT to do your homework so you can continue scrolling through TikTok. But like the vegan electric-car-driving liberals will tell you, you should care.Curate your own Linux distribution through autonomous software packaging
Plus, Why the best way to "learn Linux" is to make it from scratchDescription coming soon…
The meta-distro reproducible package manager
Plus, Modifying dependency-hell to avoid NP-completenessLinux distributions aren’t useful until they hit a critical mass of packaged software.
A Linux package set without GNU, X11, nor systemd
Plus, Meet the modular next-generation of Linux softwareLinux distributions Description coming soon…
Programmers neglect the non-programming stuff
Aspiring programmers seem to perceive programming like a playing the guitar to serenade your love at first sight, in that they think of a fun song, immediately start writing, and play it. But in reality, its a concert. You have to collaborate with other musicians, secure a venue and setting (devops), convince people to come (marketing) and tell them how to get there (documentation), and hold dress rehearsals (testing). Otherwise, you’re just a bum playing your trombone in the streets with no one listening, except for the disgruntled apartment residents above you that are the source of the tomatoes.Generate personalized documentation for users and developers of OSS
Plus, How distributing RAG systems can democratize knowledgeLearning new software is hard. Even though we’re in a time where writing software is easier than ever due to ChatGPT and the likes, finding information that’s right for your comfort level and exposure to the project hasn’t become much easier. There’s an abundance of online resources to learn how...
A music arrangement transformer for any song, any instrumentation
Plus, Pioneering a new modality for AII know it’s a stretch to put this idea under this category, but music is technically non-programming. Scribe is a transformer that takes a segment of a song on YouTube and generates sheet music for any desired instrumentation. The model is trained on YouTube song - MuseScore sheet music pairs....
Unit test LLM prompts through embeddings
Plus, Coping with nondeterminism in language modelsLLMs are non-deterministic by nature, which means our prompts can’t be traditionally unit-tested. Instead, assert that the similarity between the model’s output and your reference output is above your defined threshold. We first calculate the vector representation of both pieces of data, and then take either the Euclidian distance, cosine,...
Linux shells have terrible UX
The UNIX command-line was clearly designed by the hardened programmers fabled in The Night Watch, who worked with rudimentary tools like pointy sticks and teletypewriters. They laid the groundwork of their OS with their bare hands and wrote textbooks when things went wrong. However, today’s command-line users get to wear their non-functional scarfs and sip tea while executing ./run.sh because of the hard work of those systems programmers before us. But boy did they leave us some unresolved baggage while designing these systems.Toggle the command-line between English and shell
Plus, The history of natural language interfacesDescription coming soon…
Synchronize development environments with AI-generated aliases
Plus, Solving "it works on my machine" with Occam's razorDescription coming soon…
Autoconnect to eduroam during Linux bootstrapping
Plus, Understanding the Linux networking stackA common chicken-and-egg situation is connecting to institute WiFi during a minimal Linux installation. To download the tools you’re familiar with using, you need to have internet access. Secure networks, specifically 8021.X compliant ones, are notoriously difficult to configure from CLI because CLI authenticators are far behind their GUI counterparts...