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Comment by k310 | Hacker News Reader

I am not on board with the graphic, whatever the heck it is.

https://www.openbsd.org/images/blowfishonbike-s.gif

Forget the artwork and check out the accompanying song and lyrics for the new release. I think it's one of the funnier ones so far. https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#80

“Back in my day we didn't have artificial intelligence, we had real stupidity - and we liked it.”

Real stupidity is still available, you just have to opt in. Yesterday I spent an evening writing Game of Life in Prolog for no good reason, and it gave me 941 live cells instead of 18,885 because my neighbour rule counted diagonals twice. Finding that bug by hand was more fun than anything an agent did for me that day. The pointless tinkering didn't go away, we just have to choose it now.

Now implement Prolog in your Game of Life and observe the Universe fold in on itself.

Is it a pun?

The Simps on AI

The Simpson AI?

And then the 3 eyes fish makes a reference to Blinky

https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/Two_Cars_in_Every_Garage_an...

Just as cringeworthy as the QT4 dance

To me that cringiness is oh so wonderful. Everyone is so weirdly afraid of their image, of how others think of them.

We've become sterile; caricatures of ourselves so that we can adhere to the groupthink. It's refreshing to see people unashamed to be themselves, with all of their weird parts.

It lost one eye, but that's ok, it still has two left.

Nice! Think there was a gap in release-accompanying songs from 7.4 to 7.8 or I missed them. Seems they are back on track now.

     ACHTUNG!  ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS!

Alles touristen und non-technischen looken peepers! Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist easy schnappen der springenwerk, blowenfusen und poppencorken mit spitzensparken. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen. Das rubbernecken sichtseeren keepen das cotten-pickenen hans in das pockets muss;

relaxen und watchen das blinkenlichten.

Man, I love the spirit of the blinkenlights warning, but the "cotten-pickenen hans" bit makes it hard to use the original for anything.

Yeah.. the last line is enough for the reference.

I can't see why; it's a goofy 20th-century colloquialism popularized by Bugs Bunny cartoons as a substitute "damn". I sincerely doubt the original author meant anything else.

You can't see how using "cotton-picking hands" as a negative term can cause backlash? If the phrase was something like "don't break anything in this cotton-picking rack", I would understand, but "keep your cotton-picking hands away"?

I'm not a native speaker, so I might have genuinely missed something here. Still, if I had this warning printed on my cubicle I would be fearing for my job everyday.

I suspect it is social commentary on the dangers of letting the machine do all your thinking for you.

Or merely a single portrayal of a puffer subject to the socio-technological forces of this generation.

I really like OpenBSD. I have used it for years. I feel the folks there are very helpful and awesome but I also do not like that graphic.

To be fair, I'm reading it as satire of AI. So not liking it is kind of the point.

You are not supposed to, it is intended to represent(and probably is) a machine generated image.

I have not really formalized my thoughts on the matter, but it boils down to. It feels great to get the machine to generate a thing for you but it feels terrible to receive a thing from somebody that is machine generated.

The worse part is the paranoia, Now I am seeing "tells" of machine generated content, and it may or may not be. But I have already lost interest.

The real irony would be that it is a hand drawn image carefully animated to feel machine generated.

Credit is given to yvaneht nioj and clanker

Yeah. To me, I feel like Theo de Raadt is being a comedian here, and the joke probably went over some heads.

If your joke is to smear your face with shit, don't be surprised when people aren't laughing with you.

I thought it was hilarious

that's the point

They're just showing humility. Give them a break.

I mainly don't like the self-destructive aspect. Even if it's a spoof.

Especially when I see all the self-destructive goings-on in the world, based on senselessly divisive beliefs or just the power-seeking that generates them to divide and conquer.

I once met Ken Bering, "The Wheelchair Guy" whose foundation provided wheelchairs for people who could not afford them. The wheels weren't spiked, nor were they like a Seinfeld episode, where George donates a cheap wheelchair with poor brakes that sends its occupant down a steep hill.

Oh well.

It's satire

I would guess it is the pelican on a bicycle reimagined ;)

And a reference to a meme of someone sticking a pipe into their own bike and complaining about someone else.

We need to find out which LLM was used to generate this benchmark image, it is the frontier now!

I don't like it being 8MB and taking 53 seconds to download from this server!

It's rare to even see a "real" gif rather than webm or other optimised format, I don't know if that choice is part of the commentary or not.

I would just like to say that the Simpsons Already Did It: https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/Blinky

Wow, that’s a weird coincidence.

It's not a coincidence. The song is called "The Simps on AI". They're definitely referencing Blinky.

The art is credited to yvaneht nioj, another simpsons reference.

Which reminds me of the Ralph Wiggum music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b403GtvwyEc

Sometimes I'm genuinely surprised that people can't recognise such obvious sarcasm

Earth was created six thousand years ago and we were running short on souls so we had to borrow a few chips from xAI.

The theme this time is from The Simpsons, so yeah that is where they got it from. https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html

It's like a pelican on a bicycle, but with social commentary.

> I am not on board with the graphic, whatever the heck it is.

They are purposefully iconoclast with whatever aesthetics are "socially acceptable" for mainstream nerds. For example, their use of comic-sans in official presentations. Here they use ridiculous slop in front of an audience of conservative unix hackers. You can find it funny with the right mindset.

The upgrade mechanism from 7.9 to 8.0 is still gloriously simple, and exactly the same as it has been for many years :

    ssh myopenbsdbox    # log-in to your machine
    doas sysupgrade     # will log you out, go drink some coffee
    ssh myopenbsdbox    # log-in to the upgraded machine

    doas sysmerge       # (optional) solve merge conflicts of your cfg files
    doas pkg_add -u     # (optional) upgrade local packages

Don't forget: doas syspatch. They tend to find some minor issues rather quickly after release.

Since I maintain my own custom patch set under OpenBSD, this is also usually when I need to vendor in the new release and update all of my patches.

Yup. I have heard the siren call. I’ll be putting it on an old fanless sbc router I have that is just sitting around since I upgraded.

What window managers is everyone running? I’m thinking i3 or dwm

I use a custom dwm.

> What window managers is everyone running? I’m thinking i3 or dwm

everyone is running different managers... I use evilwm on linux and cwm on openbsd. They are very similar (keyboard-driven, floating windows with no frames) with different default keybindings.

> The upgrade mechanism from 7.9 to 8.0 is still gloriously simple, and exactly the same as it has been for many years

The upgrade mechanism on a typical Linux distribution is _even more_ gloriously simple, and exactly the same as it has been for many years.

  # Fedora/RHEL
  $ sudo dnf upgrade -y

  # Debian/Ubuntu
  $ sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

  # Arch Linux
  $ sudo pacman -Syu

The false distinction between the OS packages and user local (/usr/local) packages during upgrade causes much unneeded complexity. FreeBSD is making this go away which is welcome.

    # Debian/Ubuntu
    $ sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

But this is equivalent to syspatch && pkg_add -u , this does not upgrade the computer from one version of the OS to the next.

For a rolling release like Arch Linux you just always use pacman -Syu.

But yes you are correct, if you want to upgrade a Ubuntu distribution like 26.04 you do need to issue a command like `sudo apt dist-upgrade` which is admittedly an additional command. But then you could run 26.04 for many years. In OpenBSD anytime the base system/kernel is upgraded for a security fix or point release you need to do a slightly more complex dance.

> a command like `sudo apt dist-upgrade`

That is still wrong.

The correct form is `apt-get dist-upgrade` but that's just the command to update all packages to the latest versions in the same release of the OS. It is the equivalent of `apt full-upgrade` if you have the more modern `apt` command rather than `apt-get`.

So, no, that will not upgrade your distro.

The recommended course of action for Debian is to edit the repository config files, change to the new release names, and then do a full update.

It's a big job.

https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/release-notes/upgradi...

Ubuntu wraps this in simpler tools: `do-release-upgrade` from the shell, or Software Updater for GUI users.

I just upgraded my Ubuntu 24.04 box to 26.04, and my OpenBSD 7.9 box to 8.0. OpenBSD is quicker and easier.

I'm pretty sure it takes more to move debian 11 to debian 12 and Arch doesn't even have versions

Arch upgrades are really fun if you don't run pacman for a year or more. It rarely works in your favor to not run pacman on a extremely frequent schedule.

A typical Debian upgrade process is more involved than that.

Hey, you'd love this one:

  guix pull && guix system reconfigure

To undo, it's:

  guix roll-back

(now, where is guix-bsd?..)

https://guix.gnu.org/manual/1.5.0/en/html_node/Upgrading-Gui...

And don't forget to cross your fingers so the upgrade does not break your system... like what happened to me when systemd came out.

OpenLSD, bicycle day edition?

It's a reference to your basic 'Baton Roue' meme.

I assume it's meant to represent the perspective of pro-AI people, but it's ambiguous.

Puffy's always looked kind of weird. I remember when they gave the damn fish human lips a few times and it always put me off

"Wireframe Puffy" T-shirt design with the 'human lips' was always my favorite. Hope they bring it back.

https://www.openbsd.org/tshirts.html

This is an amazing image, I am fully on board with whatever it is.

Is the animation comically slow for anyone else?

that's the gif loading, it should be fast once it's done

I love it too. It's nice to be able to enjoy some art with personality when everything out there is inoffensive and bland art.

similar on the front page https://www.openbsd.org/index.html , "UNDSREA LREER"

it seems very much like social commentary.

Tell me tis not AI, cause it sure as hell looks like one.

It is clearly AI generated and that’s the message.

It's satire

It's literally in the name

it's a parody of LLM generated images, referencing the pelican benchmark. I suppose the image itself is hand -drawn and stylized for genAI slop

It gets better: https://www.openbsd.org/images/blowfishonbike.html

That's Puffy, a yellow, spiky pufferfish, on a bike.

And so it begins.

SlopenBSD.

Disappointing OpenBSD is and all of software is descending into slop.

Don't care if it is satire or not.

Agreed. Lowering yourself to the level of the AI drones is the first step to becoming one of them.

Before they were anti-AI edgelords, they were anti-VM edgelords.

Now they ship their own hypervisor in the base system.

I don’t think the theme is “anti‐AI.” I think what it’s trying to express is something along the lines of “take responsibility for your code,” where one’s code is the code one unleashes upon the world.

But that’s just my interpretation.

It's not that they were anti VM, they just didn't think it was a proper security boundary.

And they've been proven correct. Even the "secure" variety with hardware level encryption turned out to be vulnerable.

Even Xen (VM used by Qubes) periodically has CVEs, although they don’t always affect Qubes due to additional layers of defense and/or limited hardware targets.

CPU flaws are even more daunting. OpenBSD's BDFL, Theo De Rhaadt, had what some called harsh but accurate words for Intel CPUs when Meltdown was uncovered.

Rhaadt and Stallman have something in common in that they have been vindicated in near biblical proportions, often far long after presenting their stance and having been casually derided for it.

There is today still no real mitigation for the side channel flaws collectively named Spectre flaws. A look at Jonathan Perry's work, adjacent to the side channel stuff, tells us that most modern CPUs still not end of life today are truly single-tenant.

When reading AWS' writing on side channel flaws, someone who skims that writing will leave with a different conclusion than someone who reads what AWS has shared in its entirety and reads it slowly.

The only truly effective way to isolate applications effectively, in a way accessible to people in average financial stature, is to put them on different CPUs (hello dual and quad socket server boards). Thanks to the prevalence of inexpensive ARM and Risc-V based single board computers, although this requires advanced skills with operating systems and relevant tooling this is practicable (as ugly as it is).

There are some new general purpose processors made from ISA that don't use any form of speculative execution. These may be undoing decades of bad-assumptions cruft. Those who deserve these processors won't wait for retail channels to deliver them.

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