| ▲ | PaulRobinson 12 hours ago | |
A few days back, a book on FreeBSD Driver Development was posted here [0], and everyone assumed a) it's LLM slop and b) a terrible introduction to the topics covered. I scanned a couple of chapters and realised it likely wasn't LLM generated, it just needed an edit. The intro to C is a hard and weird intro, but then driver development in FreeBSD is hard and weird and people who aren't prepared to get through such intros probably aren't going to get through the rest of it. Being the contrarian, I've started going through it. I was involved on the periphery of the FreeBSD project ~25 years ago, went to conferences, ran a BSDUG in my hometown, and so on. And I realised I've missed systems programming and FreeBSD itself a little, and in recent years became a little sentimental. What I've discovered so far in the first few chapters: 1. I miss FreeBSD. And it's weird my muscle memory kicks in and am surprised in a lovely way to find familiar things like /etc/rc.conf work the way I remember them. 2. This is not AI slop. There are issues that I can blame on him not using the same platforms I am (if you're on Apple Silicon, just use UTM and the aarch64 ISO - don't use the VirtualBox config he suggests, as an early example), but as somebody who sees a lot of AI generated content in my day job - this isn't it 3. I have got excited about coding again for the first time in a while. So, this is my hobby for a while. Go back to where I started, get into low-level systems programming again, I have some ideas on some hardware I want to help out on... it's different to a lot of what I've been working on for the last decade or so, but that excites me. | ||