What it has always been. Nothing has changed in this regard.

Oh, ok. I guess computer science is finished, then. I should have known. It's not like there's any evidence that it's been blown wide open recently.

(The irony is that all the reading that's gone into our design is like, old CSAIL papers. Maybe it's true! Maybe everything we're doing is just crate-digging through old settled computer science. That would be on brand. I should find a way to work Athena into it. Maybe we'll use Zephyr for messaging.)

I think operating systems have changed. They don't interact directly with hardware much anymore, and the hardware is filled with SoCs all running systems of their own, sometimes with entire network stacks, communicating with devices and each other, collecting and processing data, often totally invisible to the operating system the user gets to work with. The operating systems most people use have gone from giving users control over their computer to being a sandboxed interface to manage files and some of what their computer is doing.

I've heard very competent people claiming similar things. I think there's an abstraction I'm missing. I know they don't mean it literally.

The most recent was Loris Degioanni yesterday in a conference talk.

I think saying " This dumb dumb doesn't know what a device driver is" is a very incorrect read since you know, he's written a bunch of them

This is by and for people who do not distinguish between the UI and the OS, like how "MSIE" is "The Internet" for them.