Re: [9fans] Greetings (MAD)

Re: [9fans] Greetings (MAD)

[red]

Hi Vincent,

I found it very hard to read through your posts. They are
walls of text written by AI, with no substamtial content.
The ideas are too vague, contradicting, and all over the
place.

There is no design I can replicate or specification I can
work from. In your posts, you refuse to get into details.

Nobody is going to do this for you.

You worry too much about security in a system that doesn't
exist and you have no plans to implement. These are all just
fun hypotheses for you to think about, and that's okay if
you plan to keep it that way.

From what I could read, Plan 9 already does 90% of what
you're looking for.

If what you want is to learn more about Plan 9, there are
plenty of resources online that you can follow. You can
either leverage this as a huge jumpstart to your ideas, or
build your own solution from scratch.

You'd be better off stopping the blog posts and writing code
instead. You only write a paper after you did something
useful or are working on a project with a clear and defined
specification.

% cat /env/user
red

Re: [9fans] Greetings (MAD)

[vincent.van.laak]

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First of all, I can guarantee you that AI was not involved even the slightest bit in the writing of the articles.  If it's insane, that insanity is in my head, not artificial.  In an AI written article, the person "writing" genuinely has no idea what the words on the page actually mean.  There are whole paragraphs they don't even know exist.  Any sense that it all ties together thematically is a lie.  I know the text, but more importantly, it is all coming from something that I know.  There is no jack-in-the-box sneaking in surprise details that I'm not aware of.  If you threw a dart at a random blog post, I'd explain more about whatever it landed on.  Over voice, if you don't want to believe the text.

The idea that I don't get into details, and need to write code, both are misunderstandings of the main point.  What you call not getting into details, I call not hyperfocusing on some small bit when I haven't even explained the overall concept yet.  Believe me, I have tried to write deeper about systems or jump into coding.  The problem is, I'm one of those people who got into very bad coding habits.  In college, when I sat down to write code for an assignment, I sat in front of the computer for a few minutes thinking and then the finished program spilled out from my fingers.  That's not me bragging.  I don't understand how to lay out a framework and then fill in the details.  I have *tried*.  You have no idea how many completely insane things I have sketched out on a whiteboard or spilled across notebooks trying to capture the idea that I have in my head.  When I have tried to grab python and make a basic web server that implements part of the core concept, gears try to mesh in my head and instead lock up.  If I try to write out a plan first, I end up writing in a circle.  If I try to explain one part of the system, I end up explaining where it fits into something else that I haven't described yet, because I'm talking about multiple new, interlocking systems.  It is insane, and I'm trying, but it's really, really not easy.

The point of coming here is not that I expect someone to be my monkey and do everything for me.  I am alone, and I don't mean that I have no one else working on the project.  I am *alone*.  I have never once in the twenty years I have been working on this thing been able to bounce ideas off of anyone.  There's not been anyone who has given me feedback on something I said, who asked me to clarify anything.  I have never once in my life had a peer.  Not in *twenty years* of working on this.  Many of the fundamentals are stuck in my brain in ways that don't make sense to anyone else, and I don't even know that until I'm trying to explain why something else makes sense.  I will not be able to code until I can get help untangling the knot in my own head, and believe me, it's not the sort of thing my therapist can help me with.

That I have thought too much about security is a fair point.  I have done similar elsewhere, even if I don't highlight it in the blog.  A large part of the project is tacking conceptual hurdles, and once I know there is a solution and I kind of know where it is, any other thinking about it prior to implementation is kind of extraneous.

From what I can see, Plan 9 does... somewhere in the 60-80% range of what I want.  90 is a slight exaggeration.  Some of the differences are in core systems which would mean redoing other work.  But I generally agree with the overall point: there's nothing there that an engineer or coder can simply go out and do.  Because I wanted to explain how the pieces fit together on a large scale before I ramble endlessly about, for example, the layout of the distributed filesystem and how that ties into the user model and the app deployment model.

Meaning no offense, but where my blog doesn't get into details, your reply also doesn't ask any questions.  Is there something in particular you wanted to know?  Or is it just too weird and you bounce off of it?  Because I fully understand the latter, but I was kind of hoping for more of the former.
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Re: [9fans] Greetings (MAD)

[Calvin via 9fans]

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> * I think Microsoft COM (and DCOM) may be another piece that addresses a lot of what you were talking about with RPC. It allows transparent remote procedure call, divides functionality into separate interfaces and deals with versioning, extensible interfaces and also provides a factored means to marshal (encode and decode) function interface parameters and results. I haven't really used that in years, and probably things have moved on, but I remain quite influenced by it. While it's quite sophisticated (read: complicated) it's also quite comprehensive - there's a lot of depth there. Possibly you won't use it directly, but it might be a good thing to study, as it will be complementary to the things that Plan 9 does.

The older I get, the more I appreciate the COM interfaces in Microsoft. I was not exposed to the windows stack early on but in the last several years have been working in it. Interop is so cool, the only other thing I can think that is similar.

One system I have been enamored with of late is the Erlang/BEAM VM. It's RPC procedures may be worth looking at. It's such a nice system, and I find myself favoring a more 'batteries included' approach these days.

It's interesting to me how there are parallels between the Erlang stuff like servers and a plan9 server. Of course they're not totally the same, Erlangs focus is really on message passing / actor system but again, it's very interesting.

Though this is certainly a forum for discussing plan9, i'd recommend everyone take a look at Erlang for building cool distributed systems.

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Re: [9fans] Greetings (MAD)

[vincent.van.laak]

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After much consideration and editing, I've made the first of at least two blog posts about how the models behind Plan 9 and MAD are different.  I hope that this will be somewhat more readable for the people here, because it frames the latter in terms of something you understand.  I hope it will also clarify what I am doing with the blog, which is discussing theory.

The topic this time, is how you reach devices from any given application, without assuming that both are on the same system.  https://www.projectmad.tech/2025/10/plan-9-on-resource-distribution.html

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Re: [9fans] Greetings (MAD)

[Clout Tolstoy]

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As someone that likes to build and think about stuff. I would try to ask
myself a few questions:

What problem(s) are you trying to solve?

Has someone else already solved or is working on solving the problem?

What's the hardware needed to solve the problem?

It's rare that there isn't already a lot of ground work already done for
the second question.

You might fair better in finding discourse on a place like reddit, albeit
at the hazard of their user base.


After grazing your blog, plan 9 might be for you and I would highly
recommend booting up 9front in a VM and checking out 'acme', mouse cording
and plumbing. It takes a minute to get used to the system but the ability
to click on any text like it is a button is a pretty neat UI.

I believe a lot of basic programs are in `rc` the plan 9 shell interpreter,
and the concepts of namespaces, (r)import, (r)cpu, and everything as a file
are extremely flexible and simple. Yet, so is the game Go and that
simplicity leads to complexion.

On Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 2:03 PM <vincent.van.laak@gmail.com> wrote:

> Yeah, the blog is kind of a crap show stylistically, to say nothing of the
> content.  I hate blogger.  If I wasn't flat broke right now I'd go back to
> hosting my own Drupal, and I hated running my Drupal blog.  For what it's
> worth the recommended read order is in posting order, not the blog-standard
> recent-first.  At minimum, start with the first article, because that's
> where the highest-level summary is.
>
> I just finished writing a reply under Red's thread that explains why
> there's no code; the short version is that I'm losing my damn mind.  I want
> to, my brain just won't cooperate, and it never did.  Even when I was
> working on my BSCS, I was never great at just laying things out and getting
> to work on them.  Either my brain solves the problem in two minutes and I
> spend hour transcribing it, or my brain is a whiny baby who refuses to eat
> their peas.  I absolutely agree that when you get down to actually working
> on something, many things become clearer.  But I am not sure that I can
> work on the details while keeping the whole machine in my brain; that's why
> I want to get it all out of my brain first.  Maybe then I'll be able to
> actually zero in on some of the pieces.
>
> I understand the instinct to point me to this or that technology for
> inspiration or to use for implementation (someone else did something
> similar the other day), but for right now I'm looking for people to help me
> corral the tidal wave of cats that is my brain so that I can explain the
> things that I have already thought of.  What would be most helpful is
> directed questions, even if it's just pointing at some random thing I said
> and asking, "No, seriously, what are you trying to say here?"  And feel
> free to do that as comments or emails if you don't want to tie up the board
> here.
> *9fans <https://9fans.topicbox.com/latest>* / 9fans / see discussions
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Re: [9fans] Greetings (MAD)

[Alyssa M via 9fans]

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I have a few suggestions:

* First, Don't give up! You clearly have a big Vision and a lot of creative ideas.

* I'd go further than your summary post and try to describe the main themes in one screenful, that you can read without scrolling. What are the main ideas? This can be a great way to get your arms around the ideas. You can expand on them separately. Can you get it down to one paragraph? One sentence?

* One difficulty with describing ideas is knowing your audience: if you can assume nothing about what they know you have to start from first principles - which gets kind of ridiculous. If you know your audience better, then it's much easier, as you can relate your ideas to things they are familiar with. Learn to speak their language/jargon, and meet them where they're at. It's easier than getting them to come and meet you where you're at.

* I know it's hard, but pictures really help. If you can find a few different ways to look at pieces of the system that you could express in picture form that might help you and others to understand what you're aiming for.

* I'd prototype some of the individual pieces separately. It doesn't have to be the final form. If interactions with other parts are needed, just use faked up placeholders. Divide and conquer! Keep it simple!

* I've often found it helpful to hack my way through the jungle of ideas with a narrow path: just make one small example work end-to-end. Then you can build out sideways. Actually getting something small to work gives you the confidence and enthusiasm to keep going.

* I think Microsoft COM (and DCOM) may be another piece that addresses a lot of what you were talking about with RPC. It allows transparent remote procedure call, divides functionality into separate interfaces and deals with versioning, extensible interfaces and also provides a factored means to marshal (encode and decode) function interface parameters and results. I haven't really used that in years, and probably things have moved on, but I remain quite influenced by it. While it's quite sophisticated (read: complicated) it's also quite comprehensive - there's a lot of depth there. Possibly you won't use it directly, but it might be a good thing to study, as it will be complementary to the things that Plan 9 does.

I think a lot of the trouble with bringing systems together is logistical rather than technical: getting the right software onto a variety of systems runs up against business interests, amongst other things. The whole IOT thing will struggle while the platforms are all proprietary. Having to "jail break" devices before you even start is a major impediment. In our house we've ditched the chromecasts and assembled Linux RPi's with little audio daughter boards. Now when google has an outage our music doesn't stop...

There are many "big thinkers" out there, just as there are many people who focus narrowly. We need people of all kinds. Probably everything we think about has been thought about by other people in other contexts. But that doesn't mean there's no need to keep going. While much is done by people who are very connected and mutually knowledgeable, important advances are also made by relative outsiders. Sometimes being too immersed in a field can make it hard to think outside the box. But it's also worth looking around at related areas, such as distributed transactions, process migration, remote paging, etc. If nothing else, it can be inspiring...
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Re: [9fans] Greetings (MAD)

[vincent.van.laak]

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Yeah, the blog is kind of a crap show stylistically, to say nothing of the content.  I hate blogger.  If I wasn't flat broke right now I'd go back to hosting my own Drupal, and I hated running my Drupal blog.  For what it's worth the recommended read order is in posting order, not the blog-standard recent-first.  At minimum, start with the first article, because that's where the highest-level summary is.

I just finished writing a reply under Red's thread that explains why there's no code; the short version is that I'm losing my damn mind.  I want to, my brain just won't cooperate, and it never did.  Even when I was working on my BSCS, I was never great at just laying things out and getting to work on them.  Either my brain solves the problem in two minutes and I spend hour transcribing it, or my brain is a whiny baby who refuses to eat their peas.  I absolutely agree that when you get down to actually working on something, many things become clearer.  But I am not sure that I can work on the details while keeping the whole machine in my brain; that's why I want to get it all out of my brain first.  Maybe then I'll be able to actually zero in on some of the pieces.

I understand the instinct to point me to this or that technology for inspiration or to use for implementation (someone else did something similar the other day), but for right now I'm looking for people to help me corral the tidal wave of cats that is my brain so that I can explain the things that I have already thought of.  What would be most helpful is directed questions, even if it's just pointing at some random thing I said and asking, "No, seriously, what are you trying to say here?"  And feel free to do that as comments or emails if you don't want to tie up the board here.
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Re: [9fans] Greetings (MAD)

[gnufan42 via 9fans]

I just read through your blog. I'd say it's hard to follow, but I'll try my best to explain where Plan 9 fit and does not fit into your visions:

- Plan 9 does expose almost everything as file. Aside from process management, synchronization, memory management and note handling (notes are simply Plan 9's version of signals), which require separate system calls, everything else is reachable with the file API. You can take a look at rio(1), webfs(4) and vmx(3). All of them exposes files as interfaces.
- However, Plan 9 merely gets you to the point where all resources on all your machines are accessible at one place. Plan 9 does not automatically schedule processes across machines. If you run a program on one CPU server, it'll stay on that server during its lifecycle.
- You might be interested in Erlang, which I consider fits your description of "Distributed Single Thread Programs" the most. In Erlang processes do not share memories. Instead, IPC is done by message passing. It's also quite easy to spawn processes on remote notes. I do not know much about Erlang and I think Wikipedia is a better source than me.
- For persistent objects, you might want to take a look at Smalltalk. Though in Plan 9 we usually don't use complicated binary formats and protocols and would rather keep things in plain text.

Finally, I'd like to give feedback about the style of your blog. 

First, I see no code in your blog. I think if you have an idea, you should write a proof of concept. Not only this forces you to settle down what are you actually trying to make, it also makes communication easier.

Second, it's really hard to tell where's the beginning and the end of an article on your website. The paragraph titles somehow has a larger font size than the main title, and there's no clear separators between articles.

And that's what I can tell you right now. Try to implement something. It might not even end up being related to Plan 9, but don't just spend time tinking about the specifications. You'll start to see the problems of your idea once you actually try to make them true.

Happy Hacking!
GNUfan

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[9fans] Greetings (MAD)

[vincent.van.laak]

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Hello,


I am a nut who has a concept for a distributed system, made over twenty years without ever knowing of Plan 9 or its descendants.  I'm kind of tired of it only existing in my own brain, so I've been trying to pull it out, find people to talk to about it, figure out what the concept is missing and otherwise evaluate it, etc.  Fair warning that it is unreasonably optimistic, and I probably do a bad job of explaining it.


I'm not sharing it to get money or attention.  Designing the system is genuinely fun for me.  I want to talk about the theory and how the things I came up with would apply to other distributed systems.  I think I'm right, because of course I do, but I'm also willing to believe that significant parts of my design will turn out to be wrong, and someone will eventually do it better with or without me.  If nothing else, I feel like the weird perspective I have on it may be interesting and some of the problems I isolated and solutions for them may be helpful.  And… it helps as much as it hurts, that it's all theory and I'm not locked into past decisions.  No rationalizing keeping things the way they are to avoid doing the hard work, because doing the hard work was never really in the cards in the first place.


I have a blog in which I've done a poor-to-decent job at laying out some of the core concepts.  At the very least, I need help understanding how well I come across and what still needs explaining.  I expect the next post I make will be about how the core of the project differs on a conceptual/design level from Plan 9, as I understand it.  Which to be fair, I don't really understand P9 at all right now, except insofar as the fact that I designed something just like it makes me look at the docs and say, “Yeah, I see where they're going with that.”  9P protocol, for example, is very familiar in concept if foreign in its specifics.


Be nice if the blog sounds a bit hubristic, weird, or dumb.  I am definitely a little crazy, and part of that is severe depression (not helped by being unemployed and isolated).  I will absolutely take criticism, but not abuse.  I'll gladly respond to questions here, in the comments, or by other channels if needed.


https://www.projectmad.tech


- V



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