Joplin is open source but isn't half of Obsidian, it's slow and grouchy, a fairly poor Electron app, but at least I can turn off the plugin that does freehand drawing. It's also has self-hosted sync for free. If Obsidian was open source, I'd have switched already even if it needed a subscription to sync, especially if I could toggle off unwanted features.
Yes, for some definition of OS. It could build a DOS-like or other TUI, or a list of installed apps that you pick from. Devices are built on specifications, so that's all possible. System API it could define and refine as it goes. General utilities like file management are basically a list of objects with actions attached. And so on... the more that is rigidly specified, the better it will do.
It'll fail miserably at making it human-friendly though, and attempt to pilfer existing popular designs. If it builds a GUI, it's be a horrible mashup of Windows 7/8/10/11, various versions of OSX / MacOS, iOS, and Android. It won't 'get' the difference between desktop, laptop, mobile, or tablet. It might apply HIG rules, but that would end up with a clone at best.
In short, it would most likely make something technically passable but nightmareish to use.
Given 100 years though? 100 years ago we barely had vacuum tubes and airplanes.
Given a century the only unreasonable part is oneshotting with no details, context, or follow up questions. If you tell Linus Torvalds "write a python script that generates and OS", his response won't be the script, it'll be "who are you and how did you get into my house".
Flickr was a hero, then yahoo/smugmug killed it. It's still there, but along the way all changes reduced it to an also-ran. It's still a nice tool, but I just don't see myself using it again. The URL scheme, as neat as it was, I never noticed or cared to hack at. I just wanted to upload photos.
You can absolutely still do this. I'm still a Flickr Pro subscriber since 2015, and I still regularly upload photos to Flickr. I don't think there was a set of changes that reduced Flickr to an also-ran, the entire market shifted. First, there was a shift away from photography being focused on what I will short hand as "quality" towards being focused on what I'll short hand as "moments" with services like Instagram, which had 100m users by the end of 2013 and continued growing exponentially from there, which was deeply interconnected with the introduction of reliable fairly high-quality phone cameras built into smart phones.
Flickr was, and continues to be, a place where people who use actual camera equipment post photos that are taken not just to capture a moment, but to express a scene, using technique and artistry to do so. That type of high quality photography doesn't really get much traction in more contemporary social media, because the photos of moments shared on Instagram weren't about the photo, they were about the moment. It was about proving that you were in a place or experienced a thing, and the place or thing giving you social value. "Pics or it didn't happen."
Instagram has now largely been supplanted by TikTok, because short video is now much more of a common, engaging, and desired format than photography, and thankfully this means Flickr in 2026 is once again a refuge of die-hard photographers sharing their works, and not seeing much attempt to change it into Instagram 2.0. Many (maybe most) of the photos on Flickr are now taken with smartphones, but there is still an expectation from the community to focus on expressing a scene using technique and artistry, and modern smartphones now have good enough cameras to do just that without detracting from what you're trying to express.
Flickr is an unsung hero in this. I uploaded photos back in 2011 when I purchased my first DLSR camera, and had forgotten about them until this day, and seems they're still up! Did some other checks for content I uploaded back then, and seemingly only my YouTube and Vimeo videos are still up, everything else I spot checked from the same period seems to be gone by now.
I understand the Yahoo part, but what do you mean with smugmug? My impression was that they bought it and "revived" it but I might misremember the history there.
They bought it but the revival was just the corpse moving around from heavy handed cpr attempts. It still lives thanks to the guy from Pinboard, but only as an archive really.
Revived might be too strong a word, it's still a shadow of what it used to be. Besides, wasn't it Smugmug that introduced the 1000 photo limit for free users? I too could be misremembering here.
I'd say that's hardly the fault of the acquisition but more the change of the landscape for photo communities. Everyone moved to Instagram and online storage space alone isn't such a big selling point any more as everyone has their image in Google Photos / iCloud already.
That's like saying Tumblr/MySpace got ruined by acquisitions, in reality people just moved on to other platforms like it always happens with social networks over time.
This was why I canned a potentially useful image project a long time ago that could resize and manipulate images from any URL to optimise for mobile use. It's also why I've not dipped my toes into the murky pool of self-hosting any of this and rather use services moderated by someone else. It's just too toxic to handle, and dangerous to my career, and I don't know how I'd contain it beyond never hosting ANY image data and making it text only.
As facebookexternalhit is listed in the robots.txt, it does look like it's optimistically rechecking in the hope it's no longer disallowed. That rate of request is obscene though, and falls firmly into the category of Bad Bot.
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