[glangdale]

You have a strange notion of what 'research' might be, which doesn't really map to either a academic notion of research ("write papers that might appeal to an {OS,PL,NS}DI committee") or a practical notion of research ("build cool things that might help people do things with computers that couldn't be done before"). I've actually done these things, as it happens, so spare me your frothing at the mouth about "buzzword machines" and substance please - a bit much coming from an anonymous account.

I'm not going to denigrate noodling around with uxn, which seems quite neat, but it's not in any way shape or form something that most people would recognize as "research": it might be cool, and it might be an effective way of learning things, but it is not going to let anyone do anything substantially new they couldn't do before.

The point of "popularity" is not to win internet brownie points: it's to get outside your own head and find out what other people's workloads look like. If "modern" workloads sounds too much like a cliche (and I admit it does sound a bit like I feel like all research OS work should be centered around supporting an Electron stack or some hipster NoSQL database running in Kubernetes when I talk like that) - it could just as easily be "scientific workloads" or even, god help us, COBOL workloads.

Just something that you didn't yourself make up. That's noodling. That's a hobby. We're all really good at asking ourselves questions and providing good answers for them.

Anyhow, enjoy your noodling. I'm sure you'll have some absurd and reactive response to this, and yell and scream some more about how I don't have any substance and how your notion of research is Super Awesome and we all should invest more time playing with 8-bit computers, but I have some 256-bit and 512-bit stuff to get to, so have a nice day.