Comment by wokwokwok | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wokwokwok | Hacker News Reader

> what if you are the only survivor with some programming skills sitting in front of a computer you’ve never heard of, with some hex pad to enter machine codes, with maybe some pen and paper. What will you do?

Leave it on the ground and forage around until I find a computer that runs windows. It's not great, but, it'll do. Failing that, a phone and a solar charger.

Charming as it is to build yourself toys 'from scratch' to play with, it's pretty unrealistic that you'd end up ever needing those skills in a real 'end of the world' or 'total supply chain disruption' situation.

It's far, far more likely that you'd use off the shelf software, and your skills would revolve around being a cell-phone/laptop/whatever repairman, repairing old screens, charging cables, and other mechanical bits and bobs on hardware that was never really intended to be used for more than ~5 years; and ripping up 'no longer working' stuff for bits you can put into 'mostly working' stuff, and maybe building analogue circuits or maintaining power grids and solar panels.

Electrical engineer, soldering wires types of skills, not writing interpreters and coding skills, is what you would need ...if, you were indeed, in the luxury of not spending all your time just looking for food and water.

Let's be real. No one is going to sit around implementing an interpreter for some obscure cpu you found.

That's a skill for idly bored rich modern folk and archeologists of the future.

Without highly automated, industrialized farming, majority of people's occupation will be food production, as it was most of human history.

And post apocalypse labor shortages would mean nobody will be growing food for you, so you most likely need to do it yourself.

If I survived and was industrious, I would start making tractors to sell, instead of twiddling with Forth.

With enough solar panels, abundance of corrected soils, and a much smaller population, one can coast on the current agriculture investment and get a reasonable productivity (you will still spend a month or two every year on it) for a lifetime or two. Plenty of time to reboot tractors.

You'd still need a supply chain of raw materials. The winning strategy is to form a mafia that seizes scrapyards and landfills.

I wonder how many working Windows computers you can pull out of the typical landfill.

Good way to win yourself an assassination.

Heck, you don't really need tractors, these can be substituted with manpower. They're a nice to have more than a must.

What you will need, however, is someone to maintain waterways and water treatment facilities, and the necessary components. Can't count on rainfall being sufficient or wells being clean. This comes with maintaining the power supply and electronic components thereof.

But...autonomous tractors, powered by cybernetic fuzzy forth AI!1!!

edit: doubling as Guardners.

Agreed, all of this "build from the ground up" post-apoc stuff is fantasy.

It would be scavenge and cobble together. If there was time to do any of this, you'd be trading a bit of your clan's goods for a disk with some rare library on it for calculating dates and times based on the planets and stars.

I think that scavenging old libraries and installers is going to become more of a thing as they disappear from the internet over time anyway.

I was going to throw my old encyclopedias away, but then there came this wave of increasing attempts to edit articles on wikipedia to:

1. rewrite history through the lens of a political point of view

2. conduct disinformation campaigns

3. create hoaxes for personal amusement

4. conduct marketing campaigns

5. clean up reputations

6. redefine words to justify past lying

I decided to keep the paper ones for the time being.

Those things are in your paper encyclopedia too, they just won't ever be fixed.

Over time, the drift between the past print encyclopedias and present digital ones will itself be informative.

Reading my 100 year old encyclopedia is certainly informative from a social perspective.

Anyone not white was considered fairly subhuman at the time, and I know that, but reading how casually that all is presented as fact in an encyclopedia is mildly disturbing.

White Europeans and Americans had a whole spectrum of terrible ideas about race 100 years ago but 'everyone not white was considered subhuman' overstates the case by a lot.

Expect facts from an encyclopedia, not opinions and judgments.

If your only takeaway is how wrong the past was compared to the present (and no doubt in many ways they were) you're not really reading history.

The same medium that makes it hard to fix mistakes makes it hard to commit that many mistakes to begin with.

And paper is distributed, hard to counterfeit and long-lasting in ways we haven't figured out how to replicate in electrons yet.

It's actually extremely easy to distribute something signed so that you're sure it's "authentic", at least that no bits are wrong. Assuming that somewhere in the chain, there exists trust. But it's the same with books, you have no way to know a book is authentic without buying it from a valid store

True, though the process of establishing the trust and authenticity around digitally signed artifacts is not as widely established or disseminated as it is with print media.

Also, establishing what a signature means often requires out-of-band information. I really like the concept of annotations for a signature that would communicate the signer's relationship to the work: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=1545

Pretty sad that you of all people are getting downvoted for telling the truth.

I see room for both.

This was kind of an exercise in what it would take to bootstrap a minimal stack that would turn a CPU into something useful. Think if someone desoldered a Z80 from like an old VCR from a junkyard or something and stuck it on a breadboard with some RAM and I/O to maybe a serial interface. How much work would it take to create, from nothing, a programming environment that allowed the user to build real-world applications that made that cobbled-together Z80 computer useful without too much hassle? And once that's done, if someone managed to scavenge an old floppy or hard drive or video monitor, those things could be attached and drivers written for them without too much effort.

So yes, after the apocalypse, soldering and repair skills are going to be super important. But devising the software stack that keeps old CPUs functional and useful, especially when old 8-, 16-, and 32-bit CPUs are much more tractable than modern PC CPUs, is going to come in handy too.

The windows computer would try to dial home and then refuse to run because it is not "Genuine" or it can not run without "Essential Cloud Services" enabled or something like that.

funny enough it was Apple that stopped you from running software because their server was down

Oh, so you will need a good cracker for it.

Or use Linux...

I think you missed the point.

The intro is what in TV and other forms of media is called a "framing device". Here it's used as a story to provide motivation as to why someone could potentially need to build their own software stack. It's not meant to be taken literally.

> Here it's used as a story to provide motivation as to why someone could potentially need to build their own software stack.

I dunno: sounds like it failed.

The intro is fairly humorous, the "post-apocalyptic" framing is really tongue in cheek, at least to my reading.

I think you're taking it far too literally, and analyzing a joke to death.

(E.g. a random other quote from the article: "I will be using C to keep the grim atmosphere of the apocalypse, but you may try this exercise in a different language, of course." This is not a serious "what to do in case of apocalypse" thing.)

Hope that I remember Assembly from my Computer Architecture course.

I disagree. With a discovered machine, the scavenger wants to use a bit of the found computer's CPU time to hack in the machine if it was an authentication device that needs to be bypassed to start a 'tractor' or 'combine harvester'. Not all computers are disconnected from the supply chain.

The tools, skills, and knowledge required to literally hack open the tractor and physically bypass its authentication will be drastically more transferrable and overall useful.

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