Hundred Rabbits is a small collective exploring the failability of modern tech
100r.co
100r.co
https://youtube.com/watch?v=MNF8SF69QvM&list=PLb1uDATFJPcEEG...
https://youtube.com/watch?v=DBI8eBMGyYs
Super cool in theory though!
Here's a blog post I wrote after spending a long weekend figuring out how to use it to make some procedurally generated music: https://inventingsituations.net/2021/12/26/procedural-music-...
and the screen-cap of some of the generated music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF-DD43sk2E
Such a great line.
I may not (correction: almost definitely don't on 80% of stuff) agree with them politically, but I have to admire their creativity and product execution.
Stark contrast from the core attitude of mainstream extractive tech work, and a necessary ethos amid a growing storm of complexity that humanity increasingly depends on
We are trying to go slow and fix things biologically that our natural evolution has left us vulnerable to. Cancer, prion diseases, etc. Yet we have resigned the evolution of information tech over to God as we haphazardly race in a survival of the "financially fittest" sort of contest, rewarding the companies that win at financial selection
https://100r.co/site/solar_cooking_experiment.html
100Rabbits is like the coming true of Grothendieck's 1972 permatech lecture given at CERN*
https://github.com/Lapin0t/grothendieck-cern
>"I think that agriculture, stockbreeding, decentralized energy production, medicine of a certain kind, very different from the medicine that prevails today, will come to the fore. It's impossible to say which part purely creative joy will play in these new developments. My hope is, it will be a creative development in which there will be no essential difference between conceptual activities and manual physical activities. When people become masters of their own needs to the point where an appreciable part of their creativity remains free---and this will take a time we can't predict, it may be a generation, it may be ten, no one knows---at that point, anyone, not just a certain scientific elite, will be able to devote a significant part of their time to purely creative, purely speculative, purely playful research"
*which I (or 1 of you?!) will post soon (Thanks Bluestein for showing the best time to post this stuff!)
Thank you for the link you've shared. I read it with great interest. While I can conceive that the aforementioned areas might survive in a post-industrial civilization, it is unclear to me how the technology that 100rabbits is researching could do the same. They might use Raspberry Pis or old PCs donated by others, but:
- these are impossible to manufacture without industries, and they are limited in number
- the only means of communication they're using to share their work, the Internet, inherently requires an industrial society to exist
This seems somewhat akin to the naive reaction to the financial crises we experienced a few years ago: "Oh dear, banks and finance can be evil, let's decentralize with Bitcoin."
I believe that we cannot address the problems that technology has brought us (nuclear weapons, global warming) without resorting once again to technology and science. This technology and science must necessarily be funded by the market.
Decentralization is a very long term effort -- Grothendieck said it would take generations, we can't expect immediate results. So while 100R certainly can't survive without relying on industry, it does do research into technologies that may be easier to "deindustrialize". See the "off-grid" and "sustainability" pages on their site.
Finer point: even before the industrial revolution, humans have had access to supercomputers -- their own brains!
It's conceivable that in the not so far future we will be able to grow computers of our own design, from just air and water.
See promising efforts in this direction, it's not an empty dream! https://youtu.be/bEXefdbQDjw
I guess the moral of the day with regards to banks and finance is, don't jump the gun! We will need them until we can grow raspberry pies on a tree!
The first milestone is to minimize the use of metals in our society, use as dopants or catalysts only. Second milestone is alumina. (Money OTOH will probably always be necessary!) What I wanted to explain above is that for computing, arguably our most advanced tech, metals are not strictly needed.
You would also probably be surprised at the true state of our solarpunk tech. There are water antennas, solar-pumped lasers.. that's almost 1950 already.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22149...
For organoid intelligence, more hyped so you have higher impact, free journals https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/science/articles/10.338...
Japan has a lot of interesting not-quite-industrial family run high tech businesses. Solar pumped lasers I mentioned, but there's also crystal growing, small scale almost cottage level hightech paper and wood makers. Few reading materials though. Some of this "movement" will eventually diffuse to China, Korea and finally India.
These are about nearer term substitutes, a lot of them still involve industrial processes, but it is much easier to tweak industrial processes to turn them solarpunk than to replace entire classes of materials.
For the finance angle, I'm afraid I won't be able to direct you to any good free roadmap for Year 50 to Year 250, but for Year 0 to 50 I recommend studying how governments in the asia-pacific are funding decarbonization R&D, especially in SMEs. (Although we might be more interested in Africa or India?) Pay attention to IP law reform.
E.g. japanese gov report here (I was especially interested in the optoelectronics, for reasons of "demetallization", but Japan has small very localizable optics firms, think Thor but localized).
https://www.mof.go.jp/english/policy/jgbs/topics/JapanClimat...
R & D expenditures for optoelectronic fusion technology that is expected to reduce energy consumption by up to 40 per cent in data centers. Optoelectronic fusion is a technology that fuses circuits that handle electrical signals and optical signals. Calculations have been performed with "binary numbers" by switching on and off of the electricity in conventional computers.Electricity however generates heat when it flows through circuits, and energy is used to generate heat that is not originally necessary, and when it generates heat, the resistance of the electric paths increases,leading to decreases in the calculation speeds. Therefore, research is underway to replace calculation using electricity with processing using light.Power saving and low latency are achieved by connecting internal circuits in computers with light without using electricity as much as possible. The aim is to gradually introduce light into computing chips or peripheral equipment in computers that have been processed by electricity.The aims are ﴾1﴿ to establish a technology that connects chips used for calculation and peripheral equipment with light in 2024, ﴾2﴿ to connect between chips with light in 2024 and ﴾3﴿ to practically realize a photoelectric fusion chip that calculates with light in the final stage in 2030. There are some estimation that the spread of optoelectronic fusion technology will save more than 40 per cent of energy by 2030 compared to the current state-of-the-art data centers.
This is at commercial scale, but the process is very simple, you can even do it at home! (And of course, barely hinted in the video many mom and pop shops in Japan doing it. It's not very far from samurai just making swords from beach sand.)
used to be many small town companies in the US doing this, you can imagine, IF THERE WAS DEMAND from your cow rearing neighbours..
Requires boots on the ground to see if the energy shortages will lead to these networks evolving "solarpunk" tech. (They are also similarly secretive). Let me know if you see any trends in that direction!
I can tell you from AP that people are trying to reverse engineer "secret" Japanese tech, reverse engineering is sacred work :)
Central Europe out of all places.
> very similar low volume ceramics/optics SME networks
By which you mean - excuse the question - "SME networks" as in "business-networked" mid-size commercial concerns doing low volume production in the electroptical field -or- production networks running optoelectronic hardware at a small scale? Or, both ...
Also want to point out to academic spinoffs (which most of these SMEs are) like
https://www.kit.edu/kit/english/pi_2023_041_nanomaterials-3d...
They have been "incorporated" but still seems like they haven't got the attention they deserve? (Okay the temp/volume is maybe not low/high enough, but the process is almost domestic kitchen level simple)
Beyond the chip level, tech becomes more decentralizable -- soon you will replicate many Shenzhens in India, but at that point you hit the diffusability of polymer and metalworking tech.
No reference here, but money diffuses faster than technical knowhow, that is the issue, that's why markets seem like magic.
See the quartz growing video I linked, I'm surprised that I'm surprised that this almost stone age but highly used tech is largely "secret" compared to random JavaScript tricks.
We can afford to imagine new systems and models because we have significantly more time than our predecessors. We have more time than our ancestors because we are highly specialized, and we exchange this specialization on a local and international level for services, goods, and raw materials.
In the scenario you propose, would we have the time to search for raw materials, study to understand how to process them, create the objects and tools we need, and simultaneously dedicate ourselves to other things (i.e.: while we are doing all of this, we need to attend to children, family, and the fulfillment of basic needs such as food, leisure, sleep, illness, etc.)
In my opinion, it isn't possible. I would more readily understand forms of anarcho-primitivism in which people decide to return to nature and primitive values, either forcibly (which might be feasible) or voluntarily (which seems highly unlikely). At least these do not violate the spatial-temporal limits in which we live :)
Friend, I love being as independent as possible, fixing things by myself and maintaining a garden at home, but I'm aware that it's just a hobby. It's a hobby I can indulge in because for other needs, there are others in the market to lend a hand. If I were to have a toothache tomorrow or if my glasses were to break, in a fully decentralized model like 100rabbits, I'd be in trouble :) Or perhaps, I'm still missing some pieces of the puzzle they propose.
I'm not sure what is this "scenario" that you think I'm proposing ;)
You seem to like spending time on HN, as do I :)
Are you a resident of Trieste, by any chance? rOtfl
Let me stress, anarcho-primitivism isn't the label I would like to have thoughtful people put on my "scenario", haha!
I will outline my "scenario" more carefully, promise! I realize what I have written here so far is still ripe to be misunderstood. Sorry!
But I also have a job (,i.e. something equally crucial to the delicate art of time management) and that takes a lot of quality time as well ;)
(Did you notice that rearchitecting finance is the top priority in my "scenario"? money=time=money?)
Thank you for taking time out to formulate these important questions.
was that a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Enough_at_Last reference?
I think your reference to time as a limiting input may be very close to the objection I'm groping towards in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39844527 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34160852 , and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33952298 ?
On second thought, these are more than enough lol
Just a quick and dirty counter-objection-- to satisfy a Grothendieck model as well as yourselves, perhaps in the decentralized future, your glasses get fixed purely as a side effect of research on silica?
So,really, the problem could be, as you implied, success in silica research is very random (Poisson?), but the need for silica manipulation is some other unfortunate mismatched distribution? You would think Russell already worked that out!
I.e. why are you guys unhappy. You're already getting well-paid for managing!! (For my part, my other research feels like a rachet and not a controlled spiral into nothingburger, which is what I have to label the unhappy ones)
Of course the tongue-in-cheek way to improve morale is to improve research until it feels more like labour :)
EDIT: Less tongue-in-cheek guess is that interacting time-utility functions (i.e. connected "counter-rachets") are poorly worked out,or at least, not grokked by the unwashed masses (but very well understood by your Grandma)
Not so long ago (200 yr? 300 yr?) almost all people spent a significant fraction (2/3+?) of their time just keeping themselves fed. We've automated enough of that that even with distribution, etc. the time budget for keeping oneself fed is now actually dominated by eating (~1/7) and not by production (~1/20?).
So, 200 or 300 years in the future, will we have done something similar to other physiological needs? other safety needs? (note here that many aspects of keeping oneself fed in prior centuries involved long-lead time skills that are no longer necessary because we produce and distribute food in an entirely different manner)
Upon reflection, the broken glasses scenario is not so dire: distribution of new lenses (produced in bulk) according to Rx is low-enough skill that one might imagine easily finding volunteers who schlep packages for the variety of social contact it affords. The toothache would be more difficult, because there treatment (currently) requires specialised knowledge. (and fixing the lens-making machine might be easy enough if one takes the "DEC repairman" attitude of parts are cheap, time and knowledge is expensive, so just swap old parts for new until it passes the self-test again?)
[e.g. Maxwell's] Ratchets are part of the firmware debug, ideally a debug should be irreversible, yes?
Sorry about the TUFs, it was a lagniappe for gvicino (--assuming you've already seen my previous rant on it.) some (most?) have the form of a reverse rachet: discontinuity+monotonic. I surmise that it would be a good entity with which to model complexodynamic (economic) agents ("peers") trying to debug (cooperate with) one another.
(Each assuming an epsilon of bad faith in the other peers?)
For glasses, unbreakable or, in 30 years time, self-healing teutonic glasses.
EDIT: main problem with today's deployment finance ("VC"): it monotonically moves complexity/brittleness (eg cloud is arguably simpler than locally-served wares as a business model, but not as a technology) -- but not S-Sophistication.
The lust for funding software comes from the seduction of centralized simplification. The business of deploying atoms has no moat besides the violent one.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41167865
Resulted in this: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/th...
The FDA never approved it in the US, although thalidomide did make its way to the US market. It's the perfect example of seen-versus-unseen. There are probably lots of examples of benefits that unapproved drugs could provide but we don't see them, while we do see the effects of the bad drugs that the FDA did not approve. I favor looser FDA regulations, but if my side doesn't even know the history of the #1 argument against it then we should just give up.
*Due to my bounded rationality, I shudder to discuss the technical reasons, with,uh, people who have not thought about it..
But your grandma probably knew that... AMP is a OTC supplement and GMP is a common food additive . (Compare with their d variants)
Why?
https://scmresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/supply_ch...
This also applies to science. The Covid pandemic is almost certainly a result of global warming caused by human activities, but the vaccine for Covid was found thanks to a shared effort of humanity, encouraged by both government policies and, above all, the profit of pharmaceutical companies.
I am well aware of all the flaws of capitalism, but I can't understand how we can have an "information age" without a market. We can try to reduce our impact, learn to decentralize, learn to fix things that break (all things I personally do), but I can't envision a decentralized technological and scientific world that wouldn't set us back 300 years.
And trying to create a market, also from his yacht, but alas also not very successful
And yet you are here arguing for more capitalist market-based solutions, which are inherently decentralized and have a tendency to create unrelated, wasteful (duplication of effort), and often pointless competition and profit-seeking?
Very odd.
- The decentralization of markets (criticized by some, though I'm not among them) is often condemned because it can lead to elements of economic power centralization. Critics argue that it makes people dependent on tools and technologies controlled by a few, and driven by profit.
- The decentralization proposed in the technological field is closer to anarchist ideals and suggests a kind of decentralization implemented by individual people and groups on a voluntary and mutualistic basis.
I don't believe the latter can truly benefit humanity because I don't think we are that evolved. Individuals primarily seek their own personal gain and are often so uninformed as to not understand that this personal benefit is only achievable with the benefit of the community. I believe that the market (controlled and monitored by nations and supranational entities) functions better because it is an imperfect model that, by leveraging people's selfishness, compels them to collaborate and communicate with each other.
Anarchist ideals? From right-wing billionaires like Musk and Thiel? Or by centrist billionaires like...?
Because that's who is driving the technological field, ultimately — people who have more money than entire countries, to whom we are basically just bugs to be squashed if we bother them.
>I believe that the market (controlled and monitored by nations and supranational entities) functions better because it is an imperfect model that, by leveraging people's selfishness,
lmao
This doesn't feel like a serious discussion. I'm out.
gvicino has important points regarding the fine structure of collaboration regulation.. he says it's a "belief", which means it could still be open to discussion!
(Imagine, OTOH, if he started with "reason tells me.." :)
Imagine discussing math and programming with someone who insists that pi=3 and GOTO is the best control flow mechanism.
a) A friend made their pile developing Atari 2600 cartridges. In those days, doing a pythagorean distance calculation would've been way too expensive (especially as they had to work in between scan lines), so in their programs hit regions were octagonal, which is not pi=3, but not far off from pi=6.
b) As someone who generates object code, GOTO is the best control flow mechanism in that domain. [see also "Lambda: the ultimate GOTO" (1977) https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/5753 ]
compare with VADM EJK ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41144977 ):
> It is essential to extend the knowledge and the practice of "initiative of the subordinate" in principle and in application until they are universal in the exercise of command throughout all echelons of command.
(with Grothendieck being a little more optimistic than King, as the latter stops short of pushing universal initiative all the way to the bluejacket)
Let's just say subordinate can be replaced by "peers" above WLOG,ala Gr
* and hence finite topologies, a class to which any social topology belongs?
Yet real engineers ought to now that “An engineer has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but nothing left to take away”. ... or they never new and yet attempting engineering anyway?
Growing portion of my life is spending time with the complexity of toolchain and work context, while my outcome diminishes in every sense, amount and importance. Pissing into the headwind and getting almost nothing to show for kind of feeling. More and more draws me towards the lifestyle of the rabbits (stopping somewhere in between though).
Btw. financial selection is the way how society work on top of finite resources since ancient times. That's part of the game. ... saying so while I ferociously avoid competition steering into directions that circumnavigate the competing crowd, taking less busy alternative route. When available.
I don't know where you get that from, but if anything it looks like there has never been a single society but many forms of organisation. I'd be even more careful with any reference to finance in that context.
Single society? ... where that came from and who brought it here, apart from you of course? Collaborative large human groups where division of labour is an intrinsic matter is referred simplisticly as society. No elaborated and complete study was the goal here to give complete picture of the matter but a short referral to the inherent competitive need, as part of the story.
[0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/What-FUCK-are-talking-about/dp/B08X... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money
The sentence I quoted from you implied that there is some universal form of society that retained the same traits throughout history, which seems false. If that's not what you meant, I'm sorry for misunderstanding.
> [0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/What-FUCK-are-talking-about/dp/B08X... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money
Really?
Don't get me wrong, the project is absolutely insane. There's an api with a gpu layer for raster transformation.
But the build process is still:
go build [-tag {project name}] .Agreed, not saying financial signals are not valuable, just that they bring new challenges that, like most things, lead to problems when obsessed over in lieu of what matters most. You can also develop problems by moving too slowly and fixing things that do not matter.
I value your way of putting it. "Storm" carries with it all due nuances and, indeed, "complexity" is a touchstone.-
Baffling. I'm in
Absurd: Not enough power on our sailboat to run Ableton and Photoshop.
Real: So we replaced it with open source technology.
Absurd: That technology was based on Electron.
Real: Electron was too bloated.
Absurd: So we ported everything over to the NES.
Real: And now you can run our software anywhere you can emulate an NES
PS. Which leads me - tangentially - to think that (maybe) the solution to (at least) some of our problems might someday be found in a cult :)
Who knows ...
> Absurd: So we ported everything over to the NES.
This was grand. The NES as a most effective "baseline" platform. Can totally see humanity sending out an NES emulator on Voyager VI as a last gasp.-
... in no small part perhaps because they remain isolated "pockets" of culture where - often - "progress" is slower or more controlled. Where idiosyncratic behavior becomes the "new" orthodoxy as behavior or culture "degrades".-
Where was it ... "Nightfall" (the novel) I think it was where a cult periodically saves civilization - by being the only ones that know how to handle the aftermath.-
The major religions have been beating that dead horse for a long time.
"8 bit 'looks' and hardware constitutes - and 'looks like' - some optimum as far as computing is concerned"
... so sufficiently advanced systems will look like it to interface with us as a sort of lingua franca.-
AGIs. Alien probes. The works. They will all look to us like a C64 or NES would :)
Please, vid.:
Make it a thousand rabbits. Make it a flotilla. Make it an armada ... :)
technically varvara isn't actually the nes
Now that's an interesting proposition (which, I do not contend mind you ...)
Chat rooms and bare bones text editors aren't supposed to be process-heavy, and yet the popular communication platform Slack requires outrageous amounts of ram and CPU to function. [...] Making software this way is costly to off-grid users, or those on slow connections, [...]
ETA: to be clear there's nothing wrong with making a toy and then turning that toy into it's own all-consuming hobby (TTRPGs for example) and one of the best parts of programming is how easy it is to do just that. It's just kind of annoying watching people wax rhapsodic about nonsense instead of copping to "yeah we're having a lot of fun, i feel like a kid again"
Yeah, you can have a simple regular life; that's lower on problems maybe. But man, sailing around & futzing with interesting barefoot developers projects sure sounds challenging in a lot of very very excellent ways.
Every personal problem has at least one easy solution. better ones take more effort.
Signed, someone who has lived on a boat before.
Or whose boat came equipped with casinos, an Olympic swimming pool, Michelin-starred restaurants, and somebody else footing the bill.
Also not unlike: It's not the destination, it's the journey.
I wouldn't call any of the listed problems "real problems" in the context of my long winded disability and homelessness lmao. I used to be in their community, the mods, and indirectly, them, were abusive as hell. Their community is, last I heard, hemorrhaging queer folk (or maybe it's bled dry and queer folk just don't stick around there anymore!) because they have repeatedly shielded abusive members and placed them in positions of power, and ignored, silenced, and ejected their victims when they finally kicked up a fuss about it. Part of the move from an internal chat to Mastodon was specifically so it would take the pressure off them having to actively perform any sort of moderation duty or deal with the abusive people directly.
They are, fundamentally, rich people playing at being poor and living in a tiny sustainable island while the rest of the world burns. Their stuff is very interesting, sure, but stating "real problems they face" ignores the fact that every one of the problems they are facing are ones that they themselves have created. I actually really love some of the things they've come out with, but it's important that all of their work comes with the context that it was formed in, at least in my opinion.
edit: I forgot about the 'cult' thing... they are absolutely a cult. at least one of their members made explicit reference multiple times to being part of a cult and it was never actively denied outside of a "well, not yet, we don't have the numbers ;)" kind of thing.
Their design sensibilities are very good, and I feel exactly the same -- it just... doesn't sit right, feels bitter, somehow, to create things with their tools, in the full context of everything.
I've often mulled over starting up a little group sharing some of the same sensibilities but without the toxicity, to be honest.
Ergo: some of them are actual arseholes.
Oscar Pistorius was an abusive murdering douchebag, not just a brave para olympic gold medal winning runner.
The ones who are wealthy will hold relative power over the ones who aren't. The ones in good health may neglect or actively exclude the ones who aren't. Racism and xenophobia rear their ugly heads. And so on.
1. Leaders identify with nonbinary pronouns,
2. thus: leaders appear to be members of the/a queer community,
3. and: queer community members tend to center queer people/experiences (regardless of whether said members are shitty people for any reason),
4. yet: the leaders are specifically harming and driving out queer members of their community. This is unexpected. Not "wow, this should be impossible" unexpected, just "damn, this shouldn't have happened" unexpected.
It's quite simple and straightforward.
As an aside, (and I know I'll get downvoted for my tone, but it is what it is), for ye straight commenters: consider that your opinions on queerness and queer community dynamics probably aren't very well informed when you're entering conversations about them. (Inspired by but not personally attacking the parent comment. They might be queer too! And their statement is true, it's just off the mark in this context.)
In practice this isn't the case, because you can use this as a shield. So for homophobic people it might be advantageous to enter the community in a way that causes the least amount of personal friction. Like, simply putting pronouns in your bio and doing literally nothing else is trivial - but the social benefit is not.
It's a big problem, because people who ARE non-binary or ARE bisexual or whatever then get a ton of backlash. Because those identities are the most common to be commandeered, so to speak. At least online.
I do not have logs of direct messages because it escaped my intention -- while I planned to get them, that never happened. At the time, I was lied to and told I would be able to return, and then 3 months later I was informed I was not going to be able to return to the space. They also did not inform anyone that I was leaving, either. I had long friendships with many in that slack instance, and not only would they not know where to find me, but none of them were informed that I had even left -- as far as any of them know, I ghosted them. There was absolutely zero transparency of moderation both at the time, and as far as I am aware, to this day.
Something I forgot to mention in the above is that at the time they had a code of conduct, and this code of conduct listed a two strike system, along with a resolution system. Neither of these were followed in any capacity (likely because they didn't exist), and there was never any communication by the moderators that I had had strikes raised against me.
I'll just point out though that most problems of the world are ones we ourselves have created.
https://checkpointgaming.net/features/2020/05/making-games-a...
Not the original poster, but that’s my view exactly. If you impose the limitations upon yourself then it’s not really a “problem” for you, is it now. You just can afford to make your life shittier for an “experience” to then have fun solving the issues you’ve created for yourself
Edit: However, upon reading further comments, I don't want this to be seen as a defense of the group against actual complaints.
PS. Except for AI, perhaps ...
... I was going to add certain forms of cryptography to that, but then realized that we've always have had some sort of cryptography that was "hardware-appropriate" (ie. sufficiently hard to break, to be useful) for the age. So older hardware was just fine ...
What the boat couple is doing strikes me as the most romantic sort of bricolage and just gives me the warm fuzzies all over. But Urbit just pisses me off for a variety of reasons.
What I care about is technology, and you have to dig quite hard to extract it here.
I don’t think you’re an activist, I just think you’re yet another someone who is unable to see the Amazon forest for the chip on your shoulder.
Here's 100r's (specifically xxiivv's) page on the topic https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/permacomputing.html
The first paragraph gives a good overview of the idea:
> Permacomputing encourages the maximization of hardware lifespan, minimization of energy usage and focuses on the use of already available computational resources. It values maintenance and refactoring of systems to keep them efficient, instead of planned obsolescence, permacomputing practices planned longevity. It is about using computation only when it has a strengthening effect on ecosystems.
1. We could have examined each of the 12 Permaculture Design Principle and attempted to directly apply them to software design. For example, "Observe and Interact" is so broadly useful and versatile (and the core of adversarial domains, such as warfare), it can easily be applied to software. You won't see it directly listed here: https://permacomputing.net/Principles/
2. The permaculture ethical principles are not there in full. "Care for life" refers to "Care for Earth", "Care for People", but nothing about "Fair Share". Comparing these two ways of looking at it, I don't see how the permacomputing formulation is an improvement on how the permaculture ethical principles are formulated. Furthermore, I think this has more to do with not sufficiently delving into the place of technologies within a regenerative paradigm. I am speculating here with little basis, but I don't think the people who came up with this got their hands dirty with planting, nurturing, and harvesting things.
However, reading more with 100r, CollapseOS, DuskOS, there is a lot of thought put into this even if I think there are some key things missing from my experience with permaculture.
It is why my friends and I are exploring the ideas of "permatech", what is Technology's full, integrated place within a living systems world view? We have yet to come up with anything coherent yet.
If you mean modern high technology, I suspect it has no place.
It is a really interesting question,
I once heard a historian described technology as a lever. A small effort has greater gains.
However, we were looking at it from a different angle. What if civilization are not walls and cities — the division of labor so that peasants can support the ruling class — but rather, in _design_? When I first posed that, one of my friends went right into architectural design. (Which is fine, since we explored Christopher Alexander’s work).
But an example of what I was thinking of was this discovery that one of the cave paintings was probably a hunting calendar. It allows the tribe to count the number of moons when there is sufficient deer.
That’s a kind of design — a kind of permacomputing - a kind of civilization if we were to reframe it as design.
I might be stretching it there.
I have seen effective use of technology in permaculture. Digging up swales and basins make use technology, whether it is with a shovel, or feeding pigs in a way so that they can dig for you.
So I think there is something there.
What a grand concept.-
There is a related project from permacomputing that I'd like to highlight: CollapseOS/DuskOS which has overlapping and adjacent ends with what 100 Rabbits are trying to do with UXN. I know there are attempts to port UXN to DuskOS.
Their boat is very small and has only one engine, and it looks like they will sail thousands of kms in one leg on occasion.
I am soft. If I must do this, and I would kick and scream, I would sell my house and buy a yacht with megalitres capacity of water, batteries, refrigerators, and starlink. But I do not think that I could be happy doing this. I would find it more anxious than normal life.
TL;DR is strength increases with square of the length, forces acting on the vessel increase with the cube of the length.
This guy is the champion of tiny blue-water vessels:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCptM0nqGDJLz14oP6ROdKRw/vid...
According to their page they can store up to 4 months of provisions
> Fully-geared, stocked with provisions for 4 months (food & water) Pino weighs 7484,274 kg (16,500 lbs)【7 484 kg】, or 8.25 tons.
> I aspire to have an interesting website like yours
let me know if you need help / inspiration!
> I came back to read them again and your website was down though
sorry about that, i was moving & my server came with me :)
https://100r.co/site/computing_and_sustainability.html
Transcribed and video format. Among other things, they came into computing from a bit of a different direction and ended up building tools and a platform that I’m betting 90% of people in the industry would revere in awe as things beyond their understanding. Truly an inspiration.
"PLI is truly a picturesque place, nestled between extraordinarily large mountains and cliffs, blessed with clear waters and lush forests. The waters in the inlet are very calm, it is well-shielded. Any boat wakes travel far thoughout the inlet, from wall to wall, and take a long while to subside. If motoring in this inlet, go slow."
Wow. Surprised to see one of my favourite places show up on HN.
If you have the opportunity to go to Princess Louisa Inlet, I highly recommend it.
The contrast between the glaciers and the ocean is breathtakingly beautiful.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Princess+Louisa+Inlet/@50....
As with most experiments, we can observe and borrow shadows of their ideas into our own life hopefully!
Indeed.-
PS. If we stop and examine, our entire computing "paradigms" have been - mostly - driven, propelled forward by "industrial", commercial, business productivity (use cases) ...
... but what would have happened / will happen were these paradigms to emerge (and emerge mainly) from art, creation, play, instead?
The game would check for files named the same as it's default resources, read them in for use instead of the original. But then people started using the aforementioned transparent walls in competitive matches, and so a new variable was introduced to force the use of the defaults.
The next game (CS:GO) provided skins through a marketplace, including the use of loot-crate mechanics, the prices of in demand items sky rocketed, they are now used as currency for hackers and online gambling, and the online skin gambling sites have been caught advertising fraudulently through streamers. "rare" skins can sell for tens or hundreds of THOUSANDS of dollars.
In short, a great feature got exploited, commercialized, more exploited, and inspired a great amount of profiteering and sketchy business practices while ruining community aspects of a whole genre of entertainment (lots of copycats).
What I'm trying to say, is I think those paradigms most likely would have been co-opted by third parties in the name of greed and profit, destroying the communal and humanistic aspects of them in short order.
The boat idea would perhaps too lonely for most people, but it would be nice to see folks experiment with re-inventing communes/new types of forming communities.
There is strictly no reason for each person to own a TV, PC, dishwasher, washing machine, etc. - most of that could be shared so as to reduce electronic waste and increase sustainability.
The minimalism idea of their VM resonates with me and remindes me of Niklaus Wirth, who had similar values and pushed things even further (designing his whole hardware + OS + language all by himself).
This sounds nice in theory, but doesn't work out well in practice. You get a tragedy of the commons situation where people don't take care of the equipment and it gets broken, or dies early. Also, some people are just really bad with handling and taking care of things: some people will buy some item, and then you look at it again years later and it's in pristine condition. But look at another person's identical item after that time and it's either destroyed, or looks really beat-up. Maybe they're too rough with it, maybe they never clean it, maybe they don't maintain it, but I've noticed some people just seem to destroy everything they use.
Also, trying to share many things doesn't work out in practice because people want to use them at the same time. You can see this at places like laundromats; you can't expect people to wake up at 2AM to do their laundry. People usually like to watch TV at the same time too. So you need enough equipment to handle peak times.
And sharing a PC? What do you do when someone in your commune insists on clicking on every potentially malicious attachment on your shared Windows PC?
But that's, like, the Patriarchy. That would really harsh our buzz, so we need to reinvent, in a broken and stupid way, what previously worked fine for tens of thousands years.
Co-buying second homes? How many people are involved in a transaction like that? That's not communal at all, that's a partnership. Of course you can be selective with whom you partner and only partner with someone trusted, plus you both have a strong economic interest in taking care of the property. Same with your so-called "communal houses": it's not like dozens or hundreds of people are going to live in a house. Makerspaces, etc., can screen their members, and keep track of who does what to penalize people who abuse things.
Libraries have occasionally had trouble with people abusing books (ever seen a loaned-out book with folded-down corners, or writing in them?). However books don't need nearly as much care and maintenance as complex machinery (i.e. power tools) so of course you don't have to worry about it as much, and normal libraries budget and plan for books having a limited lifetime anyway. Extremely rare and valuable books aren't left out for random people to handle either.
TV? Meh. Who gets to decide what we all watch?
PC? GTFO. That's mine. Hands off. That means you, too, Satya.
So much software also just takes for granted that it should be allowed on the Internet.
Indeed, and I find it a problem on land too. I use Miro at work and it is _awful_ on an unreliable internet connection, like on trains in the UK.
I really value local-first software for this reason. I’d like to see more of it.
Somebody really ought to set that up, assuming it doesn't already exist in some fashion ...
Bluestein, you should check out the Handmade Conference(s).
Also, the Yamaha 33 is an impressively tiny and light boat for the sailing they're doing, let alone living and working on.
Extremely passionate about ecology. Pessimistic about where the world is headed but optimistic about our individual ability to cope with it.
Super into low-level programming and old school pixel art and that whole aesthetic.
Absolutely full of stories about sailing. And just completely present in conversation.
Therein lies one key, methinks. I find that refreshing. It seems a viable "compromise", and, a solution to "data disaster driven dispair" :)
... faith in the individual.-
> And just completely present in conversation.
Incredible.-
Many thanks for sharing.-
Is like buying a electric car while you have a luxury ICE that works, is a waste of resources. I dont really mind, but dont say you care about the enviroment.
Our sailboat is a Yamaha33, a 1982 masthead sloop fiberglass sailboat. - https://100r.co/site/pino.htmlYou're trying really hard to be contrary here, but it's not working. Devine is not claiming to be ecologically perfect. They're just trying to be as ecologically efficient as they can while living a life that feels meaningful and rewarding to them.
What I think is cool about 100r is that it is not "computer generated art" or "digital art", but rather "computer science/language design/programming as art". It's like they have this respect and reverence for it that I've often felt, and I often feel isolated in feeling.
And, what an enormous difference there is, between these two things.-
I continue to use it for nearly all my projects now. I have become addicted to the smallness of it all.
Yeah, nah. They know exactly what they are doing.
> The modern stack doesn't really work for us, it doesn't apply to the limitations that we have on the boat. We have 180 watts of solar. We just spent the whole summer with two 6-volt batteries, which is very small. When you're going down that route, at every turn people are telling to just put more solar panels, or to buy more batteries. That is such a modern way of solving your problem. In reality, technology like this(especially high-tech) rarely solves problems. It creates a lot of other problems, which on a sailboat is very immediate. Putting more solar would mean more windage, more chance of things flying off and cutting our limbs. More batteries would mean the boat would be heavier, it would stop us from being able to run away from storms.
(That does change somewhat when doing paid work though...)
I hope they keep it up (I donated, I’ll probably donate again now).
But. I keep coming back around to, where are they getting all this stuff. Everything that keeps them going has to be made somewhere, by working stiffs with day jobs.
There is no escaping Moloch. These groups are the odd random cast off, and I really want to be them, but everyone can't be them, or their wouldn't be any of the things that keep them going. They are living on the cast offs of the rest of us still in the machine.
I often settle on a more optimistic note, wherein the people living on boats in the ocean are setting some kind of example that even if it can't be followed directly, maybe it can give a little jolt, shocking you out of complacency.
I really like your takeaway. It’s very important to have ideas of what life could be, so we have something to work towards as individuals and society.
I read a book a while back, passions and the interests, which talks about the philosophical underpinnings of capitalism. It’s interesting to think that capitalism as it was originally conceived was meant to lower our passions in favor of commerce, since it was considered the most tamable vice. No wonder we feel inspired when people choose to try something different.
Love their editing style. Very inspiring indeed.
> Diversity is important in nearly all aspects, whether it's with computers, or with life itself. A polyculture of tools and systems distributes the surface of attack and creates resilience. Viruses can attack a single crop, or a single computer architecture. The more services, or resources are centralized, the more power is concentrated into fewer hands and more easily taken over.
Feels particularly relevant given the recent Crowdstrike outage.
From my vantage point their work fits the definition nicely.
"A collective body" [1] ... "Collectivized or characterized by collectivism" [1] ... "A political or economic theory advocating collective control especially over production and distribution" [2]
[1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/collective [2]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/collectivism
"We eventually ported our tools to C, but while we had achieved ideal energy usage, portability was still an issue, so we kept looking. We learnt 6502 Assembly, seeing players run our games as NES roms on all these different platforms gave us an idea."
A simple example is the fact that they use Plan 9 C. I urge you to try making a simple game that runs on both Plan 9 and Linux.
The only reason C is portable is because a lot of collective effort was put into porting various libraries to various systems, and homogenizing them to look kinda the same if you squint.
Uxn creates a very easy to implement virtual computer that is actually identical. A Uxn program is more portable than a C one for their purposes. And I think it's obvious how that could have came to them from NES emulators, which have similar properties.
Congrats on everything Aliceffekt !
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_1Y8PwD5XDs" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
a thing to keep in mind is that accelerometer access has recently been shown to leak enough information about passwords to compromise them
I think they are at risk of becoming exactly what they hate, with a convoluted build stack that outside people struggle to use. Why was 6502 decided on instead of Java for example, which is relatively platform agnostic?
The old TRS-80 Model 100 fits some of the goals. It runs for a long time on just four AA batteries. But it's text only and perhaps even too limited even for 100R. I'd love to see a modern version of that machine with a bitmapped display, running a minimal (not Linux) OS, that can run for months on four AA batteries. Maybe something like a somewhat upgraded Psion 5. I think much of the Psion software is available so maybe it's actually a possibility.
In fact i've been working on and off on implementing operating system that uses CANOpen framework (a higher-level system based on CAN bus) for super-reliable wired networking. I want to follow similar path of travelling on expedition truck and doing programming for the truck sub-systems on the go.
The Pomera DM250 is one that looks pretty interesting to me. Occasionally I check for any progress on hacking the thing to run other software but I haven't found much so far.
The Psion 5 (and 3) keep popping up (and deservedly so) all over the place. They are such great little machines. Particularly as some sort of "baseline" for computing.-
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
...need a way to stop myself from posting while high.
Looks sustainable enough.
But I guess by HN standards are different to mine.
Now… what could they do about this issue? Assuming this is the root cause of the failures.
The problem is the moist, salty air, circulating through the electronics.
Use a tablet (it's closed, doesn't suck in air for cooling), ideally a waterproof one. There are also "sealed", splash-proof keyboards, but even if using a regular keyboard, replacing that from time to time is far cheaper than replacing a whole laptop.
Such a simple solution. Have a special low-humidity environment.-
What apocalyptic events?
They're smart, capable, and committed to openly sharing knowledge and ideas in their community.
It's hard to take people with this political manifesto seriously, but I have to give credit where it's due — their work is impressive. Many artists say that they "explore" something and end up with completely bland "social critique" pieces that don't say anything new, but these guys manage to do a lot of interesting stuff, especially Orca.
Crazy how HN works. I posted this 6 months ago because I collect unique personal websites, but no one took a bite...
Glad people took interest this time.
I remember vising the Seychelles a few years ago, and finding it an earthly paradise, the kind that everyone should experience at least once. Yet it's a tiny nation state that can only properly handle a limited amount of tourists.
In essence, I've started believing that all these "digital nomads" that work remotely in one of these places are simply abusing their quota of earthly paradise, which really is in a fixed supply. I'm not really blaming them, but let's not glamourize this.
100R live on a boat?
Like, sure, we can call them digital nomads but they are very much different from the “startup that has no office we have a travel stipend and work from anywhere” crowd. (I’ve been that person before. That’s easy mode compared to how 100R live.)
You put your finger on an objection I had but couldn't quite place.-
The motivations beat those of the average digital nomad by a mile, and I applaud them, but this is still squarely into "rich people" stuff.
They live in a 1982 sailboat as their primary residence. They use older hardware and are trying to be sustainable.
Does this look like "rich people" to you? https://100r.co/media/content/travel/hathayim14.jpg
There are definitely rich people that live on $500,000 boats and sail the world. 100R doesn't appear to be that? I'm pretty sure they've actually decided "not to make a lot of money" and are rich in experiences from going all in on this lifestyle.
Soooo... kinda no shit, you can live a more creative and meaningful life if you don't work. Which most people can't afford(?) to do. Where's the secret? What's the cheat code they have?
It's not like they're millionares or something. They just managed to cut expenses low enough, while convincing people to pay them for the things they produce.
Also I did not mean to say that their creative output is not useful because it's not work. They are definitely doing more useful work than me.
Privacy Badger blocked tracking from:
googleads.g.doubleclick.net
static.doubleclick.net
play.google.com
www.google.com
www.youtube.com
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_1Y8PwD5XDs"
title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer;
autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture"
allowfullscreen>
</iframe>
So they should either introduce a cookie banner, find an alternative host that more strictly adheres to privacy concerns, or just host the video themselves in a video element.
i mean peertube is a great alternative, and nowadays browsers are pretty okay at just playing bare mp4 files if you re-encode them with ffmpeg -movflags faststart -c copy, but if for whatever reason you choose to use youtube instead there are some harm-reduction measures you can take
I’ve done this in the past by literally grabbing a screenshot of the video thumbnail (and the play button) and adding a link to that image.
Sure, it won’t play in the same page and won’t be up to date with thumbnail or other presentation changes but I didn’t care - it was a small image that also didn’t include any executable code or privacy risks.
Someone just pointed out I have the same problem on my blog and I'm very pissed. It's not enough that their embeds break every Lighthouse metric and recommendation. It's all this, too
Google's become a marketing-profiling engine, wrapped in ad-serving infrastructure, wrapped in the decaying remnants of a search engine.-
I’m not sure you can fully blame Google for what the web became though. Part of the reason search engines are close to useless here 24 years later is because most of the content people produce go to SoMe sites. Sites like Hacker News, sites like Medium and so on and because of how everything became a popularity matrix people are posting soooo much useless stuff online. Where it used to be you actually had to have something to say to bother putting it online, because it took an effort, we now live in a world where 90% or the talk people do is while they’re on the shitter. Those 90% is a number I pulled out my ass, but it would be hilarious to see an actual number on just how much internet “content” gets created by people on a toilet.
It is what it is though. To make a functional search engine today which was on par with Google in 2000, you’d probably need access to browser bookmarks of the people you’ve ranked as having interesting taste in what they bookmark. Which probably isn’t really possible without breaking a lot of laws, if at all.
I'll pull out an equally haphazard guess: Up to 5%.-
Edit: I am vegetarian, probably has something to do with it.
The reason I know a shit should take 30 seconds is because there is this Danish doctor who has spent like 30 years studying how we shit, and her name is Gert which is typically a male name. Anyway some years back she was on TV telling the nation how to shit, and it sort of went viral and now everyone above a certain age basically knows who Gert “who knows how to shit” is.
But yeah, for some it’s definitely an escape. Particularly at work.
A little chewy, but you get used to it. And you definitely aren't short of fiber if you also have a salad that day
That didn't last very long. Even before geocities there was a huge amount of random/pointless stuff online. It was okay though because those people weren't looking to make money. They didn't feel the need to misrepresent or SEO the hell out of their personal sites to drive traffic.
Greed killed the internet. Once people started putting up websites with the intent to line their own pockets instead of doing it just to share something fun or cool or personal or helpful it was doomed. Corporations quickly got involved and everything else got crowded out, bought out, or replaced by ad-filled trash.
Anyway, I’d like to NOT embed YouTube. Maybe I will anyway, but I wonder if anyone has alternatives, especially if they are scrappy, tiny alternatives like those that I imagine 100r might produce.
I’m considering MP4 or WebM in HTML and wilder ideas like an audio file and a few images that are started at the same time with JS.
Not the prettiest or purest solution, but very simple.
Can't recall where though.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/171780?hl=en#zippy...
I use lite-youtube on my site for this reason. Instead of embedding the YT player directly, it shows a thumbnail that pulls in the embed when you click to watch the video.
That way visitors aren't tracked unless they actively click the thumbnail to watch the embedded player. Iirc it also works as just a link so visitors have the option to cmd+click or right-click-copy to avoid the embed.
You’ll have to learn some ffmpeg incantations but the bandwidth will be free and your total costs will be the tiny VM and block storage. Might even be able to point Cloudflare at a public bucket and skip the VM.
If you need to store and serve several terabytes of content, a dedicated server instead of block storage will be your best bet (again with Cloudflare), you’ll just need to figure out offsite backup and restoration.
I think by keeping the HLS segments at a few megabytes each and not using a file extension in the URL, I've slipped through the cracks.
(My religion forbids me from recognizing any terms of service that haven't been given the three blessings of the matriarch)
Saint Trader Joes tried to unite them by using both light and dark sesame years ago, but there’s just too much bad blood for them to work together. We are still waiting for the chosen one that will bring balance to the bagel.
May the bagel balanced be.
> Unless you are an Enterprise customer, Cloudflare offers specific Paid Services (e.g., the Developer Platform, Images, and Stream) that you must use in order to serve video and other large files via the CDN. Cloudflare reserves the right to disable or limit your access to or use of the CDN, or to limit your End Users’ access to certain of your resources through the CDN, if you use or are suspected of using the CDN without such Paid Services to serve video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other large files.
- https://www.cloudflare.com/service-specific-terms-applicatio...
Reading between the lines a bit: they really only care if you're using Cloudflare to front a site whose primary purpose is to deliver video content, and lots of it (like, say, if you're running a tube site or a livestreaming site). They don't care about web sites which happen to incidentally include a small amount of video content.
Just make sure that player supports right click->Save I'd much rather download and view a video in VLC than somebodies janky JS player
give site-url to mpv
watch video
PS:
vlc can play from urls too, but isn't as compatible with the way most sites implement it
What else am I missing?
I know because I explored this for a hobby project of a movie I liked. See here: http://lelandbatey.com/projects/REDLINE-intro/
Use your network inspector to observe your browser requesting the individual chunks over time. Note that my server is just an Apache2 file server.
most video players also support http and there is no problem with just putting files up.
imho all the streaming tech, drm, hls, adaptive bitrate selection and whatnot, are just commercial fads to increase margin
sending the whole file at network-speed usually works fine, but maybe uneconomical at scale especially if coupled with users that skip a lot and tend to not watch the whole thing anyway.
[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/tutori...
My host doesn't support video. If I point <video> at a file it plays just fine but the server doesn't do partial content so the player crashes or stutters if the user attempts to seek outside what was downloaded. When the whole thing is downloaded it works smoothly but it isn't quite acceptable. There is no easy html way to preserve the seek/progress bar and `Accept-Ranges: none` has the same meaning as not setting the header(?)
I cant seem to find answers or bugs, all I find "make sure your server supports partial content" which really isn't required to make it work.
I'm surprised to see my inexpressible urges documented by others. I'm with these people 100% right down to why a sailboat.
I tried to do this with an apartment building. The building is too large to focus on a the detail I need. A 43' sailboat is actually a great size to prototype on.
I have a signed P&S and hope to be hard core boat living sometime in September. The idea will be the studio time I get while on land will be much sweeter if I spend a lot of time on a boat.
The boat is self-contained so my aspirations won't effect people paying rent.
The building has everything I need to host my own streaming. I don't know that I will ever publish content, but if I do it will be entirely self-hosted. If the audience is so vast that brings everything to a halt, things will start functioning again once the hordes get bored.
Think of all the wasted brain power content-creators go through to keep YouTube at bay.
I believe content should be the residue of the work. I think once publishing is the funding source it may distort the work.
This will work for now but my mind still wonders if there isn't a better way to reduce the size of these. I'll continue to experiment.
Also what kind of name is "100 rabbits". Reminscent of "50 blessing" from hotline miami
Just displaying the page with the embed hits those sites. All in all there were around 20 successful network requests made to load the site. There were another 7 or so requests the Ublock Origin blocked, to play.google.com/log, and then after the page loaded it continues trying those every second or so, although it seems to have slowed down after around 19 but is still ongoing.
It leaves 5 cookies (4 persistent, 1 session) and also looks like it has something in IndexedDB.
Similar with Firefox in a private window except it stores one fewer persistent cookies.
On Safari in a private window it has similar network access, but no cookies.
The "\u263Eoe\u2721is\u271E" of online politics if I've ever seen. Nearly meaningless but people place great emotional and identity-based weight on it (even if they've signed away all their data via TOS, as they likely have).
Sidebar—why does hacker news fuck with arbitrary unicode codepoints? Strikes me as deeply user-hostile behavior.
The symbols you wanted to include are in the Dingbats and Miscellaneous Symbols blocks, which I expect are all banned because they contain some emoji and this was the cheap way to be rid of those, quick test: "" "", that's a Miscellaneous Symbol and a Dingbat of no emotional valence to speak of and certainly not colourful ones.
As you can see, that's the deal: they're casualties. I wouldn't mind a more discerning filter, but then again, I wouldn't mind a dark mode, and here it is, years later.
Evidently they've blocked far more than just emoji—I was just using standard unicode.
This is meant to be a representation of this image https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coexist_(image) for people too lazy to copy and paste
This is a perfect candidate to host yourself and just slap it in some <video> tags.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/vi...
Half the """GIFs""" you see online are webm. Just put a webm. They work great.
Content-Security-Policy:
default-src 'self';
frame-src 'self';
script-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline' 'unsafe-eval';
style-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline';
img-src 'self' data:I feel it’s such a “I am very smart gotcha” comment that isn’t helpful in any way.
It distracts from the actual topic.
I doubt they are actively trying to trick people into letting down their "adblocker" guard so they can retarget them with advertising...
I have compassion for their cause. Read 2 articles and was intrigued.
At the same time, spotting such an obvious mistake does make me wonder if their articles have glaring mistakes in them as well.
Someone is aware of the issue of online tracking and tries their best to get rid of all of these things (web fonts, analytics,...) and even states their intent "No tracking". One day they make a small mistake and don't realize that sharing a YouTube link on their website drops a cookie and immediatelly all the good they are trying to do is forgotten.
I hope you never make mistakes.
You can spin it any way you like. Claims should be backed and checked, else credibility flies out the window. I don't get how that's not glaringly obvious.
And you seem to read way too much into this mistake, promptly distrusting all the content they ever made or wrote.
Next time you make a mistake, I hope people around you will treat you the same way you treat other people, let’s find out if you like that.
It does matter, it is important. Making such a mistake calls into question if they don't have other, more serious, mistakes in their actual articles.
> Next time you make a mistake, I hope people around you will treat you the same way you treat other people, let’s find out if you like that.
I don't make extraordinary claims so I am not bound to provide any extraordinary evidence. They do make an extraordinary claim.
> I don't make extraordinary claims
That seems like a pretty extraordinary claim to me. That you've made. Twice.
This shows such black-and-white thinking, thinking in absolutes that doesn't take in account, the context and circumstances.
To me it shows a rigid mind that can't perceive nuance, and think / reason about topics in a particular context.
Minor mistakes are often just that: minor mistakes. If this was an error in a scientific paper or news article, your stance may have had more merit. But that's not the context here at all.
> I don't make extraordinary claims so I am not bound to provide any extraordinary evidence. They do make an extraordinary claim.
A blog claiming not to track you isn't an 'extraordinary claim' by any definition. So that's a mistake on your part, so I can't take anything you say seriously anymore, by your own definition.
This is noteworthy because it’s 180 degrees opposite from how most HN people live and what they do.
I feel we should change society somewhat
... could a bunch of self organized comunes such as these ever replicate such industry?
It is peculiar no self-standing group such as this has - AFAIK - attempted such a thing. Why don't they start there?
Privacy Badger can replace YouTube embeds with "click to activate" placeholders. Faster browsing, better privacy, easy-to-use controls, at least when the replacement works properly.
See "Pro tip #1" in https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/01/privacy-badger-puts-yo...
Main Menu > Extensions > Extensions Manager > Privacy Badger > Settings > Tracking Domains > search for youtube.com > tap to update the toggle for youtube.com to red
> Dusk OS is a 32-bit Forth and big brother to Collapse OS. Its primary purpose is to be maximally useful during the first stage of civilizational collapse, that is, when we can't produce modern computers anymore but that there's still many modern computers around.
I mean, what's not to love here? :)
more generally, collapseos is cosplay, not engineering
in more detail, collapseos is not a pragmatic engineering effort to foster resiliency, but an essentially religious effort to atone for the sins of the worldly through ascetic renunciation of pleasures such as guis, returning to an imagined arcadian past of austere virtue
see against-collapseos.md in http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/pavnotes2.git for the full critique
DuskOS doesn’t run on z80. It’s i386 or ARM. Whether that makes it a serious effort or not is still up for debate.
I'm curious because I buy this comment more than their mission statement, although I absolutely agree with their stance on the "longevity/maintainability problem" in software and hardware.
but as soon as I saw the ranting about colonialism I was like "oh... basically, anarchist anti-capitalists"
as soon as they have kids, they will quickly abandon their non-acquisition of resources stance, LOL
collapseos isn't a 100r thing, and i haven't seen anything from virgil that sounds like an anarchist anti-capitalist. i have a lot of sympathies for the anarchist anti-capitalist point of view although personally i've suffered a lot more harm from anti-capitalism than from capitalism
The funny thing about having a kid (he's 3) is that you are forced to re-evaluate all your values and preconceived notions to see what it is you really want to transmit to your kid.
i've added a header to that effect since it seems to have been confusing people
there are other advantages as well. if someone clones the git repo, they'll still be able to read it after i die and my site goes down; and there's no incentive for anyone to pressure me to rewrite history by deleting things from it, which is a thing that has happened to me in the past, since i can't delete them from remote clones
I agree with some of it in modified form, such as pointing out that far more powerful systems like old Android phones are sitting around in great quantity and would be a useful scavenge for a complete CollapseOS. In fact that seems to be what DuskOS is about, I'll be interested in your take on that once you have one.
But those are not microcontrollers, and what microcontrollers do can't be replaced by sticking a JTAG on an abandoned Android and calling it a day. Your take on the availability for scavenge of 6502s is simply incorrect, Western Digital, who should know, says annual production is in the hundreds of millions, joining the estimated 5 to 10 billion which already exist. https://www.westerndesigncenter.com/wdc/
It strikes me as a quixotic, but worthwhile, investment in civilizational insurance. I don't disagree about the motive at all, but it seems like a useful outlet for that sort of angst. If he keeps at it long enough I would hope he'll support a few more chips, and that seems likely, as I remember a time when it was Z80 only. Variants on that chip exist in their billions as well, although the original was taken off the market, hmm. This April.
looking on digikey i can't find any 6502 or 65c02 parts, although there are a couple of sbcs like https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/olimex-ltd/NEO650.... digikey of course doesn't have everything, but they're usually an okay indicator of what is popular
i agree that android phones cannot substitute for microcontrollers! their cortex-a cpus can't guarantee hard real-time responsiveness. and i agree with virgil's point that microcontrollers are very important for practical everyday things. and 6502s make perfectly good microcontrollers, albeit more power-hungry than designs fabbed in a smaller feature size, and requiring external memory
while the z80 itself is no longer made, plenty of clones of it are, and a z80 is also perfectly fine as a microcontroller, and a 6502 or z80 is close to the smallest machine on which a self-hosting development environment is feasible
They were also quite widespread in LCD games, the Tamagotchi used one, Furby, later-model Tiger handhelds, that sort of thing. There are a great many product numbers and variations, because it was widely licensed. Keyboards, computer mice, lots of things.
Digikey has the W65C02SXB, the NEO6502, the W65C02S, and I'm sure there are more in there somewhere. In a scavenge scenario, just figuring out what speaks the ISA would be challenging, but I'm picturing our plucky heroes getting the hang of it after awhile. And of course a Forth like in CollapseOS has an advantage in that adding words to take advantage of extended instructions is practical.
It looks like the project is converging on "OS that runs on comfortable hardware, which can serve as a hub for and talk to the microcontrollers which join the baling wire in holding remnant technology together" which is a more interesting vision of the future, although just as grimdark as it ever was.
> WDC has licensed our 65xx technology to a number of companies over our long history including MOS Tech, Rockwell, GTE, CMD and many others.
rockwell, mos technologies, and cmd don't exist since 02001, gte since 02000. i suspect this page hasn't been updated in quite a while, maybe since last millennium, and possibly if they were ever making hundreds of millions per year they aren't now. https://wdc65xx.com/where-to-buy has been updated and has their current stock numbers, which total under 31000 for all their microcontrollers and microprocessors, which would be 8 hours of stock if they were making a hundred million per year. a hundred thousand seems more plausible
mouser has another 4000 or so in stock, again summing all the different skus. by comparison they have 38000 attiny13a-ssur chips https://ar.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Microchip-Technology/ATT..., 22000 atsamd20e16b-mut chips https://ar.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Microchip-Technology/ATS..., 28000 pic18f46k42-i/pt chips https://ar.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Microchip-Technology/PIC..., almost 63000 stm32f030f4p6tr chips https://ar.mouser.com/ProductDetail/STMicroelectronics/STM32...
digi-key doesn't actually have the w65c02sxb, which is an eval board. that's a 'marketplace product' meaning that digi-key just sends your order to another seller, in this case wdc. they do have 5 units of the w65c02s and 17 units of the neo6502, which are eval boards from olimex. no bare chips
as for the furby, it used the spc81a, a 6502 clone that lacks the y register. more importantly, though, the spc81a is evidently mask-programmed and lacks any apparent way to get it to use external memory. so it's probably useless as a microcontroller to scavenge. the same can be said of keyboard and mouse controllers: although conceivably they might use a 6502 instruction set, they aren't of any use if you can't reprogram them
i can't find any information on tiger electronics handheld games hardware, but given that they designed the furby, i suspect the story will be the same there: game in rom, not enough pins for a memory bus (though you can use the spc81a's i/o ports to control an external bit-serial memory; the datasheet suggests an spi ram)
as for traffic lights, the last traffic light controller i saw open was electromechanical, no visible electronics beyond diodes, so i don't think you're going to be salvaging very many microcontrollers from traffic light controllers; there are too few per population and their replacement lifetime is too long
a vision i think is a lot more appealing is self-sufficient microcontrollers. cp/m was perfectly capable of self-hosting, although dec machines gave it its initial bootstrap. a 4-megahertz z80 was perfectly adequate for assembling the bios, bdos, and command processor, despite having only something like 0.5 8-bit mips and 0.05 dhrystone mips (https://netlib.org/performance/html/dhrystone.data.col0.html), with 64 kibibytes of ram or even less, and only a 90-kibibyte floppy or two for mass storage. bds c provided a reasonable facsimile of a c compiler that would run on cp/m
contrast that to things like the atsamd20e16b microcontroller i mentioned above: a 32-bit cortex-m0+ running at 48 megahertz and about 60 dhrystone mips, 64 kibibytes of in-application-programmable nor flash, and 8 kibibytes of sram, whose spi interface can control a microsd card with gigabytes or even a terabyte of nonvolatile memory, accessible not at kilobytes per second but megabytes per second, with access latencies measured not in seconds but microseconds. it supposedly uses 50 microamps per megahertz; at 1.8 volts that would be 90 picojoules per clock cycle and so about 100 picojoules per instruction. running on a milliwatt it would still provide you 10 million instructions per second. mouser will sell them to you for two bucks fifty. or lcsc will sell you a cypress cy8c4045fni-ds400t for 1.5¢: https://www.lcsc.com/product-detail/Microcontrollers-MCU-MPU... which is also a 48-megahertz 32-bit arm but with a tiny amount of ram
these seem like the kind of thing you'd want to be using if you're concerned about sustaining the ability to program microcontrollers in the face of societal collapse
with respect to duskos, i've been reading through their documentation and it doesn't seem like an unreasonable approach. possibly the wrong approach but it does seem like they're considering engineering tradeoffs rather than cosplaying steve wozniak
Talk about the end of an era.-
PS. For many XP was some sort of "sweetspot", as far as Win OSs are concerned.-
PS. Then again, it depends. How much evidence of "past-proof"-ness do you need - in terms of "backstory" to meet that requirement? Linux, or - even better - some BSD variants go way further back.-
My experience is quite the opposite. I still play the Windows Entertainment Pack version of Tetris. In Linux, thanks to Wine, it just works. In Windows 10, I'm told to contact the publisher for a new version.
Because literally every piece of software in the Nix repo includes all dependencies (including things like build dependencies, not just runtime dependencies) that existed at the time it was built, all the way down to the metal basically
Indeed. Good call. Another superb sweetspot.-
My understanding is:
* The authors wanted to run on a Raspberry Pi powered by solar + batteries
* They're often somewhere in the Pacific so their internet connection is often bad
* Varvara[1] is the portable-enough solution which works for them
* Others liked it enough to write a bunch of other tools[2]
It's all pretty much self-hosting at this point. It's not for everyone, but why bother with Windows if it fits your needs?
[1]: https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/varvara.html
[2]: https://github.com/hundredrabbits/awesome-uxn?tab=readme-ov-...
Good luck running Windows 7 on an RPI and with a laughable power draw.
Oh, and don't even compare VS + MSDN documentations (huge GB's wasted) vs what Acme can do and just the plan9's 9.intro.pdf book. The disk usage would wear out any SD in days. 9front, otoh, can even selfcompile itself in a breeze. Try that under Windows.
And, with a Gemini client for 9front (there are a few), between the gemini 'capsules' (sites and blogs) and gemini://gemi.dev (web decrafying proxy to gemini, where you can read news stripping out the 95% of the pages, scripts, trackers and all the bullshit, they can get totally covered.
Gopher9 (Gopher client) makes a good point with gopher://magical.fish for global news, translation services and such. Much less bandwidth spent than the web, for sure.
With a bare irc client (again, literally few lines of shell scripting under 9front due how's designed) they can connect to the public IRC servers from bitlbee.org and connect to modern disservices such as Discord and Slack, at least being able to chat against their peers.
Question: how is it helpful for you to label them as a straight couple? Why would it matter to you? Why is adding the "straight" qualifier better than just leaving it as "they're a couple"?
I wonder if this actually is a meta-art project of upmarketing a high-net-worth lifestyle (look at me, I live on a boat!) to a far left wing audience. Just need a vague manifesto ala https://xkcd.com/451/ and you're halfway there.
Great idea. I shall someday write that.-
Of course, this is almost certainly accidental and I'd think it would be corrected if it were brought to their attention, and the meat of their work is in domains other than lightweight websites.
That said, it'd be even more cynical to dismiss all of the work and thought that Rek and Devine have put out there because certain elements of it seem a bit hypocritical from a certain point of view. I just spent a couple of hours surfing through their site, reading about their philosophy, and find myself respecting the parts I disagree with almost as much as the parts I identify with. That kind of content is exactly what HN's good for discovering.
I will do my part by upvoting the other comments, but judging by the karma ranking and comment history of some of these commenters, I think I am in the minority.
My comment is actually downvoted at -3 points currently. As for the top comment, I don't see the issue with pointing out that the site is enabling the tracking of users when it claims not to, especially since it is directly related to the topic of the site itself. I don't think being unconditionally positive is in line with the site's goal of promoting "intellectual curiosity."
>judging by the karma ranking and comment history of some of these commenters
That top comment is from John Nagle of Nagle's algorithm. I doubt his karma is from being negative.
A relentless cynicism and the willingness to shoot down bad ideas are vital for producing anything worthwhile. Someone who was able to improve real-world networking is very likely to have been "negative" by modern standards.
But unchecked cynicism tends to result in a general lack of trust that is not very conducive to progress.
Which, in a sense ends up being anímical the ethos at hand, with many blogfolk now securing their own sites, with a nice, ongoing discussion about many technical options to achieve that. Sounds like a good outcome.-