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Comment by perrygeo | Hacker News Reader

The problem with claims of imminent societal collapse is they treat "collapse" like an event, with the world neatly divided into before and after. Historically, societal collapse is much more fuzzy. No neat single cause. No single moment when things flipped. You can only truly know the collapse has happened well in retrospect.

In terms of computing, this means that any strategy looking at a before/after collapse framing is missing the entire interesting middle part - how do we transition from this high-tech to low-tech world over the course of decades. I seriously doubt it can happen by anticipating what computing we might need and just leapfrogging there.

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Same author has a sort of "missing link" version that is better suited to modern PCs. Doesn't answer your philosophical questions about civilizations etc. but the goal isn't to start building Z80s out of transistors anytime soon.

I think the vision here is more likely to play out, if any were to. Not many fabs that can make modern chips, and the biggest one is under the business end of Chinese artillery so. Gotta make do with whatever we have even if new supply dries up.

https://duskos.org/

Its's the same author.

Uh, wait, I've properly read your comment now.

Still, I miss a ZMachine interpreter for DuskOS. And networking. Gopher, IRC and email (among maybe some NNTP client) are a must.

Plausible, but there really may not be a middle part longer than a few hours or days, depending on the mechanism (and I'm not even considering nuclear war here). I recall reading a first-hand account of surviving in Sarajevo during the war, and one of the things that most struck the author was how quickly -a mere couple of days- everything changed from going about the day as normal to apocalyptic survival-mode hellscape. And not because of specific battle events, but the breakdown of supply chains.

We really have no way to predict it. It is even likely to be different in different locales.

He kinda deals with that - he has also built another OS called DuskOS, which is when we still have modern computers lying around, but can't make more of them. It's the OS you would use prior to devolving all the way to CollapseOS

I feel like he has considered everything. He also has AbacOS which is an abacus-based operating system, for when we run out of energy, then HamstOS for a hamster-wheel powered operating system

No, he doesn't.

HamstOS is just the microcontroller for the power supply. Pros: it is voice activated and fault tolerant. Cons: only responds to voice prompts beginning "Hey Mr. Binky". Also, it secretly hates you.

I don’t think it’s the focus of this, but we do now live in a time where the collapse could potentially happen in an hour.

Even if the collapse is a fuzzy decades one I think it would also have an ever increasing probability of the remainder in under an hour as something entirely forgotten fails.

Why do you think that?

I'm assuming you're talking about the internet, networked services, etc, because that's the only conceivable way a collapse could happen that quickly... except all modern infrastructure we rely on like that has backups and redundancy built in, and largely separated failure domains, so that such a failure would never be able to happen that quickly.

I assume they mean nuclear war.

Yes, exactly. Even if some fabs survived, the ability to supply and staff them would not last long. The world's ability to manufacture advanced computers would disappear.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybergeddon

Or worse, decades in the future when historians look back, they might determine that collapse started before 2025 (perhaps 9/11, 2008 financial collapse, covid, the re-emergence of populist fascism, AI, microplastics, climate change ... take your pick).

Which means we might be living in collapse now, we just don't know it yet. "The Long Emergency" as James Howard Kunstler put it.

Hasn't Kunstler been predicting the imminent end of oil supplies since the 1990s?

When a professional prognosticator's prognostications continue to be falsified by actual events, year after endless year, at some point don't people stop listening to them?

what do you think about the idea, though?

> When a professional prognosticator's prognostications continue to be falsified by actual events, year after endless year, at some point don't people stop listening to them?

Funnily enough - not whatsoever! And the benefits of this amazing fact are reaped by economists* the world over, year after year.

* And, to be fair, journalists, politicians, various flavours of youtuber, etc, etc.

"When a professional prognosticator's prognostications continue to be falsified by actual events, year after endless year, at some point don't people stop listening to them?"

Yet people still listen to Musk about when Tesla will have autonomous driving.

we'll be terraforming mars soon I just know it!

Like falling into a black hole; you don't notice as it happens, only looking back with more context.

Oh I see now, thank you for the helpful analogy! :)

Empires that collapsed not by military conquest didn’t know that they had collapsed until years later.

Is there any Empire that collapsed without military conquest? You can argue the collapse predated the conquest, but there’s always a conquest to seal the deal.

The British Empire didn't collapse due to military conquest by the Germans, it fell due to economic conquest by the United States (see the Atlantic Charter and U.S. intervention in the Suez Crisis).

The creation of Fox News

That is DuskOS, from the same creator apparently.

The frog will boil slowly and discontinuously. The net effects are that by 2030:

- Industrial food will gradually become extremely expensive and homesteading will become more popular. Crop failures and famines will be routine as food security and international trade wanes.

- Unemployment will soar with automation and overall decreased purchasing power.

- Crime and theft will soar as police decline (Austin TX is already understaffed by 300 officers and doesn't respond to property crimes until 48 hours later)

- Civil/national/world wars.

- 100M's of climate refugees migrating across and between continents. If you think scapegoating of "illegal" immigrants is bad now, just wait until all forms of hate in the forms of racism, xenophobia, and classism become turbocharged. Expect militarized borders guarded by killer robots.

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