Permacomputing | Hacker News Reader

Permacomputing

wiki.xxiivv.com

181 pointstosh51 comments

The viewpoints that the folks who run this site have are probably quite alien to your own. They remind me more of the hackers of yore, how people who interacted with technology at the margins of society used to be, before computer tech became the new finance. Iconoclasts, idealists.

I think it's worth reading the some of the rest of their site if you have time. If you look at this page and are about to crap on it on HN, take a bit and read collapse and goals and see if you have a more nuanced view of who they are and what they're doing.

> The viewpoints that the folks who run this site have are probably quite alien to your own.

As someone that finds more kinship with the ideas in this post, this very well sums up the deepening alienation I experience when I compulsively open a new tab to this forum.

I do not believe that, when I created my account 15 years ago, anyone would have called the work of Devine Lu Linvega alien or iconoclast. To me that's one of the purest examples of a hacker. A person that explores the art of computer programming just for the fun of it, instead of relegating it to simply a means to an economic end.

Whoooooo, this comment made me feel ancient. For what it's worth, the time when this sort of thinking was the dominant paradigm _overlapped_ with HN.

>If you look at this page and are about to crap on it on HN

Hundred Rabbits pops up here pretty frequently and people mostly have good things to say, how can anyone dislike them, they're an oasis in a desert full of AI crap these days. I always end up going down some rabbit hole (no pun intended) on their site.

My main critique is their non-commercial licensing. For example, the linked article is BY-NC-SA4.0.

My critique is pretty minor as most of the technical releases from 100 rabbits, as far as I can tell, is libre/free licensed, with the non-commercial licensing reserved for writing and art. Even so, it means there's effort required to decouple the non-commercial aspects of projects from their libre parts and sends a big signal, to me at least, that I should only ever consider their strictly technical work for use.

When talking about permacomputing, for example, I don't know why one wouldn't encourage, in any way possible, commercial viability that would lead to the stated goal.

I have an affinity for the 100 rabbits folks, and I deeply respect a lot of their work, but their reliance on non-commercial licenses means that they're tacitly supporting copyright terms that are dis-proportionally long that, in most cases, is well over a century at this point.

Note that Stallman also has the same stance, putting his work under a "no-derivatives" license, so it's not like free software folks believe in "free culture", either.

It's a good stance, I commend it. Although, there's a history as to why the license is there.

The license exists there so that we were able to do take down requests on OpenSea. We had to make the asset license explicit for OpenSea to take down the copied works off their network.

In a different world where we are not made to participate in crypto ecosystems against our will, we would not have that restriction.

I know I wouldn't want to restrict the use of my works just because there's a crypto bro out there that might profit from an NFT.

When putting software under a libre/free license, there are compromises to be made to promote freedom. One of them is accepting that the software that's created might be used for purposes that are considered bad by the author, such as being used by military entities for violence [0]. This would be the same argument I would make for artistic works, where I would argue that the benefits of providing freedom in use of the works outweighs the potential for abuse.

Part of my worry is that there's a large part of technology that is artistic (writing, text, pictures, illustration, art, music, etc.) that will be buried under a century of copyright. The overlong copyright terms means that parts of our culture will be restricted from the commons well beyond the window of relevancy.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#NoMilitary

When it happens to you, you can see how you react. I sure remember having your stance at one point, in the abstract. My personal use of license is reactionary to the situations I've experienced.

I never really looked into the GPL before, their stance on military use includes freedom of usage for institutions whose purpose is surveillance and warfare, my gut feeling is that they might not have asked themselves freedom for whom? the missile manufacturer? I'm not sure that this sounds like freedom.

I'll say this right out, I'll bounce out of open source if I ever see my code used for military purposes. I'll keep releasing works under the MIT until I can no longer in good conscience do so.

Thanks for the clarity, I think I have a more consistent view of your ethics now.

I'm not sure if it's cultural, but in the US there's a strong sentiment for freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is most important not when people are saying things that one agrees with, but when they are saying things for which one disagrees.

The FSF's stance on software freedom is almost surely well thought out and deeply ideological. On one hand, it means that for every bad case scenario, the freedom allows the option for other good case scenarios. On the other hand, it identifies how difficult and fickle it is to enforce a purity test for usage and that any organization involved in such a decision is bound to be corrupted.

Note that MIT is one of the more permissive libre/free licenses, allowing for commercial re-use without a copyleft component, network usage without providing source or patent exemption. At the very least, you might want to consider GPL or AGPL as they might help some of the bad use cases you're trying to guard against.

Crockford's license seems like a good alternative in this case! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4762107

> When talking about permacomputing, for example, I don't know why one wouldn't encourage, in any way possible, commercial viability that would lead to the stated goal.

Because capitalism is what destroys the world. Fucking duh.

There's very little point in spending so much time thinking about C compilers in forth that run on scavenged z80s these days if capitalism is actually viable.

> Because capitalism is what destroys the world. Fucking duh.

The issue is that “commercial” includes plenty of not-necessarily-capitalist entities as well, like sole proprietors and cooperatives (sole proprietors being single-member worker cooperatives).

Of course, a society in which worker cooperatives and individual craftspersons are the dominant forms of economic participation is probably (hopefully!) also a society which has done away with intellectual property and the enforcement thereof, rendering software license terms (including non-commercial use clauses) entirely moot.

> The issue is that “commercial” includes plenty of not-necessarily-capitalist entities as well

I see no issue, and believe me, I have the deepest empathies for people who participate in capitalism under duress.

If you could explain why I or anyone else should need to help some people murder so that those "not-necessarily-capitalists" we are so worried about can use my software without legal threat, I would happily listen to it, but I think you will be unconvincing.

I mean, you have realised that someone could just ask, right? I could listen to them, and if they had a reason that I agreed was good, I could give them whatever they needed for themselves without accessorising myself to that murder that others would do with those things.

Digital artifacts are the modern form of the means of production. Making digital artifacts available under a libre/free is giving these modern means of production to the public by putting it into the commons.

By requiring an interaction and explicit permission, you're putting yourself as a gate keeper to the means of production. In the best case, the uses will depend on your temperament at the time of request. In the worst case, such as a state backed morality commission, this could lead to corruption and abuse.

Part of capitalism is the ownership of private property, including intellectual property. If your focus is on making sure you have control over your work for things you think are moral, then the modern copyright system is in place for you to keep that control.

My focus is on empowering people with tools and making sure those tools aren't restricted in their use by a small oligarchy.

> you're putting yourself as a gate keeper to the means of production.

Liar.

I am only the gatekeeper of my own efforts.

If you had any clue how to code yourself you I could not prevent you from making your own code.

> If your focus is on making sure you have control over your work for things you think are moral, then the modern copyright system is in place for you to keep that control.

> My focus is [on preventing people from exercising moral judgement].

Good for you, and thank you for being a shining reminder of the reason I don't contribute to open source.

> take a bit and read collapse

Fears of a collapse are overblown by people who underestimate the resilience of communities, and over-index on individualism, i.e. preppers.

There is no shame in being a prepper - if you're completely honest with yourself in the odds of the apocalypse you're gearing for, and perhaps after talking to your therapist about ways your childhood fears and insecurities may be showing up in your adult life.

The permacomputing community aren’t quite preppers, although there is some overlap in interests with that community. Preppers are usually concerned about one or more possible disasters and think that with the right gear they can survive the big war, the solar flare, whatever. Permacomputing is a mix of people who think we are already doomed due to climate change, concerned people who think we aren’t yet doomed and want to help/lead by example with simpler tech, and tech minimalists who aren’t worried about doom and who find the projects congruent with their desire for a simpler lifestyle.

I was simply commenting on the Collapse page[1] that was mentioned by gp - not the larger permacumputing community. The collapse page[1] is pure nerd-prepper material - I say this a subscriber to r/DataHoarder with a Kiwix SBC in my go-bag; I know my people. I also am self-aware enough to realize this fantasy is in line with XKCD #208[2].

Anyone that is in the US that is seriously modeling an infrastructural collapse scenario (not a brief period of unavailability), has to consider what that entails: that the federal, state and local governments have failed. If that happens, you'll have much bigger, and more fundamental problems to tackle.

1. https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/collapse.html

2. https://xkcd.com/208/

Thanks for the clarification, I misunderstood what you were referring to. Still I will mirror what the sibling commenter said. I do think there is a fundamental difference between traditional tacticool gear “preppers” who dream of fighting “zombies” (a metaphor for hungry hordes of people) and those who want to help their community be more resilient in the face of danger. I also think that small scale disaster readiness is a normal and responsible thing to do; I’ve personally been helped by it in the past!

Calling that collapse page “nerd-prepper material” is a bit reductionist; there's very clearly a solarpunk/left-libertarian bent to it (even ignoring the broader context of the rest of the site) that contrasts pretty starkly with the typical prepper “my house is my castle” right-propertarian mentality. The prepper seeks to survive and rule over the ashes, assuming the throne of the same legacy socioeconomic systems that produced the collapse in the first place; the solarpunk seeks to survive and build something better than ashes, learning from the mistakes of those legacy socioeconomic systems and hopefully preventing history from repeating itself. The prepper centers on the individual, or maybe one's family; the solarpunk centers on the community.

Being a prepper doesn't require any specific political alignment, just the strongly held belief in an impending, civilizational catastrophe and the requisite preparation for it. The type of preparation is influenced by one's politicial compass, such as buying heirloom seeds and land for your polycule commune, or buying ammo and night-vision gear for your tacticool, boobytrapped redoubt, but all are rooted in the same fundamental belief: that multiple levels of government can/will fail in one's lifetime. Not mere service interruption, but permanent, catastrophic failure that kills government dead, with no replacement.

I find the CollapseOS approach unrealistic and somewhat self-indulgent. In a real collapse scenario, having a portable Forth environment for arbitrary microcontrollers wouldn’t put us meaningfully ahead. The primary value of computers wouldn’t be to run new minimalistic programs from scratch for stuff we only automate in a situaton where we are living in economic and technical abundance, but to access and preserve existing information systems and whatever remains of digital infrastructure, especially libraries, CAD/CAM systems, etc.

A more practical strategy would be maintaining simple yet complete computing environments that can operate on salvaged hardware. NetBSD is a good example: it supports a wide range of hardware, has a relatively straightforward codebase, and provides a full source-based system with a usable graphical userland, with a wide variety of tools available.

In a “collapse computing” context, it is far more plausible to repair and reuse an x86-compatible machine than to rely on extremely minimal custom setups that can barely run a Forth interpreter. With salvaged x86 hardware, one could install a robust OS like NetBSD and immediately run a broad set of existing tools, which is likely to be far more useful than rebuilding a software ecosystem from near-zero on constrained microcontrollers.

This is why having a NetBSD and pkgsrc mirror is my approach to collapse computing instead of fantasizing on building from scratch.

Your reasoning is sound, but is already covered by Collapse OS' manifesto. It refers to two stages of collapse, Collapse OS being for the second.

As long as we have working modern machines, self-contained modern open source OSes, NetBSD being one, are good choices.

One problem there is with such system is their overall complexity. Sure, you can use them, and they're pretty flexible for the user. However, when necessity forces you to crack the kernel open, the learning curve is pretty big.

For example, let's imagine a computer with a broken SATA controller. How would NetBSD behave on it? Hard to say, NetBSD developers don't develop with that target machine in mind. Usually, when you have such a machine, you replace it or repair it. But what if you can't? Maybe you'll have to play in the kernel to manage to do something with that machine, route around it. Maybe it will work, but maybe you'll be stuck, and maybe that in that particular situation, it's going to have tragic consequences.

And that's kind of what Dusk OS (http://duskos.org/) is about.

Exactly, DuskOS is for maintaining a somewhat degraded level of civilization and perhaps rebuilding, while salvaged machines are still common. CollapseOS is there if things get even worse, to retain a minimal level of computing capability during the transition to whatever comes next. It’s hard to imagine the need for CollapseOS while things are still working, but in some horrible future where it’s the only system keeping the water system running, people will appreciate it.

The additional value in Collapse OS is that — as the hardware capable of running even Dusk OS (let alone a more complicated 32+-bit operating system) continues to break down and dwindle in supply — you still have an option such that you can reasonably-comfortably use those more constrained systems for simple tasks and free up the complicated hardware for complicated tasks. You don't need a multicore 64-bit CPU to keep a typical water system running; an 8-bit microcontroller is typically enough, and having a software stack already ready to go (including an ease of adapting to whatever specific hardware might be wired to that microcontroller's pins) is a pretty big deal even long before the point where we're shooting each other over the last Z80s and PICs.

Permacomputing meeting in SF March 1st

https://alexwennerberg.com/permacomputing.html

See you all there!

This is insane. why program Lisp when u can write in assembler or bootstrap FORTH interpreter?

Btw. books rules in apocalypse. Just print them on some platinium paper and voila!

AI can't destroy them (yet).

Personally, I think there would be more value for most people in having the .zim of wikipedia (.en) on their phone.

Even when cellular communications and wifi are no longer useful, having the entirety of wikipedia in a solar-rechargeable device strikes me as incredibly valuable. The copy I took last year is about 103GB.

> Permacomputing is a design practice that encourages the maximization of hardware lifespan, minimization of energy usage

These two aims are diametrically opposed.

Compare performance per watt, P4, to Centrino, to M3 for example.

The argument I've heard is (and unfortunately I can't find offhand where I've heard this), is basically rather than having new computers made and all the vast energy usage required to do so (mining/refining metals, computer usage to design new hardware, factories assembling stuff, electronics manufacturing, packaging, shipping, and all the pollution from these processes), it's far less harmful to the environment to just keep using what you have, as long as you can. The impact of continuing to use that old computer is even less when your source of energy is a renewable resource like solar or hydroelectric.

The only problem is that it the argument is intuitive but isn't true. It hasn't been true for justifying using gas guzzlers instead of more efficient vehicles and is based upon farcial assumptions about "new vehicle people" pancaking their old cars every six months instead of the actual truth where even the neophiles cars wind up still on the road even if they get new ones, that most people don't in fact have the brand new but the backlog of previously new.

It hasn't been true for servers either, as reflected by the resale price of old server hardware. It turns out power over a long time frame dominates over the manufacturing costs. From what I've seen, the argument is just bad math and bad assumptions all the way down at best. At worst it is willful ignorance in service of validating their assumptions regardless of the truth.

I mean.. I'm not feeling like you have sufficiently debunked the argument I was citing/referencing. I have a 2012 thinkpad, and a 2018 thinkpad. They both pull the same wattage. It didn't benefit anyone for me to upgrade to the newer model, other than I can have way more browser tabs open or whatever. But the newer machine had to be manufactured, packaged, shipped, etc.

Yeah, servers are far more power-efficient than they used to be, but that's not really what millions of households worldwide are constantly buying.

Here, since I didn't have any links/quotes initially, I figured I should spend the time to dig some up.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2011.03.004 > The manufacturing phase represents 62–70% of total primary energy of manufacturing and operation.

https://web.mit.edu/2.813/www/readings/Williams%20-%20Energy... > life cycle energy use of a computer is dominated by production (81%) as opposed to operation (19%).

Depends what you are accounting and optimizing for. At the high end of computing this is generally true but occasionally vendors get pretty far in front of their skis to goose performance like current Nvidia hardware or the P4 of yore. There are plenty of SoCs over the last decades that use a few watts that can do useful work. An MSP430 of any vintage could run for years on a battery bank. If the desired work meets a small power envelope newer doesn't automatically win if you are working in small quantity like home projects.

Urbit vibes

Howso? I can understand why there may be some parallels when it comes to ensuring agency and sufficiency, but in a much broader context, these ideas and movements seem to come from opposite sides of the same coin.

~~Written by the same people?~~

EDIT: ha, confused with https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/uxn.html

lol yeah I'm pretty sure that if the UXN people were calling the shots, Curtis Yarvin and his adherents would be among the first to, let's say, receive a complimentary package at a French Revolution-themed day spa.

Exactly my thought haha. And Urbit comes from the LISP/Lambda Calculus world of concerning themselves with high level abstractions and mathematical elegance above all, while Uxn and similar systems follow in the footsteps of Forth and the idea of "get something small and low level working as soon as possible."

I've read a few years ago about permacomputing and _still_ don't know what permacomputing is

The idea seems to be a simple enough computing system (instruction set, programs, CPU, etc.) so that it can be documented, operated, and recreated indefinitely with the least amount of hassle, ideally reusing existing hardware.

There's something alien about pages like this. Seems like ramblings of an artistic that is vaguely tech themed but it's of course possible it contains deep insights. I just rarely get through one of these enough to learn what those are.

They're an interesting set of people. I highly recommend reading some of the rest of their pages - you may not agree with everything they put forth, but they are clearly thoughtful people with a coherent if alien ideology.

I think about collapse more after encountering their writing. What it means for us, what it means for the people after us, what we owe them.

Permaculture is the art of picking words that sounds logical and smart, make studies with n=1 to determine what is better, erect rules to follow based on that, and the communities that group around that. This is the same thing for computers.

No, it's not. It's Permanent Agriculture. Designing and growing sustainable food producing ecosystems.

Permaculture is a contraction of permanent culture.

No, it's not. It's Permanent Agriculture. It's a farming methodology.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/permaculture

> Blend of permanent +‎ agriculture, coined by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in 1978.

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