Permacomputing
wiki.xxiivv.com69 points by tosh 4 days ago
69 points by tosh 4 days ago
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.
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.
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.
Permacomputing meeting in SF March 1st
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.
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.
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.