hckrnws
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.
>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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
Crafted by Rajat
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