[HN Gopher] Post-Apocalyptic Programming
___________________________________________________________________
Post-Apocalyptic Programming
Author : pjmlp
Score : 164 points
Date : 2022-08-08 09:29 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (zserge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (zserge.com)
| dhosek wrote:
| I had a softer core version of this with the first computer I
| personally owned, a Spectravideo MSX machine with a Z-80
| processor. I had more than a hex pad, I had a BASIC interpretter
| which included an actual manual. And I had a Z-80 assembly
| reference manual that my older brothers had liberated from the
| high school's TRS-80 lab. The company itself was defunct and
| there was no deeper documentation of the system available (plus
| this was the pre-internet days so even if it were, finding it
| would be a challenge). I spent time peeking and poking data into
| every one of the computers 64K bytes of RAM and managed to find
| the memory which had the definitions of the displayed characters
| (and used this to allow me to type a, o, u and ss for a drill and
| practice program I wrote for studying German). I also wrote part
| of a disassembler but never got around to handling the multi-byte
| opcodes of Z-80 assembly.
|
| This kind of low-level experimentation can really help you get
| your mind around what a system can do.
| _int3_ wrote:
| In post-apocalyptic world I imagine, internet , would be scarce.
| Nobody will have full time internet connection except maybe
| internet centers. You will have to walk to nearest center. and
| upload and download your content. Your software that requires
| internet connection will stop working one by one. Also ,
| electricity. People will use more low power CPU.
| bitwize wrote:
| People will have to learn to use computers as standalone
| devices again. That is until the ones with ham radio skills set
| up a rudimentary packet-radio network. It may not even work
| like our internet -- more like USENET in the uucp days. The
| cleverer ones may be able to cobble together a TCP/IP stack
| over this network, maybe at first with ping times in the ten-
| thousands of milliseconds -- but nodes reliable enough to
| sustain that kind of comms may be rare. The rest of us will
| have to make do with a non-realtime, store-and-forward feed.
| Which, honestly, might be better for us all.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| I wonder if we got sent back to early modern period technology
| how much computing would be possible that didn't depend on access
| to semiconductors. Would glass-blowing and metallurgy be good
| enough to make thermionic valves (tubes) for example? Would
| water-wheels, animal power, and perhaps crude steam engines be
| enough to power them?
| Qem wrote:
| It's often said slide rules were enough to put men in the moon,
| computation-wise. Pretty doable with ancient technology.
| ansible wrote:
| It is understandable to want to avoid silicon doping tech,
| because that requires a substantial industrial base. But you
| could still try bootstrapping via germanium transistors.
| ralphc wrote:
| Back in the '80s I bought a HP 9100 calculator. It weighed 60
| pounds and had core memory. I even remember turning it on for the
| first time and a program stored started running. Anyway, I
| thought that if the Soviets attacked and wiped out the modern PCs
| with their EM pulses then I would still have a programming job
| with my core-memory, no IC's programmable calculator.
| hnthrowaway0328 wrote:
| This sounds interesting, but I think in reality what would happen
| is:
|
| A major crisis hits, say a virus or a nuclear war that wipe out
| say 25% of the population. Governments would shake for a while
| but eventually I expect every major government to stand up and
| begin sending troops to collect population.
|
| We as ordinary people would probably be sent to work on whatever
| we are best at or some labor jobs to build new cities.
| Programming in that world would be mostly very pragmatic. No.1
| issue is to keep whatever code that runs the utility companies
| running so there should be a lot of PLC programming, low level
| stuffs to make sure that the machines work as expected. No.2
| issue is national defense because we would expect other countries
| to move troops to grab a better share, now that we all exhaust
| our nuclear arsenals (hopefully).
|
| I'd expect most people to be living in underground or barracks
| for a while and slowly spread out to new sites once everything
| calms down. To prepare for that, I guess learning plumbing and
| civil engineering electricity are a lot more useful than
| javascript programming.
| pabs3 wrote:
| Reminds me of the Bootstrappable Builds project, who aim to go
| from an MBR of binary code plus a ton of source all the way up to
| a Linux distro.
|
| https://bootstrappable.org/
| daneel_w wrote:
| Somewhat related question: a few years back I saw a dedicated
| "low-power e-paper Wikireader" type of product which could
| display a text-only backup of Wikipedia. In essence just a niched
| e-book reader, really, but with the additional effort of putting
| it all together in a usable format. Does anyone know of a
| modernized solution that displays images as well?
| phire wrote:
| If you want to go down that rabbit hole, I think you are
| better-off just relying on the ubiquity of android phones.
|
| Instead of preloading an e-reader. Preload a usb-c flash drive
| with various databases, and an APK with the software to
| read/copy the databases (and other useful utilities). Flash
| drives are small, and reasonably cheap. You can stash them in
| your house, or carry one in your wallet.
|
| If there is an apocalypse, simply find the nearest android
| phone; enable side-loading, install the APK off the flash drive
| and copy the databases onto the phone.
|
| With the right software, you can make the database somewhat
| viral by allowing copying over adhoc wifi networks. A new
| person can get the database onto their phone by connecting to
| the adhoc network of a phone with the database, enabling
| sideloading, installing the apk and letting the two phones
| sync.
|
| Though this does add an additional problem that the survivors
| need to keep phones powered. Might be worth investing reliable
| battery banks that accept the widest ranges of voltages
| possible, so they can scavenge power from anywhere.
| sitkack wrote:
| A small device to that is designed to sideload "the most
| compatible" APKs that are useful would be neat. The thing it
| loads could be a micro VM that runs something like Lua, is
| able to access the camera, microphone, speaker. Should be
| able to get code onto via QR codes or an audio codec.
| robin_reala wrote:
| It was literally called the WikiReader. But yes, it had some
| serious limitations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiReader
| daneel_w wrote:
| That was indeed the one. Worse than I (mis)remembered, LCD
| screen instead of e-paper.
| helf wrote:
| I still have my wiki reader. I love it :)
|
| Being eink would definitely have been nicer tho.
| teddyh wrote:
| Note: This is fun and all, but beware of taking the "Post-
| apocalyptic" premise too seriously. Down that road lies only hard
| drive hoarding and becoming a prepper.
| codebolt wrote:
| The threat most developers should be concerned about is what
| happens once a major solar flare (like the Carrington event in
| 1859) shows up. That is destined to happen at some point, and
| not unlikely within the next few decades. Hard to predict the
| fallout for the internet and other technical infastructure more
| broadly, but I'm guessing it won't be pretty.
| Springtime wrote:
| Interestingly after reading a bit of the Wikipedia article on
| that event the Earth apparently missed experiencing another
| solar storm of equivalent strength in 2012[1] by just a
| number of days.
|
| Estimates in the linked article expect had it been facing
| Earth at the time the recovery would have taken 4-10 years.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_2012_solar_storm
| cheschire wrote:
| I'm interested in where you feel the numerical value of "not
| unlikely" falls on a scale such as the one from Lesson 1 of
| this article.
|
| https://hbr.org/2018/07/if-you-say-something-is-likely-
| how-l...
| codebolt wrote:
| https://earth-planets-
| space.springeropen.com/articles/10.118...
|
| This recent paper from Japan estimates the following
| likelihood for what it calls "extremely large solar
| flares":
|
| > _for 30-, 50-, and 100-year periods to be 0.70-0.76,
| 0.87-0.91, and 0.98-0.99, respectively_
| cheschire wrote:
| Perfect, thank you!
|
| I find much more value in numerical expression when it
| comes to topics about future events than the fuzzy and
| loaded English terms we tend to use in casual
| conversation. I had the wrong impression about your
| previous message based on my own preconceived notions,
| and numbers reduce all that.
| codebolt wrote:
| No problem, I should have been more specific when I wrote
| my initial comment but I was too lazy to pull up the
| exact reference until you challenged me (I somewhat
| randomly saw this paper a few days ago, initially).
| pantalaimon wrote:
| The premise that in the event of an apocalypse some 80ies CPUs
| would be more readily available than today's commodity chips
| already prevents me from taking this too seriously.
|
| But those simple Chips are certainly easier to wrap your head
| around for programming. In the event of apocalypse the most
| abundant computing platform would be old Android phones
| however.
| daneel_w wrote:
| In lieu of the obviously better solution of proactively
| preventing apocalypse, to what degree of seriousness do you
| instead suggest we acknowledge the "post-apocalyptic" premise?
| What else than becoming a prepper would you do?
| atoav wrote:
| _Actual prepping_ as in "preparing for the afternath of some
| catastrophic event that breaks civilization" is something else
| than the usual "cosplaying for the zombie apocalypse"-type of
| prepping you can observe so often.
|
| Actual prepping would involve a ton of community networking,
| trying to be in good terms with your neighbours, creating
| lasting and decentralized infrastructure for a d with them etc.
|
| The prepping most preppers do is just trying to be less fucked
| than others when the shit hits the fan. Living the ultimate
| rugged individualist delusion: that you somehow can survive
| alone if you just buy the right gear to make it through the
| first week and that you will have to shoot the looters who were
| too stupid to prepare.
|
| The problem with all of this is typically that those rugged
| individuals have to depend on the work and expertise of other
| people in some way or another. I mean you might need electrical
| engineering, a doctor, someone who is good with plants and
| animals, whatever. Unless you are already live 100% self
| sustained whatever you are doing is not going to cut it without
| other people also getting through this.
| bitwize wrote:
| I think this explains the stereotype of Christian
| conservatives in rural "fly-over country" in the USA.
| Frontiersmen were preppers writ large, and could not even
| rely on the supply chains of their time, let alone the
| massively interlinked supply chains of today. They had to
| rely on themselves -- and each other. 150 years ago, the
| church was not just a place of worship, but also a community
| center, where neighbors met each other, socialized, and
| begged for or offered aid.
|
| I am neither a Christian nor a conservative. But I think
| understanding why Christian conservatives are the way they
| are, rather than declaring them an enemy to be fought or
| diagnosing them in absentia with mental illness, without a
| license, would be good for urban liberals like me. Our side
| has done too little in terms of understanding and addressing
| the needs of these people, and it's had real costs on our
| society (like Trump).
| hunterb123 wrote:
| I can't think of anything more useful than becoming a "prepper"
| and hoarding data on hard drives these days.
|
| There's hardly any difference than prepping and camping, you
| just take your gear with you every now and then, practice with
| your gear, use your rations and replace.
|
| Prepping is usually pretty ecological as well, it leads to
| coops, greenhouses, chicken coops, water recycling, composting,
| solar, repairing skills etc.
|
| On the hard drive thing, I bought box sets of all of my shows
| and ripped them so I don't pay for the 10 streaming services
| they get passed around on.
|
| All of my episodes are there forever and won't be
| edited/censored or removed.
|
| I can even take them all camping with me, the core shows fit on
| a single flash drive.
|
| TBH prepping is just optimizing your life and mitigating the
| negative effects of an abrupt change (like loss of power,
| natural disaster, pandemic, etc.)
|
| You (should) create fail safes in software, do the same for
| your livelihood.
| havblue wrote:
| While I get the idea that prepping can become an unnecessary
| use of resources and result in people thinking you're crazy,
| I still think of the simple fact that all civilizations end
| eventually. Certainly they collapse for different reasons and
| at different rates. But the lights will go off eventually for
| our generation, or the next, or the next... Nothing lasts
| forever so it's probably worth planning for some level of
| catastrophe.
| helpfulmandrill wrote:
| You're assuming civilizations end in abrupt events, whereas
| it might be just as likely that they decline slowly over
| generations until one day people are grazing sheep on Wall
| Street or whatever.
| [deleted]
| hunterb123 wrote:
| The whole purpose of prepping is to prepare the necessary
| amount of resources for an emergency.
|
| If you stock too much food or water it will expire, you
| have to rotate it, so you eat it and restock.
|
| If you stock too many non-perishables of something you
| don't need you won't have enough room for more useful
| things.
|
| Prepping and looking crazy aren't coupled. Prepared people
| can be normal, it's not just what you see on TV.
|
| Generally the fun is seeing how long you can prepare for,
| most likely you won't need to last past a month, but
| certain natural disasters like a hurricane can hit that
| easily.
|
| I'd definitely recommend everyone have at least a 1 week
| supply and plan for emergencies (usually specific to your
| area).
| seanw444 wrote:
| Unless you want to die, there's no reason not to prep.
| It's weird that it's looked down on.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| Yeah it's a strange attitude, everyone preps in some way
| or another, but people act like you are a doomsday
| believer if you keep supplies for emergencies.
|
| Those same people who judge get helped in those
| emergencies by those who are prepared.
| andsoitis wrote:
| You do you, but for me, orienting my entire life around
| potential catastrophe would be unbearable.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| I don't remember saying I orientated my entire life around
| catastrophes?
|
| It's just getting groceries like normal once you have
| everything setup.
|
| Camping is a fun hobby, I do it a couple times of year
| anyway so my extra stays ready and gets use.
|
| I do like the peace of mind knowing the family will have
| supplies during storms and other events like lockdowns.
|
| Some people prefer the head in the sand strategy or to wing
| it when something happens, or to depend on more prepared
| people, that would stress me out and be unbearable.
|
| You don't do anything to prepare for emergencies?
| mikewarot wrote:
| It might be more appropriate to consider the computers you
| currently have in stock, and how you could power them, and swap
| out parts to keep them running, in the future.
|
| Repair skills are about to become very valuable in many parts of
| the world where they were previously dismissed due to
| globalization.
| rr888 wrote:
| More realistically, what would you do if you were a developer in
| one of the cut off countries eg Russia, Iran, N Korea right now.
| Tepix wrote:
| Let's have a look at low-power devices (for post-apocalyptic
| programming?) - is the Panasonic Toughbook CF-U1 MK2.6 from 2012
| the perfect post-apocalyptic device when low power consumption
| trumps everything else? It has a 2W CPU and dual hot-swappable
| 7.2V 2900mAh batteries that last 9 hours (i.e. 4.62 Watts). The
| keyboard is somewhat terrible but the display is "daylight
| readable".
|
| No, it looks as if the Acer Spin 7 5G SP714-61NA-S8Z7 with its
| Snapdragon 8cx Gen2 5G is even more efficient, its 56Wh battery
| has a claimed battery life of 29h (i.e. less than 2 Watts!).
| phire wrote:
| A 2 watt CPU seems liker massive overkill, you really don't
| need that much CPU power. I'm reminded of PDAs from the 90s
| that could run for almost a month on a single set of AA
| batteries.
|
| If you were designing a devices from scratch, it might be worth
| considering a large (640x300 or larger) transflective lcd
| display from the late 90s, a keyboard, large amounts of
| reliable flash storage. It seems overkill to go beyond an ARM
| M4 for CPU, though a cluster of Cortex A55s might make more
| sense, so you have an MMU.
|
| Give it flexible power input so it can run off whatever power
| source you can scavenge. From a few triple AAA batteries at the
| low end to 48v lead acid batteries at the high end. Or a highly
| variable power source like a rigged together windmill or
| scavenged solar panels.
| daneel_w wrote:
| Modern Arm SBCs definitely offer better low-power computing
| than the Atom and Celeron things of old. The Pinebook Pro Arm64
| laptop gets about 8 hours of mixed use on a full charge when
| using eMMC instead of NVMe storage. It charges using a plain DC
| barrel jack on just 5 volts, and can trickle-charge on low
| current. If "mixed use" doesn't involve surfing the web and
| using Wi-Fi/Bluetooth, it easily goes beyond 10 hours. The
| M1/M2 MacBook Airs also offer fantastic battery life, even if
| charging them is a bit more complicated.
| ctrlmeta wrote:
| The title "post-apocalyptic programming" made me think, if there
| is an apocalypse and we have to start programming from scratch
| again, surely we will need some NAND gates to make a CPU and
| surely the first language we need to create is Forth.
|
| And this article does talk about creating a Forth from scratch.
| Excellent choice for post-apocalyptic programing.
| xSxY3fj5gVCmvWE wrote:
| I like to think that in a strange, poetic twist TempleOS would
| shine in these post-apo conditions. Perhaps Terry really did
| god's work in some sense...
| pull_my_finger wrote:
| Similar premise to CollapseOS[1]. In the event of some kind of
| tech-effecting apocalypse or something we'd likely have to make
| do from less than scavenged laptops and desktops.
|
| [1]: http://collapseos.org/
| miniwark wrote:
| The first releases of CollapseOS where developed in Z80
| assembler, because Z80 is one of the more common CPU used
| worldwide (in 80's computers, Ti calculators, game consoles,
| printers, music synthesisers and many more). It's only recently
| than it was rewritten in Forth. The author explain it here
| http://collapseos.org/forth.html This history is nice to read.
|
| In the same family of OS in Forth with low tech devices, there
| is also KnightOS: https://knightos.org/
| carapace wrote:
| I love this. I'm guilty of my own project of this ilk, using
| Wirth's Oberon RISC chip and a simple Forth-like language based
| on Joy. So please don't think I'm criticizing OP or this project
| in what I say next.
|
| I think in an actual post-apocalyptic scenario we're probably not
| going to be using systems like this. The two main reasons are
| that we don't really need much computation, and that there won't
| be functioning complex computer machinery (not at any meaningful
| scale anyway.)
|
| I think we'll see bespoke automation based on e.g. clockwork
| and/or fluidics, but I doubt there will be silicon CPUs (neither
| old nor new) for quite a while. Silicon requires too much
| specialized knowledge, equipment, and chemicals to be practical.
|
| We have done most of our needful calculations on the abacus, we
| made rockets (rocket science) using slide-rules. If we allow for
| simple mechanical PID controllers and such, I doubt there will be
| a lot of serious demand (to put it in strictly economic terms)
| for "fancy" general purpose computers.
| kibwen wrote:
| Even aside from the apocalypse, I was wondering recently how
| someone might "pass down" some piece of software, like say a
| video game, to their descendants. If you want to leave a written
| record for future generations then it's easy enough to print out
| a book on some acid-free paper and reasonably expect that it will
| last for up to a millennium. But for robustly archiving a piece
| of software it's not enough to print out the complete source code
| (including dependencies), you also need the complete source of
| the compiler (including dependencies), and the complete source of
| the operating system it runs on, and complete schematics for the
| hardware it runs on, and instructions on how to manufacture the
| hardware, and possibly more.
|
| In the same way that we have standards for archival-grade books,
| it seems like we could benefit from some sort of standard
| archival-grade software stack designed for simplicity (and I mean
| real simplicity, I agree with the article that even C is too
| complicated and you want a Forth or something (or maybe a
| Scheme)). It's okay if the stack is as slow as molasses, as long
| as you have a functional reference implementation you can always
| produce a translation into whatever modern stack exists in your
| time period.
| jayhoon wrote:
| Would a technical description in plain English (specification)
| and C code be sufficient to preserve a piece of software? The
| understanding of the specification may be different years
| later, but this applies even to the paintings and the works of
| fiction.
|
| So, the question is not only about the preservation the actual
| software, but also about its correct interpretation.
| vharuck wrote:
| Sort of like how the valuable parts of math textbooks are the
| theorems and proofs, with the problem sets (i.e.
| implementations) being nice but arbitrary extras?
| jayhoon wrote:
| This is an interesting angle on essentially the same
| problem. Can a set of theorems about the prime numbers lead
| another group of people to the RSA encryption, for example?
|
| Considering that Clifford Cocks invented a similar system 4
| years before Rivest, Shamir and Adleman (and even before
| Diffie and Hellman published their cryptosystem), the
| answer seems to be "yes". On the other hand, that 4 year
| difference means that people have to be ready for the idea,
| i.e., work on their "problem sets".
| GrinningFool wrote:
| > The understanding of the specification may be different
| years later, but this applies even to the paintings and the
| works of fiction.
|
| That's an interesting parallel. But for it to be equivalent,
| I think it would have to be to the method of creating those
| paintings/works of fiction. Instead of passing down the Mona
| Lisa, you're passing painstakingly detailed instructions
| detailing how to make the Mona Lisa.
| cableshaft wrote:
| I think for simpler games this idea works well, yeah (and I
| tend to design simpler games, so I might have to start doing
| something like this). One of my old games, Proximity, ended
| up in a couple chapters on a book on an old book about Flash
| development, I think it was called Actionscript 3 Design
| Patterns.
|
| You could make the original game pretty close from there
| (even though it was someone else that reverse engineered it
| and did it somewhat differently, it still got the job done).
|
| But that game is pretty darn simple, just a hex grid where
| you draw a tile from 1-20, and wherever you place it, it'll
| capture tiles of an opposing team surrounding it if the tile
| you placed has a higher number than them. I've worked on
| tweaking the formula in a bunch of a ways over the years, but
| that's the core mechanism.
|
| Once a game gets complicated enough it gets a lot harder to
| ensure that all of the nuances in the code, edge cases, hacky
| shit to get the game out the door, etc, so it's going to be
| more limited. But I'd still love to see a series that did
| this for more games though (I know one guy did it with the
| Quake source code and a couple other Id games).
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| The most reliable way to do this is with emulators. A full
| emulator is a complete description of some hardware and
| software combination.
|
| If we can keep emulators working on modern hardware and OSs, we
| can guarantee that most old games will be playable
| indefinitely.
|
| For example, if you have dosbox you can play a lot of old MS-
| DOS games without having an x86 CPU or DOS itself.
| Kadin wrote:
| Printing the source out on paper would probably be the most
| long-lasting storage method (aside from engraving it into large
| pieces of stone, maybe). But typing the source code back in for
| most non-trivial pieces of software would be really painful.
|
| "Here's the source code, go type it in" hasn't been a very
| popular method of distributing software, for good reason, in a
| long time.
|
| Maybe there's some way that you could include the true source
| code (in C or some other well-understood language) of a small
| decoder program, which would then take as input some more-
| compact representation of the desired programs? Something
| minified and compressed, but kept in a form that would make it
| relatively quick to type in? Maybe you could have the user type
| in groups of characters (6-7 or so at a time, because that's
| generally assumed to be the number of abstract symbols a person
| can easily hold in working short-term memory) and get a
| checksum back, that they could verify against the input book.
|
| Actually, you should probably have checksums per-line, per-
| page, and per-chapter/section. That way if you had a decoding
| problem, you could quickly drill down to the error without
| manually checking each character.
| jeremysalwen wrote:
| You might be interested in this superuser question:
| https://superuser.com/questions/415451/how-to-transfer-a-
| fil...
|
| I was thinking forward error correction would make
| interactivity unnecessary.
| cardanome wrote:
| Or you could just use APL, which already has a high
| information density.
|
| Lot's of useful APL programs are very small, easily fitting
| on a single stone table and would not be much trouble to
| retype. In fact good APL programmers are even able to
| memorize them easily.
| Banana699 wrote:
| Saving the source alone hardly solves anything, the comment
| you're replying to highlights the real problem : The Stack.
| Everything from the compiler\VM to the OS to the instruction
| set architecture and everything in between. You have to save
| and store all of that.
|
| You need a format other than text, text is extraordinarily
| inefficient and lossy at anything that is not declarative
| factual information. There has to be artifacts.
| AeroNotix wrote:
| It's called a disk snapshot.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| I don't know about you, but I don't normally have the source
| code lying around on disk for:
|
| the compiler and its dependencies
|
| Any dynamically linked dependencies and whatever extra
| compilers they might need
|
| Other potentially necessary things like build tools and
| source control systems
| danieldk wrote:
| I am not sure if this is still the case, but the FreeBSD
| (and OpenBSD) CD sets and DVD used to contain the full
| source code of the base system and it's easy to rebuild the
| system from source. BSD also works on relatively modest
| hardware.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| I am most worried about the hardware. I am afraid we will have
| to start all the progress completely from scratch.
| speed_spread wrote:
| IMHO, modern microcontrollers is where it's at when it comes
| to preserving the current technological base. They're 32 bits
| and relatively high powered, yet cheap and reliable enough.
| They don't need cooling and are robust to be fed from
| different power sources. If you base your software stack on,
| say, the ARM Cortex M4 or even M0+, you should be good for
| long time. You can stash a lot of spare parts and can
| maintain boards using simple soldering techniques.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Devices running on high density flash will not be reliable
| long term. None of these devices have ECC to reduce the
| probability of catastrophic failure from accumulated bit
| flips.
| speed_spread wrote:
| I was thinking more about devices that can be repaired by
| changing a failed CPU than devices that have a lower
| failure rate. I believe STM (and others surely) has a
| line of "process critical" MCUs that may have additional
| reliability features but these chips are built in much
| lower quantity and are much pricier. It's a tradeoff that
| would need to be evaluated for sure. Preferring external
| flash to on-chip storage would also help. Some ECC can
| also be performed in software where warranted.
| ifyoubuildit wrote:
| I think you could design a device that optimizes for longevity.
| Build the cheapest, simplest device that can run your piece of
| software, and then produce lots of them.
|
| On the simplicity side, all of the parts would be solid state,
| it would handle whatever power you have on hand, the inputs and
| outputs would allow for using whatever devices you could cobble
| together in a post apocalyptic world.
|
| Then on the software side, every one of these devices could
| easily export a standard image that could be used to build
| another device.
|
| A lot of handwaving here, but most of what we sell these days
| is basically disposable because that's what is incentivized. If
| we actually optimized for longevity, we could probably do some
| amazing things.
|
| Edit: for bonus points, each device will include detailed
| technical documentation on how to produce the device itself
| from scratch. It could be a sort of rosetta computer.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| So a 6502(C)?
| bitwize wrote:
| Fun fact: PCs used to come with nearly all this information.
| Full schematics, manufacturer specs for the CPU and other
| important chips, all in the Technical Reference Manual. The
| same with Tandy computers: provided you could source the
| components, you could build your own Tandy 1000 or 2000 with
| the information in the manual.
|
| It's an absolute crying shame that computers do not come with
| this level of documentation anymore. It's not even _available_.
| There are probably parts of your computer that the
| "intelligence community" goes to great expense to ensure you
| know nothing about.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> Now, what if you are the only survivor with some programming
| skills sitting in front of a computer you've never heard of, with
| some hex pad to enter machine codes, with maybe some pen and
| paper. What will you do?
|
| As a man, I'd find a woman and get going on creating more
| programmers.
| manofmanysmiles wrote:
| I love prepping, up to a point.
|
| If we all would like to live in a world without war, the only
| path I see is if people learn to be strong as individuals, able
| to self govern, grow emotionally and take responsibility for
| their own actions. As long as we use collective thinking and
| externalization our power in organizations, believe in
| superstitions like money, government, "the greater good", rather
| than recognizing what's undeniably real, that we are all people,
| I don't see a way forward.
|
| If this resonates with anyone, hit me up!
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Have you read "The Unique and Its Property" by Max Stirner by
| any chance? I think you'd enjoy it. (The title is often
| translated as "The Ego and Its Own", but that entire
| translation is really, really bad)
|
| It's basically a 19th Century proto-existentialist analysis
| trying to explain "Why do people sacrifice their free will to
| abstract ideas, and should they?"
| Nursie wrote:
| Let me know when libertarianism achieves any more than
| attracting bears - https://www.vox.com/policy-and-
| politics/21534416/free-state-...
|
| Personally I enjoy my government roads, schools, fire service
| and all the rest.
|
| Perhaps when you've grown emotionally, you'll understand that
| government is people working together to achieve a common good.
| It's flawed and easy to get wrong, it oversteps and overspends,
| but I'll take that over "fully realised" adults living in a
| bear-ridden trash heap because they "took responsibility" for
| their own garbage disposal.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > Perhaps when you've grown emotionally, you'll understand
|
| This is arrogant, and condescending, not kind.
| Nursie wrote:
| This is a quote from the post I replied to, which is why I
| said it, as a mirror to the arrogance of the material I
| responded to. The post I responded to posits that those in
| favour of governments and collective action are not
| emotionally grown.
|
| If it is not kind, then neither is the original.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > posits that those in favour of governments and
| collective action are not emotionally grown
|
| I didn't read it like that - I read it as the ability to
| self-govern requires great individual responsibility and
| emotional control. Whether this is the only way forward
| is up for debate, but I agree it requires an (unlikely?)
| level of public competence.
| manofmanysmiles wrote:
| Show me a common good, and I'll listen to you. I only see
| people.
|
| Every time we generalize it results in violence and conflict.
|
| I am 100% supportive of people working together.
| drdeca wrote:
| "Superstition" is just as much an abstraction over a
| general pattern of things happening as "government" is.
|
| You say "show me a government and I'll listen"; I say "Show
| me a superstition (and an explanation for in what sense you
| have shown me one), and I'll show you a country (in the
| same sense)."
| badpun wrote:
| With your people-working-together model, modern
| civilization would not be possible. There would just be too
| much friction in a world where every interaction and every
| boundary must be voluntary and previously agreed upon. It
| would sorta work fine for sparsely populated pre-modern
| times, like the XIX century American West [1], which I
| believe is the origin source for a lot of such fantasies.
|
| [1] Except for the fact that the West rugged self-
| sufficiency was only possible because the pioneers could
| call in cavalry to exterminate groups of people who posed a
| threat they couldn't handle themselves.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| Whooosh you totally didn't get the point, the government is
| also just a bunch of individuals.
| Nursie wrote:
| The point that governments and money are superstitions and
| that people need to "grow emotionally and take
| responsibility" rather than believing in such things?
|
| No, I'm pretty sure I got the point there.
|
| I agree, government is just a bunch of individuals, and
| collectively we empower them to take action on our behalf,
| and they achieve things that without such cooperation would
| be hard to impossible. I don't believe the poster I replied
| to would concur, in fact a brief glance down their posting
| history shows this person believes governments should not
| exist.
| manofmanysmiles wrote:
| If you're talking about me, I believe that when people
| are ready for it, "governments" as such will cease to be
| relevant.
|
| To put this another way, I am NOT advocating for getting
| rid of governments, because a) they already don't exist,
| and b) right now, if we "got rid of government", let's
| say by somehow stopping all political, police, military
| and other activity, there most likely would be chaos, as
| many people like being told what to do, and maybe do need
| a imaginary father figure to make decisions for them and
| punish them if they do "bad" things.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Let me know when libertarianism achieves any more than
| attracting bears
|
| My pleasure. The United States was founded on libertarian
| principles (excluding allowing slavery to continue, this was
| fixed in 1865).
|
| The result was the rise if poor people to the most successful
| nation in the world, and the greatest rise in the wealth of
| those poor people.
|
| This did not happen in, say, South America, that was
| discovered and colonized at the same time. The Antebellum
| South also did not prosper under slavery and was crushed by
| the free economy of the North.
|
| Other countries which embraced libertarian principles also
| experience a surge in their economies, like the German
| Miracle after WW2, same for Japan.
| mynameishere wrote:
| _all the rest_
|
| You might want to make at least a few exceptions.
| vladharbuz wrote:
| I think that you would find it interesting to read "The Tyranny
| of Merit" by Michael J. Sandel, as it discusses some of the
| underlying assumptions that your comment rests on. I'm not
| saying it's a refutation of what you're saying or anything like
| that, but I think you would enjoy the book, and I think it
| would offer a healthy broader perspective.
| manofmanysmiles wrote:
| Replying to myself to say I will not be replying any more
| unless it's to people that do "get" what I'm saying. I chose
| not to expend any more energy arguing.
| carapace wrote:
| The way I put it sometimes is, government exists to manage
| human wickedness, good people need no laws.
|
| - - - -
|
| You might be interested in the work of Moshe Feldenkrais
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosh%C3%A9_Feldenkrais
|
| He's a fascinating person in his own right, a physicist who was
| also the first Westerner to earn a black belt in judo.
|
| > On the eve of the Nazi invasion of France in 1940,
| Feldenkrais fled to Britain with a jar of heavy water and a
| sheaf of research material, with instructions to deliver them
| to the British Admiralty War Office.
|
| Anyway, his "Method" is a kind of direct physical intervention
| to dispel superstition in the nervous system, returning the
| person to a more high-fidelity self-model, which in turn
| develops the qualities you mention above: strength (physical,
| emotional and mental) and the ability to self govern, which
| then permits taking responsibility (i.e. you can't drive a car
| if the steering wheel and pedals don't work, eh? You have to
| fix the car first, then you can drive it.)
|
| (I would normally link to the Wikipedia article on the
| "Feldenkrais Method" but unfortunately it has fallen in with
| the "Alternative medicine" woo-woo stuff, which then makes the
| Guerilla Skeptics come in and crap on it. I wish I was making
| this up but that's really what they call themselves. Anyway, if
| you're interested get a copy of his book "Awareness through
| movement : health exercises for personal growth" and try it
| out. https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3AFeldenkrais
| )
| ljw1001 wrote:
| There is nothing superstitious about government, money,
| organizations, etc. This is a fantasy.
|
| If you really want to exist as a society of strong individuals
| (assuming that's not already a contradiction in terms) in the
| absence of these constructs, you have to accept the very real
| likelihood that stronger individuals will be trying to rob and
| murder you. And organizing themselves into groups to do that
| more successfully
| manofmanysmiles wrote:
| Show me a government, and I'll believe you that it's not a
| superstition. I only see people.
|
| People organizing and working together is great.
|
| People feeling they have a right to use violence to achieve
| their goals, not so much.
|
| Edit: https://xkcd.com/386/
|
| I will take this opportunity to to try to express myself a
| bit more clearly. I don't really expect to convince anyone of
| anything, but rather I would like to reach the few people out
| their that do resonate with me and my words.
|
| Government is superstition just the way Santa is a
| superstition. You can call it an inter-subjective entity, or
| egregore, but ultimately it's not more real than any other
| imagined concept. It is perhaps a useful mental model to
| apply labels and titles to groups of people, or certain
| concepts, but it is also valuable to realize these are labels
| and models.
|
| A government, as far as I know does not exist, insofar as I
| cannot interact with it as a single entity, or see it. If you
| look at this from an esoteric perspective, perhaps nothing is
| real, or it's all consciousness, or a simulation, or
| vibration of energy, however that doesn't change my lived
| experience of what appears real now.
|
| I take issue with collective thinking, labeling a group of
| people with an identity, and then acting as if this identity
| is real. I don't have any animosity towards any other man or
| woman living in a different "country". I doubt many people
| do, and yet under the superstition of collective thinking,
| many people go to war, fighting against a "them" that someone
| did us "wrong", because we've been told so, or believe in
| large geopolitical movements. If every single conscious
| entity took a step back, and only acted violently in self-
| defense, there would be no war. There would simply be no
| reason to do it.
|
| There are numerous arguments against this, such as "there
| will always be 'bad' people, so we need gang up and make sure
| they don't do bad things", and soon enough, there will be a
| group of people, believing they are the only people who can
| legitimately use force and violence, because they are
| stopping the 'bad people'. If you look at a history book,
| you'll find more death and destruction because of
| "governments" by a very long shot, and very little due to the
| few "bad apples".
|
| The "Common Good" is another fallacy that leads to much
| suffering. How do we define it? We can use numbers, and
| metrics and "happiness surveys", and try to use left brain
| thinking to optimize for it, but ultimately "good" is in they
| experience of the individual conscious entity experiencing
| it. Trying to define it mathematically is taking away the
| agency and life of those who experience it, reveals a certain
| hubris and elitism that certain "experts" know what is best
| for everyone, for the "common good".
|
| A book I recommend for those interested in what I'm saying is
| "The Most Dangerous Superstition" by Larkin Rose.
|
| If you think I'm wrong, please continue to do so. I am
| supportive! I don't intend or expect to reach you.
| blamestross wrote:
| > I only see people.
|
| I only see atoms dancing around. That doesn't make it a
| useful abstraction at the scale we are discussing.
| Government is just an abstraction over a group of people
| self organizing.
|
| > People feeling they have a right to use violence to
| achieve their goals, not so much.
|
| Agreed, but government monopoly on violence is the only
| system that seems to have stuck. I would prefer a system of
| anarchy where everybody just did the right thing, but I
| haven't seen any evidence such a system lasts more than
| hours. Maybe we have to eradicate the cultural training and
| distrust we have already instilled into ourselves too. I've
| sat down and worked out the "root philosophy" of our
| political opinions with as many folks who will sit still
| for it, and this smells like the "Libertarian presumption
| that people, removed from the system of control, would all
| act better" and being in active denial that their planed
| solution for nonconformity they can't handle is "round up a
| posse and threaten/kill nonconformists".
| manofmanysmiles wrote:
| > Libertarian presumption that people, removed from the
| system of control, would all act better"
|
| My premise is more: "If people act better, and then
| perhaps we won't need a system of external control."
|
| I will admit I dream of a world that may not be possible.
| However, I will continue dreaming, and act to see this
| dream come to fruition.
| blamestross wrote:
| The path to such a future will either be paved with mass
| extermination to lower to population to remove scarcity
| or via surviving with government until scarcity is
| defeated and government can be safely dismantled.
|
| I do agree that there is a root problem with any existing
| power structure not being truely incentivized to reduce
| scarcity and then loose power, but that doesn't make the
| thanos solution more ok.
| alehlopeh wrote:
| What actions are you taking that could potentially cause
| billions of individuals to suddenly act as though the
| concept of scarcity doesn't exist? If the only path
| forward you see is for every single human to start acting
| differently, then you don't see any path forward.
| manofmanysmiles wrote:
| Replying to the lower comment by 'alehlopeh' since I
| don't think threaded replies go this far down.
|
| Right now, I'm looking for people with "naive optimism"
| who would like to see this world. There are a few of us.
| I'll share concrete details with those folks.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Libertarian presumption that people, removed from the
| system of control, would all act better
|
| Libertarians don't believe anything resembling that.
|
| Libertarianism requires a government empowered to use
| force to guarantee peoples' fundamental rights.
|
| If you have more questions about what Libertarianism
| actually is, feel free to ask, as I am one.
| bitwize wrote:
| Libertarianism requires _someone_ empowered to use force.
| The idea of multiple competing law enforcement apparatus
| within the same jurisdiction is not just theoretical
| wankery, either; it 's actually been tried. Most notably
| in the Icelandic Commonwealth, which endured for 300
| years.
| andsoitis wrote:
| First you deride organizations: "externalization our power
| in organizations,"
|
| but now you say: "People organizing and working together is
| great."
|
| Which is it?
| manofmanysmiles wrote:
| If you look carefully at the sentences, one is using
| nouns, the other verbs.
|
| "Organization" vs "organizing"
|
| I am not nitpicking. I am saying that as conscious
| entities, we act. We "verb". It's the labeling that I see
| as creating trouble.
| AndyMcConachie wrote:
| "There's no such thing as society."
|
| --Margaret Thatcher
| sempron64 wrote:
| The most important book in my opinion for post-apocalyptic
| programming is Charles Petzold's Code
| https://www.charlespetzold.com/code/
|
| It details how to build a working computer starting from relays.
| The greatest moment for me as a teenager reading this book was
| figuring out how a flip flop worked. Having information stored in
| a dynamic system's state seemed like the most magical thing I had
| ever seen.
| divan wrote:
| Obligatory mention of http://collapseos.org
| wokwokwok wrote:
| > what if you are the only survivor with some programming skills
| sitting in front of a computer you've never heard of, with some
| hex pad to enter machine codes, with maybe some pen and paper.
| What will you do?
|
| Leave it on the ground and forage around until I find a computer
| that runs windows. It's not great, but, it'll do. Failing that, a
| phone and a solar charger.
|
| Charming as it is to build yourself toys 'from scratch' to play
| with, it's pretty unrealistic that you'd end up ever needing
| those skills in a real 'end of the world' or 'total supply chain
| disruption' situation.
|
| It's far, far more likely that you'd use off the shelf software,
| and your skills would revolve around being a cell-
| phone/laptop/whatever repairman, repairing old screens, charging
| cables, and other mechanical bits and bobs on hardware that was
| never really intended to be used for more than ~5 years; and
| ripping up 'no longer working' stuff for bits you can put into
| 'mostly working' stuff, and maybe building analogue circuits or
| maintaining power grids and solar panels.
|
| Electrical engineer, soldering wires types of skills, not writing
| interpreters and coding skills, is what you would need ...if, you
| were indeed, in the luxury of not spending all your time just
| looking for food and water.
|
| Let's be real. No one is going to sit around implementing an
| interpreter for some obscure cpu you found.
|
| That's a skill for idly bored rich modern folk and archeologists
| of the future.
| peterkelly wrote:
| I think you missed the point.
|
| The intro is what in TV and other forms of media is called a
| "framing device". Here it's used as a story to provide
| motivation as to why someone could potentially need to build
| their own software stack. It's not meant to be taken literally.
| saurik wrote:
| > Here it's used as a story to provide motivation as to why
| someone could potentially need to build their own software
| stack.
|
| I dunno: sounds like it failed.
| jollyllama wrote:
| Agreed, all of this "build from the ground up" post-apoc stuff
| is fantasy.
|
| It would be scavenge and cobble together. If there was time to
| do any of this, you'd be trading a bit of your clan's goods for
| a disk with some rare library on it for calculating dates and
| times based on the planets and stars.
|
| I think that scavenging old libraries and installers is going
| to become more of a thing as they disappear from the internet
| over time anyway.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I was going to throw my old encyclopedias away, but then
| there came this wave of increasing attempts to edit articles
| on wikipedia to:
|
| 1. rewrite history through the lens of a political point of
| view
|
| 2. conduct disinformation campaigns
|
| 3. create hoaxes for personal amusement
|
| 4. conduct marketing campaigns
|
| 5. clean up reputations
|
| 6. redefine words to justify past lying
|
| I decided to keep the paper ones for the time being.
| pvg wrote:
| Those things are in your paper encyclopedia too, they just
| won't ever be fixed.
| lliamander wrote:
| Over time, the drift between the past print encyclopedias
| and present digital ones will itself be informative.
| Banana699 wrote:
| The same medium that makes it hard to fix mistakes makes
| it hard to commit that many mistakes to begin with.
|
| And paper is distributed, hard to counterfeit and long-
| lasting in ways we haven't figured out how to replicate
| in electrons yet.
| SQueeeeeL wrote:
| It's actually extremely easy to distribute something
| signed so that you're sure it's "authentic", at least
| that no bits are wrong. Assuming that _somewhere_ in the
| chain, there exists trust. But it 's the same with books,
| you have no way to know a book is authentic without
| buying it from a valid store
| lliamander wrote:
| True, though the process of establishing the trust and
| authenticity around digitally signed artifacts is not as
| widely established or disseminated as it is with print
| media.
|
| Also, establishing what a signature _means_ often
| requires out-of-band information. I really like the
| concept of annotations for a signature that would
| communicate the signer 's relationship to the work:
| http://www.loper-os.org/?p=1545
| CoffeeCollector wrote:
| Pretty sad that you of all people are getting downvoted for
| telling the truth.
| kosherhurricain wrote:
| Without highly automated, industrialized farming, majority of
| people's occupation will be food production, as it was most of
| human history.
|
| And post apocalypse labor shortages would mean nobody will be
| growing food for you, so you most likely need to do it
| yourself.
|
| If I survived and was industrious, I would start making
| tractors to sell, instead of twiddling with Forth.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| With enough solar panels, abundance of corrected soils, and a
| much smaller population, one can coast on the current
| agriculture investment and get a reasonable productivity (you
| will still spend a month or two every year on it) for a
| lifetime or two. Plenty of time to reboot tractors.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| You'd still need a supply chain of raw materials. The
| winning strategy is to form a mafia that seizes scrapyards
| and landfills.
| saalweachter wrote:
| I wonder how many working Windows computers you can pull
| out of the typical landfill.
| palmetieri2000 wrote:
| Good way to win yourself an assassination.
| lordleft wrote:
| Hope that I remember Assembly from my Computer Architecture
| course.
| bitwize wrote:
| I see room for both.
|
| This was kind of an exercise in what it would take to bootstrap
| a minimal stack that would turn a CPU into something useful.
| Think if someone desoldered a Z80 from like an old VCR from a
| junkyard or something and stuck it on a breadboard with some
| RAM and I/O to maybe a serial interface. How much work would it
| take to create, from nothing, a programming environment that
| allowed the user to build real-world applications that made
| that cobbled-together Z80 computer useful without too much
| hassle? And once that's done, if someone managed to scavenge an
| old floppy or hard drive or video monitor, those things could
| be attached and drivers written for them without too much
| effort.
|
| So yes, after the apocalypse, soldering and repair skills are
| going to be super important. But devising the software stack
| that keeps old CPUs functional and useful, especially when old
| 8-, 16-, and 32-bit CPUs are much more tractable than modern PC
| CPUs, is going to come in handy too.
| guessbest wrote:
| I disagree. With a discovered machine, the scavenger wants to
| use a bit of the found computer's CPU time to hack in the
| machine if it was an authentication device that needs to be
| bypassed to start a 'tractor' or 'combine harvester'. Not all
| computers are disconnected from the supply chain.
| shuntress wrote:
| The tools, skills, and knowledge required to literally hack
| open the tractor and physically bypass its authentication
| will be drastically more transferrable and overall useful.
| otikik wrote:
| The windows computer would try to dial home and then refuse to
| run because it is not "Genuine" or it can not run without
| "Essential Cloud Services" enabled or something like that.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| funny enough it was Apple that stopped you from running
| software because their server was down
| AlphENsign_Tech wrote:
| squarefoot wrote:
| In a post apocalyptic world, aside 1st necessity goods (food,
| drinkable water, medicines, knowledge on how to build/repair
| things), there will be a lack of energy; be prepared to keep
| armed watch of your roof if you have solar panels there. I
| wouldn't even try to keep powerful computers around if I couldn't
| supply them (and their peripherals) with what I have at hand,
| which could well be no more than a couple solar panels and some
| stepper motors converted to wind generators connected to a
| scavenged truck battery. So if the end of civilization occurs,
| Before anyone realizes that they're going to become doorstops, I
| will happily trade all my fastest computers for more important
| stuff as I already have in the junk boxes what would count as an
| IT lab of the apocalypse to build useful stuff usable in energy
| scarcity situations: a couple of very low powered netbooks, a few
| arduinos and similar low powered boards, b/w LCDs, sensors,
| relays, steppers and other electronics parts (all tht), gas and
| battery operated solder irons and a few solar panels.
|
| All stuff, however, that could turn 100% useless should I lose or
| break my glasses (Wasn't there a old Twilight Zone episode about
| that eventuality?) or deplete my heart medicines. If shit hits
| the fan, no matter how hard one prepares for the worst, the lack
| of a single small thing whose availability we take for granted in
| normal life could screw everything.
| akprasad wrote:
| > Wasn't there a old Twilight Zone episode about that
| eventuality?
|
| Indeed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Enough_at_Last
|
| Adapted from this short story:
| https://gutenberg.org/files/32633/32633-h/32633-h.htm
| eternityforest wrote:
| I wish more preppers would focus on rebuilding the modern
| supply chain as fast as possible. As long as there's a chip
| fab, a car factory, a lab that makes medicine, the priority
| should be to get it running and defend it.
|
| There will be people who want to loot or destroy it. Ecofascist
| primitivists could even be one of the major groups involves.
| But in a lot of disaster scenarios it should be possible to get
| a modern farm and the most critical labs running at least for a
| while, and start working on sustainable supplies.
|
| In some scenarios there might not really be any physical
| disruption at all besides the economy, starvation, or war not
| leaving time to keep tech running.
|
| I almost get the feeling a lot of preppers don't even want the
| modern world to exist though. They'd rather have privacy and
| hard work that see everyone sheltered in office jobs again.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > I will be using C to keep the grim atmosphere of the
| apocalypse, but you may try this exercise in a different
| language, of course.
|
| <crying joy emoticon>
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