[HN Gopher] Hundred Rabbits - Low-tech living while sailing the ...
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Hundred Rabbits - Low-tech living while sailing the world
Author : 0xCaponte
Score : 208 points
Date : 2025-07-14 15:45 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (100r.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (100r.co)
| 0xCaponte wrote:
| It has been a while since I found a site this interesting, I have
| been reading it on and off for the past few days. As per their
| site: "Hundred Rabbits is an artist collective that documents
| low-tech solutions with the hope of building a more resilient
| future. We live and work aboard a 10 m sailboat named Pino in
| remote parts of the world to learn more about how technology
| degrades beyond the shores of the western world"
| themk wrote:
| I highly recommend reading their north pacific crossing log
| book.
|
| https://100r.co/site/north_pacific_logbook.html
| kilpikaarna wrote:
| They used to do a monthly vlog too, I think it's still on
| YouTube.
| 0xCaponte wrote:
| Thank you, I will look into both of those. I eyed one of
| the logs, not sure which one, but more to see how it was
| shared and how extensive it was than for the content. Will
| give it a 2nd look.
| Lyngbakr wrote:
| Does anyone know if they're able to support themselves purely on
| donations via Patreon, etc., or if they need to do contract work,
| too?
| ryukoposting wrote:
| I think the closest thing you'll get to an origin story is
| this: https://100r.co/site/why_a_boat.html
|
| I'll defer to Occam's Razor: they probably had enough money at
| the outset that they don't have to worry about consistent
| month-to-month income.
|
| That's not meant to be a diss. Though, given their politics, I
| could understand if they took it that way.
| kilpikaarna wrote:
| Unsure about the day-to-day situation, I imagine by now they
| make enough off of the stuff they put out as 100r that combined
| with very low expenses it's sustainable or close to. In past
| blog posts they mention taking on contract work for boat
| repairs.
| smikhanov wrote:
| Yeah, when you take the rent and many of the temptations of
| the big city lifestyle out of consideration, the cost of
| living gets surprisingly low.
| munificent wrote:
| And kids.
| 0xCaponte wrote:
| They seem to be doing a lot of their maintenance themselves
| so that probably helps too. Still, I am curious about how
| much in average does the sailing life cost. They give some
| numbers here and there, so maybe someone more dedicated
| might be able to come up with a basic estimate.
| jgon wrote:
| I believe that at least one of them worked for Meta before they
| embarked on this journey and I believe that they basically used
| the big tech money to FIRE. They've been able to them
| supplement and transition their income with the games and apps
| they've produced as well as related income from their
| 100rabbits work, as well as having minimized living expenses
| and no children. None of this is meant to be judgement or in
| any way demean the work they currently do, I love all of their
| stuff. Just trying to answer your question.
| egypturnash wrote:
| ahhh, thanks for that, that really identifies the elephant
| I've always felt lurking in the room every time I hear about
| these people.
| entaloneralie wrote:
| Hi!
|
| One of the two authors of the site up here, I just want to
| clarify before this becomes a rumour, I never worked at
| Meta, nor in big tech, neither have my partner.
|
| Prior to moving on the water, Rek worked in a 10 person
| animation studio in Japan(Toneplus), as an
| animator/illustrator, and me(Dev) worked as a designer at a
| 15 employees company Cerego(we were building smart.fm).
| Afterward we worked independently making little games, got
| nominated for the IGF that one time, but never worked
| directly for a company again.
|
| We budgeted the sailboat like this: 2 years worth of rent
| and related expense at our current rate, and so we could
| afford a 40k CAD$ sailboat. The way we looked at it was
| that if we managed to live aboard for over 2 years, we'd
| start making up the money we borrowed. It has been nearly
| 10 years now that we live aboard.
|
| We're super opened with our finances and how we made this
| possible, so just ask us instead of making stuff up :)
| Cheers!
| jaykru wrote:
| Thanks for dispelling the myth above. Very cool (and
| inspirational! as aspirant to the 100r lifestyle down the
| line) that you managed to do it without a big tech
| windfall :)
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I love the contrast in "Low tech/bootstrapped tech" _this way_
| vs, say, duskos.org. I call this "rabbits vs forth" tech
| bootstrappers. [1].
|
| It's _somewhat_ strange to me that their tech journey is so
| narrative and ends up with a VM stack, rather than any kind of
| salvaged / repurposed hard tech. But then again, I'm probably on
| the forth side of the spectrum.
|
| https://jodavaho.io/posts/rabbits-or-forth.html
| throwaway328 wrote:
| Nice post. I hadn't noticed the "subtle suggestions" of
| donations myself, to be honest, but maybe I hadn't browsed
| around their pages enough.
|
| Anyway, if they do mention it, is it not a very far cry from
| the situation everywhere else? Youtubers begging, screaming,
| shouting, seducing, murmuring, doing the bug-eyes, repeating,
| cloying, getting emotionally heavy and forceful, for
| subscriptions, likes, and comments? Interspersed with violent
| sudden shifts to advertising products, etc.
|
| So it was a bit of a surprise to hear it mentioned like it
| might be bad. Are you surprised that the suggestions are so
| gentle? Or what
| qqqwerty wrote:
| Perhaps OP can clarify, because I too read that as a snarky
| dig. Perhaps that wasn't their intention, but it felt off.
| The only place I saw a "subtle suggestion" for a donation was
| by clicking the "Support" link all the way at the bottom of
| the page. The site has probably the least intrusive
| monetization scheme one could implement without forgoing it
| entirely.
| 0xCaponte wrote:
| Same here, after reading this I looked into multiple sites
| and articles and I only find that "Support" link in the
| footer. Maybe they changed things recently?
| jdiff wrote:
| With their stance of permacomputing, you don't think the two go
| hand in hand? A simple VM that can be implemented quickly on
| almost any hardware or underlying tech stack you can scrounge
| together? The only thing they'd be really against is designing
| new hardware to run Uxn "natively," which would seem to push
| you exclusively to reuse what you have.
| kragen wrote:
| 100r's Uxn/Varvara aspires to be that, but that's not the
| same thing as succeeding at it. AFAIK the smallest computer
| with a full Uxn/Varvara implementation is a Nintendo DS
| [correction! Game Boy Advance], which is faster than the Sun
| workstation I was using in the 90s (though it has less RAM).
| You probably aren't going to get it running on an eZ80-based
| TI calculator, for example, or an Arduino UNO.
|
| It's a good first step in that direction, the first attempt
| at permacomputing good enough to criticize.
| roughly wrote:
| > the first attempt <...> good enough to criticize.
|
| Ooh, I like this phrase.
| kragen wrote:
| From Wiki:
|
| http://found.ward.bay.wiki.org/view/good-enough-to-
| criticize
|
| > _Alan Kay described the Macintosh as the first personal
| computer good enough to be criticized. It was a serious
| step toward Kay 's Dynabook. Not perfect, but in the
| right direction. In this 2017 interview Kay explains how
| he came to his vision and how it has been completely lost
| in mobile devices since._
|
| https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-
| thinks-ab...
|
| While I think the implicit equation of Uxn with the
| 128KiB Macintosh is reasonable, the implicit comparison
| of me to Alan Kay is not.
| jdiff wrote:
| The Gameboy Advanced has a full emulator with the standard
| devices, and incompleteness is often not a dealbreaker as
| long as it supports the devices you need. There are
| incomplete emulators for ESP32 and STM32 based devices,
| DOS, and even an extremely limited emulator for the
| original Gameboy.
|
| Many of these might be more powerful than your 90s
| workstation, but if someone's scavenging technology they're
| more likely to find a Chromebook than a Sun.
| kragen wrote:
| You're right, that's smaller. I think I was confusing the
| DS and the "Game Boy Advance", because I was thinking of
| a machine with a few hundred K of RAM. The GBA is a 16MHz
| ARM7TDMI with 288KiB of RAM, not counting the 96KiB of
| VRAM; the Nintendo DS's main CPU is a 67MHz ARM946E-S,
| and it has 4MiB of RAM.
|
| As for what you're more likely to find in usable shape in
| a hypothetical collapse scenario, it probably depends on
| what kind of scenario you're talking about. Certainly
| vastly more Chromebooks exist than Suns, but the
| Chromebook's SSD only has a few months of data retention,
| so you probably won't be able to get it to boot if it's
| been sitting around unpowered for many years. All the Sun
| SPARCs are going to be in non-working order because their
| IDPROM batteries will have died, but some older
| 68000-family Suns like the 3/60 I theoretically still
| have are probably okay, because their IDPROMs are
| actually PROM rather than battery-backed RAM.
|
| (Of course you also have to worry about capacitors drying
| out.)
|
| What's _vastly_ more common than Chromebooks, Suns, or
| GBAs, though, are Flash-based microcontrollers like the
| AVR family and 48MHz members of the STM32 family. (You
| can probably salvage a couple out of the wreckage of the
| drone that killed your parents.) And those will probably
| still be in working order, unlike anything SSD-based. I
| don 't think Uxn is a good fit for those chips.
|
| In a multiple-centuries sort of collapse scenario you
| also need to worry about the retention time of the NOR
| Flash in these microcontrollers. Hopefully if they lose
| their memory you'll still be able to rewrite it, but if
| the manufacturers used Flash to implement some
| supposedly-read-only memory, they might not bother to
| mention it.
|
| In the collapse scenario we're actually in at the moment,
| GBAs, Nintendo DSs, and Chromebooks are all immensely
| more expensive than such microcontrollers. That seems
| likely to remain true even after the PRC invades Taiwan
| in a few years.
| jdiff wrote:
| Could you explain more what's wrong with the STM32 family
| as a target? The Playdate's got a complete implementation
| and an STM32 heart. And other members of the family have
| seen other non-system-specific implementations, although
| neither is complete. I'm not deeply familiar with the
| family, so insight is welcomed, but I don't immediately
| see why they'd be unsuitable.
|
| And while they're far more numerous, ultimately I think
| they're less likely to be used for personal computing.
| Sifting through the ruins, if you can find any
| functioning personal computer, you can get started
| immediately. Even if you don't have a compiler, you
| certainly have a web browser and write permissions. All
| you need to bring is the emulator spec.
|
| That's an easier bar to clear than harvesting chips, a
| set of other working parts, gathering documentation for
| each, ensuring you have tooling and likely libraries for
| each, and most critically: enough existing, functioning
| tech to program it all. But if you already have that, you
| already have everything you need to compute without
| bootstrapping a new device. Not to say it wouldn't be
| worth the effort, but it's not an easier or alternative
| path to personal computing, just a path to share or
| persist it.
| accrual wrote:
| > ends up with a VM stack, rather than any kind of salvaged /
| repurposed hard tech
|
| I love reading the Hundred Rabbits blog but I view it as sort
| of an artistic endeavor in addition to pure tech. Indeed, my
| idea of "low tech" would be 16-bit systems or early 32-bit
| stuff like 386 and 486 PCs, etc. These machines are
| surprisingly capable even in 2025 with the right applications.
| They can be repaired seemingly indefinitely with a soldering
| iron and spare caps.
| anthk wrote:
| - gopher browser -> gopher://magical.fish as a portal
|
| - HN can be read at gopher://hngopher.com
|
| - irc -> bitlbee.org to chat with anyone, even IRC with TLS
| itself. Kirc will run on any potato.
|
| - a high end 486 it's needed to play MP3's. Either that or
| burn your favourites into CD's.
|
| - sc-im+gnuplot/emacs' ses+gnulot
|
| - srln+slrnpull
|
| - telescope/sacc can do gopher fine. gemini can be stalled.
|
| - sfeed+links to read news. Altough gmane.io and gwene.io can
| relay mail lists and RSS feeds as NNTP groups and then your
| might slrn will just read _all_ news happily in a 486 (or
| less).
|
| - translate -> simply translate
|
| - Reuters -> http://neuters.de
| accrual wrote:
| Yes 100%! Some other regular HTTP sites that run great on
| old hardware are:
|
| * http://theoldnet.com/
|
| * http://68k.news/
|
| * http://weather.maniac.com/
| severak_cz wrote:
| Yes - this is definitely some kind of computer performance
| art or something like that.
| anthk wrote:
| I still use an Atom N270 netbook, and DuskOS is on the edge;
| but there are zillions of Atom netbooks in LaTam and in the
| outside as goverments agreed to ship these to students. With
| TUI/CLI tools you can do wonders, far more than CollapseOS.
| Yes, I know Forth, I did a good chunk of Starting Forth.
|
| UXN once tweaked it can run stuff like Oquonie.
|
| BTW, a properly set Emacs can double as a great legacy platform
| too; from IRC to whatever (Bitlbee<>IRC), Web browsing, email,
| gopher and gemini browser with elpher (and the Gemini proxy
| gemini://gemi.dev), epub reading, music and video (Emacs' emms,
| but mpv+yt-dlp can be set to play stuff at 480p/720@30FPS),
| Usenet client, RSS, Elisp itself, M-x calc and Gnuplot, PDF
| viewer (pdf-tools), Org-Mode+Hyperbole to expand your brain
| like nothing, sokoban gaming, Tetris, ZMachine text adventures
| with Malyon, MUDs, trace routers from OpenStreetMap with osm.el
| ...
|
| For stucking I/O:
|
| Usenet->slrnpull+GNUS.
|
| Mail->Mu4e+mu.
|
| People doesn't know that today computers from 2003 can do
| wonders and access far more services than they would think.
|
| Once you can do TLS 1.3 'fast' enough (P4 w/ SSE2), you can do
| anything from IRC, email, gopher, gemini, usenet and rss from
| proxies and terminal or Emacs clients.
| muzani wrote:
| It's remarkable how good you have to be at tech to be low tech
| and low maintenance.
| jdiff wrote:
| Necessity is the mother of invention, and as I understand it
| from their writing, life on the sea is a constant maintenance
| battle against when the "ground" underneath your feet is trying
| to pull you in at every step, from corroding everything holding
| you together to the isolation driving extensive planning and
| maintenance for self sufficiency projects.
| rwhaling wrote:
| Love 100r! There aren't a ton of examples online, but their
| livecoding music software/language, ORCA, is a remarkable
| instrument. https://100r.co/site/orca.html
|
| I posted a clip to bsky a few weeks back:
| https://bsky.app/profile/r.whal.ing/post/3lpyrm4vrqs2d
|
| And Allieway Audio made some great Youtube videos about ORCA too
| if people would like to learn how it works in more of a tutorial
| format: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaI_TuISSJE&t=446s
|
| (I love the Dwarf Fortress background for this video, it
| absolutely nails the vibe)
| RickS wrote:
| Love orca, and that's a really nice example. Messed with it a
| bit when it came out, and one toy project I'll share in the
| hopes that someone does it before me: an orca GUI that uses a
| larger grid with representative images in place of single char
| glyphs. I found that writing orca is fairly straightforward --
| you look up the sheet, find a thing and do it. It's reading
| that's the hurdle. An 8 char chunk that made perfect sense when
| I wrote it takes just as many lookups to read later. This
| probably gets easier over time, but I still think it's a cool
| design opportunity.
| rwhaling wrote:
| Yep absolutely! It reminds me of writing cryptic perl one-
| liners or something.
| lovich wrote:
| Oh this is the same group behind ORCA? I should read up on them
| more if they have multiple projects like this
| bradly wrote:
| I don't suppose you are the live coding Richard who was on
| Lopez Island earlier this month, are you?
| gadders wrote:
| Spoiler alert: no actual rabbit content.
| Mr_Eri_Atlov wrote:
| 100 Rabbits is the most successful example of solarpunk I've ever
| seen.
|
| Tech with a focus on sustainability and creation.
|
| Love their work!
| agentultra wrote:
| I recently got my basic cruising sailing license. And I also
| enjoy hacking on low-power, low-end salvaged computers that are
| repairable with a minimal set of tools and a manual. I'm hoping
| one day my tech journey will lead me to spending more time aboard
| and working on projects in this space.
|
| 100r and https://screenl.es and dynamicland are huge
| inspirations.
| xrd wrote:
| A friend asked me whether I was concerned about energy usage of
| AI. I didn't have a good answer. It feels inevitable.
|
| But, I love the write-up here on why the sailboat, and why UXN,
| because those two things are complementary when you are living in
| a sailboat and are thinking intimately about your power
| consumption.
|
| https://100r.co/site/why_a_boat.html
|
| https://100r.co/site/uxn.html
|
| Seeing Devine at StrangeLoop last year was a treat (and took a
| lot of mental energy!)
| gyomu wrote:
| > Seeing Devine at StrangeLoop last year [...] took a lot of
| mental energy!
|
| Why?
| xrd wrote:
| He's a non-linear thinker. He's brilliant. And, probably like
| a sailboat, you don't exactly know where he is going. Life is
| better that way.
| aosaigh wrote:
| This is a fascinating website which I look forward to exploring a
| bit more, along with the authors personal sites.
|
| Are there any other off-grid low-tech sites/projects/sites like
| this?
|
| I remember another interesting site that was being run off solar
| posted here on HN that went down when the batteries went out.
| yesfitz wrote:
| I believe you're thinking of Low Tech Magazine[1]
|
| 1: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/
| aosaigh wrote:
| Yes that's the one, thanks
| QRY wrote:
| Their work has molded a lot of my views on technology, such a
| breath of fresh air when I first found out about them! They
| really inspired me to look at my own work and ask how to make it
| more resilient, how to decrease dependencies.
|
| From my experience, achieving provider independence boils down
| to: own your stack, work offline-first, test failure modes
| constantly.
|
| Been trying to get a setup going with NixOS + local AI + custom
| CLI tools for development work, and I never would have thought to
| pursue this sort of thing if I hadn't found these people. Great
| stuff!
|
| Oh and ORCA is a LOT of fun! Give it a shot if you're into
| sounddesign, or generative electronic music stuff:
| https://100r.co/site/orca.html
| 0xCaponte wrote:
| Offline solutions or not totally internet dependent ones can
| bring a lot of value to the users. So many things are webapps
| that could easily work offline. Sure, the web is easier and has
| more reach, but when sites, apps, or games vanish, I start to
| miss the 90-00 CD days.
|
| But again, what is best for the user is probably not the best
| business idea...
| hooverd wrote:
| Ah, another Blame! fan.
| rezmason wrote:
| Here's two ports of their Blame!-inspired Myst-in-a-
| megastructure game, Hiversaires:
|
| https://hundredrabbits.itch.io/hiversaires
|
| https://git.sr.ht/~rabbits/hiversaires
| fitsumbelay wrote:
| I'm forever impressed by these folks' energy and creativity
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Hundred Rabbits is a small collective exploring the failability
| of modern tech_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41131181 -
| Aug 2024 (488 comments)
|
| _Gimballed Stove_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39733829 - March 2024 (12
| comments)
|
| _Weathering Software Winter_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34219654 - Jan 2023 (28
| comments)
|
| _Internet in Paradise (2006)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32080305 - July 2022 (18
| comments)
|
| _Artists are making tiny ROMs that will probably outlive us all_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31410838 - May 2022 (1
| comment)
|
| _Off the Grid_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30031472 -
| Jan 2022 (118 comments)
|
| _Busy Doing Nothing_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26760803 - April 2021 (6
| comments)
|
| _Working Off-Grid Efficiently_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25723819 - Jan 2021 (142
| comments)
|
| _North Pacific Logbook_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24489257 - Sept 2020 (7
| comments)
|
| (I omitted threads about their software projects, even though
| those are super interesting:
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)
| poulpy123 wrote:
| Where I discover that there people learning solresol in 2025
| rezmason wrote:
| I'm honored to call these rabbits (and a decent portion of their
| community) my friends.
| periodjet wrote:
| > Collapse won't be addressed by buying a Prius, signing a
| treaty, or turning off the air-conditioning. The biggest problem
| we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this
| civilization is already dead. The sooner we confront this
| problem, and the sooner we realize there's nothing we can do to
| save ourselves, the sooner we can get down to the hard work of
| adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality.
|
| > This is why we are committed to fighting normative violence,
| fascism, colonialism, and white supremacy in all of its forms. To
| undermine the capitalist structure and its abusive scripts about
| human worth in relation to work, productivity, and ownership. To
| subvert oppressive gender norms and put in question the binary.
| To actively unlearn biased and colonial thinking. To look inside
| and face these parts of our darkness, personal and collective,
| and come out of it with more kindness and compassion.
| SlowTao wrote:
| The first act of revolution is contemplation.
| Conscat wrote:
| I think I first came across them from seeing #ORCL tag on
| Twitter, which I highly recommend peeking at. I love their
| website.
| Duanemclemore wrote:
| Well I've been a big fan of 100r since I heard of them through
| the Future of Coding [0][1](and esoteric.codes [2]).
|
| BUT JUST NOW I'm kicking around the website again today and find
| out that Devine made the game Hiversaires way back in the day [3]
| which is a banger. So I guess I've been a fan for like 12 years.
| I'm very tempted to buy it again.
|
| 100r are also an inspiration that a different way of life and
| relationship with creativity and society are possible... so if I
| ever drop out definitely don't look for me doing permacomputing
| on a sailboat in coastal BC. Don't look for me - because I won't
| want to be found, ok thanks in advance?
|
| [0] https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/044
|
| [1] https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/045
|
| [2] https://esoteric.codes/blog/100-rabbits
|
| [3] https://100r.co/site/hiversaires.html
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