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Post-Apocalyptic Programming

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Re: Post-Apocalyptic Programming

#81

Post by squarefoot »

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.

Re: Post-Apocalyptic Programming

#82

Post by cardanome »

Kadin wrote: post #55
kibwen wrote: post #23

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 o…

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…

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.

Re: Post-Apocalyptic Programming

#83

Post by WalterBright »

jollyllama wrote: post #64
wokwokwok wrote: post #51

> 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 scrat…

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 int…

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.

Re: Post-Apocalyptic Programming

#84

Post by marcosdumay »

kosherhurricain wrote: post #58
wokwokwok wrote: post #51

> 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 scrat…

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.

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.

Re: Post-Apocalyptic Programming

#85

Post by WalterBright »

blamestross wrote: post #60
manofmanysmiles wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> 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…

> 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.

Re: Post-Apocalyptic Programming

#86

Post by OkayPhysicist »

manofmanysmiles wrote: post #24

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 wha…

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?"

Re: Post-Apocalyptic Programming

#87

Post by akprasad »

squarefoot wrote: post #81

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 p…

> 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

Re: Post-Apocalyptic Programming

#88

Post by WalterBright »

Nursie wrote: post #31
manofmanysmiles wrote: post #24

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 wha…

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 tak…

> 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.

Re: Post-Apocalyptic Programming

#89

Post by AndyMcConachie »

manofmanysmiles wrote: post #54
ljw1001 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 successfu…

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 t…

"There’s no such thing as society."

--Margaret Thatcher

Re: Post-Apocalyptic Programming

#90

Post by carapace »

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.

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