91–100 of 165 posts
As a man, I'd find a woman and get going on creating more programmers.
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?
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 apocaly…
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.
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…
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You might be interested in the work of Moshé 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 )
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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 bei…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 bei…
Those things are in your paper encyclopedia too, they just won't ever be fixed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 bei…
Those things are in your paper encyclopedia too, they just won't ever be fixed.
And paper is distributed, hard to counterfeit and long-lasting in ways we haven't figured out how to replicate in electrons yet.
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…
I was thinking forward error correction would make interactivity unnecessary.
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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.