Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Post-Apocalyptic Programming

zserge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 165 posts

Re: Post-Apocalyptic Programming

#111

Post by shuntress »

guessbest wrote: post #110
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…

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.

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.

Re: Post-Apocalyptic Programming

#112

Post by speed_spread »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #101
speed_spread wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

Re: Post-Apocalyptic Programming

#113

Post by bitwize »

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…

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.

Re: Post-Apocalyptic Programming

#114

Post by bitwize »

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…

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.

Re: Post-Apocalyptic Programming

#115

Post by bitwize »

WalterBright wrote: post #85
blamestross wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

Re: Post-Apocalyptic Programming

#116

Post by bitwize »

_int3_ wrote: post #106

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.

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.

Re: Post-Apocalyptic Programming

#117

Post by bitwize »

atoav wrote: post #66
teddyh wrote: post #2

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.

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…

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).

Re: Post-Apocalyptic Programming

#119

Post by saalweachter »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #100
marcosdumay wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You'd still need a supply chain of raw materials. The winning strategy is to form a mafia that seizes scrapyards and landfills.

I wonder how many working Windows computers you can pull out of the typical landfill.

Re: Post-Apocalyptic Programming

#120

Post by palmetieri2000 »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #100
marcosdumay wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You'd still need a supply chain of raw materials. The winning strategy is to form a mafia that seizes scrapyards and landfills.

Good way to win yourself an assassination.
Post reply on HN