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Dusk OS

duskos.org

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Re: Dusk OS

#81
post #79
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to avoid a slow, painful, inevitable death in a hostile world surrounded by misery. Well aren't you a bundle of joy, recommending death to people in bad situations. A life of misery isn't all that bad. Much worse could happen. This reminds me of A Man For All Seasons: Thomas More: "At the worst we could be beggars and still be keep company and be merry together." Lady Alice: "Aha, merry." Thomas More: "Aye, merry!"…

That advice sounds to me like it’s more for “an entire world where all people are in a bad situation from which they will never escape and neither will their next of kin” but if that comes to pass, the lighthearted talk of embracing the misery will probably end around the time the starvation begins.

Eschatology is always a controversial subject. Mostly pointless to discuss in such a diverse environment.

Re: Dusk OS

#82
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or why an "almost C compiler" is better than a C compiler.

I think that having an "almost" C compiler is a trick they use to minimize the size of the codebase.

Yes, this is it. A C compiler in 50 kilobytes of code is pretty innovative.

It's also doesn't lie about the "almost". It's really almost C. It's just that C's stdlib is POSIX centric and doesn't fit Forth well, so it's not implemented as is.

Re: Dusk OS

#83

>Its primary purpose is to be maximally useful during the first stage of civilizational collapse, that is, when we can't produce modern computers anymore but that there's still many modern computers around. Any event or series of events that removes mankind's ability to produce modern computers is a global extinction-level event and rather than dicking around with computers one should really be considering suicide to…

> Any event or series of events that removes mankind's ability to produce modern computers is a global extinction-level event and rather than dicking around with computers one should really be considering suicide to avoid a slow, painful, inevitable death in a hostile world surrounded by misery. To give some color, here: https://blog.sentinel-team.org/p/how-likely-are-various-prec... is a list of a few things that co…

The probability estimation of "simulation shutdown" seems a bit high. It's just as speculative as alien invasions or vacuum decay.

Re: Dusk OS

#84

Seems like a wishful thinking about the first stage portion of collapse. You're going to be more interested in running some obsolete version of Windows that controls some proprietary infrastructure hardware, not running calculations of whatever kind or building things from scratch.

That's assuming you can find the proprietary software that is needed. In some cases you're better off just cutting the proprietary bits out entirely and hooking straight into the motor controllers... or whatever else is more immediately upstream of the "business end" of the thing you're hacking.

Re: Dusk OS

#85

>Its primary purpose is to be maximally useful during the first stage of civilizational collapse, that is, when we can't produce modern computers anymore but that there's still many modern computers around. Any event or series of events that removes mankind's ability to produce modern computers is a global extinction-level event and rather than dicking around with computers one should really be considering suicide to…

Most catastrophic scenarios I can imagine result in loss of advanced silicon production, but not necessarily all silicon production. More likely than not there would be ways to keep fabs for old well-trodden processes running. In that situation, there’d probably be a temporary shock of no computers followed by new computers being a lot less powerful… it’d be less “no more computers” and more “new computers are comparable to their Pentium 4/PowerPC G5 era counterparts”, in which case operating systems would still be graphical, just a lot more lightweight. Linux and BSDs would probably quickly take over desktop computing due to being able to run reasonably on such systems with minimal legwork.

If we can’t manufacture chips at all, yeah, things will be in enough of a pickle that computers will be the least of our worries.

Re: Dusk OS

#86

Seems like a wishful thinking about the first stage portion of collapse. You're going to be more interested in running some obsolete version of Windows that controls some proprietary infrastructure hardware, not running calculations of whatever kind or building things from scratch.

But if you an need an OS for which no viruses or exploits have been develop yet, you may be in luck!

Would be funny to finally find an undamaged computer, boot it up and see a ransomware notice.

Re: Dusk OS

#87
Many comments strawman the author then argue with what they imagine he images. Guys just read the 'Why' page [0] and argue with his thesis. I'm not sure to agree with everything but it still is a very interesting and questioning read. Kudos to the author for writing it.

This OS is not for:

- you or your child

- a planet with working computers

- a planet with cheap and abundant 'bootstrap' energy like we had from 1850 to 1960

- a planet where humans really struggle to get food ("you're running away from cannibals", but I think this metaphor is a bad choice after the mad-max refutation)

That page [1] is also a core part of the theory: "What makes collapse inevitable and imminent".

[0] https://collapseos.org/why.html [1] https://collapseos.org/civ.html

Re: Dusk OS

#88

I hope the author doesn't take this the wrong way, but this feels like another Temple OS driven by a different (perhaps milder) kind of insanity. It's quite technically impressive, but I'm not sure I'd know what to do with it if I were experiencing an apocalypse, in a way that would be more useful to me than an install of Windows XP or Linux or Freedos would be

This and more is addressed on the "why.html" page. E.g.:

> (...) you and I are likely to be dead before Collapse OS is actually useful.

or:

> People who are less technical have trouble seeing the point of this project and ask "why can't we just use Linux?". People who have actually lifted Linux' hood don't ask that question because they actually understand the magnitude of complexity involved, but if you haven't, it's a legitimate question to ask.

https://collapseos.org/why.html

Re: Dusk OS

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any event or series of events that removes mankind's ability to produce modern computers is a global extinction-level event and rather than dicking around with computers one should really be considering suicide to avoid a slow, painful, inevitable death in a hostile world surrounded by misery. Wow... there are probably several ways we could lose the ability to fab semiconductors. We can look back through history at…

There are no Dark Ages. People in the Byzantine Empire (capitale in Europe) and the Abbasid Caliphate very much knew how to build domes and where actually busy advancing the state of the art. The fact that the Franks were more interested in warring against each others than building great things is no evidence of a dark age. They started building again once peace came back and didn’t restart from where they left off b…

The 'dark ages' weren't even the dark ages in Europe. The idea was invented by guys in the Renaissance who pined for the Greco-Roman world and pretended everything since then was a slide downhill. Anyone who seriously trots out this trope as 'proof' of anything should be taken about as seriously as a flat-earther.

Re: Dusk OS

#90

>Its primary purpose is to be maximally useful during the first stage of civilizational collapse, that is, when we can't produce modern computers anymore but that there's still many modern computers around. Any event or series of events that removes mankind's ability to produce modern computers is a global extinction-level event and rather than dicking around with computers one should really be considering suicide to…

> Any event or series of events that removes mankind's ability to produce modern computers is a global extinction-level event and rather than dicking around with computers one should really be considering suicide to avoid a slow, painful, inevitable death in a hostile world surrounded by misery. To give some color, here: https://blog.sentinel-team.org/p/how-likely-are-various-prec... is a list of a few things that co…

Speculative rationalist dreck. Entertaining nonetheless
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