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Dusk OS

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Re: Dusk OS

#101

Post by yencabulator »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #98
StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 idea that humanity somehow went back is a fantasy pushed forward by catholic commentators. A tangential aside: Wouldn't that make the catholics look bad and as such why would they spread it? ("We had all this great tech before the catholic/christians came along and ruined everything and now we don't have nice things" seems like another way to look at it)

Because through racist-enough eyes, Arabic discoveries or knowledge don't exist until they are whitewashed. That's the whole pretense, that there was some Dark Age that did something to the whole world. For values of "whole" meaning "the parts we care about".

Re: Dusk OS

#102

Post by yencabulator »

vdupras wrote: post #82
GTP wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

TCC is 100 kB, already exists, and is a real C compiler (+preprocessor+assembler+linker). It can build Linux too!

https://bellard.org/tcc/

Re: Dusk OS

#103

Post by vdupras »

yencabulator wrote: post #102
vdupras wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

TCC is 100 kB, already exists, and is a real C compiler (+preprocessor+assembler+linker). It can build Linux too! https://bellard.org/tcc/

100kb binary. I'm talking about source code size. TinyCC's source is 1400kb in size.

Re: Dusk OS

#104

Post by Xss3 »

keybored wrote: post #55
os2warpman wrote: post #8

>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…

> The loss of the ability to make many things, including computers but also other more important things like the industrial process for making ammonia, globally, simultaneously, is the end of humanity. The end of us sedentary people. No more ammonia by itself won’t affect hunter-gatherers and uncontacted peoples. But if we’re talking about not the end of these things in itself but an event like a nuclear winter: sure…

Most proper preppers have years of food not months.

Re: Dusk OS

#105

Post by zeroq »

alexey-salmin wrote: post #93
os2warpman wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those were all local events. The only thing removing mankind's ability to make computers is a large (Chicxulub-ish-sized) meteor strike or andromeda-strain-like sci-fi story made real. Luckily, I'll be killed by tidal waves if a meteor hits the Atlantic and I'll be killed in the firestorm if it hits land anywhere on Earth. If it hits the Pacific or Indian oceans, it depends on the size. If large enough, I'll shoot my…

> Those were all local events. > The only thing removing mankind's ability to make computers is a large (Chicxulub-ish-sized) meteor strike or andromeda-strain-like sci-fi story made real. One of the possible causes of the Bronze Age Collapse (which btw was very non-local) is a prolonged drought that apparently lasted for decades. It's wasn't severe by itself but long enough for the fertile soil to keep shrinking yea…

(disclaimer - I know very little about this, it's just common sense and theorycrafting)

> Multi-year global food reserves are not only non-existent but maybe even non-possible at this scale.

I agree with the sentiment, but I will risk a hypothesis that in "western" world we have enough canned and highly processed food (the one that lies on the shelf of your grocery store and has best before set 2-3 years ahead) to survive "covid but for crops" event. There are couple of reasons I feel safe about this. We waste massive amout of food on a daily basis. We have a huge variety of food available, and not everything has to be affected. We already rely on global supply chains on a daily basis and for whatever reason while living in EU I'm eating garlic imported as far away as China. And then there's coffee, bananas, etc.

Sure, covid has shown that a massive shift will have a dramatic short term impact. Somehow Shkreli was sent to prison after raising price of a drug by 5000%, but when every pharmacy in my country did exactly the same with face masks everyone was quite ok with that, as long as they could get one. And after the initial shock we got back to seamingly normal life.

If anything, I'm scared about the water.

But all in all, when the shit really hits the fan, I envision scenario similar to McCarthy's `The Road` or for lack of better example `The Walking Dead`. People will be more busy trying to secure food and shelter rather than figuring out how to boot some obscure OS on a defunct computer.

Re: Dusk OS

#106

Post by zeroq »

WaitWaitWha wrote: post #19
os2warpman wrote: post #8

>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. Hmmm... At a very high altitude extinction-level events have sufficiently sharp edges. But, as we get closer to things it b…

Not OP, but I somehow share his sentiment and I'd say that out of your list any would do.

Terrible things are happening right now, and people find their way out, for instance the war in Ukraine. But then again, they have visa cards, they can book travel and accomodation online and flee from the country. A lot of jews have fled from Europe during and before WW2 when things were not so much connected, but still, it was modern day, people had access to press, radio, telegrams and telephones.

But if you live in a rural village and everyone you knew died to a famine that sounds like something you might not want to carry any further.

Re: Dusk OS

#107

Post by zeroq »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #95
palata wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Brunelleschi's dome on the Florence Cathedral was the first major dome built in Europe in over a thousand years since the fall of the Western Roman Empire. I don't think it necessarily means they forgot how to do it, though. Or does it? We too stopped building domes made of big stones, it doesn't mean we don't know how to do it.

For whatever reason they weren't building domes anymore in Europe where they had been (the fall of the Western Roman empire sort of changed priorities for a while). And after a generation of not building domes the artisans (in Europe) lost the ability to do it. There's a much closer example: The US spent the 60s developing the capability to land humans on the moon. And they were successful. They did it about, what, 7…

That's a really good example.

I only want to add that's not something that we have a hard time doing because it suddenly became hard, but because it came out of fashion.

We had a really good time thanks to cold war and flexing between both sides, but now it's a just a enormous investment with no return. It's really sad to see NASA running on a shoe string budget, and Ingenuity being nothing more than a glorified student project that happened at the right time in the right place.

Re: Dusk OS

#108

Post by ummonk »

nonethewiser wrote: post #11
os2warpman wrote: post #8

>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 moderately-sized US state university can (and some have) build one from scratch: as in from fucking sand to "Shall we play a game?", all in one go. I am quite surprised to hear that. Really?

Yeah, I find that rather surprising that a university lab could fabricate a practical 14 nm chip (more than just some demonstration gates), given the billions of dollars that countries have to invest to set up even 65 nm fabs.
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