Live data from Hacker News

Hundred Rabbits – Low-tech living while sailing the world

100r.co

51–60 of 79 posts

Re: Hundred Rabbits – Low-tech living while sailing the world

#51
post #29

Their work has molded a lot of my views on technology, such a breath of fresh air when I first found out about them! They really inspired me to look at my own work and ask how to make it more resilient, how to decrease dependencies. From my experience, achieving provider independence boils down to: own your stack, work offline-first, test failure modes constantly. Been trying to get a setup going with NixOS + local A…

Offline solutions or not totally internet dependent ones can bring a lot of value to the users. So many things are webapps that could easily work offline. Sure, the web is easier and has more reach, but when sites, apps, or games vanish, I start to miss the 90-00 CD days.

But again, what is best for the user is probably not the best business idea...

Re: Hundred Rabbits – Low-tech living while sailing the world

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unsure about the day-to-day situation, I imagine by now they make enough off of the stuff they put out as 100r that combined with very low expenses it's sustainable or close to. In past blog posts they mention taking on contract work for boat repairs.

Yeah, when you take the rent and many of the temptations of the big city lifestyle out of consideration, the cost of living gets surprisingly low.

They seem to be doing a lot of their maintenance themselves so that probably helps too. Still, I am curious about how much in average does the sailing life cost. They give some numbers here and there, so maybe someone more dedicated might be able to come up with a basic estimate.

Re: Hundred Rabbits – Low-tech living while sailing the world

#53
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that at least one of them worked for Meta before they embarked on this journey and I believe that they basically used the big tech money to FIRE. They've been able to them supplement and transition their income with the games and apps they've produced as well as related income from their 100rabbits work, as well as having minimized living expenses and no children. None of this is meant to be judgement or in…

ahhh, thanks for that, that really identifies the elephant I've always felt lurking in the room every time I hear about these people.

Hi!

One of the two authors of the site up here, I just want to clarify before this becomes a rumour, I never worked at Meta, nor in big tech, neither have my partner.

Prior to moving on the water, Rek worked in a 10 person animation studio in Japan(Toneplus), as an animator/illustrator, and me(Dev) worked as a designer at a 15 employees company Cerego(we were building smart.fm). Afterward we worked independently making little games, got nominated for the IGF that one time, but never worked directly for a company again.

We budgeted the sailboat like this: 2 years worth of rent and related expense at our current rate, and so we could afford a 40k CAD$ sailboat. The way we looked at it was that if we managed to live aboard for over 2 years, we'd start making up the money we borrowed. It has been nearly 10 years now that we live aboard.

We're super opened with our finances and how we made this possible, so just ask us instead of making stuff up :) Cheers!

Re: Hundred Rabbits – Low-tech living while sailing the world

#54
post #12

I love the contrast in "Low tech/bootstrapped tech" this way vs, say, duskos.org. I call this "rabbits vs forth" tech bootstrappers. [1]. It's somewhat strange to me that their tech journey is so narrative and ends up with a VM stack, rather than any kind of salvaged / repurposed hard tech. But then again, I'm probably on the forth side of the spectrum. https://jodavaho.io/posts/rabbits-or-forth.html

> ends up with a VM stack, rather than any kind of salvaged / repurposed hard tech I love reading the Hundred Rabbits blog but I view it as sort of an artistic endeavor in addition to pure tech. Indeed, my idea of "low tech" would be 16-bit systems or early 32-bit stuff like 386 and 486 PCs, etc. These machines are surprisingly capable even in 2025 with the right applications. They can be repaired seemingly indefinit…

Yes - this is definitely some kind of computer performance art or something like that.

Re: Hundred Rabbits – Low-tech living while sailing the world

#55
post #34
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Gameboy Advanced has a full emulator with the standard devices, and incompleteness is often not a dealbreaker as long as it supports the devices you need. There are incomplete emulators for ESP32 and STM32 based devices, DOS, and even an extremely limited emulator for the original Gameboy. Many of these might be more powerful than your 90s workstation, but if someone's scavenging technology they're more likely to…

You're right, that's smaller. I think I was confusing the DS and the "Game Boy Advance", because I was thinking of a machine with a few hundred K of RAM. The GBA is a 16MHz ARM7TDMI with 288KiB of RAM, not counting the 96KiB of VRAM; the Nintendo DS's main CPU is a 67MHz ARM946E-S, and it has 4MiB of RAM. As for what you're more likely to find in usable shape in a hypothetical collapse scenario, it probably depends o…

Could you explain more what's wrong with the STM32 family as a target? The Playdate's got a complete implementation and an STM32 heart. And other members of the family have seen other non-system-specific implementations, although neither is complete. I'm not deeply familiar with the family, so insight is welcomed, but I don't immediately see why they'd be unsuitable.

And while they're far more numerous, ultimately I think they're less likely to be used for personal computing. Sifting through the ruins, if you can find any functioning personal computer, you can get started immediately. Even if you don't have a compiler, you certainly have a web browser and write permissions. All you need to bring is the emulator spec.

That's an easier bar to clear than harvesting chips, a set of other working parts, gathering documentation for each, ensuring you have tooling and likely libraries for each, and most critically: enough existing, functioning tech to program it all. But if you already have that, you already have everything you need to compute without bootstrapping a new device. Not to say it wouldn't be worth the effort, but it's not an easier or alternative path to personal computing, just a path to share or persist it.

Re: Hundred Rabbits – Low-tech living while sailing the world

#56

Love 100r! There aren't a ton of examples online, but their livecoding music software/language, ORCA, is a remarkable instrument. https://100r.co/site/orca.html I posted a clip to bsky a few weeks back: https://bsky.app/profile/r.whal.ing/post/3lpyrm4vrqs2d And Allieway Audio made some great Youtube videos about ORCA too if people would like to learn how it works in more of a tutorial format: https://www.youtube.com/…

I don't suppose you are the live coding Richard who was on Lopez Island earlier this month, are you?

Re: Hundred Rabbits – Low-tech living while sailing the world

#57
post #36

Love 100r! There aren't a ton of examples online, but their livecoding music software/language, ORCA, is a remarkable instrument. https://100r.co/site/orca.html I posted a clip to bsky a few weeks back: https://bsky.app/profile/r.whal.ing/post/3lpyrm4vrqs2d And Allieway Audio made some great Youtube videos about ORCA too if people would like to learn how it works in more of a tutorial format: https://www.youtube.com/…

Love orca, and that's a really nice example. Messed with it a bit when it came out, and one toy project I'll share in the hopes that someone does it before me: an orca GUI that uses a larger grid with representative images in place of single char glyphs. I found that writing orca is fairly straightforward — you look up the sheet, find a thing and do it. It's reading that's the hurdle. An 8 char chunk that made perfec…

[deleted]

Re: Hundred Rabbits – Low-tech living while sailing the world

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ahhh, thanks for that, that really identifies the elephant I've always felt lurking in the room every time I hear about these people.

Hi! One of the two authors of the site up here, I just want to clarify before this becomes a rumour, I never worked at Meta, nor in big tech, neither have my partner. Prior to moving on the water, Rek worked in a 10 person animation studio in Japan(Toneplus), as an animator/illustrator, and me(Dev) worked as a designer at a 15 employees company Cerego(we were building smart.fm). Afterward we worked independently maki…

Thanks for dispelling the myth above. Very cool (and inspirational! as aspirant to the 100r lifestyle down the line) that you managed to do it without a big tech windfall :)

Re: Hundred Rabbits – Low-tech living while sailing the world

#60
Well I've been a big fan of 100r since I heard of them through the Future of Coding [0][1](and esoteric.codes [2]).

BUT JUST NOW I'm kicking around the website again today and find out that Devine made the game Hiversaires way back in the day [3] which is a banger. So I guess I've been a fan for like 12 years. I'm very tempted to buy it again.

100r are also an inspiration that a different way of life and relationship with creativity and society are possible... so if I ever drop out definitely don't look for me doing permacomputing on a sailboat in coastal BC. Don't look for me - because I won't want to be found, ok thanks in advance?

[0] https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/044

[1] https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/045

[2] https://esoteric.codes/blog/100-rabbits

[3] https://100r.co/site/hiversaires.html

Post reply on HN