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

Collapse OS – bootstrap post-collapse technology

collapseos.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 119 posts

Re: Collapse OS – bootstrap post-collapse technology

#41

Post by cbozeman »

ncmncm wrote: post #20
camdenlock wrote: post #11

This site pops up on here from time to time, and I can’t escape the fact that it’s driven entirely by the coolness factor of scavenging for parts and making them work. And it is cool. But the underlying arguments he makes about imminent collapse are baffling. Imminent collapse due to our oil supply drying up? That’s been an erroneous prediction made for like a century, because we are apparently really bad at predicti…

Collapse by 2030 is entirely possible under unsurprising circumstances. I rate it as near 50% likelihood, increasing rapidly after: As climate disruption increases, crop failures in tropical and subtropical countries result in mass migration, first to cities and then toward wealthy temperate countries. Temperate countries react by electing fascist governments to repel refugees. Fascist governments start wars (as they…

Looking forward to coming back here in 10 years...

Re: Collapse OS – bootstrap post-collapse technology

#42

Post by forgotmypw17 »

I'm not sure about the predictions, but I believe that devices have the right to exist, and that saying "your browser is not good enough" is akin to saying "your car is too old for this road" or "your wheelchair is incompatible with these stairs".

I test my website with every browser I can get my hands on. Yes, hundreds of them. Yes, even Netscape 2 and IE 3. I think Web has taken a bloaty turn, but we still have a chance to retain and preserve the knowledge.

The nice part about it is that for every browser I tweak for, the site gets more and more compatible and accessible. As someone with experience, I've been able to access it under the strangest circumstances and methods.

Re: Collapse OS – bootstrap post-collapse technology

#43

Post by NegativeLatency »

smaddox wrote: post #7
stolenmerch wrote: post #5

Genuine question: if we're in a collapse scenario that is so devastating to the global supply chain that we're scavenging microcontrollers, how do we generate electricity to power them? Solar panels and batteries don't last forever and would presumably require the same or similar supply chain as the microcontrollers. This is a cool project regardless, but in such a catastrophic scenario it seems easier to just give u…

Building/refurbishing lead acid batteries wouldn't be all that difficult immediately post collapse. Solar panels can also be refurbished. For poly silicon cells, it's mostly the contacts that degrade, and you can improve that with a soldering iron. A bit more work, but still doable, would be a forming gas anneal, which can additionally passivate defects.

I suspect you could scrounge materials for a nickel iron battery without too much trouble.

Re: Collapse OS – bootstrap post-collapse technology

#44

Post by ben_w »

Gaelan wrote: post #31
neartheplain wrote: post #29

In any plausible doomsday scenario, would scavenged Z80s (with compatible displays and input devices) really be more readily available than old Intel-based laptops, or even Raspberry Pis? And if your post-collapse computer can’t read PDFs or play videos, how much useful preserved information can you really access?

Just Wikipedia would be huge.

“Just Wikipedia” exceeds the 16-bit address capacity of a z80 by a factor of 288,391 [0] even when compressed. Heck, you couldn’t even list all the article titles even if they were all an average of one character long.

Plenty of useful things you can still do with a z80, but at that tech level paper and ink is a better storage system than silicon and magnets.

[0] As per Wikipedia’s stats page, the size of current versions of all articles is 18.9 GB compressed

Re: Collapse OS – bootstrap post-collapse technology

#45

Post by emteycz »

Anarch157a wrote: post #8
stolenmerch wrote: post #5

Genuine question: if we're in a collapse scenario that is so devastating to the global supply chain that we're scavenging microcontrollers, how do we generate electricity to power them? Solar panels and batteries don't last forever and would presumably require the same or similar supply chain as the microcontrollers. This is a cool project regardless, but in such a catastrophic scenario it seems easier to just give u…

You can scavenge car's alternators and use a water wheel or windmill to turn it. Alternators can work for a decade with minimum maintenance. Just have five or six stashed, just in case. They can supply 40A at 12V, or using a transformer to up the voltage, 4A at 120V.

Alternators are also trivial to build by hand.

Re: Collapse OS – bootstrap post-collapse technology

#46

Post by tonyedgecombe »

skissane wrote: post #3

On https://collapseos.org/why.html he says: > I expect our global supply chain to collapse before we reach 2030 What's he going to say if we get to 2030 and his predicted collapse hasn't happened yet? "I was wrong" or "It's just taking a little longer than I expected"?

He seems strongly invested in the idea. The more you invest in an idea the more value you attach to it and hence the more resistant you become to evidence that contradicts it. so most likely it will be "It's just taking a little longer than I expected."

Re: Collapse OS – bootstrap post-collapse technology

#47

Post by tonyedgecombe »

6510 wrote: post #27
skissane wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What makes us think our society is special? What is “our society”? A particular country or group of countries, or global society? Certainly any country or even group of countries could go downhill. But, historically, usually when one country is in decline, somewhere else on the globe another is rising. For global society as a whole to collapse, across all countries and continents - that would be something that has…

Everything is very tightly connected now. Products and food are produced very far away and does an impressive bit of traveling during assembly. It's a supper efficient approach but not very robust. It is hard to get an idea of the knowledge hidden/locked in proprietary property but one can expect it to be truly advanced. It would take decades to replicate for other companies.

One of the things that has surprised me about the pandemic is how well these systems have held up. There are shortages of some goods, PPE in particular but on the whole our systems have continued working. We haven't been raiding our neighbours for food, if anything it's been the opposite.

Re: Collapse OS – bootstrap post-collapse technology

#48

Post by reitzensteinm »

nradov wrote: post #30
omneity wrote: post #16

CollapseOS provides the computation substrate, but is anyone thinking about the kind of computations post apocalyptic communities / individuals might be needing to run? I imagine things like ledgers, basic simulations, farming yield prediction... I couldn't find design documents besides the technical constraints it is willing to be compatible with.

We will need to calculate ballistics tables for our trebuchets in order to lay siege to neighboring towns.

Are there any works of fiction like this? A broadly competent medieval society that has scarce supplies of recovered present day technology.

There is no end to post apocalyptic fiction but usually it's set fairly soon after the collapse, or the technology uncovered is mysterious and futuristic.

Good chance I'm outing myself as an infrequent reader of science fiction asking this!

Re: Collapse OS – bootstrap post-collapse technology

#49

Post by RodgerTheGreat »

jart wrote: post #39

If anyone would prefer to write LISP rather than FORTH, I wrote a similar project that would let you dust the ashes off any post-apocalyptic x86 machine and run John McCarthy's metacircular evaluator in nearly 512 bytes. https://github.com/jart/sectorlisp

Without any access to system resources, you wouldn't be able to bootstrap from a tiny Lisp kernel to a richer system. A sector-sized Lisp (when you eventually get it down to that size) is a neat project, but something of a closed system.

Part of the magic of a minimalist Forth environment is that they come with primitives for accessing raw memory, the stacks, and facilities for extending the language. You can build new parsing words, interface with hardware, and so on.

Re: Collapse OS – bootstrap post-collapse technology

#50

Post by ncmncm »

cbozeman wrote: post #41
ncmncm wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Collapse by 2030 is entirely possible under unsurprising circumstances. I rate it as near 50% likelihood, increasing rapidly after: As climate disruption increases, crop failures in tropical and subtropical countries result in mass migration, first to cities and then toward wealthy temperate countries. Temperate countries react by electing fascist governments to repel refugees. Fascist governments start wars (as they…

Looking forward to coming back here in 10 years...

I hope you are right. But I don't see anything happening to inspire confidence.
Post reply on HN