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Collapse OS – bootstrap post-collapse technology

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Re: Collapse OS – bootstrap post-collapse technology

#91

Post by pnutjam »

ForHackernews wrote: post #61
reitzensteinm wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

It's not quite a medieval society, but The Windup Girl https://www.goodreads.com/cs/book/show/6597651-the-windup-gi... feature a post-climate change world where most energy comes from beasts of burden, but there are still a few rare computers and staggeringly expensive carbon-fuelled vehicles.

His Shipbreaker series is really good too. other authors: The world made by hand, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1689657.World_Made_by_Ha...

Eternity Road, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/128533.Eternity_Road

Re: Collapse OS – bootstrap post-collapse technology

#92

Post by throwaway316943 »

vlovich123 wrote: post #40
neartheplain wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just looked up John Titor on Wikipedia: John Titor is a name used on several bulletin boards during 2000 and 2001 by a poster claiming to be an American military time traveler from 2036. Titor made numerous vague and specific predictions regarding calamitous events in 2004 and beyond, including a nuclear war, none of which came true. Subsequent closer examination of Titor's assertions provoked widespread skepticism.…

The favorite part of this story for me was this: > ... [various debunked predictions] led to the general impression that the entire episode was an elaborate hoax. Whereas this > by a poster claiming to be an American military time traveler from 2036. Wasn’t the thing. Could be everyone was trolling but some of the commenters really seemed like true believers egged on by the trolls (kind of like flat earthers). I just…

It isn’t a matter of some people being gullible and others aren’t, everyone is gullible in this sense but a lot depends on prior experience, knowledge, peer groups and a lot of other factors. Trolls and conmen play a big part in building a cohesive narrative for fun and profit. People who are looking for a community gravitate to things like this and are easily influenced due to their lack of a counter balancing force in their lives (friends, community, work, faith, etc.). It becomes the thing they live for, part of the story of their life and a framework they use to understand the world. The scary thing is a lot of the world works this way and only varies in quality and pervasiveness. It’s the air we breath so it’s hard to get perspective on. How can you know for sure that something is true if it is beyond your means to verify? You have to appeal to authority or the majority. We do this with practically everything in our lives out of necessity, it’s impossible to vet everything. Most of it is valid and based on widely distributed independent verification. But there are messy areas where either this isn’t possible or where there is strong motivation to argue for a particular view. Politics and religion are pervaded by unverifiable claims and opinions. But it reaches into every aspect of life where there is uncertainty, money or an axe to grind.

Re: Collapse OS – bootstrap post-collapse technology

#93

Post by ForHackernews »

pnutjam wrote: post #91
ForHackernews wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not quite a medieval society, but The Windup Girl https://www.goodreads.com/cs/book/show/6597651-the-windup-gi... feature a post-climate change world where most energy comes from beasts of burden, but there are still a few rare computers and staggeringly expensive carbon-fuelled vehicles.

His Shipbreaker series is really good too. other authors: The world made by hand, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1689657.World_Made_by_Ha... Eternity Road, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/128533.Eternity_Road

Perhaps worth mentioning that Ship Breaker is YA fiction, and it shows IMHO.

Re: Collapse OS – bootstrap post-collapse technology

#94

Post by dharmab »

pmiller2 wrote: post #71
dejv wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the machinery both industrial and in home are now computer controlled. Things like furnaces, CNC machining centers and lathes.

I'm looking around at all my home "machinery," and I don't see anything essential that is computer controlled. I have an ordinary gas furnace heating it; a plain old gas stove for cooking; a refrigerator that's got a plain analog temperature control; a boring, mechanical toilet based on technology that's hundreds of years old; and simple, mechanical valves that control the flow of water through my pipes. The things I…

Your thermostat uses a microcontroller to run your furnace.

https://youtu.be/ZZC0SP02PqY

Re: Collapse OS – bootstrap post-collapse technology

#95

Post by dharmab »

ben_w wrote: post #44
Gaelan wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ver…

You don’t need the entire dataset to be addressable. Just a working set. How do you think we played 20GB video games on our Pentium 4s?

Re: Collapse OS – bootstrap post-collapse technology

#96

Post by curryst »

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?

> Can assemble Z80, AVR and 8086 binaries.

Quick Googling says that most modern x86 chips should be able to run 8086 binaries. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

> And if your post-collapse computer can’t read PDFs or play videos, how much useful preserved information can you really access?

Most websites that don't use JS to load the important content. It's also worth noting that there doesn't seem to be any way to connect normal mass storage devices. It can read from floppies and SD cards. Some people still have floppies, but I would have to imagine there's a lot more useful information laying around on SATA drives.

It doesn't matter if it can read PDFs or play videos if you can't read the storage devices those are on.

Re: Collapse OS – bootstrap post-collapse technology

#97

Post by pmiller2 »

dharmab wrote: post #94
pmiller2 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm looking around at all my home "machinery," and I don't see anything essential that is computer controlled. I have an ordinary gas furnace heating it; a plain old gas stove for cooking; a refrigerator that's got a plain analog temperature control; a boring, mechanical toilet based on technology that's hundreds of years old; and simple, mechanical valves that control the flow of water through my pipes. The things I…

Your thermostat uses a microcontroller to run your furnace. https://youtu.be/ZZC0SP02PqY

Nope. I’ve got one of the old, mechanical thermostats with an analog dial and a bimetallic strip that completes a circuit to run the heater. My apartment building is about 50 years old, and I’m pretty sure it’s still the original equipment. They’re so simple they just don’t wear out.

Re: Collapse OS – bootstrap post-collapse technology

#98

Post by pratik661 »

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…

This doesn't really need to be hypothetical. There are plenty of contemporary and recent examples of countries experiencing collapse: Syria + Libya in the 2010s, Yemen now, etc.

Re: Collapse OS – bootstrap post-collapse technology

#99

Post by koheripbal »

kreeben wrote: post #70

I imagine that if an apocalypse occurs during our era, the internet era, our first main technological endeavor would be to build an internet out of scraps of hardware we would find sprinkled almost homogeneously all over earth (phones, old C64's etc) so that we could once again start organizing ourselves and reach out to our fellow human beings and in this reoccurring daydream of mine I always end up thinking long an…

Most programmers (myself included) are incapable of doing even the most basic things without googling them. We need an offline storage of StackExchange and it's subdomains.

Re: Collapse OS – bootstrap post-collapse technology

#100

Post by fractallyte »

pjc50 wrote: post #66
crocodiletears wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In most reasonable collapse scenarios I could imagine, energy isn't so much a technological concern as it might be a political concern. Slightly scarcer perhaps, but there's a ubiquity of old alternators, plenty of shit to burn, and I guarantee the extractive industries will be among the first to come online, if they ever went out in the first place, and can be coaxed to function in a degraded state without globalize…

> energy isn't so much a technological concern as it might be a political concern This is what irks me about these kinds of "collapse fantasy". Somebody described the apocalypse novels of John Wyndham (Day of the Triffids etc) as "cosy catastrophe", and that very much applies here. The laser focus on technological detail-hoarding while having blinders on to any consideration of the politics of the situation, or what…

It was Brian Aldiss who coined that description, and I despise it. It's as though he never actually read any of Wyndham's books...
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