11 ms·

Collapse OS – bootstrap post-collapse technology

213 points by rewir 6y ago

crmrc114 6y ago
I like the honesty on https://collapseos.org/civ.html https://collapseos.org/civ.html but I get a very John Titor vibe from the author- To be honest if we have the collapse he envisions I think most people would be too worried about food to care about bootstrapping something on random hardware. However cyberpunk or fallout cool the idea is... still, was a fun read.
- neartheplain 6y ago
  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. Inconsistencies in his explanations, the uniform inaccuracy of his predictions, and a private investigator's findings all led to the general impression that the entire episode was an elaborate hoax. Sounds more than a bit like QAnon, at least in design if not reach or effect.
  - vlovich123 6y ago
    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 fundamentally don’t understand the level of gullibility involved that’s needed to buy into a story like that (like I get it exists but I just can’t understand the mentality that leads there). It’s also likely why astrology, religion, and wild unbelievable conspiracy theories take hold in our society (I like my conspiracy theories to have what I consider a more plausible down-to-earth premise). I wonder what the evolutionary advantage there is for the duality in society. Is it really just as simple that the primitive “what if it could be true” is good for helping you avoid danger and the “that’s not a plausible line of thinking” helping better locate real world opportunities are the two engines for our success as a species? And that the misapplication is just a trait that’s not useful in a comparatively peaceful time (and the tension ironically brings about the reduction of peace time?).
    - throwaway316943 6y ago
      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.
  - aruggirello 6y ago
    HN thread also worth reading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22558182 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22558182
  - QuesnayJr 6y ago
    I was just wondering if people ever claim to be time travelers from the future, and if so what kind of reception they get.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  His expectations ("predictions"?) are predicated on three things: climate-change, peak-oil and "cultural bankruptcy". I understand the most realistic scenarios for climate-change do indeed suck for everyone involved, but won't lead to mass human extinction - and the predictions of "water wars" were not grounded in realpolitk. Of peak-oil being a harbinger of imminent societal collapse is immediately bunk: the world's economically leading countries and supranationals have already put in place plans for post-oil sustainability - such as fossil-fuel car sale bans within 10 years. Furthermore Covid has demonstrated that society carries on functioning when air-travel is cut to a fraction of its former volume - leaving only international shipping and road-haulage as the remaining oil consumers without a decent post-oil plan yet - but it's demonstrable that there's plenty of oil left to keep those services running for decades with current proven reserves - considerably more-so with the expected end of gas-powered cars within a couple of decades. The author's definition of "cultural bankruptcy" seems to be "the US is exporting individualism to the world, which will mean an inevitable decline to non-cooperation and (insert your preferred game-theory metaphor here)". Whatever one may think of that, he doesn't establish a reasoned connection between the two - just hand-waving. I think the author just has an anxiety disorder that needs better management.
skissane 6y ago
On https://collapseos.org/why.html 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"?
- jolmg 6y ago
  Doesn't really matter. The project's value doesn't require the collapse to happen by then or any specific time. In any case, the author found value for themselves in building their project even if the collapse never happens: > But nevertheless, this idea seems too powerful to not try it. And even if it proves futile, it's a lot of fun to try.
  - skissane 6y ago
    I'm not saying the project is without value; I think if the author or others find educational/aesthetic/recreational/etc benefit from it, that's great. It is like TempleOS. Not useful for its purported purpose of communicating with God, but nonetheless interesting and valuable as an example of a single person developing a programming language and OS, which even has a few novel ideas in it.
    - jolmg 6y ago
      Except this one could serve its purported purpose, even if a collapse doesn't happen by 2030. A collapse doesn't even need to happen ever. As I see it, its purpose is to be available as a safety net.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Probably the latter. Doesn't mean he will be wrong, though. I really don't get people's optimism here. This is not some doomsday prophecy divined from religious texts. It's a trend in the data - if nothing significantly changes, we're headed for a crash in the coming decades. It's like watching a program with a memory leak - you see it ticking up in its memory usage, knowing that when it approaches 100%, it will crash. Oh, it didn't, because Haber-Bosch^W^Wthere was a swap drive? Well, the swap space isn't infinite either. Sure, maybe skyrocketing oil prices won't crash the economy (though people seem to forget that oil isn't just fuel and energy, but also anything made from plastics - i.e. just about everything). But something else will give (likely the habitability of this planet). We need to step off the exponent, or ride it to space. But we can't fit it on Earth much longer.
stolenmerch 6y ago
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 up on computing and go back to more primitive technology. If I can't get a single thing delivered, I see myself collecting rainwater and gardening, not compiling Forth to an old Z80.
- smaddox 6y ago
  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.
  - NegativeLatency 6y ago
    I suspect you could scrounge materials for a nickel iron battery without too much trouble.
- Anarch157a 6y ago
  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.
  - emteycz 6y ago
    Alternators are also trivial to build by hand.
    - mauvehaus 6y ago
CivBase 6y ago
I like it. It's like having a small fire extinguisher in your kitchen. Hopefully you'll never need it. Most likely you wont. But if you ever do, you'll be glad it's there. Are there any other projects out there like this?
camdenlock 6y ago
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 predicting what the economics of oil extraction will be in the near future. As it turns out, finding and extracting oil becomes way cheaper, and different categories of extraction tech emerge. The lights stay on, and more people write about the NEXT energy collapse which is totally going to happen. Also, am I missing something, or does he really not even consider nuclear power? It just seems like such an odd hyperbolic and ungrounded argument overall.
- analyte123 6y ago
  I love the project too, but even if we’re at peak oil (demand) there are still dozens of unexplored or barely touched shale basins around the world. Peak gas is a long way off. And oil & gas infrastructure doesn’t just “rot away” in a year or two due to a pandemic, or it would have already rotted due to the periodic busts that crash the rig count just as much. It’s interesting how people’s reasons for the impending doom differ with their political leaning. Left leaning people will say we’re running out of resources and soon to be inundated with melted ice caps because we’re too individualistic. Right leaning people say we’re going to turn into Idiocracy because of poor breeding and easy living because there’s too much welfare and immigration.
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    It's tricky though, right, because these sorts of societal collapses do happen! We've seen them many times throughout history. I think the pure numbers indicate that the next one probably won't happen in my lifetime (good), but I do think it will happen! What makes us think our society is special?
    - skissane 6y ago
      > 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 never happened before. I don’t even know if we can put a probability on it - how do you determine the probability of something happening if it has never happened before?
analyte123 6y ago
This could be useful even outside of the global collapse that the creator fears. Imagine a sanctioned country or separatist region that was both completely cut off from the internet and also had all of their computers remotely bricked by remote management engine, malware, or EMP. Maybe the chips in their weapons and radios are shielded and working for now, but how would they bootstrap a new development environment?
- swirepe 6y ago
  >how would they bootstrap a new development environment? The worst part of the collapse is going to be remembering everything in my vimrc file
omneity 6y ago
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.
- nradov 6y ago
  We will need to calculate ballistics tables for our trebuchets in order to lay siege to neighboring towns.
  - reitzensteinm 6y ago
    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!
    - ForHackernews 6y ago
      It's not quite a medieval society, but The Windup Girl https://www.goodreads.com/cs/book/show/6597651-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.
      - pnutjam 6y ago
        His Shipbreaker series is really good too. other authors: The world made by hand, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1689657.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 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/128533.Eternity_Road
agumonkey 6y ago
Makes me wonder what's the cheapest most efficient application class chip out there. Esp8266 ? I assume it's not the best but I'm not too aware of the MCU world.
- parsecs 6y ago
  It's always a multi dimensional spectrum of cost, performance, peripherals, development support, availability, family reach, etc. I personally really like STM8 microcontrollers for their simplicity and very low cost (can be less than 30 cents). There's actually another project that brings Forth to STM8: https://github.com/TG9541/stm8ef https://github.com/TG9541/stm8ef It has very good documentation and I recommend anyone to take a look
- gruturo 6y ago
  Today, probably the ESP32 is the most bang for the buck - unless there's something more cost competitive and equally widespread, which didn't come to my mind. Notably, an ESP32 based on RISC-V is due shortly, with an expected price of $1. Wifi, BT5+BLE, 400KB ram (which may not be enough for everybody, but it's close), 22 GPIO's, a single 32-bit RISC-V core running at 160Mhz. https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/12/20/esp32-c3-wifi-ble-risc-v-processor-esp8266-price/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/12/20/esp32-c3-wifi-ble-ri...
wallacoloo 6y ago
Love this sort of thing, though less for the post-collapse aspect and more for the dependency-free nature, which provides a certain amount of freedom. I don’t like that seemingly all accessible bootstrapped projects still rely on non-bootstrappable silicon (like the 8086 here). Does anyone know of an effort to bootstrap the actual computational substrate (i.e. the silicon, or something which serves the same purpose but isn’t silicon)?
- bosco_tm 6y ago
  Could you explain why the 8086 is "non-bootstrappable silicon" please? Or what you mean by "bootstrap the actual computational substrate"? Thanks.
  - pmiller2 6y ago
    I think those are both referring to the fact that without some very sophisticated manufacturing processes and equipment, it's not possible to build an 8086 to begin with. Once we're at a point of societal collapse, we would, presumably, need to begin re-climbing the tech tree at a lower level and work ourselves up to 8086s again. So, we would need to start with computers we could actually build in order to get there.
jzer0cool 6y ago
Feels a bit like something of becoming. A new successor to ham radio for the tech and internet. Love the idea.
neartheplain 6y ago
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?
- Gaelan 6y ago
  Just Wikipedia would be huge.
  - ben_w 6y ago
    “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
    - dharmab 6y ago
      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?
      - ben_w 6y ago
        Much as I enjoy seeing old machines on the modern web [0], they’re still the wrong tool for the job and the wrong job for the tool. We did useful stuff with computers even back in the 60s when transistors were the technobabble plot device for how Iron Man could fly [1]; we just used them to calculate solutions rather than as electronic libraries. [0] https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/File:ContikiBreadbox64.png https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/File:ContikiBreadbox64.png [1] https://comicbooktheblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/iron-man-and-transistors.html?m=1 https://comicbooktheblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/iron-man-and-t...
dang 6y ago
If curious see also 2020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23450287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23450287 2020 (a bit) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22901002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22901002 2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21182628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21182628 Sharp readers of the FAQ* will note that those 2020 posts mean we should really mark this one as a dupe, but there's something so perfect about prepping meeting operating systems and the language being Forth...I just can't do it. * https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
- rewir 6y ago
  It wasn't posted this year yet. ;)
NegativeLatency 6y ago
No love for the Motorola 68k series?
jart 6y ago
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 https://github.com/jart/sectorlisp
- RodgerTheGreat 6y ago
  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.
forgotmypw17 6y ago
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.
drKarl 6y ago
I think Secure Scuttlebutt would be an awesome technology for a post-collapse world... I see how travellers arriving to a settlement could spread the updates of the network offline using the Gossip protocol, thus bringing news from far away.
nakeru 6y ago
I don't fully get the reason for this project. Does it consider that you (or your community) will build a computer from scratch? In that case OK, I don't know enough but I guess an 8 bit simple computer makes sense, as long as it's something you can build using cables, LEDs and a breadboard. If the idea is that you gather already manufactured parts, wouldn't it be better to just use some cheap SOC computers like the Raspberry Pi? They're low on power consumption, so powering them wouldn't be much of an issue, and it has greater, easier to use, software. It would also allow you to have things like a copy of useful Wikipedia articles, videos, photos, etc. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the project goal though.
kreeben 6y ago
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 and hard about the choices I've made in my career that would essentially render me as useless as my mom when it comes to rebuilding the internet, since the only programming language I know really well is C#. Because we would have limited resources a post-apocalyptic internet would almost certainly not be built on something like dotnet. My plan is to read the news very carefully and quickly throw myself at a C tutorial as soon as I feel an apocalypse coming on.
- notjustanymike 6y ago
  The most likely networked computers to survive will be banking computers, so time to brush up on your... <checks notes>...Fortran? Oh dear. Nevermind, I'll just be a raider.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    With some luck you are going to find a prepper basement with a Raspberry Pi cluster.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  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.
- JNRowe 6y ago
  There is a nice subplot in After the End - Survival¹ that deals with this. In it a well respected cardiologist finds himself useless post collapse, and is suffering from obvious minor medical problems. ¹ https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25061009-after-the-end---survival https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25061009-after-the-end--...
ThinkBeat 6y ago
Thinking about this is interesting if you go with premise the author uses. (to the extent I understand it. Which might be entirely wrong) The farther we progress techologically the less can be salvaged in the aftermath of a collapse. I have done a bit of manual soldering earlier in my life. This was simple stuff but I switched out memory chips. Switched out ROMS (only way to update some machines) Primarily, zx81 (that you could get as a kit) zx spectrum and then what I consider my first real computer the Atari ST. I have not performed any such surgery since my ST. Looking at motherboards if various types we have now requires a lot more precision to “fix” If you found 3 broken motherboards for the latest version of an I9 it would I think be difficult to cannibalize. Parts to get one working motherboard. One these old computers it would be possible. I presume that is one of the reasons the author talks about the z80. I am very familiar with the generations Sinclair used. And there are genuinely massive amounts of them in various less sexy roles as controllers for electric appliances. I wonder how far in the Intel PC evolution one could realistically salvage and make Frankenstein computers out of. Storage would be a problem. Hard disks are complicated and prone to fail more so after a collapse I am sure. Getting production of floppy drives going is not trivial either Say the collapse hapoens in 20 years there will not be easy to find huge collections of 3.5 5 or 8 disks Casette takes are also getting rare. Though some appear to think it retro and it is making a comeback now. VHS tapes would be nice.
wejick 6y ago
Is there any hyperscaler that publicly disclose that they run centos?
beprogrammed 6y ago
Can't wait to use it.

213 points by rewir 6y ago

I like the honesty on https://collapseos.org/civ.html https://collapseos.org/civ.html but I get a very John Titor vibe from the author- To be honest if we have the collapse he envisions I think most people would be too worried about food to care about bootstrapping something on random hardware. However cyberpunk or fallout cool the idea is... still, was a fun read.

neartheplain 6y ago
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. Inconsistencies in his explanations, the uniform inaccuracy of his predictions, and a private investigator's findings all led to the general impression that the entire episode was an elaborate hoax. Sounds more than a bit like QAnon, at least in design if not reach or effect.
- vlovich123 6y ago
  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 fundamentally don’t understand the level of gullibility involved that’s needed to buy into a story like that (like I get it exists but I just can’t understand the mentality that leads there). It’s also likely why astrology, religion, and wild unbelievable conspiracy theories take hold in our society (I like my conspiracy theories to have what I consider a more plausible down-to-earth premise). I wonder what the evolutionary advantage there is for the duality in society. Is it really just as simple that the primitive “what if it could be true” is good for helping you avoid danger and the “that’s not a plausible line of thinking” helping better locate real world opportunities are the two engines for our success as a species? And that the misapplication is just a trait that’s not useful in a comparatively peaceful time (and the tension ironically brings about the reduction of peace time?).
  - throwaway316943 6y ago
    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.
- aruggirello 6y ago
  HN thread also worth reading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22558182 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22558182
- QuesnayJr 6y ago
  I was just wondering if people ever claim to be time travelers from the future, and if so what kind of reception they get.
DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
His expectations ("predictions"?) are predicated on three things: climate-change, peak-oil and "cultural bankruptcy". I understand the most realistic scenarios for climate-change do indeed suck for everyone involved, but won't lead to mass human extinction - and the predictions of "water wars" were not grounded in realpolitk. Of peak-oil being a harbinger of imminent societal collapse is immediately bunk: the world's economically leading countries and supranationals have already put in place plans for post-oil sustainability - such as fossil-fuel car sale bans within 10 years. Furthermore Covid has demonstrated that society carries on functioning when air-travel is cut to a fraction of its former volume - leaving only international shipping and road-haulage as the remaining oil consumers without a decent post-oil plan yet - but it's demonstrable that there's plenty of oil left to keep those services running for decades with current proven reserves - considerably more-so with the expected end of gas-powered cars within a couple of decades. The author's definition of "cultural bankruptcy" seems to be "the US is exporting individualism to the world, which will mean an inevitable decline to non-cooperation and (insert your preferred game-theory metaphor here)". Whatever one may think of that, he doesn't establish a reasoned connection between the two - just hand-waving. I think the author just has an anxiety disorder that needs better management.

skissane 6y ago

On https://collapseos.org/why.html 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"?

jolmg 6y ago
Doesn't really matter. The project's value doesn't require the collapse to happen by then or any specific time. In any case, the author found value for themselves in building their project even if the collapse never happens: > But nevertheless, this idea seems too powerful to not try it. And even if it proves futile, it's a lot of fun to try.
- skissane 6y ago
  I'm not saying the project is without value; I think if the author or others find educational/aesthetic/recreational/etc benefit from it, that's great. It is like TempleOS. Not useful for its purported purpose of communicating with God, but nonetheless interesting and valuable as an example of a single person developing a programming language and OS, which even has a few novel ideas in it.
  - jolmg 6y ago
    Except this one could serve its purported purpose, even if a collapse doesn't happen by 2030. A collapse doesn't even need to happen ever. As I see it, its purpose is to be available as a safety net.
TeMPOraL 6y ago
Probably the latter. Doesn't mean he will be wrong, though. I really don't get people's optimism here. This is not some doomsday prophecy divined from religious texts. It's a trend in the data - if nothing significantly changes, we're headed for a crash in the coming decades. It's like watching a program with a memory leak - you see it ticking up in its memory usage, knowing that when it approaches 100%, it will crash. Oh, it didn't, because Haber-Bosch^W^Wthere was a swap drive? Well, the swap space isn't infinite either. Sure, maybe skyrocketing oil prices won't crash the economy (though people seem to forget that oil isn't just fuel and energy, but also anything made from plastics - i.e. just about everything). But something else will give (likely the habitability of this planet). We need to step off the exponent, or ride it to space. But we can't fit it on Earth much longer.

stolenmerch 6y ago

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 up on computing and go back to more primitive technology. If I can't get a single thing delivered, I see myself collecting rainwater and gardening, not compiling Forth to an old Z80.

smaddox 6y ago
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.
- NegativeLatency 6y ago
  I suspect you could scrounge materials for a nickel iron battery without too much trouble.
Anarch157a 6y ago
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.
- emteycz 6y ago
  Alternators are also trivial to build by hand.
  - mauvehaus 6y ago

CivBase 6y ago

I like it. It's like having a small fire extinguisher in your kitchen. Hopefully you'll never need it. Most likely you wont. But if you ever do, you'll be glad it's there. Are there any other projects out there like this?

camdenlock 6y ago

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 predicting what the economics of oil extraction will be in the near future. As it turns out, finding and extracting oil becomes way cheaper, and different categories of extraction tech emerge. The lights stay on, and more people write about the NEXT energy collapse which is totally going to happen. Also, am I missing something, or does he really not even consider nuclear power? It just seems like such an odd hyperbolic and ungrounded argument overall.

analyte123 6y ago
I love the project too, but even if we’re at peak oil (demand) there are still dozens of unexplored or barely touched shale basins around the world. Peak gas is a long way off. And oil & gas infrastructure doesn’t just “rot away” in a year or two due to a pandemic, or it would have already rotted due to the periodic busts that crash the rig count just as much. It’s interesting how people’s reasons for the impending doom differ with their political leaning. Left leaning people will say we’re running out of resources and soon to be inundated with melted ice caps because we’re too individualistic. Right leaning people say we’re going to turn into Idiocracy because of poor breeding and easy living because there’s too much welfare and immigration.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  It's tricky though, right, because these sorts of societal collapses do happen! We've seen them many times throughout history. I think the pure numbers indicate that the next one probably won't happen in my lifetime (good), but I do think it will happen! What makes us think our society is special?
  - skissane 6y ago
    > 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 never happened before. I don’t even know if we can put a probability on it - how do you determine the probability of something happening if it has never happened before?

analyte123 6y ago

This could be useful even outside of the global collapse that the creator fears. Imagine a sanctioned country or separatist region that was both completely cut off from the internet and also had all of their computers remotely bricked by remote management engine, malware, or EMP. Maybe the chips in their weapons and radios are shielded and working for now, but how would they bootstrap a new development environment?

swirepe 6y ago
>how would they bootstrap a new development environment? The worst part of the collapse is going to be remembering everything in my vimrc file

omneity 6y ago

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.

nradov 6y ago
We will need to calculate ballistics tables for our trebuchets in order to lay siege to neighboring towns.
- reitzensteinm 6y ago
  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!
  - ForHackernews 6y ago
    It's not quite a medieval society, but The Windup Girl https://www.goodreads.com/cs/book/show/6597651-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.
    - pnutjam 6y ago
      His Shipbreaker series is really good too. other authors: The world made by hand, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1689657.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 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/128533.Eternity_Road

agumonkey 6y ago

Makes me wonder what's the cheapest most efficient application class chip out there. Esp8266 ? I assume it's not the best but I'm not too aware of the MCU world.

parsecs 6y ago
It's always a multi dimensional spectrum of cost, performance, peripherals, development support, availability, family reach, etc. I personally really like STM8 microcontrollers for their simplicity and very low cost (can be less than 30 cents). There's actually another project that brings Forth to STM8: https://github.com/TG9541/stm8ef https://github.com/TG9541/stm8ef It has very good documentation and I recommend anyone to take a look
gruturo 6y ago
Today, probably the ESP32 is the most bang for the buck - unless there's something more cost competitive and equally widespread, which didn't come to my mind. Notably, an ESP32 based on RISC-V is due shortly, with an expected price of $1. Wifi, BT5+BLE, 400KB ram (which may not be enough for everybody, but it's close), 22 GPIO's, a single 32-bit RISC-V core running at 160Mhz. https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/12/20/esp32-c3-wifi-ble-risc-v-processor-esp8266-price/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/12/20/esp32-c3-wifi-ble-ri...

wallacoloo 6y ago

Love this sort of thing, though less for the post-collapse aspect and more for the dependency-free nature, which provides a certain amount of freedom. I don’t like that seemingly all accessible bootstrapped projects still rely on non-bootstrappable silicon (like the 8086 here). Does anyone know of an effort to bootstrap the actual computational substrate (i.e. the silicon, or something which serves the same purpose but isn’t silicon)?

bosco_tm 6y ago
Could you explain why the 8086 is "non-bootstrappable silicon" please? Or what you mean by "bootstrap the actual computational substrate"? Thanks.
- pmiller2 6y ago
  I think those are both referring to the fact that without some very sophisticated manufacturing processes and equipment, it's not possible to build an 8086 to begin with. Once we're at a point of societal collapse, we would, presumably, need to begin re-climbing the tech tree at a lower level and work ourselves up to 8086s again. So, we would need to start with computers we could actually build in order to get there.

jzer0cool 6y ago

Feels a bit like something of becoming. A new successor to ham radio for the tech and internet. Love the idea.

neartheplain 6y ago

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?

Gaelan 6y ago
Just Wikipedia would be huge.
- ben_w 6y ago
  “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
  - dharmab 6y ago
    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?
    - ben_w 6y ago
      Much as I enjoy seeing old machines on the modern web [0], they’re still the wrong tool for the job and the wrong job for the tool. We did useful stuff with computers even back in the 60s when transistors were the technobabble plot device for how Iron Man could fly [1]; we just used them to calculate solutions rather than as electronic libraries. [0] https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/File:ContikiBreadbox64.png https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/File:ContikiBreadbox64.png [1] https://comicbooktheblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/iron-man-and-transistors.html?m=1 https://comicbooktheblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/iron-man-and-t...

dang 6y ago

If curious see also 2020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23450287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23450287 2020 (a bit) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22901002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22901002 2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21182628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21182628 Sharp readers of the FAQ* will note that those 2020 posts mean we should really mark this one as a dupe, but there's something so perfect about prepping meeting operating systems and the language being Forth...I just can't do it. * https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

rewir 6y ago
It wasn't posted this year yet. ;)

NegativeLatency 6y ago

No love for the Motorola 68k series?

jart 6y ago

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 https://github.com/jart/sectorlisp

RodgerTheGreat 6y ago
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.

forgotmypw17 6y ago

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.

drKarl 6y ago

I think Secure Scuttlebutt would be an awesome technology for a post-collapse world... I see how travellers arriving to a settlement could spread the updates of the network offline using the Gossip protocol, thus bringing news from far away.

nakeru 6y ago

I don't fully get the reason for this project. Does it consider that you (or your community) will build a computer from scratch? In that case OK, I don't know enough but I guess an 8 bit simple computer makes sense, as long as it's something you can build using cables, LEDs and a breadboard. If the idea is that you gather already manufactured parts, wouldn't it be better to just use some cheap SOC computers like the Raspberry Pi? They're low on power consumption, so powering them wouldn't be much of an issue, and it has greater, easier to use, software. It would also allow you to have things like a copy of useful Wikipedia articles, videos, photos, etc. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the project goal though.

kreeben 6y ago

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 and hard about the choices I've made in my career that would essentially render me as useless as my mom when it comes to rebuilding the internet, since the only programming language I know really well is C#. Because we would have limited resources a post-apocalyptic internet would almost certainly not be built on something like dotnet. My plan is to read the news very carefully and quickly throw myself at a C tutorial as soon as I feel an apocalypse coming on.

notjustanymike 6y ago
The most likely networked computers to survive will be banking computers, so time to brush up on your... <checks notes>...Fortran? Oh dear. Nevermind, I'll just be a raider.
- imtringued 6y ago
  With some luck you are going to find a prepper basement with a Raspberry Pi cluster.
koheripbal 6y ago
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.
JNRowe 6y ago
There is a nice subplot in After the End - Survival¹ that deals with this. In it a well respected cardiologist finds himself useless post collapse, and is suffering from obvious minor medical problems. ¹ https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25061009-after-the-end---survival https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25061009-after-the-end--...

ThinkBeat 6y ago

Thinking about this is interesting if you go with premise the author uses. (to the extent I understand it. Which might be entirely wrong) The farther we progress techologically the less can be salvaged in the aftermath of a collapse. I have done a bit of manual soldering earlier in my life. This was simple stuff but I switched out memory chips. Switched out ROMS (only way to update some machines) Primarily, zx81 (that you could get as a kit) zx spectrum and then what I consider my first real computer the Atari ST. I have not performed any such surgery since my ST. Looking at motherboards if various types we have now requires a lot more precision to “fix” If you found 3 broken motherboards for the latest version of an I9 it would I think be difficult to cannibalize. Parts to get one working motherboard. One these old computers it would be possible. I presume that is one of the reasons the author talks about the z80. I am very familiar with the generations Sinclair used. And there are genuinely massive amounts of them in various less sexy roles as controllers for electric appliances. I wonder how far in the Intel PC evolution one could realistically salvage and make Frankenstein computers out of. Storage would be a problem. Hard disks are complicated and prone to fail more so after a collapse I am sure. Getting production of floppy drives going is not trivial either Say the collapse hapoens in 20 years there will not be easy to find huge collections of 3.5 5 or 8 disks Casette takes are also getting rare. Though some appear to think it retro and it is making a comeback now. VHS tapes would be nice.

wejick 6y ago

Is there any hyperscaler that publicly disclose that they run centos?

beprogrammed 6y ago

Can't wait to use it.