Their philosophy makes me think they should just use Windows XP/7 or something and call it a day. Offline first? “past-proofing”? These are desktop and console programs where the OS vendors have spent onerous amounts of capital to maintain backward API compatibility. In other words: Windows and Win32, and nothing but. Everything else, including the Web, has been broken and deprecated several times over.
> Dusk OS is a 32-bit Forth and big brother to Collapse OS. 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.
more generally, collapseos is cosplay, not engineering
in more detail, collapseos is not a pragmatic
engineering effort to foster resiliency, but an
essentially religious effort to atone for the sins of
the worldly through ascetic renunciation of pleasures
such as guis, returning to an imagined arcadian past of
austere virtue
that URL leads directly to what looks like the contents of a .git directory (so, all the metainformation but no project directory listing)
I'm curious because I buy this comment more than their mission statement, although I absolutely agree with their stance on the "longevity/maintainability problem" in software and hardware.
but as soon as I saw the ranting about colonialism I was like "oh... basically, anarchist anti-capitalists"
as soon as they have kids, they will quickly abandon their non-acquisition of resources stance, LOL
collapseos isn't a 100r thing, and i haven't seen anything from virgil that sounds like an anarchist anti-capitalist. i have a lot of sympathies for the anarchist anti-capitalist point of view although personally i've suffered a lot more harm from anti-capitalism than from capitalism
I have sympathies for it too. But I am also not at all surprised by your "harmed more by anti-caps than caps" statement.
The funny thing about having a kid (he's 3) is that you are forced to re-evaluate all your values and preconceived notions to see what it is you really want to transmit to your kid.
well, i live in argentina, see, so i've had the opportunity to live under an anti-capitalist government. if you've only lived in a society where capitalists have all the power then it would be unsurprising if the powerless anti-capitalists haven't harmed you
There's something ironic about condemning someone for "ascetic renunciation of pleasures such as guis" and publishing it as a Markdown file available only by cloning a git repo.
the markdown file does say that this point of view resonates with me ;)
there are other advantages as well. if someone clones the git repo, they'll still be able to read it after i die and my site goes down; and there's no incentive for anyone to pressure me to rewrite history by deleting things from it, which is a thing that has happened to me in the past, since i can't delete them from remote clones
I'm somewhat surprised that this is your take on the project.
I agree with some of it in modified form, such as pointing out that far more powerful systems like old Android phones are sitting around in great quantity and would be a useful scavenge for a complete CollapseOS. In fact that seems to be what DuskOS is about, I'll be interested in your take on that once you have one.
But those are not microcontrollers, and what microcontrollers do can't be replaced by sticking a JTAG on an abandoned Android and calling it a day. Your take on the availability for scavenge of 6502s is simply incorrect, Western Digital, who should know, says annual production is in the hundreds of millions, joining the estimated 5 to 10 billion which already exist. https://www.westerndesigncenter.com/wdc/
It strikes me as a quixotic, but worthwhile, investment in civilizational insurance. I don't disagree about the motive at all, but it seems like a useful outlet for that sort of angst. If he keeps at it long enough I would hope he'll support a few more chips, and that seems likely, as I remember a time when it was Z80 only. Variants on that chip exist in their billions as well, although the original was taken off the market, hmm. This April.
i'm surprised to hear 6502s are being produced in quantity! thank you for the correction. any idea what they are used in? i've never found one ripping apart a tv, vcr, printer, dvd player, vacuum cleaner, power supply, radio, lab data recorder, washing machine, etc. i've found 8051 clones, 68000s, weird epson microcontrollers without a publicly documented instruction set, pals, z80 clones with dsp bolted on, and i've seen other people report pics and stm32s, but never a 6502 except in the drean brand commodore 64 i have here
looking on digikey i can't find any 6502 or 65c02 parts, although there are a couple of sbcs like https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/olimex-ltd/NEO650.... digikey of course doesn't have everything, but they're usually an okay indicator of what is popular
i agree that android phones cannot substitute for microcontrollers! their cortex-a cpus can't guarantee hard real-time responsiveness. and i agree with virgil's point that microcontrollers are very important for practical everyday things. and 6502s make perfectly good microcontrollers, albeit more power-hungry than designs fabbed in a smaller feature size, and requiring external memory
while the z80 itself is no longer made, plenty of clones of it are, and a z80 is also perfectly fine as a microcontroller, and a 6502 or z80 is close to the smallest machine on which a self-hosting development environment is feasible
I've been unable to find a reference for this bit of lore, but I'm told that the typical traffic light has one, if built after the mid-90s.
They were also quite widespread in LCD games, the Tamagotchi used one, Furby, later-model Tiger handhelds, that sort of thing. There are a great many product numbers and variations, because it was widely licensed. Keyboards, computer mice, lots of things.
Digikey has the W65C02SXB, the NEO6502, the W65C02S, and I'm sure there are more in there somewhere. In a scavenge scenario, just figuring out what speaks the ISA would be challenging, but I'm picturing our plucky heroes getting the hang of it after awhile. And of course a Forth like in CollapseOS has an advantage in that adding words to take advantage of extended instructions is practical.
It looks like the project is converging on "OS that runs on comfortable hardware, which can serve as a hub for and talk to the microcontrollers which join the baling wire in holding remnant technology together" which is a more interesting vision of the future, although just as grimdark as it ever was.
> WDC has licensed our 65xx technology to a number of companies over our long history including MOS Tech, Rockwell, GTE, CMD and many others.
rockwell, mos technologies, and cmd don't exist since 02001, gte since 02000. i suspect this page hasn't been updated in quite a while, maybe since last millennium, and possibly if they were ever making hundreds of millions per year they aren't now. https://wdc65xx.com/where-to-buyhas been updated and has their current stock numbers, which total under 31000 for all their microcontrollers and microprocessors, which would be 8 hours of stock if they were making a hundred million per year. a hundred thousand seems more plausible
digi-key doesn't actually have the w65c02sxb, which is an eval board. that's a 'marketplace product' meaning that digi-key just sends your order to another seller, in this case wdc. they do have 5 units of the w65c02s and 17 units of the neo6502, which are eval boards from olimex. no bare chips
as for the furby, it used the spc81a, a 6502 clone that lacks the y register. more importantly, though, the spc81a is evidently mask-programmed and lacks any apparent way to get it to use external memory. so it's probably useless as a microcontroller to scavenge. the same can be said of keyboard and mouse controllers: although conceivably they might use a 6502 instruction set, they aren't of any use if you can't reprogram them
i can't find any information on tiger electronics handheld games hardware, but given that they designed the furby, i suspect the story will be the same there: game in rom, not enough pins for a memory bus (though you can use the spc81a's i/o ports to control an external bit-serial memory; the datasheet suggests an spi ram)
as for traffic lights, the last traffic light controller i saw open was electromechanical, no visible electronics beyond diodes, so i don't think you're going to be salvaging very many microcontrollers from traffic light controllers; there are too few per population and their replacement lifetime is too long
a vision i think is a lot more appealing is self-sufficient microcontrollers. cp/m was perfectly capable of self-hosting, although dec machines gave it its initial bootstrap. a 4-megahertz z80 was perfectly adequate for assembling the bios, bdos, and command processor, despite having only something like 0.5 8-bit mips and 0.05 dhrystone mips (https://netlib.org/performan...
PS. For many XP was some sort of "sweetspot", as far as Win OSs are concerned.-
PS. Then again, it depends. How much evidence of "past-proof"-ness do you need - in terms of "backstory" to meet that requirement? Linux, or - even better - some BSD variants go way further back.-
Windows has become a garbage pile of spyware lately, but even Linux can't really compare to the insane level of backwards compatibility Windows offers.
> even Linux can't really compare to the insane level of backwards compatibility Windows offers.
My experience is quite the opposite. I still play the Windows Entertainment Pack version of Tetris. In Linux, thanks to Wine, it just works. In Windows 10, I'm told to contact the publisher for a new version.
Emulators tend to be better for compatibility than live systems. Did you try using Wine on windows? And if you take a similar-vintage Linux program, you may well find it runs more easily under SFU or WSL on Windows than on a current version of Linux.
Because literally every piece of software in the Nix repo includes all dependencies (including things like build dependencies, not just runtime dependencies) that existed at the time it was built, all the way down to the metal basically
It wasn't secure and it wasn't perfect but Windows 2000 Professional was my favorite version of Windows. The UI had minimal unnecessary animations and graphical effects, it felt quick and responsive, and it didn't spy on you.
They run 9front, much better than XP and 7. No reinstalls, no DLL hells, everything it's statically compiled, updates can be done totally in place and offline.
Good luck running Windows 7 on an RPI and with a laughable power draw.
Oh, and don't even compare VS + MSDN documentations (huge GB's wasted) vs what Acme can do and just the plan9's 9.intro.pdf book. The disk usage would wear out any SD in days.
9front, otoh, can even selfcompile itself in a breeze. Try that under Windows.
Not just that. For any non-JS web, they can compile and share netsurf offline from 9front and happily post at HN or read lots of sites such as http://68k.news and https://midnight.pub
And, with a Gemini client for 9front (there are a few), between the gemini 'capsules' (sites and blogs) and gemini://gemi.dev (web decrafying proxy to gemini, where you can read news stripping out the 95% of the pages, scripts, trackers and all the bullshit, they can get totally covered.
Gopher9 (Gopher client) makes a good point with gopher://magical.fish for global news, translation services and such. Much less bandwidth spent than the web, for sure.
With a bare irc client (again, literally few lines of shell scripting under 9front due how's designed) they can connect to the public IRC servers from bitlbee.org and connect to modern disservices such as Discord and Slack, at least being able to chat against their peers.
The thing is, while it might mandate efficiency, what they made was an un optimized 8 bit VM synthesizing 16bit arithmetic running on 64 bit hardware. It's not efficient at all, it's just that the constraints they gave themselves leaves enormous amount of power on the table.
you will probably be interested in the efficiency measurements i made in the thread linked from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41132868. the standard sdl uxn implementation is less inefficient for things like text editing than you'd expect from the facts you mention, and i suspect uxn11 may actually be pretty decent
SDL2 has been built as a fast whole/partial screen refreshing platform for textures/images, no wonder if it's that slow mimicking XFT/Cairo's job on fonts/text. Just look at the Emacs editor for Common Lisp vs the SDL build of Lem.
I think their philosophy / research is in understanding how to build modern software that is more resilient. So from that research/exploration standpoint it makes sense to me they would go that route instead of using older tech
A larger battery and more solar panels doesn’t seem to be an option for the authors:
> The modern stack doesn't really work for us, it doesn't apply to the limitations that we have on the boat. We have 180 watts of solar. We just spent the whole summer with two 6-volt batteries, which is very small. When you're going down that route, at every turn people are telling to just put more solar panels, or to buy more batteries. That is such a modern way of solving your problem. In reality, technology like this(especially high-tech) rarely solves problems. It creates a lot of other problems, which on a sailboat is very immediate. Putting more solar would mean more windage, more chance of things flying off and cutting our limbs. More batteries would mean the boat would be heavier, it would stop us from being able to run away from storms.
I love what they're doing, but these are reasons that don't hold up to scrutiny. gluing flexible panels to the deck would solve the windage problem and the boat is over 16,000 pounds laden... adding another ~80 pounds (less if LiFePO) of batteries would decrease their "run away" ability by about 0.5%. They pretty clearly ran into a challenge, chose the fun solution rather than the practical one, and ran with it. Which is great.
Not only that, but how cutting-edge is the stuff they have? New solar panels have much better efficiency than panels made 20 years ago, for instance (both because of better technology, and because of the effects of aging). Newer battery technology has much higher energy density than old stuff.
When faced with a similar situation and come up with multiple potential solutions — such as settling for older Adobe software versus creating your own resource-efficient graphics application, I'd definitely take the more creative and fun solution over the quick and simple one! Interesting how people's approaches vary in this way.
(That does change somewhat when doing paid work though...)
LessWrong had some pretty good advice in the early months of the pandemic, despite their terrible track record on politics and AI. There's a lot right with the Amish. You could write an entire book about the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Cults can have a lot to offer.
... in no small part perhaps because they remain isolated "pockets" of culture where - often - "progress" is slower or more controlled. Where idiosyncratic behavior becomes the "new" orthodoxy as behavior or culture "degrades".-
Where was it ... "Nightfall" (the novel) I think it was where a cult periodically saves civilization - by being the only ones that know how to handle the aftermath.-
It's like how you can say that VT100 emulation has an expiration date, but you can't say that about the underlying concept of some UI based on a screenful of monospaced text, which is immortal.
I apologize for an off-topic question, but I'm curious why you choose to write "." as ".-". Is it an internet convention I'm unaware of, or maybe punctuation from a language other than English?
cults are generally the only way to solve deep-rooted problems. otherwise people's habits are too strong and they keep reproducing the existing traditions that create the problems through unexamined avenues
Chat rooms and bare bones text editors aren't supposed to be process-heavy, and yet the popular communication platform Slack requires outrageous amounts of ram and CPU to function. [...] Making software this way is costly to off-grid users, or those on slow connections, [...]
everything about it reinforces the feeling that it's all just retroactive justification for finding a toy they made more fun than expected
ETA: to be clear there's nothing wrong with making a toy and then turning that toy into it's own all-consuming hobby (TTRPGs for example) and one of the best parts of programming is how easy it is to do just that. It's just kind of annoying watching people wax rhapsodic about nonsense instead of copping to "yeah we're having a lot of fun, i feel like a kid again"
fwiw they actually live on a sailboat and have sporadic internet access and limited electricity, so saying it's retroactive justification isn't really true and minimizes the real problems they face.
Living on a sailboat approaches some very very hard life/existential pinnacles that most people never even attempt to climb.
Yeah, you can have a simple regular life; that's lower on problems maybe. But man, sailing around & futzing with interesting barefoot developers projects sure sounds challenging in a lot of very very excellent ways.
Satellite internet is expensive, let’s all move down town! Housing in the city is expensive, let’s all move to sailboats! So you see at some point you have to address difficulties with some kind of approach besides avoiding them
"We choose to make this video game and do the boat life thing, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win!"
> , so saying it's retroactive justification isn't really true and minimizes the real problems they face.
I wouldn't call any of the listed problems "real problems" in the context of my long winded disability and homelessness lmao. I used to be in their community, the mods, and indirectly, them, were abusive as hell. Their community is, last I heard, hemorrhaging queer folk (or maybe it's bled dry and queer folk just don't stick around there anymore!) because they have repeatedly shielded abusive members and placed them in positions of power, and ignored, silenced, and ejected their victims when they finally kicked up a fuss about it. Part of the move from an internal chat to Mastodon was specifically so it would take the pressure off them having to actively perform any sort of moderation duty or deal with the abusive people directly.
They are, fundamentally, rich people playing at being poor and living in a tiny sustainable island while the rest of the world burns. Their stuff is very interesting, sure, but stating "real problems they face" ignores the fact that every one of the problems they are facing are ones that they themselves have created. I actually really love some of the things they've come out with, but it's important that all of their work comes with the context that it was formed in, at least in my opinion.
edit: I forgot about the 'cult' thing... they are absolutely a cult. at least one of their members made explicit reference multiple times to being part of a cult and it was never actively denied outside of a "well, not yet, we don't have the numbers ;)" kind of thing.
Wow, you're the first person I've seen speak up about having similar experiences with them as me, thank you. I was a merveilles member some years back until I had some really rude/abusive interactions in IRC from Devine and a prominent moderator. I really would love to play with uxn and varvara but gosh I simply refuse to be around people like that.
Honestly, adding your voice here is incredibly kind; and likewise, I'm so grateful to hear of another with this sort of experience.
Their design sensibilities are very good, and I feel exactly the same -- it just... doesn't sit right, feels bitter, somehow, to create things with their tools, in the full context of everything.
I've often mulled over starting up a little group sharing some of the same sensibilities but without the toxicity, to be honest.
If the single voice of just some random, well meaning guy on the internet helps: Go ahead and get going. We need more "groups", projects, efforts, initiatives, approaches, not less. Go for it.-
Indeed. And even within a group that shares some core identity across one axis (e.g., queer people), the usual fraught hierarchies have a way of establishing themselves—unless you really make a point of preventing that from happening.
The ones who are wealthy will hold relative power over the ones who aren't. The ones in good health may neglect or actively exclude the ones who aren't. Racism and xenophobia rear their ugly heads. And so on.
Yes, well, that's not what anyone is doing. Here is the logic that caused surprise:
1. Leaders identify with nonbinary pronouns,
2. thus: leaders appear to be members of the/a queer community,
3. and: queer community members tend to center queer people/experiences (regardless of whether said members are shitty people for any reason),
4. yet: the leaders are specifically harming and driving out queer members of their community. This is unexpected. Not "wow, this should be impossible" unexpected, just "damn, this shouldn't have happened" unexpected.
It's quite simple and straightforward.
As an aside, (and I know I'll get downvoted for my tone, but it is what it is), for ye straight commenters: consider that your opinions on queerness and queer community dynamics probably aren't very well informed when you're entering conversations about them. (Inspired by but not personally attacking the parent comment. They might be queer too! And their statement is true, it's just off the mark in this context.)
No that's not what they mean. They mean you'd kind of assume someone who identifies as queer, or is at least knowledgeable enough on the community to participate in some ways, wouldn't be homophobic.
In practice this isn't the case, because you can use this as a shield. So for homophobic people it might be advantageous to enter the community in a way that causes the least amount of personal friction. Like, simply putting pronouns in your bio and doing literally nothing else is trivial - but the social benefit is not.
It's a big problem, because people who ARE non-binary or ARE bisexual or whatever then get a ton of backlash. Because those identities are the most common to be commandeered, so to speak. At least online.
I have logs of some interactions stored somewhere, but they're very patchy and stored in plain text. They also contain personal interactions between server members, so I would not feel comfortable releasing them (I also lack any way to get in touch to obtain consent for releasing the logs!)
I do not have logs of direct messages because it escaped my intention -- while I planned to get them, that never happened. At the time, I was lied to and told I would be able to return, and then 3 months later I was informed I was not going to be able to return to the space. They also did not inform anyone that I was leaving, either. I had long friendships with many in that slack instance, and not only would they not know where to find me, but none of them were informed that I had even left -- as far as any of them know, I ghosted them. There was absolutely zero transparency of moderation both at the time, and as far as I am aware, to this day.
Something I forgot to mention in the above is that at the time they had a code of conduct, and this code of conduct listed a two strike system, along with a resolution system. Neither of these were followed in any capacity (likely because they didn't exist), and there was never any communication by the moderators that I had had strikes raised against me.
Thanks for writing this. It matches my experience 100%. I just signed up to comment because I know people will desperately want it to not be true but there are plenty of us ex-mervilles folk out there who've experienced the cult element and abuse, we just don't talk about it.
Is this the right forum for accusations lacking evidence? We appear to be very reluctant about it, if it’s someone like Sam Altman, but it’s just fine for random developers?
The problem is that none of their problems are real problems and there's nothing to minimize when they're not real. You cannot minimize made up first world problems
No, they really do live on a sailboat with intermittent power and internet access. Unless you take "made up" to mean "as a result of their choices" these are real problems, and ironically enough not problems faced by most people in the first world.
One of the (many) fascinating things here is that - even if by virtue of their 'self-imposed' stringencies - their output showcases production values that are very applicable throughout.-
> Unless you take "made up" to mean "as a result of their choices"
Not the original poster, but that’s my view exactly. If you impose the limitations upon yourself then it’s not really a “problem” for you, is it now. You just can afford to make your life shittier for an “experience” to then have fun solving the issues you’ve created for yourself
Then say "constraints" if it feels better. To me, this conversation comes off as much more of a manufactured problem than idealistic people living on a boat and figuring out how to make tech work for them.
Edit: However, upon reading further comments, I don't want this to be seen as a defense of the group against actual complaints.
... I was going to add certain forms of cryptography to that, but then realized that we've always have had some sort of cryptography that was "hardware-appropriate" (ie. sufficiently hard to break, to be useful) for the age. So older hardware was just fine ...
Any crypto you did couldn't be future-proof in the way it is today though. Don't know if that's mainly due to better algorithms or from the fact modern CPUs are optimized to rapidly decrypt/encrypt things.
It was algorithms. Back in the 90s there was no AES or ECC. There was RSA, and it was feasible to generate long keys, but it was impractical. Keys from back then could probably be easily factored nowadays. I think the spread of the Internet pushed demand for longer keys and better (more secure and efficient) algorithms.
Just because I was there (I agree with your general point) I wanted to say that I made my first PGP key in 1995 and it was a 4096 byte one, which is just as uncrackable now as it was then. I even remember being vaguely confused, because it gave you options, and I was thinking to myself "wut. Who wants the weaker-than-necessary key. I'll take the big one, thx"
Interesting. How long did it take to sign? Also, though I wasn't sure (which is why I didn't mention it), I thought one of the reasons keys were so short back then was due to the US classifying encryption algorithms as munitions, which made working with actually secure encryption standards difficult for developers. I would have expected the longest key would be 1024 bits, at a stretch. Even that is barely crackable today.
Neural nets using individual tubes as nodes? Although the current trend seems to be quantizing down to a minimal amount of bits to process more in parallel, in an analogue system you could have a near "continuous" range of values.
What the boat couple is doing strikes me as the most romantic sort of bricolage and just gives me the warm fuzzies all over. But Urbit just pisses me off for a variety of reasons.
For me any potential technical argument and innovation is completely drowned in the needlessly pervasive anti-capitalist genderfluid digital nomad hippie talk.
Fascinating that you seem to think that taking the time and energy to write a trollish shitpost about your offense at someone’s use of pronouns is somehow not acknowledging or caring about that someone’s use of pronouns.
I don’t think you’re an activist, I just think you’re yet another someone who is unable to see the Amazon forest for the chip on your shoulder.
I had the good fortune to meet and spend some time with Devine at Handmade Seattle a couple of years ago. It was an absolutely wonderful, inspiring experience.
Buying something that will last 10 years instead of buying a home that will last generations. Even more, most likely this people already had a home.
Is like buying a electric car while you have a luxury ICE that works, is a waste of resources. I dont really mind, but dont say you care about the enviroment.
It's a sailboat. They do most of their transitting under sail not power.
You're trying really hard to be contrary here, but it's not working. Devine is not claiming to be ecologically perfect. They're just trying to be as ecologically efficient as they can while living a life that feels meaningful and rewarding to them.
You being in awe of them is very relatable to me lol. I discovered them a few years ago and seem to be surrounded by people that just don't "get it". A lot of people think programming and/or computer science as a way to make art, as a tool.
What I think is cool about 100r is that it is not "computer generated art" or "digital art", but rather "computer science/language design/programming as art". It's like they have this respect and reverence for it that I've often felt, and I often feel isolated in feeling.
Orca singlehandedly got me out of a multi-year musical rut. It's such an interesting and different way of sequencing than the traditional piano roll experience. Like modular synthesis, it can be easier to just use it like a toy and not make anything "finished", but it really can spark the imagination.
I may not (correction: almost definitely don't on 80% of stuff) agree with them politically, but I have to admire their creativity and product execution.
Occasionally i've stumbled upon some neat tool or beautiful software and i'm like, wow - who's behind this? And then I realize it's these two folks. Their approach is so surprising and inspiring, thanks for putting out some cool stuff into the world!
The first paragraph gives a good overview of the idea:
> Permacomputing encourages the maximization of hardware lifespan, minimization of energy usage and focuses on the use of already available computational resources. It values maintenance and refactoring of systems to keep them efficient, instead of planned obsolescence, permacomputing practices planned longevity. It is about using computation only when it has a strengthening effect on ecosystems.
That's the idea. However, my initial criticism of the way permacomputing is formulated are:
1. We could have examined each of the 12 Permaculture Design Principle and attempted to directly apply them to software design. For example, "Observe and Interact" is so broadly useful and versatile (and the core of adversarial domains, such as warfare), it can easily be applied to software. You won't see it directly listed here: https://permacomputing.net/Principles/
2. The permaculture ethical principles are not there in full. "Care for life" refers to "Care for Earth", "Care for People", but nothing about "Fair Share". Comparing these two ways of looking at it, I don't see how the permacomputing formulation is an improvement on how the permaculture ethical principles are formulated. Furthermore, I think this has more to do with not sufficiently delving into the place of technologies within a regenerative paradigm. I am speculating here with little basis, but I don't think the people who came up with this got their hands dirty with planting, nurturing, and harvesting things.
However, reading more with 100r, CollapseOS, DuskOS, there is a lot of thought put into this even if I think there are some key things missing from my experience with permaculture.
It is why my friends and I are exploring the ideas of "permatech", what is Technology's full, integrated place within a living systems world view? We have yet to come up with anything coherent yet.
That is why I had been having trouble with it. Modern high technology is a lot of exploitation.
I once heard a historian described technology as a lever. A small effort has greater gains.
However, we were looking at it from a different angle. What if civilization are not walls and cities — the division of labor so that peasants can support the ruling class — but rather, in _design_? When I first posed that, one of my friends went right into architectural design. (Which is fine, since we explored Christopher Alexander’s work).
But an example of what I was thinking of was this discovery that one of the cave paintings was probably a hunting calendar. It allows the tribe to count the number of moons when there is sufficient deer.
That’s a kind of design — a kind of permacomputing - a kind of civilization if we were to reframe it as design.
I might be stretching it there.
I have seen effective use of technology in permaculture. Digging up swales and basins make use technology, whether it is with a shovel, or feeding pigs in a way so that they can dig for you.
Oops, I meant "permacomputing". Among my friends in a private discord group, we were generalizing that to all of tech and I forgot it originated from "permacomputing".
There is a related project from permacomputing that I'd like to highlight: CollapseOS/DuskOS which has overlapping and adjacent ends with what 100 Rabbits are trying to do with UXN. I know there are attempts to port UXN to DuskOS.
That's the most constructive takeaway you have when looking at all their work? That's an unnecessarily limited view and doesn't add to the conversation.
From my vantage point their work fits the definition nicely.
"A collective body" [1]
...
"Collectivized or characterized by collectivism" [1]
...
"A political or economic theory advocating collective control especially over production and distribution" [2]
I wouldn't say it's a completely throwaway dis. As much as I like Orca it easily could be that calling themselves "a collective" is putting on airs or pretending to be a bigger movement than they are. But it could also be tongue-in-cheek, self-parody, or theater of the absurd (which seems more likely).
There are a bunch of contributors to these projects. I wrote the C version of Orca (and helped design the second version of its evaluation strategy) but also had help and ideas from other contributors as well. I wrote the Windows version of Uxn, Uxn32, which was a from-scratch implementation, except for a couple of things like the palette mixing table. The code from Uxn32's VM core ended up in other versions of Uxn emulators, which were then modified and improved by the people running those projects. There is not any governing body, committees, or authoritative leadership for these projects. We just talk to each other through various channels and do stuff. It's a collective.
Their sailing videos are very inspiring—from what I remember, they sailed from Vancouver to Japan, then down to New Zealand and back to Vancouver over the course of a few years.
They're the best! I first came across orca while learning about esoteric languages, and to see how it spun out and evolved into the entire Vavara virtual computer has been amazing.
They're smart, capable, and committed to openly sharing knowledge and ideas in their community.
UXN / Varvara (a project by these folks) is something really special https://100r.co/site/uxn.html - an approach to creating intelligible software by applying strict complexity constraints, sort of like Viewpoint Research’s STEPS project, but with more concrete goals and an even smaller and simpler basis.
"We eventually ported our tools to C, but while we had achieved ideal energy usage, portability was still an issue, so we kept looking. We learnt 6502 Assembly, seeing players run our games as NES roms on all these different platforms gave us an idea."
How so? NES games are genuinely more portable than C programs that do anything involving graphics or IO.
A simple example is the fact that they use Plan 9 C. I urge you to try making a simple game that runs on both Plan 9 and Linux.
The only reason C is portable is because a lot of collective effort was put into porting various libraries to various systems, and homogenizing them to look kinda the same if you squint.
Uxn creates a very easy to implement virtual computer that is actually identical. A Uxn program is more portable than a C one for their purposes. And I think it's obvious how that could have came to them from NES emulators, which have similar properties.
Wow, a website about the "failability of modern technology" and "low-tech solutions" that connects to doubleclick.net, play.google.com and embeds a youtube video. Is this a joke?
Well, it kind of negates it a little bit, because they are against trackers, and state that their website does not use them, but they are spreading Google's trackers through their website.
Of course, this is almost certainly accidental and I'd think it would be corrected if it were brought to their attention, and the meat of their work is in domains other than lightweight websites.
I don't default to unkind mode on every topic. Perhaps I phrased the comment too negatively here however. Note though that as a later comment pointed out, they claim to have "no tracking or analytics," so clearly this was a mistake on their part. A commitment to no tracking is also something I would expect from a site like this making the claims they are making. So clearly my criticism itself was well placed, even if the delivery was too harsh. Also, I would think they would at least check to see what embedding a youtube video does before doing it. And I do think embedding the youtube video is strange even ignoring the tracking for a site that describes itself as "small." Is it really small if you have a massive iframe embedded in it?
compare, perhaps, the adjacent thread that had comments like "I got that complaint about my blog too, and here's how I fixed it" and a bunch of other things that seemed plausible and helpful? (I don't know if 100r will make those changes, but I'm certainly going to look at them for some of my own youtube links...)
It's a cynical point of view ("Yet you yourselves participate in society! Curious!") but it holds some validity. They are using some very advanced tools to rage against the capitalist machine. Attacking modern power structures using tools and privileges that arise from those same power structures seems... well, ungrateful at times. The lives they're living were utterly inconceivable for most of human history.
That said, it'd be even more cynical to dismiss all of the work and thought that Rek and Devine have put out there because certain elements of it seem a bit hypocritical from a certain point of view. I just spent a couple of hours surfing through their site, reading about their philosophy, and find myself respecting the parts I disagree with almost as much as the parts I identify with. That kind of content is exactly what HN's good for discovering.
Yes it may seem ungrateful at times but I think they are doing a service by presenting alternatives. From that point of view I think we should be grateful. Ofc I am jealous of their lifestyle but if I wanted to do that badly enough I'm sure I could work towards it too I guess?
The HN audience seem to encourage this type of comment by consistently upvoting them, like how the current top comment is one that complains about tracking due to embedded video as opposed to something that is materially related to the site contents.
I will do my part by upvoting the other comments, but judging by the karma ranking and comment history of some of these commenters, I think I am in the minority.
My comment is actually downvoted at -3 points currently. As for the top comment, I don't see the issue with pointing out that the site is enabling the tracking of users when it claims not to, especially since it is directly related to the topic of the site itself. I don't think being unconditionally positive is in line with the site's goal of promoting "intellectual curiosity."
>judging by the karma ranking and comment history of some of these commenters
That top comment is from John Nagle of Nagle's algorithm. I doubt his karma is from being negative.
> That top comment is from John Nagle of Nagle's algorithm. I doubt his karma is from being negative.
A relentless cynicism and the willingness to shoot down bad ideas are vital for producing anything worthwhile. Someone who was able to improve real-world networking is very likely to have been "negative" by modern standards.
> I don't see the issue with pointing out that the site is enabling the tracking of users when it claims not to,
Which, in a sense ends up being anímical the ethos at hand, with many blogfolk now securing their own sites, with a nice, ongoing discussion about many technical options to achieve that. Sounds like a good outcome.-
We sorely need more serious experimentation with computing & computing cultures and IMO Hundred Rabbits is a great example of this. Instead of talking about ideas, they practice what they preach.
As with most experiments, we can observe and borrow shadows of their ideas into our own life hopefully!
> We sorely need more serious experimentation with computing & computing cultures
Indeed.-
PS. If we stop and examine, our entire computing "paradigms" have been - mostly - driven, propelled forward by "industrial", commercial, business productivity (use cases) ...
... but what would have happened / will happen were these paradigms to emerge (and emerge mainly) from art, creation, play, instead?
I think modding communities are a reasonably good analog to this. Up until someone realized you could change the alpha channel of wall textures to make them transparent, the way to get a custom skin in Counter Strike Source (and 1.6), was to drop a file into your install directory.
The game would check for files named the same as it's default resources, read them in for use instead of the original. But then people started using the aforementioned transparent walls in competitive matches, and so a new variable was introduced to force the use of the defaults.
The next game (CS:GO) provided skins through a marketplace, including the use of loot-crate mechanics, the prices of in demand items sky rocketed, they are now used as currency for hackers and online gambling, and the online skin gambling sites have been caught advertising fraudulently through streamers. "rare" skins can sell for tens or hundreds of THOUSANDS of dollars.
In short, a great feature got exploited, commercialized, more exploited, and inspired a great amount of profiteering and sketchy business practices while ruining community aspects of a whole genre of entertainment (lots of copycats).
What I'm trying to say, is I think those paradigms most likely would have been co-opted by third parties in the name of greed and profit, destroying the communal and humanistic aspects of them in short order.
I appreciate people who dare to experiment with their life style.
The boat idea would perhaps too lonely for most people, but it would be nice to see folks experiment with re-inventing communes/new types of forming communities.
There is strictly no reason for each person to own a TV, PC, dishwasher, washing machine, etc. - most of that could be shared so as to reduce electronic waste and increase sustainability.
The minimalism idea of their VM resonates with me and remindes me of Niklaus Wirth, who had similar values and pushed things even further (designing his whole hardware + OS + language all by himself).
>here is strictly no reason for each person to own a TV, PC, dishwasher, washing machine, etc. - most of that could be shared so as to reduce electronic waste and increase sustainability.
This sounds nice in theory, but doesn't work out well in practice. You get a tragedy of the commons situation where people don't take care of the equipment and it gets broken, or dies early. Also, some people are just really bad with handling and taking care of things: some people will buy some item, and then you look at it again years later and it's in pristine condition. But look at another person's identical item after that time and it's either destroyed, or looks really beat-up. Maybe they're too rough with it, maybe they never clean it, maybe they don't maintain it, but I've noticed some people just seem to destroy everything they use.
Also, trying to share many things doesn't work out in practice because people want to use them at the same time. You can see this at places like laundromats; you can't expect people to wake up at 2AM to do their laundry. People usually like to watch TV at the same time too. So you need enough equipment to handle peak times.
And sharing a PC? What do you do when someone in your commune insists on clicking on every potentially malicious attachment on your shared Windows PC?
There's a way to fix this, it's called an "extended family".
But that's, like, the Patriarchy. That would really harsh our buzz, so we need to reinvent, in a broken and stupid way, what previously worked fine for tens of thousands years.
This is a overgeneralization and a sad belief to hold on to. There are many many communities which share resources where things do not fall into tragedy of the commons. There are communal houses, coliving spaces, makerspaces, people co buying second homes, tool libraries, heck! libraries themselves. There is a whole advertising culture that is trying to reinforce the "we couldn't possibly share things" narrative, I urge you to go out and experience alternatives!
Nothing "sad" about it; it's true. There's no shortage of accounts on the internet of someone loaning a tool to their neighbor and then either not getting it back, not getting it back for months or years, or getting it back broken or otherwise damaged. You can't trust random people to take good care of your stuff.
Co-buying second homes? How many people are involved in a transaction like that? That's not communal at all, that's a partnership. Of course you can be selective with whom you partner and only partner with someone trusted, plus you both have a strong economic interest in taking care of the property. Same with your so-called "communal houses": it's not like dozens or hundreds of people are going to live in a house. Makerspaces, etc., can screen their members, and keep track of who does what to penalize people who abuse things.
Libraries have occasionally had trouble with people abusing books (ever seen a loaned-out book with folded-down corners, or writing in them?). However books don't need nearly as much care and maintenance as complex machinery (i.e. power tools) so of course you don't have to worry about it as much, and normal libraries budget and plan for books having a limited lifetime anyway. Extremely rare and valuable books aren't left out for random people to handle either.
Nyc has buildings that function as co-ops. You have your own apartment in a building that you own shares of. Everyone pays for amenities like laundry and maintenance together
One of their founders, Devine, gave a wonderful talk at Handmade Seattle 2022 titled Weathering Software Winter (https://vimeo.com/780005704) that sparked some really interesting conversations about software resiliency and data preservation!
Urbit had a fair bit of creativity in both aesthetic and tech. But yeah I agree it was mostly a crypto scam mainly driven by a no-longer-open/loud neonazi.
At WHOI we frequently run into some of these issues. Ocean-going projects often have long periods of disconnect, or have just a tiny bandwidth-capped connections that are meant for sending home critical data and not for automated software updates...
So much software also just takes for granted that it should be allowed on the Internet.
You're telling me. Being on HN and working on remote autonomous systems is such a dichotomy. We measure transmission rates in Kb still and costs in thousands of dollars. Not to mention power consumption. Sometimes I wish there was a conference for people working on these kinds of projects. "The union of Luddite scientists annual meeting" or something.
This page https://100r.co/site/philosophy.html
says
> Preparing for impending apocalyptic events should mean collective action and structural reform, not individualism and isolation.
The embed has to be changed to YouTube-nocookie (which is what happens when you enable privacy enhance mode when sharing embeds). But that might not entirely comply with GDPR, as Google still does attempt other measures of tracking.
So they should either introduce a cookie banner, find an alternative host that more strictly adheres to privacy concerns, or just host the video themselves in a video element.
also you could just embed a self-hosted image that links to youtube. presumably if somebody clicks on the image with the youtube logo on it they know they're going to youtube
i mean peertube is a great alternative, and nowadays browsers are pretty okay at just playing bare mp4 files if you re-encode them with ffmpeg -movflags faststart -c copy, but if for whatever reason you choose to use youtube instead there are some harm-reduction measures you can take
> also you could just embed a self-hosted image that links to youtube.
I’ve done this in the past by literally grabbing a screenshot of the video thumbnail (and the play button) and adding a link to that image.
Sure, it won’t play in the same page and won’t be up to date with thumbnail or other presentation changes but I didn’t care - it was a small image that also didn’t include any executable code or privacy risks.
any browser works as a peertube client; do you mean "peertube installations" and "wordpress installations", or are you talking about the software used to view videos?
Someone just pointed out I have the same problem on my blog and I'm very pissed. It's not enough that their embeds break every Lighthouse metric and recommendation. It's all this, too
Offtopic: that website is hosted on a webserver/proxy/LB that appears to have a wildcard certificate for dozens of Google domains. Don't they use SNI and separate certs? This wouldn't fly where I work and the security team is asleep half the time.
It’s been like that since August 2000 when they launched their premium sponsorship program, which was replaced by AdWords later that year.
I’m not sure you can fully blame Google for what the web became though. Part of the reason search engines are close to useless here 24 years later is because most of the content people produce go to SoMe sites. Sites like Hacker News, sites like Medium and so on and because of how everything became a popularity matrix people are posting soooo much useless stuff online. Where it used to be you actually had to have something to say to bother putting it online, because it took an effort, we now live in a world where 90% or the talk people do is while they’re on the shitter. Those 90% is a number I pulled out my ass, but it would be hilarious to see an actual number on just how much internet “content” gets created by people on a toilet.
It is what it is though. To make a functional search engine today which was on par with Google in 2000, you’d probably need access to browser bookmarks of the people you’ve ranked as having interesting taste in what they bookmark. Which probably isn’t really possible without breaking a lot of laws, if at all.
Makes sense. Tangentially, people always mention of spending time on the toilet, but I never could relate as its a max 2-3 minute activity for me, usually less. Only have enough time to read some Reddit posts. Maybe, as I get older, this will change.
Edit: I am vegetarian, probably has something to do with it.
Gotta give the hemorrhoid doctors some work. Ideally you should finish your business rather fast, but I think a lot of people simply find a nice break on the toilet. Obviously food has an impact but if any type of *vore has long shits it’s probably because they aren’t getting enough fibre, another boon for the hemorrhoid doctors!
The reason I know a shit should take 30 seconds is because there is this Danish doctor who has spent like 30 years studying how we shit, and her name is Gert which is typically a male name. Anyway some years back she was on TV telling the nation how to shit, and it sort of went viral and now everyone above a certain age basically knows who Gert “who knows how to shit” is.
One could probably put a date on the moment when the decreasing friction of publishing to the web intersected with the increasing potential for monetization. Suddenly all of these new people are writing blogs for AdSense revenue instead of good vibes and the atmosphere has all the vibrancy and vitality of a strip mall.
> Where it used to be you actually had to have something to say to bother putting it online, because it took an effort
That didn't last very long. Even before geocities there was a huge amount of random/pointless stuff online. It was okay though because those people weren't looking to make money. They didn't feel the need to misrepresent or SEO the hell out of their personal sites to drive traffic.
Greed killed the internet. Once people started putting up websites with the intent to line their own pockets instead of doing it just to share something fun or cool or personal or helpful it was doomed. Corporations quickly got involved and everything else got crowded out, bought out, or replaced by ad-filled trash.
I love their work. I’ve also been working on some video to teach people how to publish their own book (the first of which I’ll make available free when it’s ready).
Anyway, I’d like to NOT embed YouTube. Maybe I will anyway, but I wonder if anyone has alternatives, especially if they are scrappy, tiny alternatives like those that I imagine 100r might produce.
I’m considering MP4 or WebM in HTML and wilder ideas like an audio file and a few images that are started at the same time with JS.
The simplest thing would be to simply link to a Youtube video, perhaps with a small warning that it will take them to Youtube which uses trackers. You could even make the link an image that is the thumbnail of the video.
Not the prettiest or purest solution, but very simple.
I've seen youtube embeds be overlaid and say things like "this embed carries tracking, click here to load inline at your own peril or here to watch on original site" or something to that effect.
It also uses YouTube-nocookie.com, which turns off targeted advertising or tracking. You are still tracked, but views aren’t linked or ads aren’t linked to your account. YouTube docs call Privacy Enhanced Mode for Embeds.
Medium did (does?) this when you have DNT enabled. Several GDPR-compliant sites do the same, though many use their embeds as a means to track people into clicking the "accept all tracking" button.
What I do (first of all for performance) is use YouTube links and have a script that prepends each `a.embed` link with an "embed" button.
The button turns the link into an embed and back.
> Anyway, I’d like to NOT embed YouTube. Maybe I will anyway, but I wonder if anyone has alternatives, especially if they are scrappy, tiny alternatives like those that I imagine 100r might produce.
I use lite-youtube on my site for this reason. Instead of embedding the YT player directly, it shows a thumbnail that pulls in the embed when you click to watch the video.
That way visitors aren't tracked unless they actively click the thumbnail to watch the embedded player. Iirc it also works as just a link so visitors have the option to cmd+click or right-click-copy to avoid the embed.
Turn your videos into HLS playlists (.m3u8) or mp4 and host the individual video files behind Cloudflare. Serve them on the frontend using JW Player or some other JS video player and from the backend using a $5 DigitalOcean droplet that serves the files from block storage.
You’ll have to learn some ffmpeg incantations but the bandwidth will be free and your total costs will be the tiny VM and block storage. Might even be able to point Cloudflare at a public bucket and skip the VM.
If you need to store and serve several terabytes of content, a dedicated server instead of block storage will be your best bet (again with Cloudflare), you’ll just need to figure out offsite backup and restoration.
I think it's more likely you just don't generate enough traffic for them to care to stop you. I think the main issue is that their business model of not charging for bandwidth doesn't work well for video. As long as you aren't using a ton of bandwidth, they won't care you are doing some video.
There hasn’t been a matriarch since the last one died in 1842. The two last surviving religious orders with voting rights have been in a deadlock ever since because they can’t agree on what color sesame seed belongs in “Everything but the Bagel” seasoning.
Saint Trader Joes tried to unite them by using both light and dark sesame years ago, but there’s just too much bad blood for them to work together. We are still waiting for the chosen one that will bring balance to the bagel.
Ahh, the utter tragedy of the Sesamoschism of 1842. The sad thing is that the deadlock between the Correctly Righteous Matriarchaleanbageloptomistrists and the Righteously Correct Matriarchaleanbageloptomistrists all comes down to one member’s error in mixing toasted light sesame seeds with raw dark sesame seeds, and neither side being able to agree which member needed to suffer the rites of immaculate defenestration.
Yes, then in 1863 we had a brief window of hope as Frau Blücher, a charismatic blind preacher, wrote her famous “Two Theses” on a bagel bag: “1. I cannot taste the difference; 2. It all looks the same in your stomach.” This ecumenical message sadly did not endure and she too was thrown out of a first floor window.
> Unless you are an Enterprise customer, Cloudflare offers specific Paid Services (e.g., the Developer Platform, Images, and Stream) that you must use in order to serve video and other large files via the CDN. Cloudflare reserves the right to disable or limit your access to or use of the CDN, or to limit your End Users’ access to certain of your resources through the CDN, if you use or are suspected of using the CDN without such Paid Services to serve video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other large files.
Reading between the lines a bit: they really only care if you're using Cloudflare to front a site whose primary purpose is to deliver video content, and lots of it (like, say, if you're running a tube site or a livestreaming site). They don't care about web sites which happen to incidentally include a small amount of video content.
I suppose any reasonable browser can play off a HTTP stream. I not so sure it would be able to navigate in the stream easily (like clicking at a particular time on the progress bar), because the bitrate is highly variable.
Dynamic bitrate is the main one - the browser & server coordinate to figure out the highest video quality the user can watch without stuttering/buffering.
The client can do that 100% client side, you can serve pure static files with a JS player that handles the streaming. All you have to do is chunk the video into small 2-5 second chunks at a variety of nitrates and list them all in an .m3u8 playlist file if the right format.
Adaptive bitrate selection seems important if your clients have narrow or unstable bandwidth (e.g. mobile), or when you may get constrained by outgoing bandwidth (/. effect aka HN crowd).
imo this is mainly due to the constraint of keeping clientside pre-buffering as low as possible.
sending the whole file at network-speed usually works fine, but maybe uneconomical at scale especially if coupled with users that skip a lot and tend to not watch the whole thing anyway.
The video is 57 seconds long. Should be fine ~ kinda.
My host doesn't support video. If I point <video> at a file it plays just fine but the server doesn't do partial content so the player crashes or stutters if the user attempts to seek outside what was downloaded. When the whole thing is downloaded it works smoothly but it isn't quite acceptable. There is no easy html way to preserve the seek/progress bar and `Accept-Ranges: none` has the same meaning as not setting the header(?)
I cant seem to find answers or bugs, all I find "make sure your server supports partial content" which really isn't required to make it work.
Right but if you have your own ip address and fiber connection that should be enough for narrow-casting.
I'm surprised to see my inexpressible urges documented by others. I'm with these people 100% right down to why a sailboat.
I tried to do this with an apartment building. The building is too large to focus on a the detail I need. A 43' sailboat is actually a great size to prototype on.
I have a signed P&S and hope to be hard core boat living sometime in September. The idea will be the studio time I get while on land will be much sweeter if I spend a lot of time on a boat.
The boat is self-contained so my aspirations won't effect people paying rent.
The building has everything I need to host my own streaming. I don't know that I will ever publish content, but if I do it will be entirely self-hosted. If the audience is so vast that brings everything to a halt, things will start functioning again once the hordes get bored.
Think of all the wasted brain power content-creators go through to keep YouTube at bay.
I believe content should be the residue of the work. I think once publishing is the funding source it may distort the work.
You can just turn your video file into a bunch of HSL or MPEG Dash segments and store then as static file with a playlist/manifest file next to them, and tada! you now have video streaming in your static hosting site.
Correct. Progressive MP4 also do the trick. Many open-source tool such as ffmpeg (generalist), gpac (specialized in this and leveraging ffmpeg), etc. in the area.
most ppl probably fall into the category where self-hosting their content is viable, though most also don't know anything about it, hence the outsourcing
This is what I ended up doing. I used HandBrake to reduce the video to a reasonable size and then just put the MP4 on the site like anything else. I guess I'm getting a little carried away with my "minimalist" attitude in this case, where I want the video to be super light. Looks like a 2 minute video is about 4mb. Not great but not that bad compared to other modern websites either.
This will work for now but my mind still wonders if there isn't a better way to reduce the size of these. I'll continue to experiment.
I find it hilarious how despite endless bad press the giant data pump that is bittorrent just keeps on grinding without anyone behind the wheel, no updates, no bug fixes, and no interruption. People can scream, ball their fists and stomp their foot on the ground but daddy's money cant shut it down.
We should all feel very embarresed such a thing is possible.
You can apparently write software and/or create protocols that measure their success in moaning about revenue loss.
It has something to do with it. The internet enables control over what you talk about and share even with those close to you. We seem to like controlling others where we can. It doesnt seem al that bad but our benevolent corporate overlord dont represent the true madness of our kind. They havent categorized an untermensh nor refer to people as animals, we get to complaint about and mock our leaders. We have an elaborate system of law. One day people will no doubt wake up and it is all gone or it will gradually errode away.
Laws that require changing our entire civilisation and culture are not your friend. You dont want to search everones house to check if they own a radio or tv. If that happens depends on who is asking. It isnt a static group. It might begin with heroic crime fighters but we can expand or replace the effort with new business logic. First we need to prevent you from reading a harry potter registered in someone elses name, then we need to be able to take your music purchases away from you until eventually we need to lock you up for subscribing to the wrong youtube channel 30 years ago.
It isnt actually as absurd as not having video on websites in an afordable way.
All those people working at youtube and all of those giant servers. It takes a truly monumental effort to use the wrong technology.
I have to watch ads to pay for it? Advertisers have to influence content to pay for it? Our best men to keep the eyeballs on ads to pay for it?
I have over a thousand yt subs to deleted channels for a laundry list of resons. There use to be threaded discussions and video replies. It all had to go to pay for it?
All the horrors of central planning without the nice things the communists prommised us?
All that to make sure some people get paid for things other people did 70 years ago?
If that is what it costs they should not be paid. I hope little jimmy downloads all of their movies, every tv show, all the video games, all of their music, all of their books and all of their published papers.
They wanted little jimmy to pay for singing happy birthday on video. Imagine the money they lost that day. All of those birthdays!
We could have had birthday inspection squad teams. Fight the crime at the source.
I think i got to 2500ish of which about 1000 vanished.
The trick is to look for things not discovered by the masses. The reason (i wont call it a mistake) is almost always not publishing frequently enough. (Not that i dont watch popular things or everything in between.) Infrequent publishers dont get very noisy.
But people will tell you that software cannot be expected to work reliably and cannot function without a billion dollar corporation pushing constant updates.
Even the ‘Bible’ app requires constant updates, I thought the final version was released quite some time ago
You should check out my book then. I realized that everyone was starting to, not write books, but that they were writing instructional books teaching about how people should write books. I said to myself, "well let's teach them how to do THAT instead". One step more metain the game. Anyway, my book is about how to make videos to teach people how to write books, things like marketing and profit-maxxing. There's a lot of great pedagogy in there.
Also what kind of name is "100 rabbits". Reminscent of "50 blessing" from hotline miami
No, it happens when you load the page. As a test I made a simple web page that just said "This is a test" and included the Google embed and visited it in an incognito window in Chrome and looked at what happened in the inspector. I used an incognito window to ensure that I wasn't starting with any cookies already saved for Google.
Just displaying the page with the embed hits those sites. All in all there were around 20 successful network requests made to load the site. There were another 7 or so requests the Ublock Origin blocked, to play.google.com/log, and then after the page loaded it continues trying those every second or so, although it seems to have slowed down after around 19 but is still ongoing.
It leaves 5 cookies (4 persistent, 1 session) and also looks like it has something in IndexedDB.
Similar with Firefox in a private window except it stores one fewer persistent cookies.
On Safari in a private window it has similar network access, but no cookies.
The "\u263Eoe\u2721is\u271E" of online politics if I've ever seen. Nearly meaningless but people place great emotional and identity-based weight on it (even if they've signed away all their data via TOS, as they likely have).
Sidebar—why does hacker news fuck with arbitrary unicode codepoints? Strikes me as deeply user-hostile behavior.
This place would be utterly unbearable with emoji.
The symbols you wanted to include are in the Dingbats and Miscellaneous Symbols blocks, which I expect are all banned because they contain some emoji and this was the cheap way to be rid of those, quick test: "" "", that's a Miscellaneous Symbol and a Dingbat of no emotional valence to speak of and certainly not colourful ones.
As you can see, that's the deal: they're casualties. I wouldn't mind a more discerning filter, but then again, I wouldn't mind a dark mode, and here it is, years later.
It's an unfortunate use of Youtube embeds. Aside from letting people uncharitably dunk on them, the Youtube here isn't even doing anything. The YT video in question is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1Y8PwD5XDs , which is 57s long, has 2 worthless comments, no description/metadata/playlist/closed-captions/categories, and a yt-dlp takes literally 5s for me to download the 1.5MB MP4. (Which I think may actually be about the size of the full weight of the YT embed container based on the last post I saw here whining about YT embeds...?)
This is a perfect candidate to host yourself and just slap it in some <video> tags.
I've often wondered why Discord is the only major platform client that provides an option to play gifs only on mouseover. It's incredibly effective at solving for the problem you describe.
It's possible to stop gifs if the domain framed them with the proper code. Unfortunately many people believe gif = png,jpg and exert zero effort to handle them differently.
Yes. The website publisher would add this CSP header to ensure that the browser only loads sub-resources come from the first-party domain. It does not prevent the publisher from writing markup that declares third-party resource loads. The header ensures that the site will "break fast". CSP headers are often more useful in sites that allow clients to write markup, however there is still utility in declaring your intention to not load third-party content in your markup.
The same-origin policy prevents Google tracking in a iFrame from identifying the parent site, so technically "This website has no tracking or analytics." is correct. It does expose you to Google's analytics for the iFrame however, so it's down to how you define "this site"...
The same-origin policy prevents Google tracking in a iFrame from identifying the parent site, so technically "This website has no tracking or analytics." is correct. It does expose you to Google's analytics for the iFrame however, so it's down to how you define "this site", but as the owners of the site don't have access to that tracking information, the statement seems fair.
It calls out a bogus claim. The actual topic is diluted and deemphasized if the authors make bogus claims. So the distraction is on them, not on HN commenters.
One could also be a bit more compassionate and just realize that people make mistakes or just don't have every line on their website memorized if they decide one day to just share a YouTube video.
I doubt they are actively trying to trick people into letting down their "adblocker" guard so they can retarget them with advertising...
"Perfect is the enemy of good" really applies here.
Someone is aware of the issue of online tracking and tries their best to get rid of all of these things (web fonts, analytics,...) and even states their intent "No tracking". One day they make a small mistake and don't realize that sharing a YouTube link on their website drops a cookie and immediatelly all the good they are trying to do is forgotten.
This absolutely does not relate at all to me. I don't make extraordinary claims so I am not bound to provide extraordinary evidence. So your "I hope you never make mistakes" is irrelevant or, even worse, arguing in bad faith.
You can spin it any way you like. Claims should be backed and checked, else credibility flies out the window. I don't get how that's not glaringly obvious.
You pointing out a minor mistake that has zero implications doesn’t provide any value. It may feel good to you pointing out mistakes others made, but especially in this case it doesn’t matter. It’s not important.
And you seem to read way too much into this mistake, promptly distrusting all the content they ever made or wrote.
Next time you make a mistake, I hope people around you will treat you the same way you treat other people, let’s find out if you like that.
> It does matter, it is important. Making such a mistake calls into question if they don't have other, more serious, mistakes in their actual articles.
This shows such black-and-white thinking, thinking in absolutes that doesn't take in account, the context and circumstances.
To me it shows a rigid mind that can't perceive nuance, and think / reason about topics in a particular context.
Minor mistakes are often just that: minor mistakes. If this was an error in a scientific paper or news article, your stance may have had more merit. But that's not the context here at all.
> I don't make extraordinary claims so I am not bound to provide any extraordinary evidence. They do make an extraordinary claim.
A blog claiming not to track you isn't an 'extraordinary claim' by any definition. So that's a mistake on your part, so I can't take anything you say seriously anymore, by your own definition.
Although I feel this is yet another disingenuous question, mostly referencing my own reference, this post is about the people behind Hundred Rabbits, what they make and how they live.
This is noteworthy because it’s 180 degrees opposite from how most HN people live and what they do.
Only partly disingenuous, since I think this subject is a bit more complicated than just going off grid. So yes, the subject is this rabbits group, but I think the overall question about how individuals can live without society is not obvious. These groups couldn't do what they do without society producing these goods. Even if they are living minimally, they can never fully detach.
It takes industry of a certain complexity to fab semiconductors, and micro electronics. Once the replacement stock is depleted - there goes computing ...
... could a bunch of self organized comunes such as these ever replicate such industry?
It is peculiar no self-standing group such as this has - AFAIK - attempted such a thing. Why don't they start there?
Privacy Badger can replace YouTube embeds with "click to activate" placeholders. Faster browsing, better privacy, easy-to-use controls, at least when the replacement works properly.
You have to move the toggle for youtube.com to red first.
Main Menu > Extensions > Extensions Manager > Privacy Badger > Settings > Tracking Domains > search for youtube.com > tap to update the toggle for youtube.com to red
Nice site. This and 100r are an antidote to the soulless corporate AI slop that's slathered over everything these days. And a webring too? Don't mind if I do...
I also really enjoyed your poems :) I aspire to have an interesting website like yours. I came back to read them again and your website was down though :(
I've been following these guys for a decade now (maybe more??) and I was always blown away by their skills and aesthetics. Devine has been a huge influence on my own artistic style and finding xxiivv.com on some random chan during high school, and getting lost in it, was a big mind-changing event. Glad to see they're still sailing around the world.
I never heard of these guys and this is a fascinating rabbit hole. I don't agree with everything they stand for (and that's OK!) but the long term maintainability and sustainability of computer software and hardware I am 100% onboard with.
I think sailing and free software have in common the type of freedom that is not unlimited, necessarily constrained by the reality of sharing a planet with billions of other primates. There are a lot of rules one must follow to share the pacific ocean (especially the parts close to land) with other people, but that doesn't make travel under wind power any less captivating.
Also, the Yamaha 33 is an impressively tiny and light boat for the sailing they're doing, let alone living and working on.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 342 ms ] thread> Dusk OS is a 32-bit Forth and big brother to Collapse OS. 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.
I mean, what's not to love here? :)
more generally, collapseos is cosplay, not engineering
in more detail, collapseos is not a pragmatic engineering effort to foster resiliency, but an essentially religious effort to atone for the sins of the worldly through ascetic renunciation of pleasures such as guis, returning to an imagined arcadian past of austere virtue
see against-collapseos.md in http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/pavnotes2.git for the full critique
DuskOS doesn’t run on z80. It’s i386 or ARM. Whether that makes it a serious effort or not is still up for debate.
I'm curious because I buy this comment more than their mission statement, although I absolutely agree with their stance on the "longevity/maintainability problem" in software and hardware.
but as soon as I saw the ranting about colonialism I was like "oh... basically, anarchist anti-capitalists"
as soon as they have kids, they will quickly abandon their non-acquisition of resources stance, LOL
collapseos isn't a 100r thing, and i haven't seen anything from virgil that sounds like an anarchist anti-capitalist. i have a lot of sympathies for the anarchist anti-capitalist point of view although personally i've suffered a lot more harm from anti-capitalism than from capitalism
The funny thing about having a kid (he's 3) is that you are forced to re-evaluate all your values and preconceived notions to see what it is you really want to transmit to your kid.
i've added a header to that effect since it seems to have been confusing people
there are other advantages as well. if someone clones the git repo, they'll still be able to read it after i die and my site goes down; and there's no incentive for anyone to pressure me to rewrite history by deleting things from it, which is a thing that has happened to me in the past, since i can't delete them from remote clones
I agree with some of it in modified form, such as pointing out that far more powerful systems like old Android phones are sitting around in great quantity and would be a useful scavenge for a complete CollapseOS. In fact that seems to be what DuskOS is about, I'll be interested in your take on that once you have one.
But those are not microcontrollers, and what microcontrollers do can't be replaced by sticking a JTAG on an abandoned Android and calling it a day. Your take on the availability for scavenge of 6502s is simply incorrect, Western Digital, who should know, says annual production is in the hundreds of millions, joining the estimated 5 to 10 billion which already exist. https://www.westerndesigncenter.com/wdc/
It strikes me as a quixotic, but worthwhile, investment in civilizational insurance. I don't disagree about the motive at all, but it seems like a useful outlet for that sort of angst. If he keeps at it long enough I would hope he'll support a few more chips, and that seems likely, as I remember a time when it was Z80 only. Variants on that chip exist in their billions as well, although the original was taken off the market, hmm. This April.
looking on digikey i can't find any 6502 or 65c02 parts, although there are a couple of sbcs like https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/olimex-ltd/NEO650.... digikey of course doesn't have everything, but they're usually an okay indicator of what is popular
i agree that android phones cannot substitute for microcontrollers! their cortex-a cpus can't guarantee hard real-time responsiveness. and i agree with virgil's point that microcontrollers are very important for practical everyday things. and 6502s make perfectly good microcontrollers, albeit more power-hungry than designs fabbed in a smaller feature size, and requiring external memory
while the z80 itself is no longer made, plenty of clones of it are, and a z80 is also perfectly fine as a microcontroller, and a 6502 or z80 is close to the smallest machine on which a self-hosting development environment is feasible
They were also quite widespread in LCD games, the Tamagotchi used one, Furby, later-model Tiger handhelds, that sort of thing. There are a great many product numbers and variations, because it was widely licensed. Keyboards, computer mice, lots of things.
Digikey has the W65C02SXB, the NEO6502, the W65C02S, and I'm sure there are more in there somewhere. In a scavenge scenario, just figuring out what speaks the ISA would be challenging, but I'm picturing our plucky heroes getting the hang of it after awhile. And of course a Forth like in CollapseOS has an advantage in that adding words to take advantage of extended instructions is practical.
It looks like the project is converging on "OS that runs on comfortable hardware, which can serve as a hub for and talk to the microcontrollers which join the baling wire in holding remnant technology together" which is a more interesting vision of the future, although just as grimdark as it ever was.
> WDC has licensed our 65xx technology to a number of companies over our long history including MOS Tech, Rockwell, GTE, CMD and many others.
rockwell, mos technologies, and cmd don't exist since 02001, gte since 02000. i suspect this page hasn't been updated in quite a while, maybe since last millennium, and possibly if they were ever making hundreds of millions per year they aren't now. https://wdc65xx.com/where-to-buy has been updated and has their current stock numbers, which total under 31000 for all their microcontrollers and microprocessors, which would be 8 hours of stock if they were making a hundred million per year. a hundred thousand seems more plausible
mouser has another 4000 or so in stock, again summing all the different skus. by comparison they have 38000 attiny13a-ssur chips https://ar.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Microchip-Technology/ATT..., 22000 atsamd20e16b-mut chips https://ar.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Microchip-Technology/ATS..., 28000 pic18f46k42-i/pt chips https://ar.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Microchip-Technology/PIC..., almost 63000 stm32f030f4p6tr chips https://ar.mouser.com/ProductDetail/STMicroelectronics/STM32...
digi-key doesn't actually have the w65c02sxb, which is an eval board. that's a 'marketplace product' meaning that digi-key just sends your order to another seller, in this case wdc. they do have 5 units of the w65c02s and 17 units of the neo6502, which are eval boards from olimex. no bare chips
as for the furby, it used the spc81a, a 6502 clone that lacks the y register. more importantly, though, the spc81a is evidently mask-programmed and lacks any apparent way to get it to use external memory. so it's probably useless as a microcontroller to scavenge. the same can be said of keyboard and mouse controllers: although conceivably they might use a 6502 instruction set, they aren't of any use if you can't reprogram them
i can't find any information on tiger electronics handheld games hardware, but given that they designed the furby, i suspect the story will be the same there: game in rom, not enough pins for a memory bus (though you can use the spc81a's i/o ports to control an external bit-serial memory; the datasheet suggests an spi ram)
as for traffic lights, the last traffic light controller i saw open was electromechanical, no visible electronics beyond diodes, so i don't think you're going to be salvaging very many microcontrollers from traffic light controllers; there are too few per population and their replacement lifetime is too long
a vision i think is a lot more appealing is self-sufficient microcontrollers. cp/m was perfectly capable of self-hosting, although dec machines gave it its initial bootstrap. a 4-megahertz z80 was perfectly adequate for assembling the bios, bdos, and command processor, despite having only something like 0.5 8-bit mips and 0.05 dhrystone mips (https://netlib.org/performan...
Talk about the end of an era.-
PS. For many XP was some sort of "sweetspot", as far as Win OSs are concerned.-
PS. Then again, it depends. How much evidence of "past-proof"-ness do you need - in terms of "backstory" to meet that requirement? Linux, or - even better - some BSD variants go way further back.-
My experience is quite the opposite. I still play the Windows Entertainment Pack version of Tetris. In Linux, thanks to Wine, it just works. In Windows 10, I'm told to contact the publisher for a new version.
Because literally every piece of software in the Nix repo includes all dependencies (including things like build dependencies, not just runtime dependencies) that existed at the time it was built, all the way down to the metal basically
Indeed. Good call. Another superb sweetspot.-
My understanding is:
* The authors wanted to run on a Raspberry Pi powered by solar + batteries
* They're often somewhere in the Pacific so their internet connection is often bad
* Varvara[1] is the portable-enough solution which works for them
* Others liked it enough to write a bunch of other tools[2]
It's all pretty much self-hosting at this point. It's not for everyone, but why bother with Windows if it fits your needs?
[1]: https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/varvara.html
[2]: https://github.com/hundredrabbits/awesome-uxn?tab=readme-ov-...
Good luck running Windows 7 on an RPI and with a laughable power draw.
Oh, and don't even compare VS + MSDN documentations (huge GB's wasted) vs what Acme can do and just the plan9's 9.intro.pdf book. The disk usage would wear out any SD in days. 9front, otoh, can even selfcompile itself in a breeze. Try that under Windows.
And, with a Gemini client for 9front (there are a few), between the gemini 'capsules' (sites and blogs) and gemini://gemi.dev (web decrafying proxy to gemini, where you can read news stripping out the 95% of the pages, scripts, trackers and all the bullshit, they can get totally covered.
Gopher9 (Gopher client) makes a good point with gopher://magical.fish for global news, translation services and such. Much less bandwidth spent than the web, for sure.
With a bare irc client (again, literally few lines of shell scripting under 9front due how's designed) they can connect to the public IRC servers from bitlbee.org and connect to modern disservices such as Discord and Slack, at least being able to chat against their peers.
> The modern stack doesn't really work for us, it doesn't apply to the limitations that we have on the boat. We have 180 watts of solar. We just spent the whole summer with two 6-volt batteries, which is very small. When you're going down that route, at every turn people are telling to just put more solar panels, or to buy more batteries. That is such a modern way of solving your problem. In reality, technology like this(especially high-tech) rarely solves problems. It creates a lot of other problems, which on a sailboat is very immediate. Putting more solar would mean more windage, more chance of things flying off and cutting our limbs. More batteries would mean the boat would be heavier, it would stop us from being able to run away from storms.
https://100r.co/site/weathering_software_winter.html
(That does change somewhat when doing paid work though...)
Baffling. I'm in
Absurd: Not enough power on our sailboat to run Ableton and Photoshop.
Real: So we replaced it with open source technology.
Absurd: That technology was based on Electron.
Real: Electron was too bloated.
Absurd: So we ported everything over to the NES.
Real: And now you can run our software anywhere you can emulate an NES
PS. Which leads me - tangentially - to think that (maybe) the solution to (at least) some of our problems might someday be found in a cult :)
Who knows ...
> Absurd: So we ported everything over to the NES.
This was grand. The NES as a most effective "baseline" platform. Can totally see humanity sending out an NES emulator on Voyager VI as a last gasp.-
... in no small part perhaps because they remain isolated "pockets" of culture where - often - "progress" is slower or more controlled. Where idiosyncratic behavior becomes the "new" orthodoxy as behavior or culture "degrades".-
Where was it ... "Nightfall" (the novel) I think it was where a cult periodically saves civilization - by being the only ones that know how to handle the aftermath.-
The major religions have been beating that dead horse for a long time.
"8 bit 'looks' and hardware constitutes - and 'looks like' - some optimum as far as computing is concerned"
... so sufficiently advanced systems will look like it to interface with us as a sort of lingua franca.-
AGIs. Alien probes. The works. They will all look to us like a C64 or NES would :)
Please, vid.:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40989221
Make it a thousand rabbits. Make it a flotilla. Make it an armada ... :)
technically varvara isn't actually the nes
Now that's an interesting proposition (which, I do not contend mind you ...)
ETA: to be clear there's nothing wrong with making a toy and then turning that toy into it's own all-consuming hobby (TTRPGs for example) and one of the best parts of programming is how easy it is to do just that. It's just kind of annoying watching people wax rhapsodic about nonsense instead of copping to "yeah we're having a lot of fun, i feel like a kid again"
Yeah, you can have a simple regular life; that's lower on problems maybe. But man, sailing around & futzing with interesting barefoot developers projects sure sounds challenging in a lot of very very excellent ways.
Every personal problem has at least one easy solution. better ones take more effort.
Signed, someone who has lived on a boat before.
Or whose boat came equipped with casinos, an Olympic swimming pool, Michelin-starred restaurants, and somebody else footing the bill.
Also not unlike: It's not the destination, it's the journey.
I wouldn't call any of the listed problems "real problems" in the context of my long winded disability and homelessness lmao. I used to be in their community, the mods, and indirectly, them, were abusive as hell. Their community is, last I heard, hemorrhaging queer folk (or maybe it's bled dry and queer folk just don't stick around there anymore!) because they have repeatedly shielded abusive members and placed them in positions of power, and ignored, silenced, and ejected their victims when they finally kicked up a fuss about it. Part of the move from an internal chat to Mastodon was specifically so it would take the pressure off them having to actively perform any sort of moderation duty or deal with the abusive people directly.
They are, fundamentally, rich people playing at being poor and living in a tiny sustainable island while the rest of the world burns. Their stuff is very interesting, sure, but stating "real problems they face" ignores the fact that every one of the problems they are facing are ones that they themselves have created. I actually really love some of the things they've come out with, but it's important that all of their work comes with the context that it was formed in, at least in my opinion.
edit: I forgot about the 'cult' thing... they are absolutely a cult. at least one of their members made explicit reference multiple times to being part of a cult and it was never actively denied outside of a "well, not yet, we don't have the numbers ;)" kind of thing.
Their design sensibilities are very good, and I feel exactly the same -- it just... doesn't sit right, feels bitter, somehow, to create things with their tools, in the full context of everything.
I've often mulled over starting up a little group sharing some of the same sensibilities but without the toxicity, to be honest.
Ergo: some of them are actual arseholes.
Oscar Pistorius was an abusive murdering douchebag, not just a brave para olympic gold medal winning runner.
The ones who are wealthy will hold relative power over the ones who aren't. The ones in good health may neglect or actively exclude the ones who aren't. Racism and xenophobia rear their ugly heads. And so on.
1. Leaders identify with nonbinary pronouns,
2. thus: leaders appear to be members of the/a queer community,
3. and: queer community members tend to center queer people/experiences (regardless of whether said members are shitty people for any reason),
4. yet: the leaders are specifically harming and driving out queer members of their community. This is unexpected. Not "wow, this should be impossible" unexpected, just "damn, this shouldn't have happened" unexpected.
It's quite simple and straightforward.
As an aside, (and I know I'll get downvoted for my tone, but it is what it is), for ye straight commenters: consider that your opinions on queerness and queer community dynamics probably aren't very well informed when you're entering conversations about them. (Inspired by but not personally attacking the parent comment. They might be queer too! And their statement is true, it's just off the mark in this context.)
In practice this isn't the case, because you can use this as a shield. So for homophobic people it might be advantageous to enter the community in a way that causes the least amount of personal friction. Like, simply putting pronouns in your bio and doing literally nothing else is trivial - but the social benefit is not.
It's a big problem, because people who ARE non-binary or ARE bisexual or whatever then get a ton of backlash. Because those identities are the most common to be commandeered, so to speak. At least online.
I do not have logs of direct messages because it escaped my intention -- while I planned to get them, that never happened. At the time, I was lied to and told I would be able to return, and then 3 months later I was informed I was not going to be able to return to the space. They also did not inform anyone that I was leaving, either. I had long friendships with many in that slack instance, and not only would they not know where to find me, but none of them were informed that I had even left -- as far as any of them know, I ghosted them. There was absolutely zero transparency of moderation both at the time, and as far as I am aware, to this day.
Something I forgot to mention in the above is that at the time they had a code of conduct, and this code of conduct listed a two strike system, along with a resolution system. Neither of these were followed in any capacity (likely because they didn't exist), and there was never any communication by the moderators that I had had strikes raised against me.
I'll just point out though that most problems of the world are ones we ourselves have created.
https://checkpointgaming.net/features/2020/05/making-games-a...
Not the original poster, but that’s my view exactly. If you impose the limitations upon yourself then it’s not really a “problem” for you, is it now. You just can afford to make your life shittier for an “experience” to then have fun solving the issues you’ve created for yourself
Edit: However, upon reading further comments, I don't want this to be seen as a defense of the group against actual complaints.
PS. Except for AI, perhaps ...
... I was going to add certain forms of cryptography to that, but then realized that we've always have had some sort of cryptography that was "hardware-appropriate" (ie. sufficiently hard to break, to be useful) for the age. So older hardware was just fine ...
What the boat couple is doing strikes me as the most romantic sort of bricolage and just gives me the warm fuzzies all over. But Urbit just pisses me off for a variety of reasons.
https://thebaffler.com/
What I care about is technology, and you have to dig quite hard to extract it here.
I don’t think you’re an activist, I just think you’re yet another someone who is unable to see the Amazon forest for the chip on your shoulder.
Extremely passionate about ecology. Pessimistic about where the world is headed but optimistic about our individual ability to cope with it.
Super into low-level programming and old school pixel art and that whole aesthetic.
Absolutely full of stories about sailing. And just completely present in conversation.
Therein lies one key, methinks. I find that refreshing. It seems a viable "compromise", and, a solution to "data disaster driven dispair" :)
... faith in the individual.-
> And just completely present in conversation.
Incredible.-
Many thanks for sharing.-
Is like buying a electric car while you have a luxury ICE that works, is a waste of resources. I dont really mind, but dont say you care about the enviroment.
You're trying really hard to be contrary here, but it's not working. Devine is not claiming to be ecologically perfect. They're just trying to be as ecologically efficient as they can while living a life that feels meaningful and rewarding to them.
What I think is cool about 100r is that it is not "computer generated art" or "digital art", but rather "computer science/language design/programming as art". It's like they have this respect and reverence for it that I've often felt, and I often feel isolated in feeling.
And, what an enormous difference there is, between these two things.-
https://youtube.com/watch?v=MNF8SF69QvM&list=PLb1uDATFJPcEEG...
https://youtube.com/watch?v=DBI8eBMGyYs
https://youtube.com/watch?v=mxr8Dtw2R5w
https://youtube.com/watch?v=RDZiKYSGsjg
https://metasyn.srht.site/learn-orca/
Super cool in theory though!
Here's a blog post I wrote after spending a long weekend figuring out how to use it to make some procedurally generated music: https://inventingsituations.net/2021/12/26/procedural-music-...
and the screen-cap of some of the generated music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF-DD43sk2E
Such a great line.
I may not (correction: almost definitely don't on 80% of stuff) agree with them politically, but I have to admire their creativity and product execution.
Here's 100r's (specifically xxiivv's) page on the topic https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/permacomputing.html
The first paragraph gives a good overview of the idea:
> Permacomputing encourages the maximization of hardware lifespan, minimization of energy usage and focuses on the use of already available computational resources. It values maintenance and refactoring of systems to keep them efficient, instead of planned obsolescence, permacomputing practices planned longevity. It is about using computation only when it has a strengthening effect on ecosystems.
1. We could have examined each of the 12 Permaculture Design Principle and attempted to directly apply them to software design. For example, "Observe and Interact" is so broadly useful and versatile (and the core of adversarial domains, such as warfare), it can easily be applied to software. You won't see it directly listed here: https://permacomputing.net/Principles/
2. The permaculture ethical principles are not there in full. "Care for life" refers to "Care for Earth", "Care for People", but nothing about "Fair Share". Comparing these two ways of looking at it, I don't see how the permacomputing formulation is an improvement on how the permaculture ethical principles are formulated. Furthermore, I think this has more to do with not sufficiently delving into the place of technologies within a regenerative paradigm. I am speculating here with little basis, but I don't think the people who came up with this got their hands dirty with planting, nurturing, and harvesting things.
However, reading more with 100r, CollapseOS, DuskOS, there is a lot of thought put into this even if I think there are some key things missing from my experience with permaculture.
It is why my friends and I are exploring the ideas of "permatech", what is Technology's full, integrated place within a living systems world view? We have yet to come up with anything coherent yet.
If you mean modern high technology, I suspect it has no place.
It is a really interesting question,
I once heard a historian described technology as a lever. A small effort has greater gains.
However, we were looking at it from a different angle. What if civilization are not walls and cities — the division of labor so that peasants can support the ruling class — but rather, in _design_? When I first posed that, one of my friends went right into architectural design. (Which is fine, since we explored Christopher Alexander’s work).
But an example of what I was thinking of was this discovery that one of the cave paintings was probably a hunting calendar. It allows the tribe to count the number of moons when there is sufficient deer.
That’s a kind of design — a kind of permacomputing - a kind of civilization if we were to reframe it as design.
I might be stretching it there.
I have seen effective use of technology in permaculture. Digging up swales and basins make use technology, whether it is with a shovel, or feeding pigs in a way so that they can dig for you.
So I think there is something there.
What a grand concept.-
There is a related project from permacomputing that I'd like to highlight: CollapseOS/DuskOS which has overlapping and adjacent ends with what 100 Rabbits are trying to do with UXN. I know there are attempts to port UXN to DuskOS.
https://permacomputing.net/
http://collapseos.org/why.html
https://100r.co/site/weathering_software_winter.html
From my vantage point their work fits the definition nicely.
"A collective body" [1] ... "Collectivized or characterized by collectivism" [1] ... "A political or economic theory advocating collective control especially over production and distribution" [2]
[1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/collective [2]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/collectivism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueTCjpNXing
Love their editing style. Very inspiring indeed.
They're smart, capable, and committed to openly sharing knowledge and ideas in their community.
https://metasyn.srht.site/learn-uxn/
"We eventually ported our tools to C, but while we had achieved ideal energy usage, portability was still an issue, so we kept looking. We learnt 6502 Assembly, seeing players run our games as NES roms on all these different platforms gave us an idea."
A simple example is the fact that they use Plan 9 C. I urge you to try making a simple game that runs on both Plan 9 and Linux.
The only reason C is portable is because a lot of collective effort was put into porting various libraries to various systems, and homogenizing them to look kinda the same if you squint.
Uxn creates a very easy to implement virtual computer that is actually identical. A Uxn program is more portable than a C one for their purposes. And I think it's obvious how that could have came to them from NES emulators, which have similar properties.
Of course, this is almost certainly accidental and I'd think it would be corrected if it were brought to their attention, and the meat of their work is in domains other than lightweight websites.
That said, it'd be even more cynical to dismiss all of the work and thought that Rek and Devine have put out there because certain elements of it seem a bit hypocritical from a certain point of view. I just spent a couple of hours surfing through their site, reading about their philosophy, and find myself respecting the parts I disagree with almost as much as the parts I identify with. That kind of content is exactly what HN's good for discovering.
I will do my part by upvoting the other comments, but judging by the karma ranking and comment history of some of these commenters, I think I am in the minority.
My comment is actually downvoted at -3 points currently. As for the top comment, I don't see the issue with pointing out that the site is enabling the tracking of users when it claims not to, especially since it is directly related to the topic of the site itself. I don't think being unconditionally positive is in line with the site's goal of promoting "intellectual curiosity."
>judging by the karma ranking and comment history of some of these commenters
That top comment is from John Nagle of Nagle's algorithm. I doubt his karma is from being negative.
A relentless cynicism and the willingness to shoot down bad ideas are vital for producing anything worthwhile. Someone who was able to improve real-world networking is very likely to have been "negative" by modern standards.
But unchecked cynicism tends to result in a general lack of trust that is not very conducive to progress.
Which, in a sense ends up being anímical the ethos at hand, with many blogfolk now securing their own sites, with a nice, ongoing discussion about many technical options to achieve that. Sounds like a good outcome.-
As with most experiments, we can observe and borrow shadows of their ideas into our own life hopefully!
Indeed.-
PS. If we stop and examine, our entire computing "paradigms" have been - mostly - driven, propelled forward by "industrial", commercial, business productivity (use cases) ...
... but what would have happened / will happen were these paradigms to emerge (and emerge mainly) from art, creation, play, instead?
The game would check for files named the same as it's default resources, read them in for use instead of the original. But then people started using the aforementioned transparent walls in competitive matches, and so a new variable was introduced to force the use of the defaults.
The next game (CS:GO) provided skins through a marketplace, including the use of loot-crate mechanics, the prices of in demand items sky rocketed, they are now used as currency for hackers and online gambling, and the online skin gambling sites have been caught advertising fraudulently through streamers. "rare" skins can sell for tens or hundreds of THOUSANDS of dollars.
In short, a great feature got exploited, commercialized, more exploited, and inspired a great amount of profiteering and sketchy business practices while ruining community aspects of a whole genre of entertainment (lots of copycats).
What I'm trying to say, is I think those paradigms most likely would have been co-opted by third parties in the name of greed and profit, destroying the communal and humanistic aspects of them in short order.
The boat idea would perhaps too lonely for most people, but it would be nice to see folks experiment with re-inventing communes/new types of forming communities.
There is strictly no reason for each person to own a TV, PC, dishwasher, washing machine, etc. - most of that could be shared so as to reduce electronic waste and increase sustainability.
The minimalism idea of their VM resonates with me and remindes me of Niklaus Wirth, who had similar values and pushed things even further (designing his whole hardware + OS + language all by himself).
This sounds nice in theory, but doesn't work out well in practice. You get a tragedy of the commons situation where people don't take care of the equipment and it gets broken, or dies early. Also, some people are just really bad with handling and taking care of things: some people will buy some item, and then you look at it again years later and it's in pristine condition. But look at another person's identical item after that time and it's either destroyed, or looks really beat-up. Maybe they're too rough with it, maybe they never clean it, maybe they don't maintain it, but I've noticed some people just seem to destroy everything they use.
Also, trying to share many things doesn't work out in practice because people want to use them at the same time. You can see this at places like laundromats; you can't expect people to wake up at 2AM to do their laundry. People usually like to watch TV at the same time too. So you need enough equipment to handle peak times.
And sharing a PC? What do you do when someone in your commune insists on clicking on every potentially malicious attachment on your shared Windows PC?
But that's, like, the Patriarchy. That would really harsh our buzz, so we need to reinvent, in a broken and stupid way, what previously worked fine for tens of thousands years.
Co-buying second homes? How many people are involved in a transaction like that? That's not communal at all, that's a partnership. Of course you can be selective with whom you partner and only partner with someone trusted, plus you both have a strong economic interest in taking care of the property. Same with your so-called "communal houses": it's not like dozens or hundreds of people are going to live in a house. Makerspaces, etc., can screen their members, and keep track of who does what to penalize people who abuse things.
Libraries have occasionally had trouble with people abusing books (ever seen a loaned-out book with folded-down corners, or writing in them?). However books don't need nearly as much care and maintenance as complex machinery (i.e. power tools) so of course you don't have to worry about it as much, and normal libraries budget and plan for books having a limited lifetime anyway. Extremely rare and valuable books aren't left out for random people to handle either.
TV? Meh. Who gets to decide what we all watch?
PC? GTFO. That's mine. Hands off. That means you, too, Satya.
a thing to keep in mind is that accelerometer access has recently been shown to leak enough information about passwords to compromise them
Yeah, nah. They know exactly what they are doing.
So much software also just takes for granted that it should be allowed on the Internet.
Indeed, and I find it a problem on land too. I use Miro at work and it is _awful_ on an unreliable internet connection, like on trains in the UK.
I really value local-first software for this reason. I’d like to see more of it.
Somebody really ought to set that up, assuming it doesn't already exist in some fashion ...
Bluestein, you should check out the Handmade Conference(s).
https://handmadecities.com/
What apocalyptic events?
Privacy Badger blocked tracking from:
Because If you use anything from Google, you will be tracked.So they should either introduce a cookie banner, find an alternative host that more strictly adheres to privacy concerns, or just host the video themselves in a video element.
i mean peertube is a great alternative, and nowadays browsers are pretty okay at just playing bare mp4 files if you re-encode them with ffmpeg -movflags faststart -c copy, but if for whatever reason you choose to use youtube instead there are some harm-reduction measures you can take
I’ve done this in the past by literally grabbing a screenshot of the video thumbnail (and the play button) and adding a link to that image.
Sure, it won’t play in the same page and won’t be up to date with thumbnail or other presentation changes but I didn’t care - it was a small image that also didn’t include any executable code or privacy risks.
https://dri.es/how-to-remove-youtube-tracking
Someone just pointed out I have the same problem on my blog and I'm very pissed. It's not enough that their embeds break every Lighthouse metric and recommendation. It's all this, too
Google's become a marketing-profiling engine, wrapped in ad-serving infrastructure, wrapped in the decaying remnants of a search engine.-
I’m not sure you can fully blame Google for what the web became though. Part of the reason search engines are close to useless here 24 years later is because most of the content people produce go to SoMe sites. Sites like Hacker News, sites like Medium and so on and because of how everything became a popularity matrix people are posting soooo much useless stuff online. Where it used to be you actually had to have something to say to bother putting it online, because it took an effort, we now live in a world where 90% or the talk people do is while they’re on the shitter. Those 90% is a number I pulled out my ass, but it would be hilarious to see an actual number on just how much internet “content” gets created by people on a toilet.
It is what it is though. To make a functional search engine today which was on par with Google in 2000, you’d probably need access to browser bookmarks of the people you’ve ranked as having interesting taste in what they bookmark. Which probably isn’t really possible without breaking a lot of laws, if at all.
I'll pull out an equally haphazard guess: Up to 5%.-
Edit: I am vegetarian, probably has something to do with it.
The reason I know a shit should take 30 seconds is because there is this Danish doctor who has spent like 30 years studying how we shit, and her name is Gert which is typically a male name. Anyway some years back she was on TV telling the nation how to shit, and it sort of went viral and now everyone above a certain age basically knows who Gert “who knows how to shit” is.
But yeah, for some it’s definitely an escape. Particularly at work.
A little chewy, but you get used to it. And you definitely aren't short of fiber if you also have a salad that day
That didn't last very long. Even before geocities there was a huge amount of random/pointless stuff online. It was okay though because those people weren't looking to make money. They didn't feel the need to misrepresent or SEO the hell out of their personal sites to drive traffic.
Greed killed the internet. Once people started putting up websites with the intent to line their own pockets instead of doing it just to share something fun or cool or personal or helpful it was doomed. Corporations quickly got involved and everything else got crowded out, bought out, or replaced by ad-filled trash.
Anyway, I’d like to NOT embed YouTube. Maybe I will anyway, but I wonder if anyone has alternatives, especially if they are scrappy, tiny alternatives like those that I imagine 100r might produce.
I’m considering MP4 or WebM in HTML and wilder ideas like an audio file and a few images that are started at the same time with JS.
Not the prettiest or purest solution, but very simple.
Can't recall where though.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/171780?hl=en#zippy...
https://dbohdan.com/assets/embed.js
I use lite-youtube on my site for this reason. Instead of embedding the YT player directly, it shows a thumbnail that pulls in the embed when you click to watch the video.
That way visitors aren't tracked unless they actively click the thumbnail to watch the embedded player. Iirc it also works as just a link so visitors have the option to cmd+click or right-click-copy to avoid the embed.
You’ll have to learn some ffmpeg incantations but the bandwidth will be free and your total costs will be the tiny VM and block storage. Might even be able to point Cloudflare at a public bucket and skip the VM.
If you need to store and serve several terabytes of content, a dedicated server instead of block storage will be your best bet (again with Cloudflare), you’ll just need to figure out offsite backup and restoration.
I think by keeping the HLS segments at a few megabytes each and not using a file extension in the URL, I've slipped through the cracks.
(My religion forbids me from recognizing any terms of service that haven't been given the three blessings of the matriarch)
Saint Trader Joes tried to unite them by using both light and dark sesame years ago, but there’s just too much bad blood for them to work together. We are still waiting for the chosen one that will bring balance to the bagel.
May the bagel balanced be.
> Unless you are an Enterprise customer, Cloudflare offers specific Paid Services (e.g., the Developer Platform, Images, and Stream) that you must use in order to serve video and other large files via the CDN. Cloudflare reserves the right to disable or limit your access to or use of the CDN, or to limit your End Users’ access to certain of your resources through the CDN, if you use or are suspected of using the CDN without such Paid Services to serve video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other large files.
- https://www.cloudflare.com/service-specific-terms-applicatio...
Reading between the lines a bit: they really only care if you're using Cloudflare to front a site whose primary purpose is to deliver video content, and lots of it (like, say, if you're running a tube site or a livestreaming site). They don't care about web sites which happen to incidentally include a small amount of video content.
Just make sure that player supports right click->Save I'd much rather download and view a video in VLC than somebodies janky JS player
give site-url to mpv
watch video
PS:
vlc can play from urls too, but isn't as compatible with the way most sites implement it
What else am I missing?
I know because I explored this for a hobby project of a movie I liked. See here: http://lelandbatey.com/projects/REDLINE-intro/
Use your network inspector to observe your browser requesting the individual chunks over time. Note that my server is just an Apache2 file server.
most video players also support http and there is no problem with just putting files up.
imho all the streaming tech, drm, hls, adaptive bitrate selection and whatnot, are just commercial fads to increase margin
sending the whole file at network-speed usually works fine, but maybe uneconomical at scale especially if coupled with users that skip a lot and tend to not watch the whole thing anyway.
[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/tutori...
My host doesn't support video. If I point <video> at a file it plays just fine but the server doesn't do partial content so the player crashes or stutters if the user attempts to seek outside what was downloaded. When the whole thing is downloaded it works smoothly but it isn't quite acceptable. There is no easy html way to preserve the seek/progress bar and `Accept-Ranges: none` has the same meaning as not setting the header(?)
I cant seem to find answers or bugs, all I find "make sure your server supports partial content" which really isn't required to make it work.
I'm surprised to see my inexpressible urges documented by others. I'm with these people 100% right down to why a sailboat.
I tried to do this with an apartment building. The building is too large to focus on a the detail I need. A 43' sailboat is actually a great size to prototype on.
I have a signed P&S and hope to be hard core boat living sometime in September. The idea will be the studio time I get while on land will be much sweeter if I spend a lot of time on a boat.
The boat is self-contained so my aspirations won't effect people paying rent.
The building has everything I need to host my own streaming. I don't know that I will ever publish content, but if I do it will be entirely self-hosted. If the audience is so vast that brings everything to a halt, things will start functioning again once the hordes get bored.
Think of all the wasted brain power content-creators go through to keep YouTube at bay.
I believe content should be the residue of the work. I think once publishing is the funding source it may distort the work.
This will work for now but my mind still wonders if there isn't a better way to reduce the size of these. I'll continue to experiment.
We should all feel very embarresed such a thing is possible.
You can apparently write software and/or create protocols that measure their success in moaning about revenue loss.
the political kerfuffle because drm/dmca really has nothing to do with it but i can't shake the feeling that you are involved at this level. god bless
Laws that require changing our entire civilisation and culture are not your friend. You dont want to search everones house to check if they own a radio or tv. If that happens depends on who is asking. It isnt a static group. It might begin with heroic crime fighters but we can expand or replace the effort with new business logic. First we need to prevent you from reading a harry potter registered in someone elses name, then we need to be able to take your music purchases away from you until eventually we need to lock you up for subscribing to the wrong youtube channel 30 years ago.
It isnt actually as absurd as not having video on websites in an afordable way.
All those people working at youtube and all of those giant servers. It takes a truly monumental effort to use the wrong technology.
I have to watch ads to pay for it? Advertisers have to influence content to pay for it? Our best men to keep the eyeballs on ads to pay for it?
I have over a thousand yt subs to deleted channels for a laundry list of resons. There use to be threaded discussions and video replies. It all had to go to pay for it?
All the horrors of central planning without the nice things the communists prommised us?
All that to make sure some people get paid for things other people did 70 years ago?
If that is what it costs they should not be paid. I hope little jimmy downloads all of their movies, every tv show, all the video games, all of their music, all of their books and all of their published papers.
They wanted little jimmy to pay for singing happy birthday on video. Imagine the money they lost that day. All of those birthdays!
We could have had birthday inspection squad teams. Fight the crime at the source.
that sounds a lot
The trick is to look for things not discovered by the masses. The reason (i wont call it a mistake) is almost always not publishing frequently enough. (Not that i dont watch popular things or everything in between.) Infrequent publishers dont get very noisy.
Yeah. The so-called "Net Vicarious Loss" (NVL) protocols :)
Even the ‘Bible’ app requires constant updates, I thought the final version was released quite some time ago
... even when, sometimes, it is those very updates that bring the software down.-
Also what kind of name is "100 rabbits". Reminscent of "50 blessing" from hotline miami
Just displaying the page with the embed hits those sites. All in all there were around 20 successful network requests made to load the site. There were another 7 or so requests the Ublock Origin blocked, to play.google.com/log, and then after the page loaded it continues trying those every second or so, although it seems to have slowed down after around 19 but is still ongoing.
It leaves 5 cookies (4 persistent, 1 session) and also looks like it has something in IndexedDB.
Similar with Firefox in a private window except it stores one fewer persistent cookies.
On Safari in a private window it has similar network access, but no cookies.
The "\u263Eoe\u2721is\u271E" of online politics if I've ever seen. Nearly meaningless but people place great emotional and identity-based weight on it (even if they've signed away all their data via TOS, as they likely have).
Sidebar—why does hacker news fuck with arbitrary unicode codepoints? Strikes me as deeply user-hostile behavior.
The symbols you wanted to include are in the Dingbats and Miscellaneous Symbols blocks, which I expect are all banned because they contain some emoji and this was the cheap way to be rid of those, quick test: "" "", that's a Miscellaneous Symbol and a Dingbat of no emotional valence to speak of and certainly not colourful ones.
As you can see, that's the deal: they're casualties. I wouldn't mind a more discerning filter, but then again, I wouldn't mind a dark mode, and here it is, years later.
Evidently they've blocked far more than just emoji—I was just using standard unicode.
This is meant to be a representation of this image https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coexist_(image) for people too lazy to copy and paste
This is a perfect candidate to host yourself and just slap it in some <video> tags.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/vi...
Half the """GIFs""" you see online are webm. Just put a webm. They work great.
I feel it’s such a “I am very smart gotcha” comment that isn’t helpful in any way.
It distracts from the actual topic.
I doubt they are actively trying to trick people into letting down their "adblocker" guard so they can retarget them with advertising...
I have compassion for their cause. Read 2 articles and was intrigued.
At the same time, spotting such an obvious mistake does make me wonder if their articles have glaring mistakes in them as well.
Someone is aware of the issue of online tracking and tries their best to get rid of all of these things (web fonts, analytics,...) and even states their intent "No tracking". One day they make a small mistake and don't realize that sharing a YouTube link on their website drops a cookie and immediatelly all the good they are trying to do is forgotten.
I hope you never make mistakes.
You can spin it any way you like. Claims should be backed and checked, else credibility flies out the window. I don't get how that's not glaringly obvious.
And you seem to read way too much into this mistake, promptly distrusting all the content they ever made or wrote.
Next time you make a mistake, I hope people around you will treat you the same way you treat other people, let’s find out if you like that.
It does matter, it is important. Making such a mistake calls into question if they don't have other, more serious, mistakes in their actual articles.
> Next time you make a mistake, I hope people around you will treat you the same way you treat other people, let’s find out if you like that.
I don't make extraordinary claims so I am not bound to provide any extraordinary evidence. They do make an extraordinary claim.
> I don't make extraordinary claims
That seems like a pretty extraordinary claim to me. That you've made. Twice.
This shows such black-and-white thinking, thinking in absolutes that doesn't take in account, the context and circumstances.
To me it shows a rigid mind that can't perceive nuance, and think / reason about topics in a particular context.
Minor mistakes are often just that: minor mistakes. If this was an error in a scientific paper or news article, your stance may have had more merit. But that's not the context here at all.
> I don't make extraordinary claims so I am not bound to provide any extraordinary evidence. They do make an extraordinary claim.
A blog claiming not to track you isn't an 'extraordinary claim' by any definition. So that's a mistake on your part, so I can't take anything you say seriously anymore, by your own definition.
This is noteworthy because it’s 180 degrees opposite from how most HN people live and what they do.
I feel we should change society somewhat
... could a bunch of self organized comunes such as these ever replicate such industry?
It is peculiar no self-standing group such as this has - AFAIK - attempted such a thing. Why don't they start there?
Privacy Badger can replace YouTube embeds with "click to activate" placeholders. Faster browsing, better privacy, easy-to-use controls, at least when the replacement works properly.
See "Pro tip #1" in https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/01/privacy-badger-puts-yo...
Main Menu > Extensions > Extensions Manager > Privacy Badger > Settings > Tracking Domains > search for youtube.com > tap to update the toggle for youtube.com to red
> I aspire to have an interesting website like yours
let me know if you need help / inspiration!
> I came back to read them again and your website was down though
sorry about that, i was moving & my server came with me :)
Also, the Yamaha 33 is an impressively tiny and light boat for the sailing they're doing, let alone living and working on.