>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.
Any event or series of events that removes mankind's ability to produce modern computers is a global extinction-level event and rather than dicking around with computers one should really be considering suicide to avoid a slow, painful, inevitable death in a hostile world surrounded by misery.
People act like computers are complicated. They are but they also aren't.
Any moderately-sized US state university can (and some have) build one from scratch: as in from fucking sand to "Shall we play a game?", all in one go.
The state university nearest to me has a complete nanofab that can make-- and package!-- ICs (somewhere around 14nm-ish), a different lab that can make wafers from scratch, a chemistry department where undergrads could make the plastics, and all of the software guys you can shake a stick at.
The loss of the ability to make many things, including computers but also other more important things like the industrial process for making ammonia, globally, simultaneously, is the end of humanity.
The knowledge and ability is so widely globally distributed that taking it all out is death.
Do not mistake the centralization of consumer goods assembly with the centralization of the knowledge needed to assemble consumer goods.
Is this OS just for the brief period of time between the loss and the ultimate end? To like, play some rounds of solitaire while awaiting the inevitable?
There's a lot of idiosyncratic verbiage about stuff like collapse of civilization and users vs. operators, but it's not clear to me what makes this more lightweight or hackable than a typical lightweight RTOS or even just baremetal drivers running on a microcontroller.
I think many of us feel a lot of existential dread about the future these days, and if hacking on an OS helps the author cope with those feelings and improves their psychology, then I'm all for it. Whatever keeps you sane.
Seems like a wishful thinking about the first stage portion of collapse. You're going to be more interested in running some obsolete version of Windows that controls some proprietary infrastructure hardware, not running calculations of whatever kind or building things from scratch.
Tbh I agree with almost every word there, but I can't believe this OS would be of any help in such a situation.
In dusk of our civilization it will not be possible to boot this OS from any modern computer. Those things nowadays don't even have CD. everything is dependent on internet, our data is being disowned by us and put into cloud. In case of broken internet the knowledge is going to be lost.
And how we're going to connect to this site using http? Via dialup?
Let me preface that I do not subscribe to the ideology at all, but the concept of bootstrapping a complex system is intellectually worthwhile and often practical in its use-cases. For example, imagine a tech company with a bunch of datacenters that boot from the network, have redundancy etc, but if you somehow turn the macthines off all at once, no one knows if they can reboot safely (say, service discovery cannot find the machine hosting OS images anymore).
As a practical matter, you can flip the author's mental pessimism and look at the optimistic situation where we conquer other planets, in which case thinking about an optimal bootstrapping path is going to be essential for the society and its industrial needs.
It is also true that some fairly local shocks in human society can cause a cascading failure and doing this analysis fairly regularly can help identify and minimize the cascade.
I feel I can empathize with the ideology, and I want to argue that an idea like this is a big piece of some puzzle.
The puzzle: During the collapse, I think the biggest thing we would lose is our ability to communicate with each other in a reliable way. Like telecommunications and internet and all that. Who and what do we trust?
I imagine that before a collapse like this would happen, people would get a hint to gather as much as they can to help with their survival. Those things would include: this OS, the knowledge to load a sequence of bytes from whatever device is holding the OS to as many CPUs/controllers as possible, strategies to connect any number of arbitrary CPUs to radio devices, some knowledge of public keys and private keys. maybe all neatly organized into a handbook
The OS itself would be responsible for providing as easy an interface for any average joe to generate public/private keys, communicate with other people who have followed their same protocol, and use those public keys to build trust from communications. before the collapse happens, you may even collect a list of public keys you are likely to already trust.
The OS could maybe even have software for building communities of trust or even handling adhoc finances through (don't hate me for this) cryptocurrency.
anyways, this is all based on an assumption that the ability to communicate quickly (and build trust in a decentralized yet controllable way) is the best mitigation we have to a collapse
this answer is slightly influenced by the movie leave the world behind lol
>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.
Any event or series of events that removes mankind's ability to produce modern computers is a global extinction-level event and rather than dicking around with computers one should really be considering suicide to avoid a slow, painful, inevitable death in a hostile world surrounded by misery.
People act like computers are complicated. They are but they also aren't.
Any moderately-sized US state university can (and some have) build one from scratch: as in from fucking sand to "Shall we play a game?", all in one go.
The state university nearest to me has a complete nanofab that can make-- and package!-- ICs (somewhere around 14nm-ish), a different lab that can make wafers from scratch, a chemistry department where undergrads could make the plastics, and all of the software guys you can shake a stick at.
The loss of the ability to make many things, including computers but also other more important things like the industrial process for making ammonia, globally, simultaneously, is the end of humanity.
The knowledge and ability is so widely globally distributed that taking it all out is death.
Do not mistake the centralization of consumer goods assembly with the centralization of the knowledge needed to assemble consumer goods.
Is this OS just for the brief period of time between the loss and the ultimate end? To like, play some rounds of solitaire while awaiting the inevitable?
There's a lot of idiosyncratic verbiage about stuff like collapse of civilization and users vs. operators, but it's not clear to me what makes this more lightweight or hackable than a typical lightweight RTOS or even just baremetal drivers running on a microcontroller.
I think many of us feel a lot of existential dread about the future these days, and if hacking on an OS helps the author cope with those feelings and improves their psychology, then I'm all for it. Whatever keeps you sane.
Seems like a wishful thinking about the first stage portion of collapse. You're going to be more interested in running some obsolete version of Windows that controls some proprietary infrastructure hardware, not running calculations of whatever kind or building things from scratch.
Recent issue of Wired has an interview with the author https://www.wired.com/story/forth-collapse-os-apocalypse-pro...
Tbh I agree with almost every word there, but I can't believe this OS would be of any help in such a situation.
In dusk of our civilization it will not be possible to boot this OS from any modern computer. Those things nowadays don't even have CD. everything is dependent on internet, our data is being disowned by us and put into cloud. In case of broken internet the knowledge is going to be lost.
And how we're going to connect to this site using http? Via dialup?
Let me preface that I do not subscribe to the ideology at all, but the concept of bootstrapping a complex system is intellectually worthwhile and often practical in its use-cases. For example, imagine a tech company with a bunch of datacenters that boot from the network, have redundancy etc, but if you somehow turn the macthines off all at once, no one knows if they can reboot safely (say, service discovery cannot find the machine hosting OS images anymore).
As a practical matter, you can flip the author's mental pessimism and look at the optimistic situation where we conquer other planets, in which case thinking about an optimal bootstrapping path is going to be essential for the society and its industrial needs.
It is also true that some fairly local shocks in human society can cause a cascading failure and doing this analysis fairly regularly can help identify and minimize the cascade.
Related:
Collapse OS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43482705 - March 2025 (199 comments)
Running CollapseOS on an Esp8266 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38645124 - Dec 2023 (1 comment)
Dusk OS: 32-bit Forth OS. Useful during first stage of civilizational collapse - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36751422 - July 2023 (141 comments)
DuskOS: Successor to CollapseOS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36688676 - July 2023 (4 comments)
Collapse OS – Why? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35672677 - April 2023 (1 comment)
Collapse OS: Winter is coming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33207852 - Oct 2022 (2 comments)
Collapse OS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31340518 - May 2022 (8 comments)
Collapse OS Status: Completed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26922146 - April 2021 (2 comments)
Collapse OS – bootstrap post-collapse technology - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25910108 - Jan 2021 (116 comments)
Collapse OS Web Emulators - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24138496 - Aug 2020 (1 comment)
Collapse OS, an OS for When the Unthinkable Happens - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23535720 - June 2020 (2 comments)
Collapse OS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23453575 - June 2020 (15 comments)
Collapse OS – Why Forth? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23450287 - June 2020 (166 comments)
Collapse OS – Why? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22901002 - April 2020 (3 comments)
'Collapse OS' Is an Open Source Operating System for the Post-Apocalypse - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21815588 - Dec 2019 (3 comments)
Collapse OS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21182628 - Oct 2019 (303 comments)
I feel I can empathize with the ideology, and I want to argue that an idea like this is a big piece of some puzzle.
The puzzle: During the collapse, I think the biggest thing we would lose is our ability to communicate with each other in a reliable way. Like telecommunications and internet and all that. Who and what do we trust?
I imagine that before a collapse like this would happen, people would get a hint to gather as much as they can to help with their survival. Those things would include: this OS, the knowledge to load a sequence of bytes from whatever device is holding the OS to as many CPUs/controllers as possible, strategies to connect any number of arbitrary CPUs to radio devices, some knowledge of public keys and private keys. maybe all neatly organized into a handbook
The OS itself would be responsible for providing as easy an interface for any average joe to generate public/private keys, communicate with other people who have followed their same protocol, and use those public keys to build trust from communications. before the collapse happens, you may even collect a list of public keys you are likely to already trust.
The OS could maybe even have software for building communities of trust or even handling adhoc finances through (don't hate me for this) cryptocurrency.
anyways, this is all based on an assumption that the ability to communicate quickly (and build trust in a decentralized yet controllable way) is the best mitigation we have to a collapse
this answer is slightly influenced by the movie leave the world behind lol
Mandatory question for all OSes - Does it run EMACS or does it run inside of a EMACS?
I've seen this before, thought it was super interesting, kudos to the author. Leaving this comment for contrast with some other negative comments.