Love 100r! There aren't a ton of examples online, but their livecoding music software/language, ORCA, is a remarkable instrument.
https://100r.co/site/orca.html
Love orca, and that's a really nice example. Messed with it a bit when it came out, and one toy project I'll share in the hopes that someone does it before me: an orca GUI that uses a larger grid with representative images in place of single char glyphs. I found that writing orca is fairly straightforward — you look up the sheet, find a thing and do it. It's reading that's the hurdle. An 8 char chunk that made perfect sense when I wrote it takes just as many lookups to read later. This probably gets easier over time, but I still think it's a cool design opportunity.
I love the contrast in "Low tech/bootstrapped tech" this way vs, say, duskos.org. I call this "rabbits vs forth" tech bootstrappers. [1].
It's somewhat strange to me that their tech journey is so narrative and ends up with a VM stack, rather than any kind of salvaged / repurposed hard tech. But then again, I'm probably on the forth side of the spectrum.
> ends up with a VM stack, rather than any kind of salvaged / repurposed hard tech
I love reading the Hundred Rabbits blog but I view it as sort of an artistic endeavor in addition to pure tech. Indeed, my idea of "low tech" would be 16-bit systems or early 32-bit stuff like 386 and 486 PCs, etc. These machines are surprisingly capable even in 2025 with the right applications. They can be repaired seemingly indefinitely with a soldering iron and spare caps.
- gopher browser -> gopher://magical.fish as a portal
- HN can be read at gopher://hngopher.com
- irc -> bitlbee.org to chat with anyone, even IRC with TLS itself.
Kirc will run on any potato.
- a high end 486 it's needed to play MP3's. Either that or burn
your favourites into CD's.
- sc-im+gnuplot/emacs' ses+gnulot
- srln+slrnpull
- telescope/sacc can do gopher fine. gemini can be stalled.
- sfeed+links to read news. Altough gmane.io and gwene.io can relay mail lists and RSS feeds as NNTP groups and then your might slrn will just read all news happily in a 486 (or less).
I still use an Atom N270 netbook, and DuskOS is on the edge; but there are zillions of Atom netbooks in LaTam and in the outside as goverments agreed to ship these to students. With TUI/CLI tools you can do wonders, far more than CollapseOS. Yes, I know Forth, I did a good chunk of Starting Forth.
UXN once tweaked it can run stuff like Oquonie.
BTW, a properly set Emacs can double as a great legacy platform too; from IRC to whatever (Bitlbee<>IRC), Web browsing, email, gopher and gemini browser with elpher (and the Gemini proxy gemini://gemi.dev), epub reading, music and video (Emacs' emms, but mpv+yt-dlp can be set to play stuff at 480p/720@30FPS), Usenet client, RSS, Elisp itself, M-x calc and Gnuplot, PDF viewer (pdf-tools), Org-Mode+Hyperbole to expand your brain like nothing, sokoban gaming, Tetris, ZMachine text adventures with Malyon, MUDs, trace routers from OpenStreetMap with osm.el ...
For stucking I/O:
Usenet->slrnpull+GNUS.
Mail->Mu4e+mu.
People doesn't know that today computers from 2003 can do wonders and access far more services than they would think.
Once you can do TLS 1.3 'fast' enough (P4 w/ SSE2), you can do anything from IRC, email, gopher, gemini, usenet and rss from proxies and terminal or Emacs clients.
Nice post. I hadn't noticed the "subtle suggestions" of donations myself, to be honest, but maybe I hadn't browsed around their pages enough.
Anyway, if they do mention it, is it not a very far cry from the situation everywhere else? Youtubers begging, screaming, shouting, seducing, murmuring, doing the bug-eyes, repeating, cloying, getting emotionally heavy and forceful, for subscriptions, likes, and comments? Interspersed with violent sudden shifts to advertising products, etc.
So it was a bit of a surprise to hear it mentioned like it might be bad. Are you surprised that the suggestions are so gentle? Or what
Perhaps OP can clarify, because I too read that as a snarky dig. Perhaps that wasn't their intention, but it felt off. The only place I saw a "subtle suggestion" for a donation was by clicking the "Support" link all the way at the bottom of the page. The site has probably the least intrusive monetization scheme one could implement without forgoing it entirely.
Same here, after reading this I looked into multiple sites and articles and I only find that "Support" link in the footer. Maybe they changed things recently?
With their stance of permacomputing, you don't think the two go hand in hand? A simple VM that can be implemented quickly on almost any hardware or underlying tech stack you can scrounge together? The only thing they'd be really against is designing new hardware to run Uxn "natively," which would seem to push you exclusively to reuse what you have.
100r's Uxn/Varvara aspires to be that, but that's not the same thing as succeeding at it. AFAIK the smallest computer with a full Uxn/Varvara implementation is a Nintendo DS [correction! Game Boy Advance], which is faster than the Sun workstation I was using in the 90s (though it has less RAM). You probably aren't going to get it running on an eZ80-based TI calculator, for example, or an Arduino UNO.
It's a good first step in that direction, the first attempt at permacomputing good enough to criticize.
I'm not sure that's true. I have an eZ80-based emulator for the AgonLight2 that is already running well enough to run some real (console-based) ROMs: https://git.phial.org/d6/uxn-ez80/
(I'm new to eZ80 assembly so the project is going slower than it otherwise might.)
The AgonLight2 has 512K of RAM and a 20 MHz CPU which is more than enough for Varvara.
I agree that 8-bit computers of the era (e.g. Pet, Apple 2, C64, TI/99a, etc.) don't have enough RAM to give Varvara its own 64k of memory (though it wouldn't be hard to design a Varvara variant with a smaller memory space) but otherwise there really aren't major barriers. As far as permacomputing goes though, there are plenty of hosts out there with enough memory to comfortably run Varvara (anything 32-bit will be fine, most 16-bit computers would also be fine).
Based on my eZ80-based implementation I think any of the eZ80-based TI calculators with 128k or more of user-accessible memory could implement Varvara without major problems.
That'll be fantastic! I'd be delighted to see that! That would make those TI calculators the new smallest machines with a full Uxn/Varvara implementation, and much lower power than the GBA that is the current champion there; I'd really like to get some experience with what that's like, because I've found the experience of using Uxn to be inspiring so far.
I also hadn't seen the AgonLight2 before.
One quibble, though: the vast majority of 32-bit computers are microcontrollers, and most of them have less than 64KiB of RAM. (My comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44611710 goes into more detail about the popular STM32 family.) They would be perfectly adequate for a self-sufficient personal computing experience (most of them have more total memory than the computers I used to run Turbo Pascal on, just less RAM, plus their CPUs are 1000 times faster, and they can read and write SD cards) but probably not with Varvara.
A few of us have been discussing a modified Varvara spec that limits the system to a smaller amount of memory (e.g. 32k, 16k, or 8k). I think with a spec like that it would unlock many implementations that are not currently practical.
I think a more important consideration for currently produced microcontroller hardware is the ability to run from ROM, because then you can load your program into relatively abundant Flash instead of the much scarcer RAM. Some way of using virtual memory (take a look at Forth's approach, which doesn't require hardware support but doesn't work for code, only data) would also make a big difference. All of this doesn't necessarily depend on native-code compilation; microcontroller memory is a much more tightly pinching shoe than microcontroller speed.
It wouldn't be idiomatic Uxntal but there's a relatively simple modification where load/store is from RAM space but jump/pc is from ROM space. For a subset of existing programs it would work fine, although the assembler would need some modifications to make the memory layout(s) a bit clearer.
Another minor correction: the well-known TI home computer was called the TI-99/4A, and it was a 16-bit machine, sharing the same architecture as TI's ill-fated line of minicomputers.
The Gameboy Advanced has a full emulator with the standard devices, and incompleteness is often not a dealbreaker as long as it supports the devices you need. There are incomplete emulators for ESP32 and STM32 based devices, DOS, and even an extremely limited emulator for the original Gameboy.
Many of these might be more powerful than your 90s workstation, but if someone's scavenging technology they're more likely to find a Chromebook than a Sun.
You're right, that's smaller. I think I was confusing the DS and the "Game Boy Advance", because I was thinking of a machine with a few hundred K of RAM. The GBA is a 16MHz ARM7TDMI with 288KiB of RAM, not counting the 96KiB of VRAM; the Nintendo DS's main CPU is a 67MHz ARM946E-S, and it has 4MiB of RAM.
As for what you're more likely to find in usable shape in a hypothetical collapse scenario, it probably depends on what kind of scenario you're talking about. Certainly vastly more Chromebooks exist than Suns, but the Chromebook's SSD only has a few months of data retention, so you probably won't be able to get it to boot if it's been sitting around unpowered for many years. All the Sun SPARCs are going to be in non-working order because their IDPROM batteries will have died, but some older 68000-family Suns like the 3/60 I theoretically still have are probably okay, because their IDPROMs are actually PROM rather than battery-backed RAM.
(Of course you also have to worry about capacitors drying out.)
What's vastly more common than Chromebooks, Suns, or GBAs, though, are Flash-based microcontrollers like the AVR family and 48MHz members of the STM32 family. (You can probably salvage a couple out of the wreckage of the drone that killed your parents.) And those will probably still be in working order, unlike anything SSD-based. I don't think Uxn is a good fit for those chips.
In a multiple-centuries sort of collapse scenario you also need to worry about the retention time of the NOR Flash in these microcontrollers. Hopefully if they lose their memory you'll still be able to rewrite it, but if the manufacturers used Flash to implement some supposedly-read-only memory, they might not bother to mention it.
In the collapse scenario we're actually in at the moment, GBAs, Nintendo DSs, and Chromebooks are all immensely more expensive than such microcontrollers. That seems likely to remain true even after the PRC invades Taiwan in a few years.
Could you explain more what's wrong with the STM32 family as a target? The Playdate's got a complete implementation and an STM32 heart. And other members of the family have seen other non-system-specific implementations, although neither is complete. I'm not deeply familiar with the family, so insight is welcomed, but I don't immediately see why they'd be unsuitable.
And while they're far more numerous, ultimately I think they're less likely to be used for personal computing. Sifting through the ruins, if you can find any functioning personal computer, you can get started immediately. Even if you don't have a compiler, you certainly have a web browser and write permissions. All you need to bring is the emulator spec.
That's an easier bar to clear than harvesting chips, a set of other working parts, gathering documentation for each, ensuring you have tooling and likely libraries for each, and most critically: enough existing, functioning tech to program it all. But if you already have that, you already have everything you need to compute without bootstrapping a new device. Not to say it wouldn't be worth the effort, but it's not an easier or alternative path to personal computing, just a path to share or persist it.
The STM32 family is awesome! There's nothing wrong with it as a target! But, basically, by trying to use Uxn on most STM32s you're turning a Pentium-133 into a 386-40, with a corresponding reduction in the kind of functionality you can deliver. Also, you have to write all your software in assembly language.
The most popular model of STM32 is probably the STM32F103C8T6 https://www.st.com/en/microcontrollers-microprocessors/stm32... used on the Blue Pill, which is a 72 MHz Cortex-M3 with 64KiB of Flash and 20KiB of SRAM, consuming up to almost 0.2 watts at full speed. The Cortex-M3 is 1.24 Dhrystone MIPS per MHz https://developer.arm.com/Processors/Cortex-M3 so that's about 89 Dhrystone MIPS. Looking at historical Dhrystone results https://netlib.org/performance/html/dhrystone.data.col0.html similarly powerful CPUs include a 133MHz Pentium, a 66MHz PowerPC 602 (as used in a PowerMac 7100 or an RS/6000 250), a 100MHz PA-RISC HP 9000/715, and a 110MHz μSPARC-II as used in the SPARCstation 5.
We ran web browsers and did video playback on these; they're totally adequate for personal computing as I understand it.
As another piece of context, remember that the original Macintosh had 128KiB of RAM, 64KiB of ROM, and a 7.8MHz 68000 that achieved roughly 0.4 DMIPS (according to the above link). It could run a WIMP GUI, MacPaint, MacWrite, and a WYSIWYG version of Microsoft Word, despite its only mass storage being slow floppies, thousands of times slower and smaller than SD cards.
Currently popular personal computing machines are significantly faster. The Raspberry Pi 3 is about 2.5 DMIPS/MHz, 2201 DMIPS http://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/Raspberry%20Pi%20Benchmarks..... So if you take CPU-bound software that barely runs fast enough on the Pi 3 and run it on the STM32F103C8T6, it will run about 250 times slower. A response that it manages in 100 milliseconds on the Pi 3 will take almost 30 seconds.
But that's assuming it's not memory-bound! The Blue Pill only has 20KiB of RAM, while the bigger machines it's being compared to typically had 2–64 MiB of RAM. You can run 64KiB of code (or data) from Flash, but not self-modifying code, because Flash can only be erased blockwise. (A minimum of ten thousand times, so this is a viable thing to do a few times a day.) You can access off-chip memories, but not at anywhere near 72 MIPS. With the LDM and STM instructions you can theoretically read and write the on-chip memory at something like 250 megabytes per second, 2 gigabits per second, while off-chip SPI (which supports DMA!) tops out at 0.018 gigabits per second, roughly 100× slower. Still, the original Macintosh's floppy was closer to 0.0001 gigabits per second.
So any of these devices is probably pretty capable of running the kinds of apps Uxn is directed at, if you hook up a screen and speaker to them. They have less RAM than the original Macintosh, but their CPU is around 100 times faster, and they can swap to off-chip memory, including MicroSD cards, which consume no power for memory retention, just reading and writing. When I was a kid, I ran word processors, high-level-language interpreters and compilers, spreadsheets, databases, and IDEs on machines that were less powerful than these chips in every way, including having less memory (though usually it was almost all RAM).
Power consumption seems worth a mention, because "minimization of energy usage" figures prominently in the permacomputing ethos as explained in https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/ethics.html. Running at full speed, the higher-speed STM32 parts use more power, up to hundreds of milliwatts, while the lower-speed, lower-power STM32L parts are more like tens of milliwatts. By suspending execution, though, this power consumption is proportional to CPU load down to a few thousandths of a milliwatt. A Chromebook uses about 10000 milliwatts; a cellphone about 3000; and, according to https://www.eetimes.com/nintendo-gameboy-eases-down-the-road..., a Game Boy Advance uses about 200 milliwatts playing Donkey Kong.
(In human terms, 100 milliwatts is the amount of mechanical work per unit time done by pulling the pull cord to start a chainsaw or lawnmower about every 15 minutes. So, if you hooked up an electrical generator to such a pull cord, very roughly, you could keep a Chromebook running by yanking on the pull cord about every 10 seconds, a cellphone about twice a minute, a Game Boy Advance about twice an hour, or a 1-milliwatt STM32 about once a day.)
But these chips are probably not capable of running the apps Uxn is written for if they're running Uxn! I mean, if you're moving sprites around the screen or sounding tones with ADSR envelopes, that's handled by Varvara's "devices", which you can implement in native code, so they're just as lightweight as they would be in any other form. But your own application code is being interpreted by the Uxn bytecode interpreter, so 95% (my guess) of the CPU time is devoted to stack manipulation and interpretation overhead. So instead of 89 Dhrystone MIPS like a SPARC 5, you get 5 DMIPS. CPUs in this class from the above list include the 25MHz SPARCStation 1+, a 40MHz AMD 80386, an Amiga 2000, and a deskside 16.7MHz 68020 Sun 3/160C server http://www.obsolyte.com/sun3/, which was one of the very first Sun-3 models http://www.sun3zoo.de/en/history.html.
And you can't usefully JIT-compile Uxn code because it idiomatically relies on pervasive self-modification in order to squeeze a bit more performance out of the inherently expensive bytecode-interpreter strategy. Uxn is also not very suitable as a compilation target for higher-level languages like C.
So, the STM32 family is great as a target, but except for the higher-end members of the family like the 168MHz STM32F746 used in the Playdate (US$14.33 https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/stmicroelectronic...), Uxn is not great as a way to make them useful.
It's wonderful as a way to inspire us to imagine what could be, though!
I'll address your comments about the bootstrapping path in a second comment.
This is my response to your thoughts about the bootstrapping path, a sibling to my thoughts about the STM32. You say:
> Sifting through the ruins, if you can find any functioning personal computer, you can get started immediately. Even if you don't have a compiler, you certainly have a web browser and write permissions. All you need to bring is the emulator spec.
First of all, most collapse scenarios don't have an especially noticeable quantity of ruins. The Soviet Union collapsed in the 01990s; the GDP fell by half, the death rate skyrocketed, and they lost not only geopolitical influence but also significant parts of their high-tech industrial capacity. The People's Republic of China in some sense collapsed during the Cultural Revolution in the late 60s, losing significant parts of its cultural history, following the Qing dynasty's collapse in 01907. Syria is currently beginning to recover from a collapse into a civil war in 02011. Cambodia killed a quarter of its population and all its intellectuals in 01975–8 under the Khmer Rouge. The Imamate of Oman had been stable for over a thousand years until it collapsed under British bombing in 01957–9, bringing it under the control of the Sultanate of Oman, which still controls it today. About half of the Timbuktu Manuscripts were rescued from the onslaughts of Boko Haram after the collapse of Mali began in 02012, after centuries of being one of the greatest centers of learning in Africa; since then, that collapse has resulted in the overthrow of democracy by military coups in all three countries of the ASS. Suriname had a civil war in 01986–9.
If you want, you can read my slightly longer notes about most of those in https://derctuo.github.io/notes/pandemic-collapse.html; those are particular cases of recent collapses that I selected randomly in order to try to get a handle on the rough frequency with which countries collapsed.
Out of all of these cases, the only one with a really significant quantity of ruins to sift through was the Syrian Civil War, although there are a fair quantity of ruins in Ukraine now 33 years later, which you could argue in some sense resulted from the collapse of the USSR. Putin certainly does make that argument. I don't think I'll touch it any further.
If anything, booming economies like today's PRC might tend to have more ruins than collapsing societies, at least until a few generations into the collapse. People who can build new housing can afford to move out of the old housing; people who are struggling to survive have to patch the leaky pipes and the holes in the roof as best they can. The ruins all over the rural USA aren't the result of fentanyl and meth, but from people moving to the cities and selling their parents' farms to big agribusinesses.
So, let's get back to the scenario you proposed:
> if you can find any functioning personal computer, you can get started immediately. Even if you don't have a compiler, you certainly have a web browser and write permissions. All you need to bring is the emulator spec.
First, the likelihood of attempting something is only a weak inequality constraint on the likelihood of achieving it. Our intrepid hero is probably going to need those electronics hacking skills you're presupposing she lacks, because she's going to need to recap the PC's power supply and figure out how to run the computer off her car battery, which is a much easier task if your power supply needs to supply tens of milliwatts instead of tens of thousands of milliwatts. (Consider: my laptop charger died the day before last. It's a 65-watt USB-C charger and seems to be fully potted. Could you fix it? What would you have to know to build a replacement? How long will my laptop be useful without one?)
Second, where did you get the emulator spec? And, supposing you write a Uxn/Varvara emulator in browser JS, do you have existing ROMs to run on it? Or are you going to write the ROMs from scratch in Uxntal? If so, why not just write your applications in browser JS directly? My estimate is that you'll get roughly 20× as much useful computation per CPU cycle, and a browser pegging your CPU can easily double the baseline power consumption of a laptop. (In the case of this one, it goes from about 5 watts to about 10 watts.)
If you can get an emulator spec and ROMs, why not get a native-code IDE like Dev-C++ or Debian with Emacs from the same place you were getting those? A full Debian or NetBSD distribution is roughly one DVD.
If you want to prepare today for a possible future of scarcity, you can figure out how to harvest chips and put together tooling and libraries for them today.
> Alan Kay described the Macintosh as the first personal computer good enough to be criticized. It was a serious step toward Kay's Dynabook. Not perfect, but in the right direction. In this 2017 interview Kay explains how he came to his vision and how it has been completely lost in mobile devices since.
> Jobs always admired Kay, who in 1984 famously told Newsweek that the Mac was the “first personal computer worth criticizing.” Just before Jobs was fired from his first stint at Apple in the ’80s, he’d been pushing an effort to get the Dynabook built in Cupertino. The two would talk on the phone every couple of months until Steve’s passing, and Jobs invited him to the unveiling of the iPhone in January, 2007.
It has been a while since I found a site this interesting, I have been reading it on and off for the past few days.
As per their site: "Hundred Rabbits is an artist collective that documents low-tech solutions with the hope of building a more resilient future. We live and work aboard a 10 m sailboat named Pino in remote parts of the world to learn more about how technology degrades beyond the shores of the western world"
Thank you, I will look into both of those. I eyed one of the logs, not sure which one, but more to see how it was shared and how extensive it was than for the content. Will give it a 2nd look.
A friend asked me whether I was concerned about energy usage of AI. I didn't have a good answer. It feels inevitable.
But, I love the write-up here on why the sailboat, and why UXN, because those two things are complementary when you are living in a sailboat and are thinking intimately about your power consumption.
Well I've been a big fan of 100r since I heard of them through the Future of Coding [0][1](and esoteric.codes [2]).
BUT JUST NOW I'm kicking around the website again today and find out that Devine made the game Hiversaires way back in the day [3] which is a banger. So I guess I've been a fan for like 12 years. I'm very tempted to buy it again.
100r are also an inspiration that a different way of life and relationship with creativity and society are possible... so if I ever drop out definitely don't look for me doing permacomputing on a sailboat in coastal BC. Don't look for me - because I won't want to be found, ok thanks in advance?
Their work has molded a lot of my views on technology, such a breath of fresh air when I first found out about them! They really inspired me to look at my own work and ask how to make it more resilient, how to decrease dependencies.
From my experience, achieving provider independence boils down to: own your stack, work offline-first, test failure modes constantly.
Been trying to get a setup going with NixOS + local AI + custom CLI tools for development work, and I never would have thought to pursue this sort of thing if I hadn't found these people. Great stuff!
Oh and ORCA is a LOT of fun! Give it a shot if you're into sounddesign, or generative electronic music stuff: https://100r.co/site/orca.html
Offline solutions or not totally internet dependent ones can bring a lot of value to the users. So many things are webapps that could easily work offline. Sure, the web is easier and has more reach, but when sites, apps, or games vanish, I start to miss the 90-00 CD days.
But again, what is best for the user is probably not the best business idea...
> Collapse won't be addressed by buying a Prius, signing a treaty, or turning off the air-conditioning. The biggest problem we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead. The sooner we confront this problem, and the sooner we realize there's nothing we can do to save ourselves, the sooner we can get down to the hard work of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality.
> This is why we are committed to fighting normative violence, fascism, colonialism, and white supremacy in all of its forms. To undermine the capitalist structure and its abusive scripts about human worth in relation to work, productivity, and ownership. To subvert oppressive gender norms and put in question the binary. To actively unlearn biased and colonial thinking. To look inside and face these parts of our darkness, personal and collective, and come out of it with more kindness and compassion.
I have the sinking feeling that you upvoters are actually upvoting the content of these quotes rather than my intention in quoting them, which was to highlight their absurdity. ;)
It seems your sinking feeling has been confirmed to be true. I'm in the camp that upvoted and am now confused why you're find the concepts absurd. I doubt this is your first encounter with a frank presentation of leftist thought, so it is the popularity that gives you the sinking feeling, or something about the ideology itself?
Necessity is the mother of invention, and as I understand it from their writing, life on the sea is a constant maintenance battle against when the "ground" underneath your feet is trying to pull you in at every step, from corroding everything holding you together to the isolation driving extensive planning and maintenance for self sufficiency projects.
I recently got my basic cruising sailing license. And I also enjoy hacking on low-power, low-end salvaged computers that are repairable with a minimal set of tools and a manual. I'm hoping one day my tech journey will lead me to spending more time aboard and working on projects in this space.
I believe that at least one of them worked for Meta before they embarked on this journey and I believe that they basically used the big tech money to FIRE. They've been able to them supplement and transition their income with the games and apps they've produced as well as related income from their 100rabbits work, as well as having minimized living expenses and no children. None of this is meant to be judgement or in any way demean the work they currently do, I love all of their stuff. Just trying to answer your question.
This comment is completely untrue, the place I had read the information was incorrect and I was wrong in passing on second hand information I hadn’t personally verified. One of the people in question has clarified and corrected this comment. I can’t edit the comment at this point otherwise I would, so this is the best I can do.
One of the two authors of the site up here, I just want to clarify before this becomes a rumour, I never worked at Meta, nor in big tech, neither have my partner.
Prior to moving on the water, Rek worked in a 10 person animation studio in Japan(Toneplus), as an animator/illustrator, and me(Dev) worked as a designer at a 15 employees company Cerego(we were building smart.fm). Afterward we worked independently making little games, got nominated for the IGF that one time, but never worked directly for a company again.
We budgeted the sailboat like this: 2 years worth of rent and related expense at our current rate, and so we could afford a 40k CAD$ sailboat. The way we looked at it was that if we managed to live aboard for over 2 years, we'd start making up the money we borrowed. It has been nearly 10 years now that we live aboard.
We're super opened with our finances and how we made this possible, so just ask us instead of making stuff up :) Cheers!
Thanks for dispelling the myth above. Very cool (and inspirational! as aspirant to the 100r lifestyle down the line) that you managed to do it without a big tech windfall :)
Unsure about the day-to-day situation, I imagine by now they make enough off of the stuff they put out as 100r that combined with very low expenses it's sustainable or close to. In past blog posts they mention taking on contract work for boat repairs.
They seem to be doing a lot of their maintenance themselves so that probably helps too. Still, I am curious about how much in average does the sailing life cost. They give some numbers here and there, so maybe someone more dedicated might be able to come up with a basic estimate.
Love 100r! There aren't a ton of examples online, but their livecoding music software/language, ORCA, is a remarkable instrument. https://100r.co/site/orca.html
I posted a clip to bsky a few weeks back: https://bsky.app/profile/r.whal.ing/post/3lpyrm4vrqs2d
And Allieway Audio made some great Youtube videos about ORCA too if people would like to learn how it works in more of a tutorial format: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaI_TuISSJE&t=446s
(I love the Dwarf Fortress background for this video, it absolutely nails the vibe)
Love orca, and that's a really nice example. Messed with it a bit when it came out, and one toy project I'll share in the hopes that someone does it before me: an orca GUI that uses a larger grid with representative images in place of single char glyphs. I found that writing orca is fairly straightforward — you look up the sheet, find a thing and do it. It's reading that's the hurdle. An 8 char chunk that made perfect sense when I wrote it takes just as many lookups to read later. This probably gets easier over time, but I still think it's a cool design opportunity.
Yep absolutely! It reminds me of writing cryptic perl one-liners or something.
I don't suppose you are the live coding Richard who was on Lopez Island earlier this month, are you?
Oh this is the same group behind ORCA? I should read up on them more if they have multiple projects like this
I love the contrast in "Low tech/bootstrapped tech" this way vs, say, duskos.org. I call this "rabbits vs forth" tech bootstrappers. [1].
It's somewhat strange to me that their tech journey is so narrative and ends up with a VM stack, rather than any kind of salvaged / repurposed hard tech. But then again, I'm probably on the forth side of the spectrum.
https://jodavaho.io/posts/rabbits-or-forth.html
> ends up with a VM stack, rather than any kind of salvaged / repurposed hard tech
I love reading the Hundred Rabbits blog but I view it as sort of an artistic endeavor in addition to pure tech. Indeed, my idea of "low tech" would be 16-bit systems or early 32-bit stuff like 386 and 486 PCs, etc. These machines are surprisingly capable even in 2025 with the right applications. They can be repaired seemingly indefinitely with a soldering iron and spare caps.
- gopher browser -> gopher://magical.fish as a portal
- HN can be read at gopher://hngopher.com
- irc -> bitlbee.org to chat with anyone, even IRC with TLS itself. Kirc will run on any potato.
- a high end 486 it's needed to play MP3's. Either that or burn your favourites into CD's.
- sc-im+gnuplot/emacs' ses+gnulot
- srln+slrnpull
- telescope/sacc can do gopher fine. gemini can be stalled.
- sfeed+links to read news. Altough gmane.io and gwene.io can relay mail lists and RSS feeds as NNTP groups and then your might slrn will just read all news happily in a 486 (or less).
- translate -> simply translate
- Reuters -> http://neuters.de
Yes 100%! Some other regular HTTP sites that run great on old hardware are:
* http://theoldnet.com/
* http://68k.news/
* http://weather.maniac.com/
Yes - this is definitely some kind of computer performance art or something like that.
I still use an Atom N270 netbook, and DuskOS is on the edge; but there are zillions of Atom netbooks in LaTam and in the outside as goverments agreed to ship these to students. With TUI/CLI tools you can do wonders, far more than CollapseOS. Yes, I know Forth, I did a good chunk of Starting Forth.
UXN once tweaked it can run stuff like Oquonie.
BTW, a properly set Emacs can double as a great legacy platform too; from IRC to whatever (Bitlbee<>IRC), Web browsing, email, gopher and gemini browser with elpher (and the Gemini proxy gemini://gemi.dev), epub reading, music and video (Emacs' emms, but mpv+yt-dlp can be set to play stuff at 480p/720@30FPS), Usenet client, RSS, Elisp itself, M-x calc and Gnuplot, PDF viewer (pdf-tools), Org-Mode+Hyperbole to expand your brain like nothing, sokoban gaming, Tetris, ZMachine text adventures with Malyon, MUDs, trace routers from OpenStreetMap with osm.el ...
For stucking I/O:
Usenet->slrnpull+GNUS.
Mail->Mu4e+mu.
People doesn't know that today computers from 2003 can do wonders and access far more services than they would think.
Once you can do TLS 1.3 'fast' enough (P4 w/ SSE2), you can do anything from IRC, email, gopher, gemini, usenet and rss from proxies and terminal or Emacs clients.
Nice post. I hadn't noticed the "subtle suggestions" of donations myself, to be honest, but maybe I hadn't browsed around their pages enough.
Anyway, if they do mention it, is it not a very far cry from the situation everywhere else? Youtubers begging, screaming, shouting, seducing, murmuring, doing the bug-eyes, repeating, cloying, getting emotionally heavy and forceful, for subscriptions, likes, and comments? Interspersed with violent sudden shifts to advertising products, etc.
So it was a bit of a surprise to hear it mentioned like it might be bad. Are you surprised that the suggestions are so gentle? Or what
Perhaps OP can clarify, because I too read that as a snarky dig. Perhaps that wasn't their intention, but it felt off. The only place I saw a "subtle suggestion" for a donation was by clicking the "Support" link all the way at the bottom of the page. The site has probably the least intrusive monetization scheme one could implement without forgoing it entirely.
Same here, after reading this I looked into multiple sites and articles and I only find that "Support" link in the footer. Maybe they changed things recently?
With their stance of permacomputing, you don't think the two go hand in hand? A simple VM that can be implemented quickly on almost any hardware or underlying tech stack you can scrounge together? The only thing they'd be really against is designing new hardware to run Uxn "natively," which would seem to push you exclusively to reuse what you have.
100r's Uxn/Varvara aspires to be that, but that's not the same thing as succeeding at it. AFAIK the smallest computer with a full Uxn/Varvara implementation is a Nintendo DS [correction! Game Boy Advance], which is faster than the Sun workstation I was using in the 90s (though it has less RAM). You probably aren't going to get it running on an eZ80-based TI calculator, for example, or an Arduino UNO.
It's a good first step in that direction, the first attempt at permacomputing good enough to criticize.
I'm not sure that's true. I have an eZ80-based emulator for the AgonLight2 that is already running well enough to run some real (console-based) ROMs: https://git.phial.org/d6/uxn-ez80/
(I'm new to eZ80 assembly so the project is going slower than it otherwise might.)
The AgonLight2 has 512K of RAM and a 20 MHz CPU which is more than enough for Varvara.
I agree that 8-bit computers of the era (e.g. Pet, Apple 2, C64, TI/99a, etc.) don't have enough RAM to give Varvara its own 64k of memory (though it wouldn't be hard to design a Varvara variant with a smaller memory space) but otherwise there really aren't major barriers. As far as permacomputing goes though, there are plenty of hosts out there with enough memory to comfortably run Varvara (anything 32-bit will be fine, most 16-bit computers would also be fine).
Based on my eZ80-based implementation I think any of the eZ80-based TI calculators with 128k or more of user-accessible memory could implement Varvara without major problems.
That'll be fantastic! I'd be delighted to see that! That would make those TI calculators the new smallest machines with a full Uxn/Varvara implementation, and much lower power than the GBA that is the current champion there; I'd really like to get some experience with what that's like, because I've found the experience of using Uxn to be inspiring so far.
I also hadn't seen the AgonLight2 before.
One quibble, though: the vast majority of 32-bit computers are microcontrollers, and most of them have less than 64KiB of RAM. (My comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44611710 goes into more detail about the popular STM32 family.) They would be perfectly adequate for a self-sufficient personal computing experience (most of them have more total memory than the computers I used to run Turbo Pascal on, just less RAM, plus their CPUs are 1000 times faster, and they can read and write SD cards) but probably not with Varvara.
That's a fair point.
A few of us have been discussing a modified Varvara spec that limits the system to a smaller amount of memory (e.g. 32k, 16k, or 8k). I think with a spec like that it would unlock many implementations that are not currently practical.
I think a more important consideration for currently produced microcontroller hardware is the ability to run from ROM, because then you can load your program into relatively abundant Flash instead of the much scarcer RAM. Some way of using virtual memory (take a look at Forth's approach, which doesn't require hardware support but doesn't work for code, only data) would also make a big difference. All of this doesn't necessarily depend on native-code compilation; microcontroller memory is a much more tightly pinching shoe than microcontroller speed.
It wouldn't be idiomatic Uxntal but there's a relatively simple modification where load/store is from RAM space but jump/pc is from ROM space. For a subset of existing programs it would work fine, although the assembler would need some modifications to make the memory layout(s) a bit clearer.
Another minor correction: the well-known TI home computer was called the TI-99/4A, and it was a 16-bit machine, sharing the same architecture as TI's ill-fated line of minicomputers.
The Gameboy Advanced has a full emulator with the standard devices, and incompleteness is often not a dealbreaker as long as it supports the devices you need. There are incomplete emulators for ESP32 and STM32 based devices, DOS, and even an extremely limited emulator for the original Gameboy.
Many of these might be more powerful than your 90s workstation, but if someone's scavenging technology they're more likely to find a Chromebook than a Sun.
You're right, that's smaller. I think I was confusing the DS and the "Game Boy Advance", because I was thinking of a machine with a few hundred K of RAM. The GBA is a 16MHz ARM7TDMI with 288KiB of RAM, not counting the 96KiB of VRAM; the Nintendo DS's main CPU is a 67MHz ARM946E-S, and it has 4MiB of RAM.
As for what you're more likely to find in usable shape in a hypothetical collapse scenario, it probably depends on what kind of scenario you're talking about. Certainly vastly more Chromebooks exist than Suns, but the Chromebook's SSD only has a few months of data retention, so you probably won't be able to get it to boot if it's been sitting around unpowered for many years. All the Sun SPARCs are going to be in non-working order because their IDPROM batteries will have died, but some older 68000-family Suns like the 3/60 I theoretically still have are probably okay, because their IDPROMs are actually PROM rather than battery-backed RAM.
(Of course you also have to worry about capacitors drying out.)
What's vastly more common than Chromebooks, Suns, or GBAs, though, are Flash-based microcontrollers like the AVR family and 48MHz members of the STM32 family. (You can probably salvage a couple out of the wreckage of the drone that killed your parents.) And those will probably still be in working order, unlike anything SSD-based. I don't think Uxn is a good fit for those chips.
In a multiple-centuries sort of collapse scenario you also need to worry about the retention time of the NOR Flash in these microcontrollers. Hopefully if they lose their memory you'll still be able to rewrite it, but if the manufacturers used Flash to implement some supposedly-read-only memory, they might not bother to mention it.
In the collapse scenario we're actually in at the moment, GBAs, Nintendo DSs, and Chromebooks are all immensely more expensive than such microcontrollers. That seems likely to remain true even after the PRC invades Taiwan in a few years.
Could you explain more what's wrong with the STM32 family as a target? The Playdate's got a complete implementation and an STM32 heart. And other members of the family have seen other non-system-specific implementations, although neither is complete. I'm not deeply familiar with the family, so insight is welcomed, but I don't immediately see why they'd be unsuitable.
And while they're far more numerous, ultimately I think they're less likely to be used for personal computing. Sifting through the ruins, if you can find any functioning personal computer, you can get started immediately. Even if you don't have a compiler, you certainly have a web browser and write permissions. All you need to bring is the emulator spec.
That's an easier bar to clear than harvesting chips, a set of other working parts, gathering documentation for each, ensuring you have tooling and likely libraries for each, and most critically: enough existing, functioning tech to program it all. But if you already have that, you already have everything you need to compute without bootstrapping a new device. Not to say it wouldn't be worth the effort, but it's not an easier or alternative path to personal computing, just a path to share or persist it.
The STM32 family is awesome! There's nothing wrong with it as a target! But, basically, by trying to use Uxn on most STM32s you're turning a Pentium-133 into a 386-40, with a corresponding reduction in the kind of functionality you can deliver. Also, you have to write all your software in assembly language.
The most popular model of STM32 is probably the STM32F103C8T6 https://www.st.com/en/microcontrollers-microprocessors/stm32... used on the Blue Pill, which is a 72 MHz Cortex-M3 with 64KiB of Flash and 20KiB of SRAM, consuming up to almost 0.2 watts at full speed. The Cortex-M3 is 1.24 Dhrystone MIPS per MHz https://developer.arm.com/Processors/Cortex-M3 so that's about 89 Dhrystone MIPS. Looking at historical Dhrystone results https://netlib.org/performance/html/dhrystone.data.col0.html similarly powerful CPUs include a 133MHz Pentium, a 66MHz PowerPC 602 (as used in a PowerMac 7100 or an RS/6000 250), a 100MHz PA-RISC HP 9000/715, and a 110MHz μSPARC-II as used in the SPARCstation 5.
We ran web browsers and did video playback on these; they're totally adequate for personal computing as I understand it.
As another piece of context, remember that the original Macintosh had 128KiB of RAM, 64KiB of ROM, and a 7.8MHz 68000 that achieved roughly 0.4 DMIPS (according to the above link). It could run a WIMP GUI, MacPaint, MacWrite, and a WYSIWYG version of Microsoft Word, despite its only mass storage being slow floppies, thousands of times slower and smaller than SD cards.
Currently popular personal computing machines are significantly faster. The Raspberry Pi 3 is about 2.5 DMIPS/MHz, 2201 DMIPS http://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/Raspberry%20Pi%20Benchmarks..... So if you take CPU-bound software that barely runs fast enough on the Pi 3 and run it on the STM32F103C8T6, it will run about 250 times slower. A response that it manages in 100 milliseconds on the Pi 3 will take almost 30 seconds.
But that's assuming it's not memory-bound! The Blue Pill only has 20KiB of RAM, while the bigger machines it's being compared to typically had 2–64 MiB of RAM. You can run 64KiB of code (or data) from Flash, but not self-modifying code, because Flash can only be erased blockwise. (A minimum of ten thousand times, so this is a viable thing to do a few times a day.) You can access off-chip memories, but not at anywhere near 72 MIPS. With the LDM and STM instructions you can theoretically read and write the on-chip memory at something like 250 megabytes per second, 2 gigabits per second, while off-chip SPI (which supports DMA!) tops out at 0.018 gigabits per second, roughly 100× slower. Still, the original Macintosh's floppy was closer to 0.0001 gigabits per second.
Here are the top five most popular STM32 models listed on Digi-Key, with 53000 units or more in stock https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/microcontrollers/...:
US$1.73 STM32F030R8T6 (48MHz, 8KiB RAM, 64KiB Flash, Cortex-M0) https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/stmicroelectronic...
US$1.21 STM32G030K8T6 (64MHz, 8KiB RAM, 64KiB Flash, Cortex-M0+) https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/stmicroelectronic...
92¢ STM32G030F6P6 (64MHz, 8KiB RAM, 32KiB Flash, Cortex-M0+) https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/stmicroelectronic...
US$3.08 STM32L071CZT6TR (32MHz, 20KiB RAM, 192KiB Flash, Cortex-M0+) https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/stmicroelectronic...
US$3.25 STM32L071RZH6 (32MHz, 20KiB RAM, 192KiB Flash, Cortex-M0+, tiny BGA form factor) https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/stmicroelectronic...
So any of these devices is probably pretty capable of running the kinds of apps Uxn is directed at, if you hook up a screen and speaker to them. They have less RAM than the original Macintosh, but their CPU is around 100 times faster, and they can swap to off-chip memory, including MicroSD cards, which consume no power for memory retention, just reading and writing. When I was a kid, I ran word processors, high-level-language interpreters and compilers, spreadsheets, databases, and IDEs on machines that were less powerful than these chips in every way, including having less memory (though usually it was almost all RAM).
Take a look at https://rossumblog.com/2011/10/08/8-bit-device-kindles-ebook... and the rest of Rossum's blog by Peter Barrett to see the kinds of things all that CPU power can do despite the small RAM.
Power consumption seems worth a mention, because "minimization of energy usage" figures prominently in the permacomputing ethos as explained in https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/ethics.html. Running at full speed, the higher-speed STM32 parts use more power, up to hundreds of milliwatts, while the lower-speed, lower-power STM32L parts are more like tens of milliwatts. By suspending execution, though, this power consumption is proportional to CPU load down to a few thousandths of a milliwatt. A Chromebook uses about 10000 milliwatts; a cellphone about 3000; and, according to https://www.eetimes.com/nintendo-gameboy-eases-down-the-road..., a Game Boy Advance uses about 200 milliwatts playing Donkey Kong.
(In human terms, 100 milliwatts is the amount of mechanical work per unit time done by pulling the pull cord to start a chainsaw or lawnmower about every 15 minutes. So, if you hooked up an electrical generator to such a pull cord, very roughly, you could keep a Chromebook running by yanking on the pull cord about every 10 seconds, a cellphone about twice a minute, a Game Boy Advance about twice an hour, or a 1-milliwatt STM32 about once a day.)
But these chips are probably not capable of running the apps Uxn is written for if they're running Uxn! I mean, if you're moving sprites around the screen or sounding tones with ADSR envelopes, that's handled by Varvara's "devices", which you can implement in native code, so they're just as lightweight as they would be in any other form. But your own application code is being interpreted by the Uxn bytecode interpreter, so 95% (my guess) of the CPU time is devoted to stack manipulation and interpretation overhead. So instead of 89 Dhrystone MIPS like a SPARC 5, you get 5 DMIPS. CPUs in this class from the above list include the 25MHz SPARCStation 1+, a 40MHz AMD 80386, an Amiga 2000, and a deskside 16.7MHz 68020 Sun 3/160C server http://www.obsolyte.com/sun3/, which was one of the very first Sun-3 models http://www.sun3zoo.de/en/history.html.
And you can't usefully JIT-compile Uxn code because it idiomatically relies on pervasive self-modification in order to squeeze a bit more performance out of the inherently expensive bytecode-interpreter strategy. Uxn is also not very suitable as a compilation target for higher-level languages like C.
So, the STM32 family is great as a target, but except for the higher-end members of the family like the 168MHz STM32F746 used in the Playdate (US$14.33 https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/stmicroelectronic...), Uxn is not great as a way to make them useful.
It's wonderful as a way to inspire us to imagine what could be, though!
I'll address your comments about the bootstrapping path in a second comment.
This is my response to your thoughts about the bootstrapping path, a sibling to my thoughts about the STM32. You say:
> Sifting through the ruins, if you can find any functioning personal computer, you can get started immediately. Even if you don't have a compiler, you certainly have a web browser and write permissions. All you need to bring is the emulator spec.
First of all, most collapse scenarios don't have an especially noticeable quantity of ruins. The Soviet Union collapsed in the 01990s; the GDP fell by half, the death rate skyrocketed, and they lost not only geopolitical influence but also significant parts of their high-tech industrial capacity. The People's Republic of China in some sense collapsed during the Cultural Revolution in the late 60s, losing significant parts of its cultural history, following the Qing dynasty's collapse in 01907. Syria is currently beginning to recover from a collapse into a civil war in 02011. Cambodia killed a quarter of its population and all its intellectuals in 01975–8 under the Khmer Rouge. The Imamate of Oman had been stable for over a thousand years until it collapsed under British bombing in 01957–9, bringing it under the control of the Sultanate of Oman, which still controls it today. About half of the Timbuktu Manuscripts were rescued from the onslaughts of Boko Haram after the collapse of Mali began in 02012, after centuries of being one of the greatest centers of learning in Africa; since then, that collapse has resulted in the overthrow of democracy by military coups in all three countries of the ASS. Suriname had a civil war in 01986–9.
If you want, you can read my slightly longer notes about most of those in https://derctuo.github.io/notes/pandemic-collapse.html; those are particular cases of recent collapses that I selected randomly in order to try to get a handle on the rough frequency with which countries collapsed.
Out of all of these cases, the only one with a really significant quantity of ruins to sift through was the Syrian Civil War, although there are a fair quantity of ruins in Ukraine now 33 years later, which you could argue in some sense resulted from the collapse of the USSR. Putin certainly does make that argument. I don't think I'll touch it any further.
If anything, booming economies like today's PRC might tend to have more ruins than collapsing societies, at least until a few generations into the collapse. People who can build new housing can afford to move out of the old housing; people who are struggling to survive have to patch the leaky pipes and the holes in the roof as best they can. The ruins all over the rural USA aren't the result of fentanyl and meth, but from people moving to the cities and selling their parents' farms to big agribusinesses.
So, let's get back to the scenario you proposed:
> if you can find any functioning personal computer, you can get started immediately. Even if you don't have a compiler, you certainly have a web browser and write permissions. All you need to bring is the emulator spec.
First, the likelihood of attempting something is only a weak inequality constraint on the likelihood of achieving it. Our intrepid hero is probably going to need those electronics hacking skills you're presupposing she lacks, because she's going to need to recap the PC's power supply and figure out how to run the computer off her car battery, which is a much easier task if your power supply needs to supply tens of milliwatts instead of tens of thousands of milliwatts. (Consider: my laptop charger died the day before last. It's a 65-watt USB-C charger and seems to be fully potted. Could you fix it? What would you have to know to build a replacement? How long will my laptop be useful without one?)
Second, where did you get the emulator spec? And, supposing you write a Uxn/Varvara emulator in browser JS, do you have existing ROMs to run on it? Or are you going to write the ROMs from scratch in Uxntal? If so, why not just write your applications in browser JS directly? My estimate is that you'll get roughly 20× as much useful computation per CPU cycle, and a browser pegging your CPU can easily double the baseline power consumption of a laptop. (In the case of this one, it goes from about 5 watts to about 10 watts.)
If you can get an emulator spec and ROMs, why not get a native-code IDE like Dev-C++ or Debian with Emacs from the same place you were getting those? A full Debian or NetBSD distribution is roughly one DVD.
If you want to prepare today for a possible future of scarcity, you can figure out how to harvest chips and put together tooling and libraries for them today.
> the first attempt <…> good enough to criticize.
Ooh, I like this phrase.
From Wiki:
http://found.ward.bay.wiki.org/view/good-enough-to-criticize
> Alan Kay described the Macintosh as the first personal computer good enough to be criticized. It was a serious step toward Kay's Dynabook. Not perfect, but in the right direction. In this 2017 interview Kay explains how he came to his vision and how it has been completely lost in mobile devices since.
https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-ab...
While I think the implicit equation of Uxn with the 128KiB Macintosh is reasonable, the implicit comparison of me to Alan Kay is not.
Paywall, so, from https://web.archive.org/web/20170930235704/https://www.fastc...:
> Jobs always admired Kay, who in 1984 famously told Newsweek that the Mac was the “first personal computer worth criticizing.” Just before Jobs was fired from his first stint at Apple in the ’80s, he’d been pushing an effort to get the Dynabook built in Cupertino. The two would talk on the phone every couple of months until Steve’s passing, and Jobs invited him to the unveiling of the iPhone in January, 2007.
It has been a while since I found a site this interesting, I have been reading it on and off for the past few days. As per their site: "Hundred Rabbits is an artist collective that documents low-tech solutions with the hope of building a more resilient future. We live and work aboard a 10 m sailboat named Pino in remote parts of the world to learn more about how technology degrades beyond the shores of the western world"
I highly recommend reading their north pacific crossing log book.
https://100r.co/site/north_pacific_logbook.html
They used to do a monthly vlog too, I think it's still on YouTube.
Thank you, I will look into both of those. I eyed one of the logs, not sure which one, but more to see how it was shared and how extensive it was than for the content. Will give it a 2nd look.
A friend asked me whether I was concerned about energy usage of AI. I didn't have a good answer. It feels inevitable.
But, I love the write-up here on why the sailboat, and why UXN, because those two things are complementary when you are living in a sailboat and are thinking intimately about your power consumption.
https://100r.co/site/why_a_boat.html
https://100r.co/site/uxn.html
Seeing Devine at StrangeLoop last year was a treat (and took a lot of mental energy!)
> Seeing Devine at StrangeLoop last year […] took a lot of mental energy!
Why?
He's a non-linear thinker. He's brilliant. And, probably like a sailboat, you don't exactly know where he is going. Life is better that way.
100 Rabbits is the most successful example of solarpunk I've ever seen.
Tech with a focus on sustainability and creation.
Love their work!
Related:
Hundred Rabbits is a small collective exploring the failability of modern tech - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41131181 - Aug 2024 (488 comments)
Gimballed Stove - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39733829 - March 2024 (12 comments)
Weathering Software Winter - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34219654 - Jan 2023 (28 comments)
Internet in Paradise (2006) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32080305 - July 2022 (18 comments)
Artists are making tiny ROMs that will probably outlive us all - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31410838 - May 2022 (1 comment)
Off the Grid - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30031472 - Jan 2022 (118 comments)
Busy Doing Nothing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26760803 - April 2021 (6 comments)
Working Off-Grid Efficiently - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25723819 - Jan 2021 (142 comments)
North Pacific Logbook - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24489257 - Sept 2020 (7 comments)
(I omitted threads about their software projects, even though those are super interesting: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)
Well I've been a big fan of 100r since I heard of them through the Future of Coding [0][1](and esoteric.codes [2]).
BUT JUST NOW I'm kicking around the website again today and find out that Devine made the game Hiversaires way back in the day [3] which is a banger. So I guess I've been a fan for like 12 years. I'm very tempted to buy it again.
100r are also an inspiration that a different way of life and relationship with creativity and society are possible... so if I ever drop out definitely don't look for me doing permacomputing on a sailboat in coastal BC. Don't look for me - because I won't want to be found, ok thanks in advance?
[0] https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/044
[1] https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/045
[2] https://esoteric.codes/blog/100-rabbits
[3] https://100r.co/site/hiversaires.html
Their work has molded a lot of my views on technology, such a breath of fresh air when I first found out about them! They really inspired me to look at my own work and ask how to make it more resilient, how to decrease dependencies.
From my experience, achieving provider independence boils down to: own your stack, work offline-first, test failure modes constantly.
Been trying to get a setup going with NixOS + local AI + custom CLI tools for development work, and I never would have thought to pursue this sort of thing if I hadn't found these people. Great stuff!
Oh and ORCA is a LOT of fun! Give it a shot if you're into sounddesign, or generative electronic music stuff: https://100r.co/site/orca.html
Offline solutions or not totally internet dependent ones can bring a lot of value to the users. So many things are webapps that could easily work offline. Sure, the web is easier and has more reach, but when sites, apps, or games vanish, I start to miss the 90-00 CD days.
But again, what is best for the user is probably not the best business idea...
> Collapse won't be addressed by buying a Prius, signing a treaty, or turning off the air-conditioning. The biggest problem we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead. The sooner we confront this problem, and the sooner we realize there's nothing we can do to save ourselves, the sooner we can get down to the hard work of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality.
> This is why we are committed to fighting normative violence, fascism, colonialism, and white supremacy in all of its forms. To undermine the capitalist structure and its abusive scripts about human worth in relation to work, productivity, and ownership. To subvert oppressive gender norms and put in question the binary. To actively unlearn biased and colonial thinking. To look inside and face these parts of our darkness, personal and collective, and come out of it with more kindness and compassion.
I have the sinking feeling that you upvoters are actually upvoting the content of these quotes rather than my intention in quoting them, which was to highlight their absurdity. ;)
What's absurd? Sounds bang on
No need to press, they've already got the sinking feeling going. It's going to need some time sinking where it's gotta sink :)
It seems your sinking feeling has been confirmed to be true. I'm in the camp that upvoted and am now confused why you're find the concepts absurd. I doubt this is your first encounter with a frank presentation of leftist thought, so it is the popularity that gives you the sinking feeling, or something about the ideology itself?
The first act of revolution is contemplation.
For more thoughts along these lines, I recommend folks read Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira
I'm honored to call these rabbits (and a decent portion of their community) my friends.
It's remarkable how good you have to be at tech to be low tech and low maintenance.
Necessity is the mother of invention, and as I understand it from their writing, life on the sea is a constant maintenance battle against when the "ground" underneath your feet is trying to pull you in at every step, from corroding everything holding you together to the isolation driving extensive planning and maintenance for self sufficiency projects.
hundredrabbits did that in reverse order, which is certainly rarer, but might also inform the rest of us about how to reverse that order ourselves.
I recently got my basic cruising sailing license. And I also enjoy hacking on low-power, low-end salvaged computers that are repairable with a minimal set of tools and a manual. I'm hoping one day my tech journey will lead me to spending more time aboard and working on projects in this space.
100r and https://screenl.es and dynamicland are huge inspirations.
Does anyone know if they're able to support themselves purely on donations via Patreon, etc., or if they need to do contract work, too?
I think the closest thing you'll get to an origin story is this: https://100r.co/site/why_a_boat.html
I'll defer to Occam's Razor: they probably had enough money at the outset that they don't have to worry about consistent month-to-month income.
That's not meant to be a diss. Though, given their politics, I could understand if they took it that way.
I believe that at least one of them worked for Meta before they embarked on this journey and I believe that they basically used the big tech money to FIRE. They've been able to them supplement and transition their income with the games and apps they've produced as well as related income from their 100rabbits work, as well as having minimized living expenses and no children. None of this is meant to be judgement or in any way demean the work they currently do, I love all of their stuff. Just trying to answer your question.
This comment is completely untrue, the place I had read the information was incorrect and I was wrong in passing on second hand information I hadn’t personally verified. One of the people in question has clarified and corrected this comment. I can’t edit the comment at this point otherwise I would, so this is the best I can do.
ahhh, thanks for that, that really identifies the elephant I've always felt lurking in the room every time I hear about these people.
Hi!
One of the two authors of the site up here, I just want to clarify before this becomes a rumour, I never worked at Meta, nor in big tech, neither have my partner.
Prior to moving on the water, Rek worked in a 10 person animation studio in Japan(Toneplus), as an animator/illustrator, and me(Dev) worked as a designer at a 15 employees company Cerego(we were building smart.fm). Afterward we worked independently making little games, got nominated for the IGF that one time, but never worked directly for a company again.
We budgeted the sailboat like this: 2 years worth of rent and related expense at our current rate, and so we could afford a 40k CAD$ sailboat. The way we looked at it was that if we managed to live aboard for over 2 years, we'd start making up the money we borrowed. It has been nearly 10 years now that we live aboard.
We're super opened with our finances and how we made this possible, so just ask us instead of making stuff up :) Cheers!
Thanks for dispelling the myth above. Very cool (and inspirational! as aspirant to the 100r lifestyle down the line) that you managed to do it without a big tech windfall :)
I'm glad to hear that's incorrect!
Unsure about the day-to-day situation, I imagine by now they make enough off of the stuff they put out as 100r that combined with very low expenses it's sustainable or close to. In past blog posts they mention taking on contract work for boat repairs.
Yeah, when you take the rent and many of the temptations of the big city lifestyle out of consideration, the cost of living gets surprisingly low.
They seem to be doing a lot of their maintenance themselves so that probably helps too. Still, I am curious about how much in average does the sailing life cost. They give some numbers here and there, so maybe someone more dedicated might be able to come up with a basic estimate.
And kids.
I'm forever impressed by these folks' energy and creativity
This is a fascinating website which I look forward to exploring a bit more, along with the authors personal sites.
Are there any other off-grid low-tech sites/projects/sites like this?
I remember another interesting site that was being run off solar posted here on HN that went down when the batteries went out.
I believe you're thinking of Low Tech Magazine[1]
1: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/
Yes that’s the one, thanks
Where I discover that there people learning solresol in 2025
I think I first came across them from seeing #ORCΛ tag on Twitter, which I highly recommend peeking at. I love their website.
Spoiler alert: no actual rabbit content.
Ah, another Blame! fan.
Here's two ports of their Blame!-inspired Myst-in-a-megastructure game, Hiversaires:
https://hundredrabbits.itch.io/hiversaires
https://git.sr.ht/~rabbits/hiversaires