Winter is coming and Collapse OS aims to soften the blow. It is a Forth (why Forth?) operating system and a collection of tools and documentation with a single purpose: preserve the ability to program microcontrollers through civilizational collapse.
imagine noticing that civilization is collapsing around you and not immediately opening an emacs lisp buffer so you can painstakingly recreate the entire compiler toolchain and runtime environment for the microcontrollers around you as janky code running in your editor. fucking amateurs
TREACLES just doing its thing and trying to copy something religion has already achieved, in this case, TempleOS.
Honestly this reads a lot like someone having a “Mystical psychosis”, not sure why anyone would torture their brain attempting to write a full OS in Forth.
Chuck Moore, the inventor of Forth, who else? it also forces you to use Chuck’s custom split ergo keyboard and bindings, which means Chuck was 19 years ahead of me in exposing folks to a nonsensical but fast language-specific keyboard layout
e: fuck I forgot how bad the syntax was. I’d paste an example here but I can’t cause it’ll strip the color, which is important to the meaning of the program
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OK, I kind of love Chuck Moore though. Now there’s a guy who knows exactly what he’s doing with his life. Um, whether anyone else can tell what he’s doing is a bit of a different story, though.
oh he’s unsneeringly one of the inspirations for one of my longer-running projects (alongside early PCs like the Commodore 64 and recursive self-improvement environments like Lisp machines). colorForth is awful for me but you can tell it did exactly what Chuck needed it to, and satisfying one user is a better track record than most software
What’s your project if you don’t mind me asking? /g
it’s basically a programmer’s workbench — a bunch of Emacs Lisp UI and tooling that’s designed to make tinkering in a NixOS environment a lot faster and easier. recursive self-improvement is the term I use for the general loop that enables, where you continuously use an environment to make improvements and customizations to that same environment
it’s also my attempt to build the modern version of the best bits of old 80s computers like Lisp machines (or Commodores) where the ability to tinker was built-in and always available. to that end, the same general set of editor bindings I use to write, run, and debug code are available in every app
in general it’s a project that just won’t die, which is usually a good sign. so far it’s been useful for both rapid prototyping in Lisp and for speeding up systems software development (because it’s very hard to break NixOS even when you’ve popped the hood). one of these days I’ll finally decide I’m satisfied with it and release it, but the downside of working in an environment that’s conducive towards working on projects is I get sidetracked a lot
it runs on a very short list of 80s computers that even now are barely functional due to their age, the sega master system (or the master system emulator inside the European genesis you might even have), a ti-84+ calculator of course, or a kit computer from 2018 that also uses parts from the 80s
edit:
You use Linux, you use Windows. You operate Dusk OS.
Can you operate Linux? Sure, if you’re some kind of god, in the same way that you can operate a Tesla if you’re a top Tesla engineer. But you’re much more likely to be able to operate a landmower than a Tesla.
can’t sneer anymore, this is clearly our reality’s version of Andrew Ryan writing the software stack that’ll run rapture
You’re laughing now, but we’ll see who’s laughing after zombie plague rapture skynet destroys every random LenovoDellHP around and Trash-80 achieves 100% market share!
your post-apocalypse computing environment has to be shittier and less fun to use than a Commodore Amiga or else it’s like dangling delicious meat in front of a newborn acausal robot god looking for the last morsels of usable computing to occupy
I need to procure a cane, engrave Would You Kindly into it, and then use it to whip the ass.
Edit: operate it, one might say.
a man operates, a slave uses
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Is there a term for the trope where people imagine that when society collapses, their particular hobby horse will become the vehicle for survival?
Preppers are the poster children for this, of course at TEOTWAWKI their finely honed skills and purchased tins, guns and ammo will keep them alive and ahead of the ravening hordes struggling for survival. Similarly, in the case of this submission, the wandering knight-scholar will save the remnants of society by painstakingly re-programming their microcontrollers, conveniently the only thing standing between his grateful patrons and extinction.
The weaker version of this are people who are convinced that if they only serve images in dithered form, they will meaningfully lower global energy expenditure.
Is there a term for the trope where people imagine that when society collapses, their particular hobby horse will become the vehicle for survival?
this seems to be a good jumping point to find something specific:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LikeADuckTakesToWater
Being even slightly in the 2A space exposes one to all manner of this. Largely as you said, preppers who convince themselves that they will survive and shepherd those of like mind to post-event society by virtue of stockpiling goods they have little to no practical knowledge of how to use.
I don’t know if there’s a term for it, the term I usually use is fart-huffing.
Yeah, it’s hard to avoid. I follow Forgotten Weapons on Y/T, which I consider to be as neutral as you can get regarding firearms, but the creator is of course a 2A fundie, and seems interested in off-grid stuff.
Anyway, to an outsider it looks as if gun tinkering is one of the few remaining areas where “Made in the USA” still holds weight. There are tons of entrepreneurs designing and selling improved ways of killing your fellow human being. But it’s also where EU brands are held to a premium, a bit like cars. It’s weird, in all.
Ian McCollum is an interesting case. As far as content creators go I tend to prefer InRange/Karl Kasarda but he and Ian collaborate frequently (to the point of designing an AR-15 variant together) though not so much the last few years. I suspect Ian’s “history is more important than not platforming people like Larry Vickers” attitude may have disillusioned Karl somewhat.
Based on appearance alone, I’d have pegged Karl as the Vickers enthusiast… shows how much I know.
Anyway these videos have been a guilty pleasure of mine but it’s starting to sour. Ian’s designation of the breakup of Yugoslavia as Croatia’s “Homeland War” is no doubt politeness to his Croatian hosts but still feels a bit white-washy.
Larry Vickers
Had to search that name, but holy shit. “He believes that the fall of Rhodesia was “the greatest tragedy of the post-World War II era.””
