>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?
They can make their own ingots and ultra pure chemicals, and turbopumps and ion implantation machines and spin coaters CVD machines and and the HEPA filters for the cleanroom, and the remote servers that control the licensing dongle for the robot arm that movies the thingie from "A" to "B"?
Sand to "hello world" is a tall order. There is a pyramid of industry that supports the entire thing. Even Sand -> 99.9999 % Si (purification & Czochralski crystal growth) needs multi‑story furnaces, vacuum pulling stations, 10 MW of steady power, and months of process engineering. All of have huge dependency chains.
Even modern "mild" events like supply chain disruptions would be enough to shut down any sort of non-toy level production in short order.
So yeah, a university as it currently stands can make a microchip, relying on all of these dependency chains being in operational order. But I don't doubt that would quickly no longer be the case if you had a hot war or societal collapse.
The exponential growth in processor capabilities relied on a global manufacturing infrastructure from the 1970s until today. To do the same level of progression would require much of that infrastructure.
Assuming someone managed to strategically nuke every major foundry / chemical / machine supplier, but leave everything else the same? Sure, maybe we get back to our present tech in 15-20 years.
Assume it's the result of a societal collapse? No way in hell.
> 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.
Wow... there are probably several ways we could lose the ability to fab semiconductors. We can look back through history at other periods where they "forgot" how to do various things. Brunelleschi's dome on the Florence Cathedral was the first major dome built in Europe in over a thousand years since the fall of the Western Roman Empire. They lost the knowledge of dome building. Should they have considered doing themselves in because they found themselves in the Dark Ages? We might forget how to do various very involved technical things like fab'ing chips, or we might lose the knowledge/and or ability to even build a fab, for example (just consider the supply-chain required to build a fab and consider how fragile some of those chains are). Yeah, it will mean that something really bad has likely happened, but that doesn't mean that it's the end and we should just go and kill ourselves. It will mean that there's been some kind of discontinuity, but it doesn't necessarily mean the end of humanity. People will still be able to grow crops, hunt, fish, etc (given a reasonable climate remains in enough places). Likely the population under these conditions will be much smaller but it doesn't mean that we can never recover as a species - sure, it might take 1000 years. That's ok, we go on just like ancestors before us who endured great hardship.
There are no Dark Ages. People in the Byzantine Empire (capitale in Europe) and the Abbasid Caliphate very much knew how to build domes and where actually busy advancing the state of the art.
The fact that the Franks were more interested in warring against each others than building great things is no evidence of a dark age. They started building again once peace came back and didn’t restart from where they left off but from the new state of the art as translations started pouring over from the Arabic empires.
The idea that humanity somehow went back is a fantasy pushed forward by catholic commentators.
There are many domes that were built in the Middle East and Asia while Europe was trying to figure out how to fund expensive vanity projects (large domes).
> Brunelleschi's dome on the Florence Cathedral was the first major dome built in Europe in over a thousand years since the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
I don't think it necessarily means they forgot how to do it, though. Or does it? We too stopped building domes made of big stones, it doesn't mean we don't know how to do it.
Most catastrophic scenarios I can imagine result in loss of advanced silicon production, but not necessarily all silicon production. More likely than not there would be ways to keep fabs for old well-trodden processes running. In that situation, there’d probably be a temporary shock of no computers followed by new computers being a lot less powerful… it’d be less “no more computers” and more “new computers are comparable to their Pentium 4/PowerPC G5 era counterparts”, in which case operating systems would still be graphical, just a lot more lightweight. Linux and BSDs would probably quickly take over desktop computing due to being able to run reasonably on such systems with minimal legwork.
If we can’t manufacture chips at all, yeah, things will be in enough of a pickle that computers will be the least of our worries.
> 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.
Hmmm... At a very high altitude extinction-level events have sufficiently sharp edges. But, as we get closer to things it becomes fuzzy. For examples: The Black Death (1347-1351), The Spanish Flu (1918-1919), The Great Chinese Famine (1959-1961), The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), The Irish Potato Famine (1845-1852), each one of these events were extinction-level events for those in the middle of them. What year would you have selected to self terminate? Remember you would not have hindsight or knowledge that the events are temporary.
The only thing removing mankind's ability to make computers is a large (Chicxulub-ish-sized) meteor strike or andromeda-strain-like sci-fi story made real.
Luckily, I'll be killed by tidal waves if a meteor hits the Atlantic and I'll be killed in the firestorm if it hits land anywhere on Earth.
If it hits the Pacific or Indian oceans, it depends on the size. If large enough, I'll shoot myself in the head to avoid starvation after playing a few rounds of solitare.
Not OP, but I somehow share his sentiment and I'd say that out of your list any would do.
Terrible things are happening right now, and people find their way out, for instance the war in Ukraine. But then again, they have visa cards, they can book travel and accomodation online and flee from the country. A lot of jews have fled from Europe during and before WW2 when things were not so much connected, but still, it was modern day, people had access to press, radio, telegrams and telephones.
But if you live in a rural village and everyone you knew died to a famine that sounds like something you might not want to carry any further.
To your point - we do have some chokepoints in supply chains here and there but I often wonder how much of that is due to the learning curve. As in, things are centralized because just how we as a civilization learned to build things in our particular historical context - if the context changes and the knowledge and resources are there to rebuild in a different way, we can.
Relatedly - a lot of things seem intrinsically capital intensive, but how much of that is due to the fact that we had large pools of capital when we learned to do those things?
The point isn't that humans couldn't survive without computers, but that any even that managed to stop humans globally from manufacturing computers would be such a massively disruptive event in much more important areas than computing.
That advice sounds to me like it’s more for “an entire world where all people are in a bad situation from which they will never escape and neither will their next of kin” but if that comes to pass, the lighthearted talk of embracing the misery will probably end around the time the starvation begins.
Yeah we’re not likely to ever face such a situation and still even need that many computers. It’s an interesting project though in the sense that someone has a 32 bit OS running on every ISA out there (or even aims to).
Interesting but not practical. CPUs are either 64 bit and have memory management hardware or 32 bit and don’t. This dictates whether you have lots of addressable RAM or not, and changes what an OS is for that CPU
It is also interesting in the fact that it is extremely tiny in terms of lines of code, and the approach they took to minimize its codebase is original.
> 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 end of us sedentary people. No more ammonia by itself won’t affect hunter-gatherers and uncontacted peoples. But if we’re talking about not the end of these things in itself but an event like a nuclear winter: sure!
We’ve been through population bottlenecks in the distant past. Again, if we (reading this) die out not due to very severe climate change or nuclear winter, other kinds of humans could live on. Maybe.
By the way I think old-school Preppers are funny.[1] What’s the point of prepping with a bunker and canned goods? Truly. You don’t have enough time to train for the skills, or to hoard enough stuff, to survive in a post-civilizational state. You’re just prepping for surviving a few months at best, that’s it.
Perhaps I'm ignorant, but I wonder why I haven't seen this aspect explored in post-apocalyptic media more. I mean, beyond the obvious fact that if we can "keep making computers" all of a sudden the apocalypse doesn't sound quite that bad, which would somewhat lower the stakes.
> 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.
That was a hard, and good read. But remember Linux is Love. Linux is Life.
If the end of the world happens I'm going down making and doing dope stuff. I'm not going outside and mingling with people. That's how you get a fucking spear thrown at you or mugged by some newfound MS14 gang swinging hockey sticks and shit.
I'm going to forage for some fruits and vegetables, all that good stuff since I'm too much of a bitch to kill an animal; those things are cute.
I'm going to load up my laptops on solar power/battery, hook in to some internet somewhere and live a normal life.
I don't know what Dusk OS is about but the making computers from fucking sand, now that's dank.
I'll install Desktop Linux on it and we can all start the next era of civilization; this time Microsoft and Apple aint selling us out
>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.
Yeah, I find that rather surprising that a university lab could fabricate a practical 14 nm chip (more than just some demonstration gates), given the billions of dollars that countries have to invest to set up even 65 nm fabs.
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.
Or rather, why is it not much worse than an actual C compiler.
In an apocalyptic event energy would be precious. You'd rather have an optimizing compiler to run longer off your solar-charged car battery or whatever.
I like the roleplay/lore and the tech effort is impressive but I don't think it fits the idea.
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.
While it is most likely a very fanciful pet project borne out of post-apo fantasy doomporn, there is one fatal fly in the ointment: In a post apocalyptic situation, who will have THE TIME (nevermind the resources) to dedicate to "operating" one such OS? Apocalypse is generally synonymous with population collapse. Many less humans to interact with means a greatly diminished division of labour and rebuilding civilisation will require first and foremost food production, 14 hours of daily work in the fields, scavenging, hunting, etc....
Taking one worker away from these (tedious) activities would likely be considered an investment that requires significant returns, results, be it only to justify this to other workers who would also like to be sat in front of a computer. Hard to justify having swapped a hard days work for some code on a computer screen.
For that kind of scenario, a lightweight Android rom with some ham-radio driver would probably be more appropriate.
That's assuming you can find the proprietary software that is needed. In some cases you're better off just cutting the proprietary bits out entirely and hooking straight into the motor controllers... or whatever else is more immediately upstream of the "business end" of the thing you're hacking.
Depends on the level of collapse, and say you get infrastructure up and running (temporarily, mind you, without manufacturing..) - what then? That's what this is for. Cobbling together the pieces left over.
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?
You don't need a CD drive to boot an OS. A humble USB stick does the trick. And nearly every computer made in the last 10 years has a USB port and the ability to boot from it
What kind of apocalyptic event that wipes out all computer manufacturing capability would let USB drives (and compatible computers) survive? And how would you power that thing?
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.
Readit News
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?
Sand to "hello world" is a tall order. There is a pyramid of industry that supports the entire thing. Even Sand -> 99.9999 % Si (purification & Czochralski crystal growth) needs multi‑story furnaces, vacuum pulling stations, 10 MW of steady power, and months of process engineering. All of have huge dependency chains.
Even modern "mild" events like supply chain disruptions would be enough to shut down any sort of non-toy level production in short order.
So yeah, a university as it currently stands can make a microchip, relying on all of these dependency chains being in operational order. But I don't doubt that would quickly no longer be the case if you had a hot war or societal collapse.
The exponential growth in processor capabilities relied on a global manufacturing infrastructure from the 1970s until today. To do the same level of progression would require much of that infrastructure.
Assuming someone managed to strategically nuke every major foundry / chemical / machine supplier, but leave everything else the same? Sure, maybe we get back to our present tech in 15-20 years.
Assume it's the result of a societal collapse? No way in hell.
Wow... there are probably several ways we could lose the ability to fab semiconductors. We can look back through history at other periods where they "forgot" how to do various things. Brunelleschi's dome on the Florence Cathedral was the first major dome built in Europe in over a thousand years since the fall of the Western Roman Empire. They lost the knowledge of dome building. Should they have considered doing themselves in because they found themselves in the Dark Ages? We might forget how to do various very involved technical things like fab'ing chips, or we might lose the knowledge/and or ability to even build a fab, for example (just consider the supply-chain required to build a fab and consider how fragile some of those chains are). Yeah, it will mean that something really bad has likely happened, but that doesn't mean that it's the end and we should just go and kill ourselves. It will mean that there's been some kind of discontinuity, but it doesn't necessarily mean the end of humanity. People will still be able to grow crops, hunt, fish, etc (given a reasonable climate remains in enough places). Likely the population under these conditions will be much smaller but it doesn't mean that we can never recover as a species - sure, it might take 1000 years. That's ok, we go on just like ancestors before us who endured great hardship.
The fact that the Franks were more interested in warring against each others than building great things is no evidence of a dark age. They started building again once peace came back and didn’t restart from where they left off but from the new state of the art as translations started pouring over from the Arabic empires.
The idea that humanity somehow went back is a fantasy pushed forward by catholic commentators.
There are many domes that were built in the Middle East and Asia while Europe was trying to figure out how to fund expensive vanity projects (large domes).
Computers aren't vanity projects.
I don't think it necessarily means they forgot how to do it, though. Or does it? We too stopped building domes made of big stones, it doesn't mean we don't know how to do it.
If we can’t manufacture chips at all, yeah, things will be in enough of a pickle that computers will be the least of our worries.
Hmmm... At a very high altitude extinction-level events have sufficiently sharp edges. But, as we get closer to things it becomes fuzzy. For examples: The Black Death (1347-1351), The Spanish Flu (1918-1919), The Great Chinese Famine (1959-1961), The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), The Irish Potato Famine (1845-1852), each one of these events were extinction-level events for those in the middle of them. What year would you have selected to self terminate? Remember you would not have hindsight or knowledge that the events are temporary.
The only thing removing mankind's ability to make computers is a large (Chicxulub-ish-sized) meteor strike or andromeda-strain-like sci-fi story made real.
Luckily, I'll be killed by tidal waves if a meteor hits the Atlantic and I'll be killed in the firestorm if it hits land anywhere on Earth.
If it hits the Pacific or Indian oceans, it depends on the size. If large enough, I'll shoot myself in the head to avoid starvation after playing a few rounds of solitare.
Terrible things are happening right now, and people find their way out, for instance the war in Ukraine. But then again, they have visa cards, they can book travel and accomodation online and flee from the country. A lot of jews have fled from Europe during and before WW2 when things were not so much connected, but still, it was modern day, people had access to press, radio, telegrams and telephones.
But if you live in a rural village and everyone you knew died to a famine that sounds like something you might not want to carry any further.
Relatedly - a lot of things seem intrinsically capital intensive, but how much of that is due to the fact that we had large pools of capital when we learned to do those things?
Semiconductors have been around for, what, 70 years? The idea that humans couldn’t survive without modern tech is ludicrous.
Sure, there will be fewer humans, but extincting humans completely is likely to be incredibly difficult without an atmosphere-on-fire scale event.
Well aren't you a bundle of joy, recommending death to people in bad situations.
A life of misery isn't all that bad. Much worse could happen.
This reminds me of A Man For All Seasons:
Thomas More: "At the worst we could be beggars and still be keep company and be merry together."
Lady Alice: "Aha, merry."
Thomas More: "Aye, merry!"
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEa6XRZa9Vg&t=5459s
Interesting but not practical. CPUs are either 64 bit and have memory management hardware or 32 bit and don’t. This dictates whether you have lots of addressable RAM or not, and changes what an OS is for that CPU
The end of us sedentary people. No more ammonia by itself won’t affect hunter-gatherers and uncontacted peoples. But if we’re talking about not the end of these things in itself but an event like a nuclear winter: sure!
We’ve been through population bottlenecks in the distant past. Again, if we (reading this) die out not due to very severe climate change or nuclear winter, other kinds of humans could live on. Maybe.
By the way I think old-school Preppers are funny.[1] What’s the point of prepping with a bunker and canned goods? Truly. You don’t have enough time to train for the skills, or to hoard enough stuff, to survive in a post-civilizational state. You’re just prepping for surviving a few months at best, that’s it.
[1] This OS guy is probably more reflected.
To give some color, here: https://blog.sentinel-team.org/p/how-likely-are-various-prec... is a list of a few things that could kill over 1M people in one year. Maybe your statement is not the case for solar storms in particular.
If the end of the world happens I'm going down making and doing dope stuff. I'm not going outside and mingling with people. That's how you get a fucking spear thrown at you or mugged by some newfound MS14 gang swinging hockey sticks and shit.
I'm going to forage for some fruits and vegetables, all that good stuff since I'm too much of a bitch to kill an animal; those things are cute.
I'm going to load up my laptops on solar power/battery, hook in to some internet somewhere and live a normal life.
I don't know what Dusk OS is about but the making computers from fucking sand, now that's dank.
I'll install Desktop Linux on it and we can all start the next era of civilization; this time Microsoft and Apple aint selling us out
catches spear to the chest Shit
I am quite surprised to hear that. Really?
Here's one in Utah: https://www.nanofab.utah.edu/
Here's one in Pennsylvania: https://www.mri.psu.edu/nanofabrication-lab
Here's one in California: https://nanofab.ucsb.edu/
Deleted Comment
Like, what's going on? The pessimism is pretty high. Are you alright?
In an apocalyptic event energy would be precious. You'd rather have an optimizing compiler to run longer off your solar-charged car battery or whatever.
I like the roleplay/lore and the tech effort is impressive but I don't think it fits the idea.
Taking one worker away from these (tedious) activities would likely be considered an investment that requires significant returns, results, be it only to justify this to other workers who would also like to be sat in front of a computer. Hard to justify having swapped a hard days work for some code on a computer screen.
For that kind of scenario, a lightweight Android rom with some ham-radio driver would probably be more appropriate.
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?
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.
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