The viewpoints that the folks who run this site have are probably quite alien to your own. They remind me more of the hackers of yore, how people who interacted with technology at the margins of society used to be, before computer tech became the new finance. Iconoclasts, idealists.

I think it's worth reading the some of the rest of their site if you have time. If you look at this page and are about to crap on it on HN, take a bit and read collapse and goals and see if you have a more nuanced view of who they are and what they're doing.

I find the CollapseOS approach unrealistic and somewhat self-indulgent. In a real collapse scenario, having a portable Forth environment for arbitrary microcontrollers wouldn’t put us meaningfully ahead. The primary value of computers wouldn’t be to run new minimalistic programs from scratch for stuff we only automate in a situaton where we are living in economic and technical abundance, but to access and preserve existing information systems and whatever remains of digital infrastructure, especially libraries, CAD/CAM systems, etc.

A more practical strategy would be maintaining simple yet complete computing environments that can operate on salvaged hardware. NetBSD is a good example: it supports a wide range of hardware, has a relatively straightforward codebase, and provides a full source-based system with a usable graphical userland, with a wide variety of tools available.

In a “collapse computing” context, it is far more plausible to repair and reuse an x86-compatible machine than to rely on extremely minimal custom setups that can barely run a Forth interpreter. With salvaged x86 hardware, one could install a robust OS like NetBSD and immediately run a broad set of existing tools, which is likely to be far more useful than rebuilding a software ecosystem from near-zero on constrained microcontrollers.

This is why having a NetBSD and pkgsrc mirror is my approach to collapse computing instead of fantasizing on building from scratch.

> Permacomputing is a design practice that encourages the maximization of hardware lifespan, minimization of energy usage

These two aims are diametrically opposed.

Compare performance per watt, P4, to Centrino, to M3 for example.

Permacomputing meeting in SF March 1st

https://alexwennerberg.com/permacomputing.html

This is insane. why program Lisp when u can write in assembler or bootstrap FORTH interpreter?

Btw. books rules in apocalypse. Just print them on some platinium paper and voila!

AI can't destroy them (yet).

I've read a few years ago about permacomputing and _still_ don't know what permacomputing is

There's something alien about pages like this. Seems like ramblings of an artistic that is vaguely tech themed but it's of course possible it contains deep insights. I just rarely get through one of these enough to learn what those are.

Urbit vibes