When I first learned about CollapseOS four years ago, I thought that it's a very cool concept, but did find the idea "you'll have to implement from scratch everything in your computing stack" very disconnected from the reality. Like, what kind of plausible scenario could there be that one won't be able to get system software for their computer that they could trust to be of safe origin, free from backdoors and malware, and fit for the purpose, I thought.
Ha-ha.
Jonathan Lamothe likes this.
reshared this
ferunando
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •cthos 🐱
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •I keep thinking that the odds of that global supplychain collapse keep ticking up rapidly, but I didn't have "happily embrace slop" on my bingo card, that's for sure.
I thought surely, surely software developers of all people would realize that a brutally inefficient stochastic process was fundamently unfit for purpose but, no. Nooooooo.
mcc
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •about a year ago I was writing in my head a blog post titled "I want retro computing without the retro", about designing stacks around standards minimal enough one person can make an MVP computing environment themselves.
I am now still wanting to write this but with increased urgency and slightly more of the stack needing to be single person 🙁
Nina Kalinina
in reply to mcc • • •josh g.
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •@mcc
mcc
in reply to josh g. • • •john spurling
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •mcc
in reply to mcc • • •Nina Kalinina
in reply to mcc • • •it's still on the bingo card. And chat control here/and in the EU. And then there's mandatory file scans on Android and iOS with reporting to police, still on the bingo cards.
And then there are Black Mirror like things that are already a reality. Like the marks printers leave on the paper for IDs. And unauthorised edits of images during printing. And camera applications that automatically "enhance" the image with un-disableable AI...
Tachibana Kanade
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •jeremiah
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •I had a similar thought. I remember encountering and being like "maybe it's good for remote regions of the world use cases"
Now, I think about it on and off regularly.
William D. Jones
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •I don't WANT to reimplement everything. I just think it's bad to forget how things are done. And we look for permission to do that. As soon as computers get more convenient. It releases those feel-good endorphins that you no longer have to be on edge and actively keeping difficult-to-juggle-knowledge in your immediate working store. And then you get complacent.
I know I did/have :/.
Nina Kalinina
in reply to William D. Jones • • •mcc
in reply to William D. Jones • • •@cr1901 I have a bone deep need to have the *ability* to reimplement everything. I want to know I know how to do it. Nevertheless there are some layers in the stack I didn't actually want to implement.
2025-me was excited about making her own CPU and GPU and her own programming language to write programs that run on them. But I thought I'd be able to write those programs on some other operating system someone else wrote with a text editor someone else wrote.
Snaketember King Naga Calyo
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •The idea is still unbelievably disconnected from the reality.
I say as someone who literally has only 3-5 hours of free time outside of work to do with as I will, with a body and a mind that are both so utterly exhausted at the end of each day that I go blurry-eyed and foggy-brained when I look at a single line of code or an electrical component data sheet or any page of API documentation no matter how well-written it may be.
Snaketember King Naga Calyo
in reply to Snaketember King Naga Calyo • • •Nina Kalinina
in reply to Snaketember King Naga Calyo • • •Snaketember King Naga Calyo
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •I've honestly gotten to the point of just.... giving up.
I simply can't afford to invest any of my limited time or spoons into caring about the provenance of the codebase anymore.
If it works, it works. That's all I have time and spoons to care about now.
tom jennings
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •Yeah, I didn't want to spoil their fun...
"collapse computing" will likely be adapting to whatever crap used hardware you can get your hands on, and adapting to it. Lol we're close enough to that now to be able to pre-taste it.