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 love the Dwarf Fortress background for this video, it absolutely nails the vibe)
RickS 7 hours ago [-]
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.
3 hours ago [-]
rwhaling 5 hours ago [-]
Yep absolutely! It reminds me of writing cryptic perl one-liners or something.
bradly 3 hours ago [-]
I don't suppose you are the live coding Richard who was on Lopez Island earlier this month, are you?
lovich 6 hours ago [-]
Oh this is the same group behind ORCA? I should read up on them more if they have multiple projects like this
jvanderbot 12 hours ago [-]
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.
severak_cz 3 hours ago [-]
Yes - this is definitely some kind of computer performance art or something like that.
anthk 9 hours ago [-]
- 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).
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
qqqwerty 6 hours ago [-]
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.
0xCaponte 4 hours ago [-]
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?
jdiff 11 hours ago [-]
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.
kragen 9 hours ago [-]
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.
d66 51 minutes ago [-]
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.
jdiff 7 hours ago [-]
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.
kragen 7 hours ago [-]
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.
jdiff 3 hours ago [-]
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.
> 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.
While I think the implicit equation of Uxn with the 128KiB Macintosh is reasonable, the implicit comparison of me to Alan Kay is not.
anthk 9 hours ago [-]
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.
0xCaponte 4 days ago [-]
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"
themk 13 hours ago [-]
I highly recommend reading their north pacific crossing log book.
They used to do a monthly vlog too, I think it's still on YouTube.
0xCaponte 4 hours ago [-]
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.
xrd 8 hours ago [-]
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?
100 Rabbits is the most successful example of solarpunk I've ever seen.
Tech with a focus on sustainability and creation.
Love their work!
periodjet 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
periodjet 3 minutes ago [-]
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. ;)
SlowTao 4 hours ago [-]
The first act of revolution is contemplation.
QRY 8 hours ago [-]
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
0xCaponte 4 hours ago [-]
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...
rezmason 5 hours ago [-]
I'm honored to call these rabbits (and a decent portion of their community) my friends.
muzani 11 hours ago [-]
It's remarkable how good you have to be at tech to be low tech and low maintenance.
jdiff 10 hours ago [-]
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.
fitsumbelay 7 hours ago [-]
I'm forever impressed by these folks' energy and creativity
agentultra 9 hours ago [-]
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'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.
kilpikaarna 11 hours ago [-]
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.
smikhanov 10 hours ago [-]
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.
0xCaponte 4 hours ago [-]
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.
munificent 8 hours ago [-]
And kids.
jgon 9 hours ago [-]
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.
egypturnash 6 hours ago [-]
ahhh, thanks for that, that really identifies the elephant I've always felt lurking in the room every time I hear about these people.
entaloneralie 4 hours ago [-]
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!
egypturnash 59 minutes ago [-]
I'm glad to hear that's incorrect!
jaykru 3 hours ago [-]
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 :)
gadders 10 hours ago [-]
Spoiler alert: no actual rabbit content.
hooverd 8 hours ago [-]
Ah, another Blame! fan.
rezmason 5 hours ago [-]
Here's two ports of their Blame!-inspired Myst-in-a-megastructure game, Hiversaires:
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)
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
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.
- 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
* http://theoldnet.com/
* http://68k.news/
* http://weather.maniac.com/
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
It's a good first step in that direction, the first attempt at permacomputing good enough to criticize.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
Ooh, I like this phrase.
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.
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.
https://100r.co/site/north_pacific_logbook.html
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!)
Why?
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...)
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
Tech with a focus on sustainability and creation.
Love their work!
> 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.
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
But again, what is best for the user is probably not the best business idea...
100r and https://screenl.es and dynamicland are huge inspirations.
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.
1: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/
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.
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!
https://hundredrabbits.itch.io/hiversaires
https://git.sr.ht/~rabbits/hiversaires