It's good for them, but the only person I know who owns a boat is richer than me, and I'm already richer than basically all my friends
Old sailboats can be had for practically (and in many cases actually) nothing. If you’re reasonably handy and willing to learn you can do all the maintenance they require yourself
Boats can be some of the cheapest housing there is, even more so if you want to live somewhere picturesque
(There are, of course, significant downsides)
For example, a through-hull needs replacing. Sure you could find a secondhand one that fits, but you still need to have it hauled out to replace.
In the case of 100R, they seem to have had a lot of help from Patreon folks (per Wikipedia), though I don’t know if this was their sole source of income or funding for their lifestyle. It’s interesting that folks can live like this and share it with the world, and I don’t think that these particular folks have any ulterior motives, and I have not heard anything bad about them. They seem like they’re fairly aboveboard (pun intended).
https://100r.co/site/buying_a_sailboat.html#bankloan
If you go read their logs you'll find that they come across as people that aren't aware of such a "significant safety net" if there is one so even if it exists it is unlikely to have had a relevant influence on their work.
They've been excruciatingly open about their experiences and what they've learned along the way, including pecuniary matters.
On the contrary, they read exactly like people in that situation to me. How many people like that do you have experience with?
"We got a message from Iridium saying our account was about to be suspended. We think we may have used up all our data. We can't check the weather, but SMS still work and we're trying to get in contact with them to append more minutes. Devine's dad is also helping us with it. What a shit show. We should have purchased more, but also, I don't know how it is possible that we went through it all. We did have some issues with the device, with it stalling during some internet calls... maybe this ate up extra minutes. Either way, this situation is shit, as we don't know what's going on out there and we can't broadcast our position."
"We received a message from Devine's dad, saying that he'd contacted the customer service at Iridium and that we had indeed, run out of data. Our plan was topped up, and we're able to update our position on the live map, check emails and to check the weather — finally!"
It's been much more common that they've made friends at sea and earned knowledge and help that way, besides the business they do.
(source: I grew up on such a sailboat, and we were broke as shit)
My takeaway:
Modern software stacks are usually cloud-dependent, and much bigger and more complex than they need to be, especially for offline, low-bandwidth, or low computing power use cases.
Small, simple, useful software can be written for these use cases and has ownership and longevity benefits.
Not a groundbreaking message, but a true one. And brought home by their interesting cirumstances.
There's a middle ground between locally installed software that fails as soon as you don't have an internet connection for the phone home, and locally installed software that can be used totally unplugged. You can stick a countdown timer within the software that allows 7, 30, 90 etc days of consecutive offline interactivity before the user needs to phone home again. Heck, if you really wanted to, you could sell copies or subscriptions to that software at varying price points depending on how many days the user expects to need - if it's a feature people want, it's a feature you can price in.
Why isn't this model more common? Mm, plenty of reasons. You need to implement pretty sophisticated techniques under the hood to deter software crackers, for one, which aren't required when you make an API call every sixty seconds to an Azure Function. For two the modal human mind really hates middle grounds of this sort. I actually suspect that some "online-only" local software implements something like this under the hood, and just doesn't advertise it, or perhaps gates it being being an enterprise feature. (I have unfortunately learned firsthand that advertising my software as "works up to 30 days off-grid" gets considerably more ire than "ah, sorry, it does require an internet connection, everything's in the cloud these days, you know how it is".)
But probably the most common reason is simply that most people don't need it! Most regular people aren't using software at all when they go off grid.
Now I'm a lot more diligent about FOSS for anything important.
>Other than as confirmation of payment
This is the wrong way around, imo. Confirmation of payment is like the #1 problem a business has to solve. If the business can't reliably turn a profit by running their software on your machine, then they will run it on their own machines, no matter how much it degrades the user experience. The end result is a hollowed out market for anything local and not offered totally for free, which sadly and ironically excludes a great deal of valuable software.
It's right there, linked to from TFA's first paragraph:
It's not about the boat or the cloud. Yes, they are self-imposed restrictions, but not the actual point the author is trying to make. The message I got from the text was that all these modern systems we use hurt the preservability of software. The text was about the author's journey in finding a solution for preserving their software for generations to come. A solution that if everything is lost, the runtime can be recreated easily so that the actual software can be run again.
This is something that I have been thinking about myself a lot and it was interesting to see that the thought-process has been similar with LISP, Oberon, Smalltalk, Forth etc.
It's like a carpenter creating his own tools before building a dining room table.
Even the nostalgia factor for choosing a Forth is contrived. There are plenty of portable, modern languages that will likely be runnable for decades. Lua is embeddable and will likely be put into new systems for decades, and can run on low power hardware. But Forth is ancient. Its like learning calligraphy. Either you are in a niche, or you just love doing it. But no one uses it for the daily correspondences, they have messaging apps now.
I do agree that everything being connected to the cloud definitely excludes people and places. And that place may be anytime in the future. But you can combat this with more modern solutions.
I'm actually not sure this is true. There are certainly a few quite venerable languages that will be around unchanged for decades (i.e. Java).
I wouldn't however take the bet, that, say, Go or Rust will be able to compile code written now, on whatever the current compiler version is in 2035. I certainly wouldn't take the bet that you will still be able to download the correct dependency versions from a package manager after 10 years...
But a go-vendored repository is buildable indefinitely, and the compiler itself is easy to bootstrap.
Maven is already of legal drinking age in the USA. I'm willing to take those odds ;)
No such problems with complex C compiler packages.
Hopefully the gcc Rust project can mitigate some of the issues for Rust (since everyone wants to rust-ify long standing projects these days and hence breaking backwards compatibility of the respective packages just to be "hip & trendy")
I love writing in C because a) it’s simple and I can understand everything that’s going on and b) I feel confident that it’ll compile just fine years from now, because that’s how that particular ecosystem has worked and likely will continue to work.
Recently, I’ve been writing new projects in Rust, which has far better ergonomics but is far more complicated and causes me to cede control to the whims of the community and the compiler. I’m sure there are simple ways to ensure that I can use the same compiler for all new platforms that will support it, but just like everything in the modern day (for both better and worse), is implicitly and explicitly designed to always be updated.
Rust has become much more stable in the past few years, but you’re right to expect breaking changes in the next ten years. I love using the language, it’s been fun to learn and I (hope) it’s helped me write far more robust code, but I’m sure in the future there will be many times where I’ll miss C.
> Forth is, to my knowledge, the most compact language allowing high level constructs. It is so compact that Collapse OS' Forth implementation achieves self-hosting with about the same amount of resources than its assembler counterpart!
I'm skeptical about some kind of catastrophic disaster that makes popular technologies inaccessible (the pandemic demonstrated our strong impulse towards business-as-usual even when the world is burning) but having ecosystems that aren't as vulnerable to corporate capture and exploitation seems valuable in its own right.
It only lightly toasted during the pandemic. Arguably, we’re getting more actual disruption now with Tariffs and Visa tit-for-tat
Having toons with chat bubbles somehow made the foaming at the mouth mad ramblings of all those burgeoning future reddit moderators feel a little more benign.
I have always been skeptical of dependency (both libraries and connected runtime services), but there’s a balance.
There’s things that we just can’t do, without a dependency. We stand on the shoulders of giants.
Right now, I’m developing and refining a demonstration client/server app, for a future article on implementing PassKeys on iOS. I require two dependencies. On the server end, I use the PHP lbuchs/WebAuthn library, and on the client end, I use KeychainSwift.
The first dependency is a requirement. Implementing that functionality myself, would be prohibitive. The second dependency is one that I could do myself, but that would add a lot of complexity to an already fairly complex project.
The moral of the story is that I always have to justify every dependency that I use, and that justification involves a lot of figuring out the pros and cons. I’m always a bit discouraged, when I see folks throwing in dependencies, willy-nilly.
I remember once, attending a class on GraphQL. It hardly mentioned the standard at all. It was a class on the abstraction dependency (A JavaScript library. Maybe something like Pandas). The class was worthless to me, as I don’t work in JS. I wanted to find out about the standard.
I wonder what "peramcomputing in action" would be when you're just trying to build a website, or a SAAS app. Those things aren't really the cool alternative dreams of 100 rabbits, but they could still benefit from these kind of ideas.
One thing that often strikes me, is that the web, despite being a huge part of the problem, actually poses a lot of solutions. PWAs and WASM offer some pretty great opportunities for portability, and WASM in particular is probably the closest we've got yet to a "universal virtual machine" (I know it's still got a long way to go)
https://github.com/steveklabnik/CLOSURE
Beautiful piece of writing, very weird, very excellent.
I guess anything can be a statement about the world, and we all want our lives to have meaning, so something you poured most of your waking hours into must mean something.
But as someone that sits by a computer for the better part of 30 years I just cant find beauty in it, just sadness for the human condition. Old hardware and software do not make me nostalgic, or makes me feel like we lost anything of value. It gives me the same feeling those abandoned listening posts in Chernobyl gave me, decay, the fleeting nature of existence.
You can't fight the fact that the world will keep on keeping on, with or without you. Be a person that matters to those around you, it's the best you are going to get.
gnabgib•5mo ago
Animats•5mo ago