alt Hacker NewsI 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.
Replies
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
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.
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.
> 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.