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Their 2d music programming language, Orca is very cool/fun. Some examples:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=MNF8SF69QvM&list=PLb1uDATFJPcEEG...
https://youtube.com/watch?v=DBI8eBMGyYs
Orca's great!
Here's a blog post I wrote after spending a long weekend figuring out how to use it to make some procedurally generated music: https://inventingsituations.net/2021/12/26/procedural-music-...
and the screen-cap of some of the generated music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF-DD43sk2E
> The Orca language is much more like a spreadsheet than python. I
Such a great line.
Orca singlehandedly got me out of a multi-year musical rut. It's such an interesting and different way of sequencing than the traditional piano roll experience. Like modular synthesis, it can be easier to just use it like a toy and not make anything "finished", but it really can spark the imagination.
The best kind of tool (for creative work at least). Unpretentious "toys" that - particularly - don't "get in the way ...
for anyone curious about learning, i made a tutorial and playground for orca:
Do you use a specific browser? Looks broken-ish to me on most things but firefox, and on firefox the example play button also doesn't work for me.
Super cool in theory though!
Nice.
I may not (correction: almost definitely don't on 80% of stuff) agree with them politically, but I have to admire their creativity and product execution.
See also https://midinous.com/
Oh my.
Wow that’s beautiful. Looks intimidating. But cool.
"Go slow, and fix things."
Stark contrast from the core attitude of mainstream extractive tech work, and a necessary ethos amid a growing storm of complexity that humanity increasingly depends on
We are trying to go slow and fix things biologically that our natural evolution has left us vulnerable to. Cancer, prion diseases, etc. Yet we have resigned the evolution of information tech over to God as we haphazardly race in a survival of the "financially fittest" sort of contest, rewarding the companies that win at financial selection
> a growing storm of complexity that humanity increasingly depends on
Yet real engineers ought to now that “An engineer has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but nothing left to take away”. ... or they never new and yet attempting engineering anyway?
Growing portion of my life is spending time with the complexity of toolchain and work context, while my outcome diminishes in every sense, amount and importance. Pissing into the headwind and getting almost nothing to show for kind of feeling. More and more draws me towards the lifestyle of the rabbits (stopping somewhere in between though).
Btw. financial selection is the way how society work on top of finite resources since ancient times. That's part of the game. ... saying so while I ferociously avoid competition steering into directions that circumnavigate the competing crowd, taking less busy alternative route. When available.
> financial selection is the way how society work on top of finite resources since ancient times
I don't know where you get that from, but if anything it looks like there has never been a single society but many forms of organisation. I'd be even more careful with any reference to finance in that context.
> there has never been a single society but many forms of organisation
Single society? ... where that came from and who brought it here, apart from you of course? Collaborative large human groups where division of labour is an intrinsic matter is referred simplisticly as society. No elaborated and complete study was the goal here to give complete picture of the matter but a short referral to the inherent competitive need, as part of the story.
[0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/What-FUCK-are-talking-about/dp/B08X... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money
> Single society? ... where that came from and who brought it here, apart from you of course?
The sentence I quoted from you implied that there is some universal form of society that retained the same traits throughout history, which seems false. If that's not what you meant, I'm sorry for misunderstanding.
> [0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/What-FUCK-are-talking-about/dp/B08X... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money
Really?
> financial selection is the way how society work on top of finite resources since ancient times. That's part of the game.
Agreed, not saying financial signals are not valuable, just that they bring new challenges that, like most things, lead to problems when obsessed over in lieu of what matters most. You can also develop problems by moving too slowly and fixing things that do not matter.
This has been one of the reasons moving to go has been a godsend.
Don't get me wrong, the project is absolutely insane. There's an api with a gpu layer for raster transformation.
But the build process is still:
go build [-tag {project name}] .> amid a growing storm of complexity
I value your way of putting it. "Storm" carries with it all due nuances and, indeed, "complexity" is a touchstone.-
In this respect, their page for hacking baguettes by sun&sea is my personal favourite
https://100r.co/site/solar_cooking_experiment.html
100Rabbits is like the coming true of Grothendieck's 1972 permatech lecture given at CERN*
https://github.com/Lapin0t/grothendieck-cern
>"I think that agriculture, stockbreeding, decentralized energy production, medicine of a certain kind, very different from the medicine that prevails today, will come to the fore. It's impossible to say which part purely creative joy will play in these new developments. My hope is, it will be a creative development in which there will be no essential difference between conceptual activities and manual physical activities. When people become masters of their own needs to the point where an appreciable part of their creativity remains free---and this will take a time we can't predict, it may be a generation, it may be ten, no one knows---at that point, anyone, not just a certain scientific elite, will be able to devote a significant part of their time to purely creative, purely speculative, purely playful research"
*which I (or 1 of you?!) will post soon (Thanks Bluestein for showing the best time to post this stuff!)
Hello,
Thank you for the link you've shared. I read it with great interest. While I can conceive that the aforementioned areas might survive in a post-industrial civilization, it is unclear to me how the technology that 100rabbits is researching could do the same. They might use Raspberry Pis or old PCs donated by others, but:
- these are impossible to manufacture without industries, and they are limited in number
- the only means of communication they're using to share their work, the Internet, inherently requires an industrial society to exist
This seems somewhat akin to the naive reaction to the financial crises we experienced a few years ago: "Oh dear, banks and finance can be evil, let's decentralize with Bitcoin."
I believe that we cannot address the problems that technology has brought us (nuclear weapons, global warming) without resorting once again to technology and science. This technology and science must necessarily be funded by the market.
>This technology and science must necessarily be funded by the market.
Why?
>I can't envision a decentralized technological and scientific world that wouldn't set us back 300 years.
And yet you are here arguing for more capitalist market-based solutions, which are inherently decentralized and have a tendency to create unrelated, wasteful (duplication of effort), and often pointless competition and profit-seeking?
Very odd.
Your covid point reminds me of the Jonathan (oops forgot his last name) inventing rna tech on his yacht :)
And trying to create a market, also from his yacht, but alas also not very successful
Thank you for your curiosity!
Decentralization is a very long term effort -- Grothendieck said it would take generations, we can't expect immediate results. So while 100R certainly can't survive without relying on industry, it does do research into technologies that may be easier to "deindustrialize". See the "off-grid" and "sustainability" pages on their site.
Finer point: even before the industrial revolution, humans have had access to supercomputers -- their own brains!
It's conceivable that in the not so far future we will be able to grow computers of our own design, from just air and water.
See promising efforts in this direction, it's not an empty dream! https://youtu.be/bEXefdbQDjw
I guess the moral of the day with regards to banks and finance is, don't jump the gun! We will need them until we can grow raspberry pies on a tree!
I wouldn't say the horizon is 100 years, but 250 years. Mainly to re-architect finance to support relevant research. You know how psychological obstacles are the hardest!
The first milestone is to minimize the use of metals in our society, use as dopants or catalysts only. Second milestone is alumina. (Money OTOH will probably always be necessary!) What I wanted to explain above is that for computing, arguably our most advanced tech, metals are not strictly needed.
You would also probably be surprised at the true state of our solarpunk tech. There are water antennas, solar-pumped lasers.. that's almost 1950 already.
> When people become masters of their own needs to the point where an appreciable part of their creativity remains free...
compare with VADM EJK ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41144977 ):
> It is essential to extend the knowledge and the practice of "initiative of the subordinate" in principle and in application until they are universal in the exercise of command throughout all echelons of command.
(with Grothendieck being a little more optimistic than King, as the latter stops short of pushing universal initiative all the way to the bluejacket)
Thanks for the details in philosophical provenance point-out! I will return to the other thread when I've completed current round of debugging local firmware :)
Let's just say subordinate can be replaced by "peers" above WLOG,ala Gr
Preorders* are reflexive and transitive, but not necessarily either symmetric or antisymmetric. (eg european languages that make a T/V distinction have shifted from antisymmetric to symmetric use)
* and hence finite topologies, a class to which any social topology belongs?
Thank you, au contraire, for that wonderful link in your comment, and that marvelous quote, and your thoughts.-
The start of this reads like the beginning of a cult manifesto, but then transitions to a very logical solution for an important problem.
Baffling. I'm in
It keeps bouncing between too real and too absurd.
Absurd: Not enough power on our sailboat to run Ableton and Photoshop.
Real: So we replaced it with open source technology.
Absurd: That technology was based on Electron.
Real: Electron was too bloated.
Absurd: So we ported everything over to the NES.
Real: And now you can run our software anywhere you can emulate an NES
everything about it reinforces the feeling that it's all just retroactive justification for finding a toy they made more fun than expected
ETA: to be clear there's nothing wrong with making a toy and then turning that toy into it's own all-consuming hobby (TTRPGs for example) and one of the best parts of programming is how easy it is to do just that. It's just kind of annoying watching people wax rhapsodic about nonsense instead of copping to "yeah we're having a lot of fun, i feel like a kid again"
fwiw they actually live on a sailboat and have sporadic internet access and limited electricity, so saying it's retroactive justification isn't really true and minimizes the real problems they face.
No, they really do live on a sailboat with intermittent power and internet access. Unless you take "made up" to mean "as a result of their choices" these are real problems, and ironically enough not problems faced by most people in the first world.
https://checkpointgaming.net/features/2020/05/making-games-a...
Problems created by lifestyle choices are still real problems.
Wow, you're the first person I've seen speak up about having similar experiences with them as me, thank you. I was a merveilles member some years back until I had some really rude/abusive interactions in IRC from Devine and a prominent moderator. I really would love to play with uxn and varvara but gosh I simply refuse to be around people like that.
Thanks for writing this. It matches my experience 100%. I just signed up to comment because I know people will desperately want it to not be true but there are plenty of us ex-mervilles folk out there who've experienced the cult element and abuse, we just don't talk about it.
Do you have anything I can review to see for myself? This is the first I've heard of any of this.
I'm very surprised to read this, considering both authors of the linked article use they/them pronouns.
You may be right about all that. Sad to hear, but not altogether unexpected.
I'll just point out though that most problems of the world are ones we ourselves have created.
I mean its all quite obviously a larp but it's what makes their work interesting.
There are solutions you want, and solutions you dont want.
Every personal problem has at least one easy solution. better ones take more effort.
It's a bit like saying: People climbing a mountain can solve their mountain-climbing problems by not climbing mountings.
Also not unlike: It's not the destination, it's the journey.
Living on a sailboat approaches some very very hard life/existential pinnacles that most people never even attempt to climb.
Yeah, you can have a simple regular life; that's lower on problems maybe. But man, sailing around & futzing with interesting barefoot developers projects sure sounds challenging in a lot of very very excellent ways.
Satellite internet is expensive, let’s all move down town! Housing in the city is expensive, let’s all move to sailboats! So you see at some point you have to address difficulties with some kind of approach besides avoiding them
"We choose to make this video game and do the boat life thing, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win!"
Funny, I was about to say the same thing about most "modern" tech.
Exactly my feeling.-
PS. Which leads me - tangentially - to think that (maybe) the solution to (at least) some of our problems might someday be found in a cult :)
Who knows ...
> Absurd: So we ported everything over to the NES.
This was grand. The NES as a most effective "baseline" platform. Can totally see humanity sending out an NES emulator on Voyager VI as a last gasp.-
This is now my headcanon for why the UI of super advanced computers in 80’s sci-fi movies looks the way it does.
It's like how you can say that VT100 emulation has an expiration date, but you can't say that about the underlying concept of some UI based on a screenful of monospaced text, which is immortal.
> PS. Which leads me - tangentially - to think that (maybe) the solution to (at least) some of our problems might someday be found in a cult :)
The major religions have been beating that dead horse for a long time.
(I See what you did here :)
I apologize for an off-topic question, but I'm curious why you choose to write "." as ".-". Is it an internet convention I'm unaware of, or maybe punctuation from a language other than English?
LessWrong had some pretty good advice in the early months of the pandemic, despite their terrible track record on politics and AI. There's a lot right with the Amish. You could write an entire book about the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Cults can have a lot to offer.
> Cults can have a lot to offer.
... in no small part perhaps because they remain isolated "pockets" of culture where - often - "progress" is slower or more controlled. Where idiosyncratic behavior becomes the "new" orthodoxy as behavior or culture "degrades".-
Where was it ... "Nightfall" (the novel) I think it was where a cult periodically saves civilization - by being the only ones that know how to handle the aftermath.-
cults are generally the only way to solve deep-rooted problems. otherwise people's habits are too strong and they keep reproducing the existing traditions that create the problems through unexamined avenues
technically varvara isn't actually the nes
> cults are generally the only way to solve deep-rooted problems.
Now that's an interesting proposition (which, I do not contend mind you ...)
The real question stands still - how can I join your cult?
Seconded.-
Make it a thousand rabbits. Make it a flotilla. Make it an armada ... :)
I think the general thesis statement is, "there are very few things we do today that couldn't have been done on older hardware".
Which, holds (?)
PS. Except for AI, perhaps ...
... I was going to add certain forms of cryptography to that, but then realized that we've always have had some sort of cryptography that was "hardware-appropriate" (ie. sufficiently hard to break, to be useful) for the age. So older hardware was just fine ...
It was algorithms. Back in the 90s there was no AES or ECC. There was RSA, and it was feasible to generate long keys, but it was impractical. Keys from back then could probably be easily factored nowadays. I think the spread of the Internet pushed demand for longer keys and better (more secure and efficient) algorithms.
Neural nets using individual tubes as nodes? Although the current trend seems to be quantizing down to a minimal amount of bits to process more in parallel, in an analogue system you could have a near "continuous" range of values.
Chat rooms and bare bones text editors aren't supposed to be process-heavy, and yet the popular communication platform Slack requires outrageous amounts of ram and CPU to function. [...] Making software this way is costly to off-grid users, or those on slow connections, [...]
Slack had a good solution in the form of an IRC bridge but of course they killed it.
Moat, then drawbridge removal.-
It could be worse. One word: Urbit.
What the boat couple is doing strikes me as the most romantic sort of bricolage and just gives me the warm fuzzies all over. But Urbit just pisses me off for a variety of reasons.
I think you need to have the right mix of the absurd when you try to make something interesting.
I think they used Krita first. But UXN isn't restricted to small res art/screens. Look at oquonie.
The Baffler was a favorite read of mine in the early 90s.
I’m glad I’d still around — I’m a happy subscriber
For me any potential technical argument and innovation is completely drowned in the needlessly pervasive anti-capitalist genderfluid digital nomad hippie talk.
Sorry? Couldn’t hear you over the unnecessarily-inserted alt-right knee-jerk anti-wokism.
I'm sorry you think me not acknowledging or caring about your made-up social minority makes me some sort of political activist.
What I care about is technology, and you have to dig quite hard to extract it here.
Fascinating that you seem to think that taking the time and energy to write a trollish shitpost about your offense at someone’s use of pronouns is somehow not acknowledging or caring about that someone’s use of pronouns.
I don’t think you’re an activist, I just think you’re yet another someone who is unable to see the Amazon forest for the chip on your shoulder.
Occasionally i've stumbled upon some neat tool or beautiful software and i'm like, wow - who's behind this? And then I realize it's these two folks. Their approach is so surprising and inspiring, thanks for putting out some cool stuff into the world!
Have you looked into the permatech community in general?
What do you mean by permatech community? When i googled it I didn't find anything that fits the context.
The search term is "permacomputing" afaik.
Here's 100r's (specifically xxiivv's) page on the topic https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/permacomputing.html
The first paragraph gives a good overview of the idea:
> Permacomputing encourages the maximization of hardware lifespan, minimization of energy usage and focuses on the use of already available computational resources. It values maintenance and refactoring of systems to keep them efficient, instead of planned obsolescence, permacomputing practices planned longevity. It is about using computation only when it has a strengthening effect on ecosystems.
That's the idea. However, my initial criticism of the way permacomputing is formulated are:
1. We could have examined each of the 12 Permaculture Design Principle and attempted to directly apply them to software design. For example, "Observe and Interact" is so broadly useful and versatile (and the core of adversarial domains, such as warfare), it can easily be applied to software. You won't see it directly listed here: https://permacomputing.net/Principles/
2. The permaculture ethical principles are not there in full. "Care for life" refers to "Care for Earth", "Care for People", but nothing about "Fair Share". Comparing these two ways of looking at it, I don't see how the permacomputing formulation is an improvement on how the permaculture ethical principles are formulated. Furthermore, I think this has more to do with not sufficiently delving into the place of technologies within a regenerative paradigm. I am speculating here with little basis, but I don't think the people who came up with this got their hands dirty with planting, nurturing, and harvesting things.
However, reading more with 100r, CollapseOS, DuskOS, there is a lot of thought put into this even if I think there are some key things missing from my experience with permaculture.
It is why my friends and I are exploring the ideas of "permatech", what is Technology's full, integrated place within a living systems world view? We have yet to come up with anything coherent yet.
> planned longevity.
What a grand concept.-
Oops, I meant "permacomputing". Among my friends in a private discord group, we were generalizing that to all of tech and I forgot it originated from "permacomputing".
There is a related project from permacomputing that I'd like to highlight: CollapseOS/DuskOS which has overlapping and adjacent ends with what 100 Rabbits are trying to do with UXN. I know there are attempts to port UXN to DuskOS.
What do you mean permatech?
I meant to say "permacomputing":
Interesting concepts, thanks!
I'd like to know if they ever nearly died (or became very uncomfortable) from running out of food, broken boat, or otherwise.
Their boat is very small and has only one engine, and it looks like they will sail thousands of kms in one leg on occasion.
I am soft. If I must do this, and I would kick and scream, I would sell my house and buy a yacht with megalitres capacity of water, batteries, refrigerators, and starlink. But I do not think that I could be happy doing this. I would find it more anxious than normal life.
Rek went overboard in a Pacific storm north of Japan. ("Busy Doing Nothing" book)
Somewhat unintuitively, smaller vessels have a strength advantage, assuming a well-made closed-top vessel... your main risk AIUI is getting dismasted in a capsize.
TL;DR is strength increases with square of the length, forces acting on the vessel increase with the cube of the length.
This guy is the champion of tiny blue-water vessels:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCptM0nqGDJLz14oP6ROdKRw/vid...
> from running out of food
According to their page they can store up to 4 months of provisions
> Fully-geared, stocked with provisions for 4 months (food & water) Pino weighs 7484,274 kg (16,500 lbs)【7 484 kg】, or 8.25 tons.
UXN / Varvara (a project by these folks) is something really special https://100r.co/site/uxn.html - an approach to creating intelligible software by applying strict complexity constraints, sort of like Viewpoint Research’s STEPS project, but with more concrete goals and an even smaller and simpler basis.
for anyone curious about learning, i made an online port of UXN using emscripten that allows you to code and compile and emulate in a browser:
Rek drew the pufferfish on my website & i love it to death https://j3s.sh
Nice site. This and 100r are an antidote to the soulless corporate AI slop that's slathered over everything these days. And a webring too? Don't mind if I do...
Goodness gracious. Webrings! Discoverability pre-search engines.-
I read all your poems just now. They're perfect, thank you! Just what I need. They speak to me.
you're welcome :)
I also really enjoyed your poems :) I aspire to have an interesting website like yours. I came back to read them again and your website was down though :(
thank you!
> I aspire to have an interesting website like yours
let me know if you need help / inspiration!
> I came back to read them again and your website was down though
sorry about that, i was moving & my server came with me :)
Thank you for the poems. They're weirdly soothing.
<3
I would like to thank you, too, for your poems.
<3
If anyone is interested further, I would highly recommend one of Devine’s latest talks, from Strange Loop:
https://100r.co/site/computing_and_sustainability.html
Transcribed and video format. Among other things, they came into computing from a bit of a different direction and ended up building tools and a platform that I’m betting 90% of people in the industry would revere in awe as things beyond their understanding. Truly an inspiration.
They've been around for 15+ years I think. Recently found some clones of their repos that aren't available/updatable. Very fascinating folks and collective activity. More than just software-making
https://100r.co/site/princess_louisa_inlet.html
"PLI is truly a picturesque place, nestled between extraordinarily large mountains and cliffs, blessed with clear waters and lush forests. The waters in the inlet are very calm, it is well-shielded. Any boat wakes travel far thoughout the inlet, from wall to wall, and take a long while to subside. If motoring in this inlet, go slow."
Wow. Surprised to see one of my favourite places show up on HN.
If you have the opportunity to go to Princess Louisa Inlet, I highly recommend it.
The contrast between the glaciers and the ocean is breathtakingly beautiful.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Princess+Louisa+Inlet/@50....
We sorely need more serious experimentation with computing & computing cultures and IMO Hundred Rabbits is a great example of this. Instead of talking about ideas, they practice what they preach.
As with most experiments, we can observe and borrow shadows of their ideas into our own life hopefully!
I appreciate people who dare to experiment with their life style.
The boat idea would perhaps too lonely for most people, but it would be nice to see folks experiment with re-inventing communes/new types of forming communities.
There is strictly no reason for each person to own a TV, PC, dishwasher, washing machine, etc. - most of that could be shared so as to reduce electronic waste and increase sustainability.
The minimalism idea of their VM resonates with me and remindes me of Niklaus Wirth, who had similar values and pushed things even further (designing his whole hardware + OS + language all by himself).
>here is strictly no reason for each person to own a TV, PC, dishwasher, washing machine, etc. - most of that could be shared so as to reduce electronic waste and increase sustainability.
This sounds nice in theory, but doesn't work out well in practice. You get a tragedy of the commons situation where people don't take care of the equipment and it gets broken, or dies early. Also, some people are just really bad with handling and taking care of things: some people will buy some item, and then you look at it again years later and it's in pristine condition. But look at another person's identical item after that time and it's either destroyed, or looks really beat-up. Maybe they're too rough with it, maybe they never clean it, maybe they don't maintain it, but I've noticed some people just seem to destroy everything they use.
Also, trying to share many things doesn't work out in practice because people want to use them at the same time. You can see this at places like laundromats; you can't expect people to wake up at 2AM to do their laundry. People usually like to watch TV at the same time too. So you need enough equipment to handle peak times.
And sharing a PC? What do you do when someone in your commune insists on clicking on every potentially malicious attachment on your shared Windows PC?
This is a overgeneralization and a sad belief to hold on to. There are many many communities which share resources where things do not fall into tragedy of the commons. There are communal houses, coliving spaces, makerspaces, people co buying second homes, tool libraries, heck! libraries themselves. There is a whole advertising culture that is trying to reinforce the "we couldn't possibly share things" narrative, I urge you to go out and experience alternatives!
Nothing "sad" about it; it's true. There's no shortage of accounts on the internet of someone loaning a tool to their neighbor and then either not getting it back, not getting it back for months or years, or getting it back broken or otherwise damaged. You can't trust random people to take good care of your stuff.
Co-buying second homes? How many people are involved in a transaction like that? That's not communal at all, that's a partnership. Of course you can be selective with whom you partner and only partner with someone trusted, plus you both have a strong economic interest in taking care of the property. Same with your so-called "communal houses": it's not like dozens or hundreds of people are going to live in a house. Makerspaces, etc., can screen their members, and keep track of who does what to penalize people who abuse things.
Libraries have occasionally had trouble with people abusing books (ever seen a loaned-out book with folded-down corners, or writing in them?). However books don't need nearly as much care and maintenance as complex machinery (i.e. power tools) so of course you don't have to worry about it as much, and normal libraries budget and plan for books having a limited lifetime anyway. Extremely rare and valuable books aren't left out for random people to handle either.
There's a way to fix this, it's called an "extended family".
But that's, like, the Patriarchy. That would really harsh our buzz, so we need to reinvent, in a broken and stupid way, what previously worked fine for tens of thousands years.
Serious question, have you lived on a commute or community living environment that wasn't a college dorm?
Nyc has buildings that function as co-ops. You have your own apartment in a building that you own shares of. Everyone pays for amenities like laundry and maintenance together
Dishwasher and washing machine, sure.
TV? Meh. Who gets to decide what we all watch?
PC? GTFO. That's mine. Hands off. That means you, too, Satya.
> We sorely need more serious experimentation with computing & computing cultures
Indeed.-
PS. If we stop and examine, our entire computing "paradigms" have been - mostly - driven, propelled forward by "industrial", commercial, business productivity (use cases) ...
... but what would have happened / will happen were these paradigms to emerge (and emerge mainly) from art, creation, play, instead?
I think modding communities are a reasonably good analog to this. Up until someone realized you could change the alpha channel of wall textures to make them transparent, the way to get a custom skin in Counter Strike Source (and 1.6), was to drop a file into your install directory.
The game would check for files named the same as it's default resources, read them in for use instead of the original. But then people started using the aforementioned transparent walls in competitive matches, and so a new variable was introduced to force the use of the defaults.
The next game (CS:GO) provided skins through a marketplace, including the use of loot-crate mechanics, the prices of in demand items sky rocketed, they are now used as currency for hackers and online gambling, and the online skin gambling sites have been caught advertising fraudulently through streamers. "rare" skins can sell for tens or hundreds of THOUSANDS of dollars.
In short, a great feature got exploited, commercialized, more exploited, and inspired a great amount of profiteering and sketchy business practices while ruining community aspects of a whole genre of entertainment (lots of copycats).
What I'm trying to say, is I think those paradigms most likely would have been co-opted by third parties in the name of greed and profit, destroying the communal and humanistic aspects of them in short order.
At WHOI we frequently run into some of these issues. Ocean-going projects often have long periods of disconnect, or have just a tiny bandwidth-capped connections that are meant for sending home critical data and not for automated software updates...
So much software also just takes for granted that it should be allowed on the Internet.
>So much software also just takes for granted that it should be allowed on the Internet.
Indeed, and I find it a problem on land too. I use Miro at work and it is _awful_ on an unreliable internet connection, like on trains in the UK.
I really value local-first software for this reason. I’d like to see more of it.
You're telling me. Being on HN and working on remote autonomous systems is such a dichotomy. We measure transmission rates in Kb still and costs in thousands of dollars. Not to mention power consumption. Sometimes I wish there was a conference for people working on these kinds of projects. "The union of Luddite scientists annual meeting" or something.
> "The union of Luddite scientists ...
Somebody really ought to set that up, assuming it doesn't already exist in some fashion ...
Paging Abner Coimbre...
Bluestein, you should check out the Handmade Conference(s).
On my way. Really appreciate the tip!
I think sailing and free software have in common the type of freedom that is not unlimited, necessarily constrained by the reality of sharing a planet with billions of other primates. There are a lot of rules one must follow to share the pacific ocean (especially the parts close to land) with other people, but that doesn't make travel under wind power any less captivating.
Also, the Yamaha 33 is an impressively tiny and light boat for the sailing they're doing, let alone living and working on.
I had the good fortune to meet and spend some time with Devine at Handmade Seattle a couple of years ago. It was an absolutely wonderful, inspiring experience.
Wishing to thank you for your comment, please, do tell. Can imagine it would have been (inspiring, etc.).-
They are exactly like you'd imagine from their online work.
Extremely passionate about ecology. Pessimistic about where the world is headed but optimistic about our individual ability to cope with it.
Super into low-level programming and old school pixel art and that whole aesthetic.
Absolutely full of stories about sailing. And just completely present in conversation.
> Pessimistic about where the world is headed but optimistic about our individual ability to cope with it.
Therein lies one key, methinks. I find that refreshing. It seems a viable "compromise", and, a solution to "data disaster driven dispair" :)
... faith in the individual.-
> And just completely present in conversation.
Incredible.-
Many thanks for sharing.-
Extremly passionate about ecology but lives in a boat....
Buying something that will last 10 years instead of buying a home that will last generations. Even more, most likely this people already had a home.
Is like buying a electric car while you have a luxury ICE that works, is a waste of resources. I dont really mind, but dont say you care about the enviroment.
You being in awe of them is very relatable to me lol. I discovered them a few years ago and seem to be surrounded by people that just don't "get it". A lot of people think programming and/or computer science as a way to make art, as a tool.
What I think is cool about 100r is that it is not "computer generated art" or "digital art", but rather "computer science/language design/programming as art". It's like they have this respect and reverence for it that I've often felt, and I often feel isolated in feeling.
> that it is not "computer generated art" or "digital art", but rather "computer science/language design/programming as art".
And, what an enormous difference there is, between these two things.-
I guess I’ll also take the opportunity to point out that my Neat CSS framework was partially inspired by reading their work.
I continue to use it for nearly all my projects now. I have become addicted to the smallness of it all.
Nicely done!
Hundred Rabbits is like Urbit without the evil aura and digital real estate.
Hundred Rabbits is... nothing? Nirvana?
Urbit had a fair bit of creativity in both aesthetic and tech. But yeah I agree it was mostly a crypto scam mainly driven by a no-longer-open/loud neonazi.
If you think Curtis Yarvin is a Neo-Nazi then I’m afraid you’re so far out there and uninformed you’re probably beyond saving.
> uninformed
Yeah, nah. They know exactly what they are doing.
My solution would have been: older copies of photoshop that don't require an internet connection and a larger battery + solar panels.
A larger battery and more solar panels doesn’t seem to be an option for the authors:
> The modern stack doesn't really work for us, it doesn't apply to the limitations that we have on the boat. We have 180 watts of solar. We just spent the whole summer with two 6-volt batteries, which is very small. When you're going down that route, at every turn people are telling to just put more solar panels, or to buy more batteries. That is such a modern way of solving your problem. In reality, technology like this(especially high-tech) rarely solves problems. It creates a lot of other problems, which on a sailboat is very immediate. Putting more solar would mean more windage, more chance of things flying off and cutting our limbs. More batteries would mean the boat would be heavier, it would stop us from being able to run away from storms.
I love what they're doing, but these are reasons that don't hold up to scrutiny. gluing flexible panels to the deck would solve the windage problem and the boat is over 16,000 pounds laden... adding another ~80 pounds (less if LiFePO) of batteries would decrease their "run away" ability by about 0.5%. They pretty clearly ran into a challenge, chose the fun solution rather than the practical one, and ran with it. Which is great.
Not only that, but how cutting-edge is the stuff they have? New solar panels have much better efficiency than panels made 20 years ago, for instance (both because of better technology, and because of the effects of aging). Newer battery technology has much higher energy density than old stuff.
The constraints" are amazing. And basically *drive* good solutions.-
When faced with a similar situation and come up with multiple potential solutions — such as settling for older Adobe software versus creating your own resource-efficient graphics application, I'd definitely take the more creative and fun solution over the quick and simple one! Interesting how people's approaches vary in this way.
(That does change somewhat when doing paid work though...)
PS. Were they not to be bitrotten beyond repair, maybe some old "shareware" copy of Paint Shop Pro or similar, on a CD-ROM even.-
I've been following their travels since I guess 2016. Right around the time we were winding down our own seabattical. It's good to see they are still out there, traveling. creating, and coding. Even on our much bigger boat, boat projects were much bigger and more complex. So, there is a lot to be said about their minimalist travels. It really strips you down to the essence and encourages you to focus on what's most important.
"seabattical" Love it!
It’s weird to be a “fan” of programmers but I’m a big fan of Hundred Rabbits. Orca is one of the most fun projects I’ve used in years and the fact that it’s from some hackers on a boat makes it all the more delightful.
I hope they keep it up (I donated, I’ll probably donate again now).
These two precious human beings are an inspiration for me since very long. Their radical life choices are a teaching for me; the most important part being that it all happens incrementally: tooth paste can be replaced with something that has less chemicals, no packaging, cheaper (and that doesn’t clog the pipes of the boat… a “fix” that came later) and likewise many other things in our daily lives.
I want to get on board with these groups, would really want to be in one. Can't all society be cool and live like this?
But. I keep coming back around to, where are they getting all this stuff. Everything that keeps them going has to be made somewhere, by working stiffs with day jobs.
There is no escaping Moloch. These groups are the odd random cast off, and I really want to be them, but everyone can't be them, or their wouldn't be any of the things that keep them going. They are living on the cast offs of the rest of us still in the machine.
Have you seen the movie My Dinner with Andre? At its core is a debate over whether or not people need to get to the top of Mount Everest (metaphorically) to have a transcendent experience, and if so, what do you do for the people who can't afford to get to the top of Everest? I've seen the movie several times and I always leave conflicted. I find these kinds of radical departures from "normal life" to be thrilling, even just vicariously. And modern life is constructed in such a way that it's extremely hard to break free from "the machine" (as you call it) without something radical, which is usually inaccessible.
I often settle on a more optimistic note, wherein the people living on boats in the ocean are setting some kind of example that even if it can't be followed directly, maybe it can give a little jolt, shocking you out of complacency.
Woah, one of my favorite movies is referenced here. That’s cool to see.
I really like your takeaway. It’s very important to have ideas of what life could be, so we have something to work towards as individuals and society.
I read a book a while back, passions and the interests, which talks about the philosophical underpinnings of capitalism. It’s interesting to think that capitalism as it was originally conceived was meant to lower our passions in favor of commerce, since it was considered the most tamable vice. No wonder we feel inspired when people choose to try something different.
Thank you, I'll check it out.
Most people (in rich countries) can retire early if they live frugally enough. There'd be much less workers on the market, so companies would make much less stuff - but frugal living means less consumption and much more reuse anyway, so there wouldn't be shortages or inflation. And everyone, after doing their 10-20 year stint in the industry, would be done with working and free to live. I've pursued this path myself and am happy about it, I just feel sorry for those hundreds of millions of people who are miserable in their jobs and who are waiting for their retirements at 65...
Their sailing videos are very inspiring—from what I remember, they sailed from Vancouver to Japan, then down to New Zealand and back to Vancouver over the course of a few years.
Ha, thanks for sharing! I quickly looked for something like that on their site but didn't find it.
Love their editing style. Very inspiring indeed.
From their mission statement (https://100r.co/site/mission.html):
> Diversity is important in nearly all aspects, whether it's with computers, or with life itself. A polyculture of tools and systems distributes the surface of attack and creates resilience. Viruses can attack a single crop, or a single computer architecture. The more services, or resources are centralized, the more power is concentrated into fewer hands and more easily taken over.
Feels particularly relevant given the recent Crowdstrike outage.
I've been following these guys for a decade now (maybe more??) and I was always blown away by their skills and aesthetics. Devine has been a huge influence on my own artistic style and finding xxiivv.com on some random chan during high school, and getting lost in it, was a big mind-changing event. Glad to see they're still sailing around the world.
One of their founders, Devine, gave a wonderful talk at Handmade Seattle 2022 titled Weathering Software Winter (https://vimeo.com/780005704) that sparked some really interesting conversations about software resiliency and data preservation!
Two people and a pet isn’t really a “collective”
There are a bunch of contributors to these projects. I wrote the C version of Orca (and helped design the second version of its evaluation strategy) but also had help and ideas from other contributors as well. I wrote the Windows version of Uxn, Uxn32, which was a from-scratch implementation, except for a couple of things like the palette mixing table. The code from Uxn32's VM core ended up in other versions of Uxn emulators, which were then modified and improved by the people running those projects. There is not any governing body, committees, or authoritative leadership for these projects. We just talk to each other through various channels and do stuff. It's a collective.
That's the most constructive takeaway you have when looking at all their work? That's an unnecessarily limited view and doesn't add to the conversation.
From my vantage point their work fits the definition nicely.
"A collective body" [1] ... "Collectivized or characterized by collectivism" [1] ... "A political or economic theory advocating collective control especially over production and distribution" [2]
[1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/collective [2]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/collectivism
I wouldn't say it's a completely throwaway dis. As much as I like Orca it easily could be that calling themselves "a collective" is putting on airs or pretending to be a bigger movement than they are. But it could also be tongue-in-cheek, self-parody, or theater of the absurd (which seems more likely).
This is the best critique of the entire idea, clearly.
I read this and thought it was satire at first:
"We eventually ported our tools to C, but while we had achieved ideal energy usage, portability was still an issue, so we kept looking. We learnt 6502 Assembly, seeing players run our games as NES roms on all these different platforms gave us an idea."
How so? NES games are genuinely more portable than C programs that do anything involving graphics or IO.
A simple example is the fact that they use Plan 9 C. I urge you to try making a simple game that runs on both Plan 9 and Linux.
The only reason C is portable is because a lot of collective effort was put into porting various libraries to various systems, and homogenizing them to look kinda the same if you squint.
Uxn creates a very easy to implement virtual computer that is actually identical. A Uxn program is more portable than a C one for their purposes. And I think it's obvious how that could have came to them from NES emulators, which have similar properties.
we had a really wonderful thread about uxn/varvara on here in june: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40805267
I never heard of these guys and this is a fascinating rabbit hole. I don't agree with everything they stand for (and that's OK!) but the long term maintainability and sustainability of computer software and hardware I am 100% onboard with.
Before his pivot to programmer sailor he helped start the Montreal chiptune scene under the name of http://toycompany.cc/
Congrats on everything Aliceffekt !
Every time this comes up in HN I lose myself in the weeds and spend hours poking at their site(s), which is saying something. My own quest for “less” keeps getting postponed, though.
One quirk here is that they say "This website has no tracking or analytics." but Brave is showing Double Click / Google Ads? Might be an oversight!
i think this is the culprit:
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_1Y8PwD5XDs" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
a thing to keep in mind is that accelerometer access has recently been shown to leak enough information about passwords to compromise them
it is the embedded YouTube video most likely :)
That their static site generator is hand-coded in plain old C never ceases to amuse (and for the record, I'm all for quirky low-fi tech like this)
A "small collective" is two people in this case?
I think they are at risk of becoming exactly what they hate, with a convoluted build stack that outside people struggle to use. Why was 6502 decided on instead of Java for example, which is relatively platform agnostic?
Java is seemingly the first thing they considered[1], but it was too fragmented and complicated for their purely pragmatic usecase.
A single 1$ STM32 blue pill (or one 4$ STM32F4, or god forbid esp32) could do so much more than a NES at lower energy consumption.
There's definitely some tension between their constraints and desires. I love that they are able to productively use hardware that is usually considered obsolete. But they also have a pretty severe power and space budget. If I were asked to advise on a small, low power computing setup, it would be hard to beat a modern phone of some type. But that choice violates so many of their stated objectives it's a non-starter.
The old TRS-80 Model 100 fits some of the goals. It runs for a long time on just four AA batteries. But it's text only and perhaps even too limited even for 100R. I'd love to see a modern version of that machine with a bitmapped display, running a minimal (not Linux) OS, that can run for months on four AA batteries. Maybe something like a somewhat upgraded Psion 5. I think much of the Psion software is available so maybe it's actually a possibility.
In my opinion mid-level STM32F4 or high level STM34H7 would be pretty great machines for people who'd like to self-constrain themselves. Very capable, and with a lot of freedom to improvise unorthodox solutions. There're so many modes of operations, sub-systems (i.e. creative use of DMA to emulate extra UARTs), ability to drive LCD if needed, all the GPIOs, ability to add external RAM, etc.
In fact i've been working on and off on implementing operating system that uses CANOpen framework (a higher-level system based on CAN bus) for super-reliable wired networking. I want to follow similar path of travelling on expedition truck and doing programming for the truck sub-systems on the go.
The AlphaSmart Dana has a similar form factor to the TRS-80 Model 100. It runs Palm OS and can easily be converted to run off of standard rechargeable AA batteries. The downside is that the batteries only last for 20-25 hours of screen on time.
Those are getting hard to find. There are still new similar machines being made.
The Pomera DM250 is one that looks pretty interesting to me. Occasionally I check for any progress on hacking the thing to run other software but I haven't found much so far.
> Maybe something like a somewhat upgraded Psion 5. I think much of the Psion
The Psion 5 (and 3) keep popping up (and deservedly so) all over the place. They are such great little machines. Particularly as some sort of "baseline" for computing.-
What do you have against the Linux Kernel?
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and/or flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
sorry dang! I'll try harder.
...need a way to stop myself from posting while high.
Love these two. I’m always so happy to see whenever they’re posted to HN. They’re such interesting people, and I so deeply respect their commitment to their values and continuous evolution. The world needs more people like this.
One thing I don't get is how they sustain themselves in terms of income - does anyone know what they do to support their lifestyle? Just really curious (and potentially out of the loop). Thanks.
I don't think they sustain themselves with this project.
They get 900 USD a month of stable income from Patreon. Add to that income from art commissions etc. and realize that they don't have to pay rent, car insurance etc.
Looks sustainable enough.
Mantaining a boat is very expensive. The people I know with boats all make what we call good money here.
But I guess by HN standards are different to mine.
Ahh right so this is not a 365days per year thing, but they have relatively normal jobs in the industry?
I think they worked in the industry and don’t need to work to sustain themselves now. Probably they had a few years of runway and then together with their income sources can sustain themselves at a slight negative.
I doubt it. In my experience most people who have this kind of lifestyle is people who dont need to work.
Look at the cool stuff at they are doing and stop fussing about tracking.
One thing modern tech gets right is that it tries to get you to correct the spelling of 'failability' by adding red lines under the letters when you type it into a web page.
Their philosophy makes me think they should just use Windows XP/7 or something and call it a day. Offline first? “past-proofing”? These are desktop and console programs where the OS vendors have spent onerous amounts of capital to maintain backward API compatibility. In other words: Windows and Win32, and nothing but. Everything else, including the Web, has been broken and deprecated several times over.
https://git.sr.ht/~vdupras/duskos
> Dusk OS is a 32-bit Forth and big brother to Collapse OS. Its primary purpose is to be maximally useful during the first stage of civilizational collapse, that is, when we can't produce modern computers anymore but that there's still many modern computers around.
> 32-bit Forth OS mixed with C
I mean, what's not to love here? :)
the z80
more generally, collapseos is cosplay, not engineering
in more detail, collapseos is not a pragmatic engineering effort to foster resiliency, but an essentially religious effort to atone for the sins of the worldly through ascetic renunciation of pleasures such as guis, returning to an imagined arcadian past of austere virtue
see against-collapseos.md in http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/pavnotes2.git for the full critique
i'm surprised to hear 6502s are being produced in quantity! thank you for the correction. any idea what they are used in? i've never found one ripping apart a tv, vcr, printer, dvd player, vacuum cleaner, power supply, radio, lab data recorder, washing machine, etc. i've found 8051 clones, 68000s, weird epson microcontrollers without a publicly documented instruction set, pals, z80 clones with dsp bolted on, and i've seen other people report pics and stm32s, but never a 6502 except in the drean brand commodore 64 i have here
looking on digikey i can't find any 6502 or 65c02 parts, although there are a couple of sbcs like https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/olimex-ltd/NEO650.... digikey of course doesn't have everything, but they're usually an okay indicator of what is popular
i agree that android phones cannot substitute for microcontrollers! their cortex-a cpus can't guarantee hard real-time responsiveness. and i agree with virgil's point that microcontrollers are very important for practical everyday things. and 6502s make perfectly good microcontrollers, albeit more power-hungry than designs fabbed in a smaller feature size, and requiring external memory
while the z80 itself is no longer made, plenty of clones of it are, and a z80 is also perfectly fine as a microcontroller, and a 6502 or z80 is close to the smallest machine on which a self-hosting development environment is feasible
> Z80 only. Variants on that chip exist in their billions as well, although the original was taken off the market, hmm. This April.
Talk about the end of an era.-
apologies! i haven't investigated duskos in any detail and so whatever opinions i may have about it are not worth considering
it's a git repo, you have to clone it
i've added a header to that effect since it seems to have been confusing people
cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41133098
collapseos isn't a 100r thing, and i haven't seen anything from virgil that sounds like an anarchist anti-capitalist. i have a lot of sympathies for the anarchist anti-capitalist point of view although personally i've suffered a lot more harm from anti-capitalism than from capitalism
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I think their philosophy / research is in understanding how to build modern software that is more resilient. So from that research/exploration standpoint it makes sense to me they would go that route instead of using older tech
The way you put it, it makes sense.-
PS. For many XP was some sort of "sweetspot", as far as Win OSs are concerned.-
PS. Then again, it depends. How much evidence of "past-proof"-ness do you need - in terms of "backstory" to meet that requirement? Linux, or - even better - some BSD variants go way further back.-
It wasn't secure and it wasn't perfect but Windows 2000 Professional was my favorite version of Windows. The UI had minimal unnecessary animations and graphical effects, it felt quick and responsive, and it didn't spy on you.
> Windows 2000 Professional
Indeed. Good call. Another superb sweetspot.-
Windows has become a garbage pile of spyware lately, but even Linux can't really compare to the insane level of backwards compatibility Windows offers.
> even Linux can't really compare to the insane level of backwards compatibility Windows offers.
My experience is quite the opposite. I still play the Windows Entertainment Pack version of Tetris. In Linux, thanks to Wine, it just works. In Windows 10, I'm told to contact the publisher for a new version.
Emulators tend to be better for compatibility than live systems. Did you try using Wine on windows? And if you take a similar-vintage Linux program, you may well find it runs more easily under SFU or WSL on Windows than on a current version of Linux.
NixOS can.
Because literally every piece of software in the Nix repo includes all dependencies (including things like build dependencies, not just runtime dependencies) that existed at the time it was built, all the way down to the metal basically
fair, but you can pick your kernel and define your kernel extensions I believe, so there's that
TL;DR: They already wrote Varvara[1] + software[2] for it
My understanding is:
* The authors wanted to run on a Raspberry Pi powered by solar + batteries
* They're often somewhere in the Pacific so their internet connection is often bad
* Varvara[1] is the portable-enough solution which works for them
* Others liked it enough to write a bunch of other tools[2]
It's all pretty much self-hosting at this point. It's not for everyone, but why bother with Windows if it fits your needs?
[1]: https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/varvara.html
[2]: https://github.com/hundredrabbits/awesome-uxn?tab=readme-ov-...
They run 9front, much better than XP and 7. No reinstalls, no DLL hells, everything it's statically compiled, updates can be done totally in place and offline.
Good luck running Windows 7 on an RPI and with a laughable power draw.
Oh, and don't even compare VS + MSDN documentations (huge GB's wasted) vs what Acme can do and just the plan9's 9.intro.pdf book. The disk usage would wear out any SD in days. 9front, otoh, can even selfcompile itself in a breeze. Try that under Windows.
The constraints under which they work are wonderful. Power included. It basically mandates excellence, efficiency.-
The thing is, while it might mandate efficiency, what they made was an un optimized 8 bit VM synthesizing 16bit arithmetic running on 64 bit hardware. It's not efficient at all, it's just that the constraints they gave themselves leaves enormous amount of power on the table.
SDL2 has been built as a fast whole/partial screen refreshing platform for textures/images, no wonder if it's that slow mimicking XFT/Cairo's job on fonts/text. Just look at the Emacs editor for Common Lisp vs the SDL build of Lem.
Not just that. For any non-JS web, they can compile and share netsurf offline from 9front and happily post at HN or read lots of sites such as http://68k.news and https://midnight.pub
And, with a Gemini client for 9front (there are a few), between the gemini 'capsules' (sites and blogs) and gemini://gemi.dev (web decrafying proxy to gemini, where you can read news stripping out the 95% of the pages, scripts, trackers and all the bullshit, they can get totally covered.
Gopher9 (Gopher client) makes a good point with gopher://magical.fish for global news, translation services and such. Much less bandwidth spent than the web, for sure.
With a bare irc client (again, literally few lines of shell scripting under 9front due how's designed) they can connect to the public IRC servers from bitlbee.org and connect to modern disservices such as Discord and Slack, at least being able to chat against their peers.
Reading through the homepage one part stood out: they burn through quite some laptops. I wonder, perhaps it’s related to their environment? Salpeter is probably damaging the electronics. Consumer laptops were never designed to be out on sea for such extended time.
Now… what could they do about this issue? Assuming this is the root cause of the failures.
> what could they do about this issue?
The problem is the moist, salty air, circulating through the electronics.
Use a tablet (it's closed, doesn't suck in air for cooling), ideally a waterproof one. There are also "sealed", splash-proof keyboards, but even if using a regular keyboard, replacing that from time to time is far cheaper than replacing a whole laptop.
I can't find the link right now but I believe they've learned to clean all the ports and keep the laptops in boxes with desiccants to keep them dry
> keep the laptops in boxes with desiccants to keep them dry
Such a simple solution. Have a special low-humidity environment.-
Similar cross of art, low power/resilient tech, and sailing I saw at strange loop last year. Non-standard tech talk for sure, but fit right in at that conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3u7bGgVspM
The presenter, Devine, is one of the folks behind 100r :)
:facepalm: no wonder it rang a bell… I thought, “I wonder if these are the same folks” and even looked at their route map but somehow missed that key detail. Appreciate the graceful response :)
This page https://100r.co/site/philosophy.html says > Preparing for impending apocalyptic events should mean collective action and structural reform, not individualism and isolation.
What apocalyptic events?
They're the best! I first came across orca while learning about esoteric languages, and to see how it spun out and evolved into the entire Vavara virtual computer has been amazing.
They're smart, capable, and committed to openly sharing knowledge and ideas in their community.
> 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.
It's hard to take people with this political manifesto seriously, but I have to give credit where it's due — their work is impressive. Many artists say that they "explore" something and end up with completely bland "social critique" pieces that don't say anything new, but these guys manage to do a lot of interesting stuff, especially Orca.
Why such old computers? I get linux and open source, but you can use new stuff. The keyboard error specifically. Also maybe then have a spare usb one. Laptops in general are bad.
I have so much more interest in people behind Hundred Rabbits and how they try to live than all of the modern world that makes people miserable for shareholder value.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38878760
Crazy how HN works. I posted this 6 months ago because I collect unique personal websites, but no one took a bite...
Glad people took interest this time.
It's been submitted many times. Sometimes people read and comment, sometimes they don't.
Yep...I understand.
I couldn't find it anywhere, how many people are living on this boat? Do they have financial support from someone on land? It is a collective, do people swap in/out of living on the boat?
As I understand it, it's just two people on the boat, with - of course - a pet rabbit.-
I'm always a bit conflicted when I see these kinds of stories, due to the message they send.
I remember vising the Seychelles a few years ago, and finding it an earthly paradise, the kind that everyone should experience at least once. Yet it's a tiny nation state that can only properly handle a limited amount of tourists.
In essence, I've started believing that all these "digital nomads" that work remotely in one of these places are simply abusing their quota of earthly paradise, which really is in a fixed supply. I'm not really blaming them, but let's not glamourize this.
Uh,
100R live on a boat?
Like, sure, we can call them digital nomads but they are very much different from the “startup that has no office we have a travel stipend and work from anywhere” crowd. (I’ve been that person before. That’s easy mode compared to how 100R live.)
You're right, it's a totally different thing that they're doing. That's why I'm conflicted, since I'm openly against digital nomads. It's still glamourizing a lifestyle that I can't see working on a larger scale, and which doesn't contribute to the infrastructure that enables it.
> that I can't see working on a larger scale, and which doesn't contribute to the infrastructure that enables it.
You put your finger on an objection I had but couldn't quite place.-
How many people can afford to live on a boat, sailing between countries, building and designing like they do?
The motivations beat those of the average digital nomad by a mile, and I applaud them, but this is still squarely into "rich people" stuff.
Why do you have "rich people" in quotes?
They live in a 1982 sailboat as their primary residence. They use older hardware and are trying to be sustainable.
Does this look like "rich people" to you? https://100r.co/media/content/travel/hathayim14.jpg
There are definitely rich people that live on $500,000 boats and sail the world. 100R doesn't appear to be that? I'm pretty sure they've actually decided "not to make a lot of money" and are rich in experiences from going all in on this lifestyle.
The name reminds me of the fictional Twelve Monkeys.
reminds of moxxie's boat
I’d the name related to Centzon Totochtin?
It is! :)
My first impression after reading a bit about their lifestyle was "how on earth do they have time for all this?" Things like maintaining the boat, sourcing fresh food every day for cooking, making games, creating art. Meanwhile they do all this in a very constrained environment, which can't help efficiency. Where is the time in the day for everything, after working? Then I saw they say they only work during the morning.
Soooo... kinda no shit, you can live a more creative and meaningful life if you don't work. Which most people can't afford(?) to do. Where's the secret? What's the cheat code they have?
The cheat code is that they have a Patreon. They make things that people like, so people pay them for it. "They don't work" is a bit reductive. Working is producing value, and value is whatever people are willing to pay for.
It's not like they're millionares or something. They just managed to cut expenses low enough, while convincing people to pay them for the things they produce.
This seems plausible enough. I guess I'm surprised that one can live sustainably with such a lifestyle and income. Wild because I would consider myself "barely getting anywhere in life" living the typical 9-5 job, probably earning more cash and with even less spare time. Theoretically higher work efficiency, but perhaps for naught? If one can get by with a more enjoyable life and working less, living on a boat.
Also I did not mean to say that their creative output is not useful because it's not work. They are definitely doing more useful work than me.
Maybe, but your life is almost definitely more luxurious (unless you live somewhere where that's not the case). Not everyone could manage to live like this, I think.
"a small collective exploring the failability of modern tech" really just means "a couple living on a boat".
And discovering that consumer hardware doesn't do well in a marine environment.
"they/them x iel/ielle" really just means "a heterosexual couple"
Need to in group signal, especially if you're a normie.
I wonder if this actually is a meta-art project of upmarketing a high-net-worth lifestyle (look at me, I live on a boat!) to a far left wing audience. Just need a vague manifesto ala https://xkcd.com/451/ and you're halfway there.
> a vague manifesto
Great idea. I shall someday write that.-
I wonder why this bothers you so much as to go on the internet and tell everyone what you personally think about who those two people actually are.
I believe clear and succinct writing is the key to effective communication.
A very good way to make writing clearer is to replace the words that you don't care to know with other words that are completely inaccurate.
Question: how is it helpful for you to label them as a straight couple? Why would it matter to you? Why is adding the "straight" qualifier better than just leaving it as "they're a couple"?
The content matters though. If you are clearly and succinctly communicating something insecure and stupid, you don't get any bonus points.
Wow, a website about the "failability of modern technology" and "low-tech solutions" that connects to doubleclick.net, play.google.com and embeds a youtube video. Is this a joke?
Have you looked at their body of work? An embedded YouTube video does not negate their ethos.
Well, it kind of negates it a little bit, because they are against trackers, and state that their website does not use them, but they are spreading Google's trackers through their website.
Of course, this is almost certainly accidental and I'd think it would be corrected if it were brought to their attention, and the meat of their work is in domains other than lightweight websites.
I'm glad this is the best critique we can do.
Brings to mind a comment I saw here the other day observing that some on HN seem to default to a rather "unkind" mode.
I don't default to unkind mode on every topic. Perhaps I phrased the comment too negatively here however. Note though that as a later comment pointed out, they claim to have "no tracking or analytics," so clearly this was a mistake on their part. A commitment to no tracking is also something I would expect from a site like this making the claims they are making. So clearly my criticism itself was well placed, even if the delivery was too harsh. Also, I would think they would at least check to see what embedding a youtube video does before doing it. And I do think embedding the youtube video is strange even ignoring the tracking for a site that describes itself as "small." Is it really small if you have a massive iframe embedded in it?
compare, perhaps, the adjacent thread that had comments like "I got that complaint about my blog too, and here's how I fixed it" and a bunch of other things that seemed plausible and helpful? (I don't know if 100r will make those changes, but I'm certainly going to look at them for some of my own youtube links...)
The HN audience seem to encourage this type of comment by consistently upvoting them, like how the current top comment is one that complains about tracking due to embedded video as opposed to something that is materially related to the site contents.
I will do my part by upvoting the other comments, but judging by the karma ranking and comment history of some of these commenters, I think I am in the minority.
> That top comment is from John Nagle of Nagle's algorithm. I doubt his karma is from being negative.
A relentless cynicism and the willingness to shoot down bad ideas are vital for producing anything worthwhile. Someone who was able to improve real-world networking is very likely to have been "negative" by modern standards.
> I don't see the issue with pointing out that the site is enabling the tracking of users when it claims not to,
Which, in a sense ends up being anímical the ethos at hand, with many blogfolk now securing their own sites, with a nice, ongoing discussion about many technical options to achieve that. Sounds like a good outcome.-
It's a cynical point of view ("Yet you yourselves participate in society! Curious!") but it holds some validity. They are using some very advanced tools to rage against the capitalist machine. Attacking modern power structures using tools and privileges that arise from those same power structures seems... well, ungrateful at times. The lives they're living were utterly inconceivable for most of human history.
That said, it'd be even more cynical to dismiss all of the work and thought that Rek and Devine have put out there because certain elements of it seem a bit hypocritical from a certain point of view. I just spent a couple of hours surfing through their site, reading about their philosophy, and find myself respecting the parts I disagree with almost as much as the parts I identify with. That kind of content is exactly what HN's good for discovering.
Yes it may seem ungrateful at times but I think they are doing a service by presenting alternatives. From that point of view I think we should be grateful. Ofc I am jealous of their lifestyle but if I wanted to do that badly enough I'm sure I could work towards it too I guess?
It's an unfortunate use of Youtube embeds. Aside from letting people uncharitably dunk on them, the Youtube here isn't even doing anything. The YT video in question is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1Y8PwD5XDs , which is 57s long, has 2 worthless comments, no description/metadata/playlist/closed-captions/categories, and a yt-dlp takes literally 5s for me to download the 1.5MB MP4. (Which I think may actually be about the size of the full weight of the YT embed container based on the last post I saw here whining about YT embeds...?)
This is a perfect candidate to host yourself and just slap it in some <video> tags.
this could honestly even be a gif if you just showed the app without the desktop background
GIFs are warts. There's no way to stop them, so they endlessly demand your attention.
They're probably not GIFs, and I have to say this because it bugs the hell out of me.
Half the """GIFs""" you see online are webm. Just put a webm. They work great.
It's possible to stop gifs if the domain framed them with the proper code. Unfortunately many people believe gif = png,jpg and exert zero effort to handle them differently.
Depends on your browser, I guess?
Unconditionally, for all websites. I suppose nothing of value is lost.
also with <video> it does not get preloaded before you press play (in Firefox and chrome at least?
Depends on what you set the preload attribute to
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/vi...
(I develop Privacy Badger.)
Privacy Badger can replace YouTube embeds with "click to activate" placeholders. Faster browsing, better privacy, easy-to-use controls, at least when the replacement works properly.
See "Pro tip #1" in https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/01/privacy-badger-puts-yo...
Thank you for developing an amazing tool!
Thank you for using Privacy Badger!!
FYI I just installed Privacy Badger to test this out, but this feature does not seem to work on Firefox for Android (at least on this page)
You have to move the toggle for youtube.com to red first.
Main Menu > Extensions > Extensions Manager > Privacy Badger > Settings > Tracking Domains > search for youtube.com > tap to update the toggle for youtube.com to red
You're welcome! I didn't make it clear that you have to opt into blocking YouTube for now.
ah thanks for this! youtube embeds disabled by default is an improvement I didn't even know I was looking for!
You're welcome!
One solution is to add headers that forbid all includes (and therefore all tracking):
Wouldn't this break the embedded video?
Yes. The website publisher would add this CSP header to ensure that the browser only loads sub-resources come from the first-party domain. It does not prevent the publisher from writing markup that declares third-party resource loads. The header ensures that the site will "break fast". CSP headers are often more useful in sites that allow clients to write markup, however there is still utility in declaring your intention to not load third-party content in your markup.
Yeah, or as a META tag
I love their work. I’ve also been working on some video to teach people how to publish their own book (the first of which I’ll make available free when it’s ready).
Anyway, I’d like to NOT embed YouTube. Maybe I will anyway, but I wonder if anyone has alternatives, especially if they are scrappy, tiny alternatives like those that I imagine 100r might produce.
I’m considering MP4 or WebM in HTML and wilder ideas like an audio file and a few images that are started at the same time with JS.
Turn your videos into HLS playlists (.m3u8) or mp4 and host the individual video files behind Cloudflare. Serve them on the frontend using JW Player or some other JS video player and from the backend using a $5 DigitalOcean droplet that serves the files from block storage.
You’ll have to learn some ffmpeg incantations but the bandwidth will be free and your total costs will be the tiny VM and block storage. Might even be able to point Cloudflare at a public bucket and skip the VM.
If you need to store and serve several terabytes of content, a dedicated server instead of block storage will be your best bet (again with Cloudflare), you’ll just need to figure out offsite backup and restoration.
> Serve them on the frontend using JW Player or some other JS video player
Just make sure that player supports right click->Save I'd much rather download and view a video in VLC than somebodies janky JS player
<pkg-manager> install mpv ytdlp
give site-url to mpv
watch video
PS:
vlc can play from urls too, but isn't as compatible with the way most sites implement it
You might, but the UX of that process for a 57s video is... below standard expectation.
Doesn't cloudflare TOS forbid video content?
I think it's more likely you just don't generate enough traffic for them to care to stop you. I think the main issue is that their business model of not charging for bandwidth doesn't work well for video. As long as you aren't using a ton of bandwidth, they won't care you are doing some video.
I’ve heard that third blessing is pretty much impossible to get.
It's not quite that clearcut:
> Unless you are an Enterprise customer, Cloudflare offers specific Paid Services (e.g., the Developer Platform, Images, and Stream) that you must use in order to serve video and other large files via the CDN. Cloudflare reserves the right to disable or limit your access to or use of the CDN, or to limit your End Users’ access to certain of your resources through the CDN, if you use or are suspected of using the CDN without such Paid Services to serve video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other large files.
- https://www.cloudflare.com/service-specific-terms-applicatio...
Reading between the lines a bit: they really only care if you're using Cloudflare to front a site whose primary purpose is to deliver video content, and lots of it (like, say, if you're running a tube site or a livestreaming site). They don't care about web sites which happen to incidentally include a small amount of video content.
The simplest thing would be to simply link to a Youtube video, perhaps with a small warning that it will take them to Youtube which uses trackers. You could even make the link an image that is the thumbnail of the video.
Not the prettiest or purest solution, but very simple.
I've seen youtube embeds be overlaid and say things like "this embed carries tracking, click here to load inline at your own peril or here to watch on original site" or something to that effect.
Can't recall where though.
It also uses YouTube-nocookie.com, which turns off targeted advertising or tracking. You are still tracked, but views aren’t linked or ads aren’t linked to your account. YouTube docs call Privacy Enhanced Mode for Embeds.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/171780?hl=en#zippy...
Medium did (does?) this when you have DNT enabled. Several GDPR-compliant sites do the same, though many use their embeds as a means to track people into clicking the "accept all tracking" button.
Duck duck go?
What I do (first of all for performance) is use YouTube links and have a script that prepends each `a.embed` link with an "embed" button. The button turns the link into an embed and back.
https://dbohdan.com/assets/embed.js
Neat solution.-
I disagree. That is the prettiest and the purest solution!
The "purest" solution would be to host the video yourself.
> Anyway, I’d like to NOT embed YouTube. Maybe I will anyway, but I wonder if anyone has alternatives, especially if they are scrappy, tiny alternatives like those that I imagine 100r might produce.
I use lite-youtube on my site for this reason. Instead of embedding the YT player directly, it shows a thumbnail that pulls in the embed when you click to watch the video.
That way visitors aren't tracked unless they actively click the thumbnail to watch the embedded player. Iirc it also works as just a link so visitors have the option to cmd+click or right-click-copy to avoid the embed.
You should check out my book then. I realized that everyone was starting to, not write books, but that they were writing instructional books teaching about how people should write books. I said to myself, "well let's teach them how to do THAT instead". One step more metain the game. Anyway, my book is about how to make videos to teach people how to write books, things like marketing and profit-maxxing. There's a lot of great pedagogy in there.
Also what kind of name is "100 rabbits". Reminscent of "50 blessing" from hotline miami
why wouldn't you host your own video file? I don't understand this dependency on youtube
This is what I ended up doing. I used HandBrake to reduce the video to a reasonable size and then just put the MP4 on the site like anything else. I guess I'm getting a little carried away with my "minimalist" attitude in this case, where I want the video to be super light. Looks like a 2 minute video is about 4mb. Not great but not that bad compared to other modern websites either.
This will work for now but my mind still wonders if there isn't a better way to reduce the size of these. I'll continue to experiment.
Streaming is important, especially for longer videos. I don't believe any static hosting site supports video streaming.
Amazon S3 (static hosting) supports streaming[1], but doesn’t transfer the hosting “cost” to the user as YT does.
[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/tutori...
The video is 57 seconds long. Should be fine ~ kinda.
My host doesn't support video. If I point <video> at a file it plays just fine but the server doesn't do partial content so the player crashes or stutters if the user attempts to seek outside what was downloaded. When the whole thing is downloaded it works smoothly but it isn't quite acceptable. There is no easy html way to preserve the seek/progress bar and `Accept-Ranges: none` has the same meaning as not setting the header(?)
I cant seem to find answers or bugs, all I find "make sure your server supports partial content" which really isn't required to make it work.
Correct. Progressive MP4 also do the trick. Many open-source tool such as ffmpeg (generalist), gpac (specialized in this and leveraging ffmpeg), etc. in the area.
Dynamic bitrate is the main one - the browser & server coordinate to figure out the highest video quality the user can watch without stuttering/buffering.
> any reasonable browser can play off a HTTP stream
most video players also support http and there is no problem with just putting files up.
imho all the streaming tech, drm, hls, adaptive bitrate selection and whatnot, are just commercial fads to increase margin
Right but if you have your own ip address and fiber connection that should be enough for narrow-casting.
I'm surprised to see my inexpressible urges documented by others. I'm with these people 100% right down to why a sailboat.
I tried to do this with an apartment building. The building is too large to focus on a the detail I need. A 43' sailboat is actually a great size to prototype on.
I have a signed P&S and hope to be hard core boat living sometime in September. The idea will be the studio time I get while on land will be much sweeter if I spend a lot of time on a boat.
The boat is self-contained so my aspirations won't effect people paying rent.
The building has everything I need to host my own streaming. I don't know that I will ever publish content, but if I do it will be entirely self-hosted. If the audience is so vast that brings everything to a halt, things will start functioning again once the hordes get bored.
Think of all the wasted brain power content-creators go through to keep YouTube at bay.
I believe content should be the residue of the work. I think once publishing is the funding source it may distort the work.
most ppl probably fall into the category where self-hosting their content is viable, though most also don't know anything about it, hence the outsourcing
[flagged]
Not everyone wants to be a man, you know.
But people will tell you that software cannot be expected to work reliably and cannot function without a billion dollar corporation pushing constant updates.
Even the ‘Bible’ app requires constant updates, I thought the final version was released quite some time ago
maybe because bittorrent is genuinely useful and far from abandoned as most shops that regularly distribute large blobs use it.
the political kerfuffle because drm/dmca really has nothing to do with it but i can't shake the feeling that you are involved at this level. god bless
> protocols that measure their success in moaning about revenue loss.
Yeah. The so-called "Net Vicarious Loss" (NVL) protocols :)
> If you use anything from Google, you will be tracked
Google's become a marketing-profiling engine, wrapped in ad-serving infrastructure, wrapped in the decaying remnants of a search engine.-
It’s been like that since August 2000 when they launched their premium sponsorship program, which was replaced by AdWords later that year.
I’m not sure you can fully blame Google for what the web became though. Part of the reason search engines are close to useless here 24 years later is because most of the content people produce go to SoMe sites. Sites like Hacker News, sites like Medium and so on and because of how everything became a popularity matrix people are posting soooo much useless stuff online. Where it used to be you actually had to have something to say to bother putting it online, because it took an effort, we now live in a world where 90% or the talk people do is while they’re on the shitter. Those 90% is a number I pulled out my ass, but it would be hilarious to see an actual number on just how much internet “content” gets created by people on a toilet.
It is what it is though. To make a functional search engine today which was on par with Google in 2000, you’d probably need access to browser bookmarks of the people you’ve ranked as having interesting taste in what they bookmark. Which probably isn’t really possible without breaking a lot of laws, if at all.
> Where it used to be you actually had to have something to say to bother putting it online, because it took an effort
That didn't last very long. Even before geocities there was a huge amount of random/pointless stuff online. It was okay though because those people weren't looking to make money. They didn't feel the need to misrepresent or SEO the hell out of their personal sites to drive traffic.
Greed killed the internet. Once people started putting up websites with the intent to line their own pockets instead of doing it just to share something fun or cool or personal or helpful it was doomed. Corporations quickly got involved and everything else got crowded out, bought out, or replaced by ad-filled trash.
One could probably put a date on the moment when the decreasing friction of publishing to the web intersected with the increasing potential for monetization. Suddenly all of these new people are writing blogs for AdSense revenue instead of good vibes and the atmosphere has all the vibrancy and vitality of a strip mall.
Early 2004, I'd ballpark.-
Makes sense. Tangentially, people always mention of spending time on the toilet, but I never could relate as its a max 2-3 minute activity for me, usually less. Only have enough time to read some Reddit posts. Maybe, as I get older, this will change.
Edit: I am vegetarian, probably has something to do with it.
This is why I stopped eating keto; I lost two stone really quickly but you pay for it when you're on the throne.
Have a go at it in the wilderness and you’ll realize really rather quickly how disconnected modern … durations have become.
But yeah, for some it’s definitely an escape. Particularly at work.
No shit.-
> on just how much internet “content” gets created by people on a toilet.
I'll pull out an equally haphazard guess: Up to 5%.-
Apparently there's http://youtube-nocookie.com/ that doesn't do that, but of course that's not the default.
Someone just pointed out I have the same problem on my blog and I'm very pissed. It's not enough that their embeds break every Lighthouse metric and recommendation. It's all this, too
Offtopic: that website is hosted on a webserver/proxy/LB that appears to have a wildcard certificate for dozens of Google domains. Don't they use SNI and separate certs? This wouldn't fly where I work and the security team is asleep half the time.
The same-origin policy prevents Google tracking in a iFrame from identifying the parent site, so technically "This website has no tracking or analytics." is correct. It does expose you to Google's analytics for the iFrame however, so it's down to how you define "this site", but as the owners of the site don't have access to that tracking information, the statement seems fair.
The embed has to be changed to YouTube-nocookie (which is what happens when you enable privacy enhance mode when sharing embeds). But that might not entirely comply with GDPR, as Google still does attempt other measures of tracking.
So they should either introduce a cookie banner, find an alternative host that more strictly adheres to privacy concerns, or just host the video themselves in a video element.
also you could just embed a self-hosted image that links to youtube. presumably if somebody clicks on the image with the youtube logo on it they know they're going to youtube
i mean peertube is a great alternative, and nowadays browsers are pretty okay at just playing bare mp4 files if you re-encode them with ffmpeg -movflags faststart -c copy, but if for whatever reason you choose to use youtube instead there are some harm-reduction measures you can take
> also you could just embed a self-hosted image that links to youtube.
I’ve done this in the past by literally grabbing a screenshot of the video thumbnail (and the play button) and adding a link to that image.
Sure, it won’t play in the same page and won’t be up to date with thumbnail or other presentation changes but I didn’t care - it was a small image that also didn’t include any executable code or privacy risks.
yes, exactly!
Peertube. Now there's an idea whose time has come.-
I'd like to see Peertube clients as widely available as Wordpress clients. They don't have to be federated. You can just host your own stuff.
any browser works as a peertube client; do you mean "peertube installations" and "wordpress installations", or are you talking about the software used to view videos?
More info:
https://dri.es/how-to-remove-youtube-tracking
It makes me sad that this is the top comment for this link to Hundred Rabbits.
I feel it’s such a “I am very smart gotcha” comment that isn’t helpful in any way.
It distracts from the actual topic.
It calls out a bogus claim. The actual topic is diluted and deemphasized if the authors make bogus claims. So the distraction is on them, not on HN commenters.
One could also be a bit more compassionate and just realize that people make mistakes or just don't have every line on their website memorized if they decide one day to just share a YouTube video.
I doubt they are actively trying to trick people into letting down their "adblocker" guard so they can retarget them with advertising...
"Perfect is the enemy of good" really applies here.
Someone is aware of the issue of online tracking and tries their best to get rid of all of these things (web fonts, analytics,...) and even states their intent "No tracking". One day they make a small mistake and don't realize that sharing a YouTube link on their website drops a cookie and immediatelly all the good they are trying to do is forgotten.
I hope you never make mistakes.
This is indeed how I feel about it, thanks.
You pointing out a minor mistake that has zero implications doesn’t provide any value. It may feel good to you pointing out mistakes others made, but especially in this case it doesn’t matter. It’s not important.
And you seem to read way too much into this mistake, promptly distrusting all the content they ever made or wrote.
Next time you make a mistake, I hope people around you will treat you the same way you treat other people, let’s find out if you like that.
I feel that engaging here is probably a mistake, but screw it.
> I don't make extraordinary claims
That seems like a pretty extraordinary claim to me. That you've made. Twice.
> It does matter, it is important. Making such a mistake calls into question if they don't have other, more serious, mistakes in their actual articles.
This shows such black-and-white thinking, thinking in absolutes that doesn't take in account, the context and circumstances.
To me it shows a rigid mind that can't perceive nuance, and think / reason about topics in a particular context.
Minor mistakes are often just that: minor mistakes. If this was an error in a scientific paper or news article, your stance may have had more merit. But that's not the context here at all.
> I don't make extraordinary claims so I am not bound to provide any extraordinary evidence. They do make an extraordinary claim.
A blog claiming not to track you isn't an 'extraordinary claim' by any definition. So that's a mistake on your part, so I can't take anything you say seriously anymore, by your own definition.
Curious? What is the actual topic?
Although I feel this is yet another disingenuous question, mostly referencing my own reference, this post is about the people behind Hundred Rabbits, what they make and how they live.
This is noteworthy because it’s 180 degrees opposite from how most HN people live and what they do.
I feel we should change society somewhat
It takes industry of a certain complexity to fab semiconductors, and micro electronics. Once the replacement stock is depleted - there goes computing ...
... could a bunch of self organized comunes such as these ever replicate such industry?
It is peculiar no self-standing group such as this has - AFAIK - attempted such a thing. Why don't they start there?
The same-origin policy prevents Google tracking in a iFrame from identifying the parent site, so technically "This website has no tracking or analytics." is correct. It does expose you to Google's analytics for the iFrame however, so it's down to how you define "this site"...
That doesn't happen until you actually attempt to play the video though, right?
No, it happens when you load the page. As a test I made a simple web page that just said "This is a test" and included the Google embed and visited it in an incognito window in Chrome and looked at what happened in the inspector. I used an incognito window to ensure that I wasn't starting with any cookies already saved for Google.
Just displaying the page with the embed hits those sites. All in all there were around 20 successful network requests made to load the site. There were another 7 or so requests the Ublock Origin blocked, to play.google.com/log, and then after the page loaded it continues trying those every second or so, although it seems to have slowed down after around 19 but is still ongoing.
It leaves 5 cookies (4 persistent, 1 session) and also looks like it has something in IndexedDB.
Similar with Firefox in a private window except it stores one fewer persistent cookies.
On Safari in a private window it has similar network access, but no cookies.
Thanks! I appreciate the effort to get us this info
A lot of sites (that follow GDPR mostly) have a "turn on embeddings" switch so that you only see embedded content if you want
> This website has no tracking or analytics
The "\u263Eoe\u2721is\u271E" of online politics if I've ever seen. Nearly meaningless but people place great emotional and identity-based weight on it (even if they've signed away all their data via TOS, as they likely have).
Sidebar—why does hacker news fuck with arbitrary unicode codepoints? Strikes me as deeply user-hostile behavior.
This place would be utterly unbearable with emoji.
The symbols you wanted to include are in the Dingbats and Miscellaneous Symbols blocks, which I expect are all banned because they contain some emoji and this was the cheap way to be rid of those, quick test: "" "", that's a Miscellaneous Symbol and a Dingbat of no emotional valence to speak of and certainly not colourful ones.
As you can see, that's the deal: they're casualties. I wouldn't mind a more discerning filter, but then again, I wouldn't mind a dark mode, and here it is, years later.
> This place would be utterly unbearable with emoji.
Evidently they've blocked far more than just emoji—I was just using standard unicode.
> \u263Eoe\u2721is\u271E
This is meant to be a representation of this image https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coexist_(image) for people too lazy to copy and paste