Discussion
When I first learned about CollapseOS four years ago, I thought that it's a very cool concept, but did find the idea "you'll have to implement from scratch everything in your computing stack" very disconnected from the reality. Like, what kind of plausible scenario could there be that one won't be able to get system software for their computer that they could trust to be of safe origin, free from backdoors and malware, and fit for the purpose, I thought.
Ha-ha.
@nina_kali_nina at the time I thought the reason I needed this was age verification
@mcc it's still on the bingo card. And chat control here/and in the EU. And then there's mandatory file scans on Android and iOS with reporting to police, still on the bingo cards.
And then there are Black Mirror like things that are already a reality. Like the marks printers leave on the paper for IDs. And unauthorised edits of images during printing. And camera applications that automatically "enhance" the image with un-disableable AI...
@nina_kali_nina @mcc I’m reminded of John Barnes’ novel _Finity_, in which the protagonists had to fall back to pre-digitisation tools to avoid the way more modern tools would have undesired side-effects. In the novel it was quantum mechanics having this effect, but the analogy of all-pervasive AI having a dangerous level of influence on our perception (or even the possibility) of consensus reality is striking.
@mcc I hope it's encouraging to know that there are dozens of us (dozens!), people who want/need this
@nina_kali_nina
have you both looked at uxn? it's not quite for everybody, but it's definitely built with "ground-up implementable" in mind
@mcc
@nina_kali_nina I keep thinking that the odds of that global supplychain collapse keep ticking up rapidly, but I didn't have "happily embrace slop" on my bingo card, that's for sure.
I thought surely, surely software developers of all people would realize that a brutally inefficient stochastic process was fundamently unfit for purpose but, no. Nooooooo.
Install bonfire.cafe
Get the full app experience
@nina_kali_nina about a year ago I was writing in my head a blog post titled "I want retro computing without the retro", about designing stacks around standards minimal enough one person can make an MVP computing environment themselves.
I am now still wanting to write this but with increased urgency and slightly more of the stack needing to be single person :(