Hundred Rabbits is a small collective exploring the failability of modern tech

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

(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...

One solution is to add headers that forbid all includes (and therefore all tracking):

   Content-Security-Policy: 
     default-src 'self';
     frame-src 'self';
     script-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline' 'unsafe-eval';
     style-src  'self' 'unsafe-inline';
     img-src 'self' data:

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.

That doesn't happen until you actually attempt to play the video though, right?

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

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"...

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.

A lot of sites (that follow GDPR mostly) have a "turn on embeddings" switch so that you only see embedded content if you want

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

For me any potential technical argument and innovation is completely drowned in the needlessly pervasive anti-capitalist genderfluid digital nomad hippie talk.

The Baffler was a favorite read of mine in the early 90s.

https://thebaffler.com/

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.

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 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.-

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-...

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

I'm glad this is the best critique we can do.

Have you looked at their body of work? An embedded YouTube video does not negate their ethos.

Wishing to thank you for your comment, please, do tell. Can imagine it would have been (inspiring, etc.).-

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.

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!)

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.-

Have you looked into the permatech community in general?

See also https://midinous.com/

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.

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

for anyone curious about learning, i made a tutorial and playground for orca:

https://metasyn.srht.site/learn-orca/

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.

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).

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?

"they/them x iel/ielle" really just means "a heterosexual couple"

And discovering that consumer hardware doesn't do well in a marine environment.

I don't think they sustain themselves with this project.

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.

https://100r.co/site/weathering_software_winter.html

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.-

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.)

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...

I would like to thank you, too, for your poems.

Thank you for the poems. They're weirdly soothing.

I read all your poems just now. They're perfect, thank you! Just what I need. They speak to me.

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

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.

This is the best critique of the entire idea, clearly.

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.

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.

Hundred Rabbits is... nothing? Nirvana?

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.

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.

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.

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...

it is the embedded YouTube video most likely :)

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's been submitted many times. Sometimes people read and comment, sometimes they don't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=100r.co

The presenter, Devine, is one of the folks behind 100r :)

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...

Rek went overboard in a Pacific storm north of Japan. ("Busy Doing Nothing" book)

"seabattical" Love it!

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.

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:

https://metasyn.srht.site/learn-uxn/

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

Nicely done!

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.

Java is seemingly the first thing they considered[1], but it was too fragmented and complicated for their purely pragmatic usecase.

[1] https://100r.co/site/weathering_software_winter.html

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.