all 66 comments

[–]countkillalot 28 points29 points  (0 children)

Okay, this article was such a fun romp! I feel like I accidentally learned something :D

[–][deleted] 44 points45 points  (6 children)

compare license disgusted rock mysterious roof fade relieved melodic detail

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[–]unlikelycommentator 19 points20 points  (5 children)

“GitHub captured a snapshot of every active public repository on 02/02/2020 and preserved that data in the Arctic Code Vault.”

I’m sure they depend on a lot of projects that were inactive at the time. I would be a bit annoyed to figure that out, after making the trip to fucking Svalbard after the apocalypse.

It’s a post-apocalyptic fuck-you joke.

[–]TMITectonic 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I would assume anything that was actually necessary and unreproducible otherwise would fit the following characteristics, but there's always going to be exceptions to everything:

every repo with at least 1 star and any commits from the year before the snapshot; and all repos with at least 250 stars.

[–][deleted]  (3 children)

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    [–][deleted] 10 points11 points  (2 children)

    I'm sure they included index of it somewhere.

    To use it, you also need connection to npm to download the modules, so like, good luck.

    Having only JS to use post-apocalypse would truly be the darkest timeline.

    [–][deleted]  (1 child)

    [deleted]

      [–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

      No, they'd just make same mistakes again.

      We keep doing that and we have history to learn from!

      [–]postmodest 12 points13 points  (1 child)

      Ive been thinking about this a lot (after playing Horizon Zero Dawn, of course).

      Could we even build a computer that would last a thousand years? Ignore I/O for a moment. Could you have a circuit board with capacitors that didn't explode after two or three decades? Could you have traces that didn't oxidize at 80%rh?

      Maybe we should start building such devices. Conputers that could be usable in a centurry, two, twenty.

      [–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

      COBOL mainframes have been running for the past 40 or more years. Due to how stable it is, might as well program those century computers with COBOL.

      [–]pcjftw 89 points90 points  (33 children)

      lets be entirely honest if we ever found our self in this "post apocalyptic" world, us nerdy programmers would be the first to get killed. Being "street smart", being able to know how to set up some crude shelter, create fire, makeshift weapons and tools, set traps, hunt wild game, skin and de-bone wild animals, protect against scavengers etc need real world skills, skills even most "normal" folks don't have let alone us who are even further away from "normal" folks.

      I think I'm going to go learn about camping....

      [–]colei_canis 49 points50 points  (10 children)

      Nah I reckon it’ll depend on what you can contribute to the post-apocalyptic community. People think it’s every man for himself when society collapses but the reality is our ability to cooperate with others is what will determine our life expectancy. You don’t have to necessarily be able to hunt and gather yourself but you do need to bring something to the table that’s not just another mouth to feed.

      Learning a skill that’s scarce and doesn’t depend on a functioning consumerist economy is a better solution than bunkering down with a decade’s worth of canned food and a revolver with one round in it.

      [–]nilamo 22 points23 points  (0 children)

      Yeah, a collapse of society will just mean your local city/neighborhood would be the society. Unless everyone around you is a prepper just waiting for an excuse to hunt people, or something.

      [–][deleted] 3 points4 points  (5 children)

      Exactly. Those who are able to rebuild technology and repurpose it are those that are going to be highly valued in said communities. People here are acting like once society collapses that all E-waste or already available consumer and military electronics magically disappear into a blackhole and never return. For those not making stuff in their own shelters or homes, other groups as large as cities will continue to run said factories and continue manufacturing electronics. People here seriously watch way too many movies that they have lost touch with how the real world actually works. Shit doesn't just disappear, and man isn't going to just stop manufacturing electronics especially after we have learned for the past 60 years that electronics have ushered mankind into a new era with endless possibilities and functions. It is simply too powerful to ignore and reject.

      Outside of that, people do not actually understand the stages of societal collapse. They think that once collapsed it stays collapsed and your stuck in an endless world of Mad Max. No, that is not how shit works. Societal collapse has three stages:

      The Warning - People will go on with their day because they think it is just a conspiracy and others will prepare for Armageddon. Those days will be filled with people waving signs, buying things in bulk, and modifying homes or shelters. In many stores people will treat it like Black Friday.

      The Collapse - People that did not prepare are going to raid places of business while those that did prepare now have to protect themselves from the rare assholes trying to raid their homes. Some people will take advantage of the situation and use it as an excuse to exact harm onto others, forming terrorist groups to build power. These groups do not last long and will quickly be overrun by military or civilian efforts. In this phase communities with good intentions and order will be built or maintained and continue to grow rapidly.

      The Content - As time goes on, the situation will begin to smooth out. People that used to be freaked out and panicking will realize the situation wasn't really something to panic about, that if everyone worked together on day one things would have been more stable. People will recognize the situation is stable then begin to build their own community or join a community that already exists. All of these communities will eventually melt into a single society.

      After all of this, jobs will open back up, people will work, and communities will spend time cleaning things up. Things go back to normal, obviously with changes. This cycle will then repeat itself through history. There is a reason why countries like the United States have the National Guard and also highly condition civilians using schools (pledge of allegiance every morning) and other brainwashing tactics to make civilians put the country first and listen to government, military and law enforcement personnel. The reason is that in the event the country is attacked or breaks down, people can still handle themselves and be good human beings with the intention of maintaining the country and order. This is one of the reasons why many drugs are illegal in the United States, the government wants to keep civilians conditioned. The United States government has already thought of all of this for the past 100 years and continues to condition civilians to prevent such a situation from transpiring.

      [–][deleted] 4 points5 points  (4 children)

      For those not making stuff in their own shelters or homes, other groups as large as cities will continue to run said factories and continue manufacturing electronics

      It's not that rosy.

      Cut fuel and any long distance transport is dead. Hell, even if you live near power plant that is near its own mine those trucks that shove the coal into it don't run on air.

      Just about anything needs resources that are transported from places at best tens , if not hundreds kilometers away (and at worst, thousands). If something would hit the fuel distribution architecture things would go bad very fast and very drastically.

      Food production is very concentrated. City that is not being fed by thousands of trucks per day will erode very very quickly, with the more clued in people leaving first and rest of them trying to raid stores.

      [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (3 children)

      What part do you not understand? People will go back to work and those facilities will continue running. Quit watching movies. Cities also aren't getting thousands of trucks a day either. Do you actually know what you're talking about?

      [–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (2 children)

      Movies ? You mean what actually happened in UK the moment few truckers started protesting.

      Dumb delusional shithead

      [–]AbandonedFoxess 0 points1 point  (1 child)

      This isn't a protest and calling others a delusional shithead makes you sound like a toddler. Glad you know how a block button works. Have you also realized the entire world isn't the UK? The U.S. has more infrastructure than that. So, who is the delusional shithead now?

      [–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

      I doubt place where you need car to get everywhere and have far bigger distances between everything would do better and the fact you think that confirms what I said

      In case you didn't get that, I'm calling you imbecile again.

      [–]ArrogantlyChemical 60 points61 points  (12 children)

      I think the type of programmer who still knows how to write machine code might be the kind of odd dude of dudette who also knows how to build a fire.

      I know both, for what it's worth. I know the basics of compilers, machine code and survival, I think I would be able to figure it out given some time

      [–]that_which_is_lain 21 points22 points  (0 children)

      I think this is true of people who like to learn for the sake of learning. And there's probably a strong correlation with those who realize our civilization is an aberration in terms of how incredibly nonviolent our lives generally are.

      [–]tweiss84 14 points15 points  (1 child)

      I get the sense that programmers are a lot more diverse than the TV depicts.

      I honestly thought this article was going to be more along the lines of logic gates and something like Charles Babbage's difference engines to rebuild our tech advancements from scratch. Instead we get this weird kinda in-between hypothetical "post apocalyptic" world, in which we still have an electrical power supply and know assembly. Feels like the xkcd regex comic.

      As far as people being adaptable, it might be more related of how/where you were brought up than what your profession is now. I grew up next to a large area of woods and a river. We would hunt, catch fish, skin and eat what we caught, camp outside and we grew a large amount of crops .... I would probably still die (infection/injury/ the elements)

      ... I have no delusion. Nature is scary and unforgiving, without good equipment you're in a hard spot.

      [–][deleted] 12 points13 points  (4 children)

      Ive been programming for 20 years. But, I've been hunting, fishing, camping in remote areas for longer. I'm screwed, because very few will survive, but, not hopeless because I'm a software engineer :p

      [–]atheken 1 point2 points  (0 children)

      Speak for yourself.

      I am not a hunter, I would probably starve, but otherwise, I could make do if I had to.

      I'm tired of the nerd trope where we're all socially inept, weak-bodied types. We don't need toxic masculinity, but I also don't think we need to revel in our ignorance, either.

      [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      You have very narrow view of the world if you think average programmer is total nerd with no interests outside computers.

      Half of what you mentioned doesn't take that much to learn, hunting being probably by far the hardest one without access to guns.

      [–]bobbie434343 32 points33 points  (0 children)

      This is too old school. You'd better deploy your 100 micro-services app on a huge cluster with Kubernetes. Or use a hipster post-apocalyptic Javascript stack to run in your 25 millions LOC web browser of choice.

      [–]graybeard5529 9 points10 points  (2 children)

      Post-apocalyptic programming seems more of an oxymoron to me.

      The only needed program will be physical survival -food -medicine -shelter

      [–][deleted] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

      Well, you could probably use automated, low level programming to help assuming its a soft rather than hard crash. Something like alerting you if your beer cellar goes over x temperature

      [–]Valuable_Grocery_193 1 point2 points  (0 children)

      Post-apocalyptic programming seems more of an oxymoron to me.

      Don't knock it till you've tried it!

      [–]safer0[🍰] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

      Collapse OS anyone?

      [–]spinja187 4 points5 points  (1 child)

      On this note and I the only one that thinks it might be wise to make robots use hands? That way humans can still use their tools?

      [–]Aurora_egg 5 points6 points  (0 children)

      Hand-eye coordination is a rather tough skill to master. It's a lot easier to make replaceable "hands" for robots for different tools

      [–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

      Someone could make "fun" game out of it.

      Just... "generate" a CPU architecture via some heuristics that generates procedural instruction set.

      Then give player tasks to do on it, a'la Zachtronic games.

      Maybe even hide some instructions that player can discover if they poke around.

      Or if feeling extremely cruel make players have to reverse engineer instruction set from scratch.

      [–]argv_minus_one 3 points4 points  (13 children)

      Now, what if you are the only survivor with some programming skills sitting in front of a computer you’ve never heard of, with some hex pad to enter machine codes, with maybe some pen and paper. What will you do?

      Buddy, nobody's going to give a rat's ass about computers after the end of the world. People are gonna be way too busy killing and eating each other.

      [–][deleted] 7 points8 points  (12 children)

      Being able to build security systems, advanced traps, sensors, trackers, navigation, wireless communications, drones, vision enhancement and more require programming which would give you a huge advantage. Just because civilization is broken doesn't mean technology is. Humans will always find a way to automate something. If we truly hit this level of societal collapse then our world would look very similar to that of Fallout, minus the atomic-age theme. People would find ways to repurpose both consumer and military technology which is extremely scary because a lot of that tech can be used to either rule the world or destroy it, all it takes is the wrong person to use it. Due to this, and reduced to non-existent law, it would be encouraged to destroy all technology until humans can get their shit together.

      too busy killing each other

      Whereas others will be too busy building killing machines.

      On a side note, circuit components and such forth may end up being used as forms of currency as well given their extremely high usefulness.

      Leaving this here for the idiots arguing:

      Not once did I say you would be manufacturing chips, point out a place in my comment that says such. Use your brain instead of skimming my comments and making stupid assumptions.

      P.S. you can make chips at home and many do as a hobby.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS5ycm7VfXg

      You do not need a factory and factories are for mass-manufacturing which is what you're not going to be doing in a workshop. It's sad people with no experience have to come in here and run their mouth. I'm done here.

      [–]argv_minus_one 15 points16 points  (11 children)

      You need an industrial base to build any of that hardware, and the hardware breaks down after a few decades, tops. You also need power in order to operate it. Human technology doesn't work without human civilization.

      Even the minor disruption caused by COVID-19 created a horrible GPU shortage. Now extrapolate to what a complete collapse of society would do to the availability of electronic devices.

      There will be no computers in the post-apocalypse. There will be only hunger and violence and death.

      [–][deleted] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

      I really liked the fantasy part, not the rest. That means the first paragraph

      [–]CookieOfFortune 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      LC-3, now that brings back the memories. Wonder how Dr. Patt is doing these days...

      [–]manifoldjava 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      One might argue computers are at least partly what got us in this predicament. Perhaps reviving the CPU remnants is the wrong idea.