by kragen | 2025-07-19 02:13:23+00:00
This is my response to your thoughts about the bootstrapping path, a sibling to my thoughts about the STM32. You say:

> Sifting through the ruins, if you can find any functioning personal computer, you can get started immediately. Even if you don't have a compiler, you certainly have a web browser and write permissions. All you need to bring is the emulator spec.

First of all, most collapse scenarios don't have an especially noticeable quantity of ruins. The Soviet Union collapsed in the 01990s; the GDP fell by half, the death rate skyrocketed, and they lost not only geopolitical influence but also significant parts of their high-tech industrial capacity. The People's Republic of China in some sense collapsed during the Cultural Revolution in the late 60s, losing significant parts of its cultural history, following the Qing dynasty's collapse in 01907. Syria is currently beginning to recover from a collapse into a civil war in 02011. Cambodia killed a quarter of its population and all its intellectuals in 01975–8 under the Khmer Rouge. The Imamate of Oman had been stable for over a thousand years until it collapsed under British bombing in 01957–9, bringing it under the control of the Sultanate of Oman, which still controls it today. About half of the Timbuktu Manuscripts were rescued from the onslaughts of Boko Haram after the collapse of Mali began in 02012, after centuries of being one of the greatest centers of learning in Africa; since then, that collapse has resulted in the overthrow of democracy by military coups in all three countries of the ASS. Suriname had a civil war in 01986–9.

If you want, you can read my slightly longer notes about most of those in https://derctuo.github.io/notes/pandemic-collapse.html; those are particular cases of recent collapses that I selected randomly in order to try to get a handle on the rough frequency with which countries collapsed.

Out of all of these cases, the only one with a really significant quantity of ruins to sift through was the Syrian Civil War, although there are a fair quantity of ruins in Ukraine now 33 years later, which you could argue in some sense resulted from the collapse of the USSR. Putin certainly does make that argument. I don't think I'll touch it any further.

If anything, booming economies like today's PRC might tend to have more ruins than collapsing societies, at least until a few generations into the collapse. People who can build new housing can afford to move out of the old housing; people who are struggling to survive have to patch the leaky pipes and the holes in the roof as best they can. The ruins all over the rural USA aren't the result of fentanyl and meth, but from people moving to the cities and selling their parents' farms to big agribusinesses.

So, let's get back to the scenario you proposed:

> if you can find any functioning personal computer, you can get started immediately. Even if you don't have a compiler, you certainly have a web browser and write permissions. All you need to bring is the emulator spec.

First, the likelihood of attempting something is only a weak inequality constraint on the likelihood of achieving it. Our intrepid hero is probably going to need those electronics hacking skills you're presupposing she lacks, because she's going to need to recap the PC's power supply and figure out how to run the computer off her car battery, which is a much easier task if your power supply needs to supply tens of milliwatts instead of tens of thousands of milliwatts. (Consider: my laptop charger died the day before last. It's a 65-watt USB-C charger and seems to be fully potted. Could you fix it? What would you have to know to build a replacement? How long will my laptop be useful without one?)

Second, where did you get the emulator spec? And, supposing you write a Uxn/Varvara emulator in browser JS, do you have existing ROMs to run on it? Or are you going to write the ROMs from scratch in Uxntal? If so, why not just write your applications in browser JS directly? My estimate is that you'll get roughly 20× as much useful computation per CPU cycle, and a browser pegging your CPU can easily double the baseline power consumption of a laptop. (In the case of this one, it goes from about 5 watts to about 10 watts.)

If you can get an emulator spec and ROMs, why not get a native-code IDE like Dev-C++ or Debian with Emacs from the same place you were getting those? A full Debian or NetBSD distribution is roughly one DVD.

If you want to prepare today for a possible future of scarcity, you can figure out how to harvest chips and put together tooling and libraries for them today.