Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Gollapalli 2170 days ago
Beautiful.

Honestly, nothing scares me more than losing all the code and all the technology we've developed in the past 70 or so years. There's been so much advancement, but it's also transferred in such a way (institutional knowledge, propietary software, proprietary hardware, etc.) that it's super easy to lose. If we preserve open hardware and software, then we could rebuild in the case of civilizational decline and the accompanying knowledge loss, something which we would neither be the first nor the last to experience.
2 comments
Wowfunhappy 2170 days ago
> If we preserve open hardware and software, then we could rebuild in the case of civilizational decline and the accompanying knowledge loss

...can we?

I'm sometimes a little concerned about how complicated chip fabs are. They feel like something that could take generations to rebuild, even if we had all the knowledge on what to do.

link
helldritch 2170 days ago
Home photo-lithography and chemical etching setups aren't common, but have been done by several people. We wouldn't be able to jump straight to 14NM, but we would probably be able to get to the 500-300nm size relatively quickly (a year or two, maybe, if starting from scratch) and shrink down from there.

Devices would be much bigger and less efficient, but we would be able to run code and pump out 8086 processors within 6 months.

link
quicklime 2170 days ago
That's just one layer of the stack though. Future archaeologists will also need to create mock npm registries and maven repositories, and set up docker and k8s so they can deploy a complex set of microservices to look up our birthdays.
link
Wowfunhappy 2170 days ago
...all the code to which should be right in the Github Vault, right?

Idk, the hardware part seems much more difficult to me.

link
nomoreservices 2170 days ago
Thanks for the laugh! I needed that today :)
link
eezurr 2167 days ago
>Honestly, nothing scares me more than losing all the code and all the technology we've developed in the past 70 or so years

I think We'll be fine (as in, our species will survive). If we lose it all, we can rebuild. We've already proven that we're capable. The code is a just a record of our capabilities, not a barrier to entry.

link