[falcor84]

With all due respect to subsistence farming, I would say that digital tech is already sufficiently "bootstrapped", such that even if the world's industrial base entirely collapses, and we don't have any more chips fabricated, the next century will still be about who can best utilize computers, scrounging up discarded phones and repurposing them to (re)automate farming, manufacturing and drone warfare. Even LLM-based AIs are already entrenched, and I'd expect people to be running ollama and aider/void on solar powered laptops in their tribe's half-destroyed buildings.

[vdupras]

The amount of offline documentation required to do so is gargantuan. Try any kind of "repurposing" of any phone -- go for something trivial, not as hard as controlling an automated greenhouse circuit -- and try to do so without the internet -- or let's take the difficulty down a notch, without AI or search engines, wikipedia allowed. The operating system on that phone is likely way too complicated for you to succeed. It's also likely to be locked.

[sidewndr46]

It seems that few to no people understand just how unusual it is to buy an Intel or AMD64 based system and just boot it up. It's the exception in the industry, not the norm. Even the Raspberry Pi relies on the device tree, which is effectively a series of magic numbers for booting the board.

I worked at an enormous company that made embedded products. In the entire company, there were maybe ~12 engineers that knew how to boot up the various products. None of them were capable of booting all the devices. There was another team dedicated to preserving the knowledge they had because when one would retire they didn't even bother handing over all the knowledge. Only active product lines were transitioned to another employee. If a product line was brought back for a new contract and the bootloader was not already available, there were a huge number of man hours budgeted for that activity alone.

[cheema33]

> The amount of offline documentation required to do so is gargantuan.

I have Ollama running on my local PC with 128GBs of RAM. If civilization collapses will my tribe be better off compared to a tribe that doesn't have a similar system running on solar power? I would think so. And if we have a local copy of Wikipedia (25GBs compressed, 150GBs uncompressed & with basic images), then we'd be infinitely better off.

My PC isn't anything special and is made of commodity parts.

The tribe members do not have to run ollama on their phones. My PC could be the server that they connect to over tribe wifi.

Capabilities of commodity PCs continue to grow every year. This appears to make a complete civilization collapse near impossible. As long as some of us survive the initial catastrophic event, and the planet can sustain human life, humanity will not be starting from scratch and will bounce back.

[vdupras]

I guess you could settle the question by trying it!

[achierius]

Why without AI? You can run those locally now. Sure they're slow, but that doesn't much matter here.