355 points | 2d ago | Discuss on Hacker News | Back to Radar
a recent interview: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x8yKp1qdWh8&pp=ygURZGV2aW5lIGx...
I feel like we have to be realistic about the problems we’re solving here—-is the goal to optimize for 95% of users or 100%? If 100%, I have to ask if the tradeoffs for the last 5% of users are worth the squeeze to the 95%? SaaS really is the right solution for many people; not all but many.
This is not a 5% thing, it's a >50% potential users thing. Viewed that way, it makes commercial sense to consider them. However, SaaS was usually an exploitative now-or-never growth model seeking unrealistic returns in a short period based on false economics, so give-a-damn was already managed out of corporate scope.
The off the grid experience and journey discussed highlights how little hardware and connectivity we really need. Writing that off on the proviso it's economically 'smart' to ignore users misses the intellectual point.
SaaS is a great solution for people selling software to have locked in revenue and customers who can’t leave.
For actual customers there used to be a time you could but some software, install it and then just run it for years. No forced recurring payments, no forced updates that break your workflows, no unnecessary look&feel changes every year, etc.
But only a bad salesman dictates what the customer needs— talk to your customers.
Surely wording can be improved....
Also their Permacomputing 101 gave a lot to think.
Feeling inspired to finally learn C properly and never touch AI tools again :)
And thinking of clothing as akin to open source software is fair. Before the industrial revolution, all clothing was hand-made, almost entirely at home or by a friend, or a tailor if you had money. From the end of the 18th century until pretty much the 1980s, sewing patterns were the paper version of open source software. Could be copied infinitely, forked and changed, traded and borrowed, or created from scratch if you knew what you were doing. Magazines included them to boost sales, just like how software magazines used to include pages of code you could try at home - no license needed.
Fabric stores were commonplace for a century or more, and big box stores reserved a huge amount of floor space for fabric sales up through the 90s. Patterns were trivially inexpensive, and picking your favorite material for the pattern was how you could personalize it.
That said, hand crafts like tailoring did get a resurgence during the panny-D, I hope it stays. The local Lidl here has affordable sowing machines for sale.
It doesn't look like it was a very pleasant life for her or her brother. She describes it stealing her childhood. That's one reason not to do it.
It's something that looks glamorous from the outside but a bit grim when you really consider what's involved.
Worse things happen at sea, as they say.
(I still love their website and ideas, I just know I wouldn't want to inflict that lifestyle on my family).
1. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/mar/25/suzanne...
The parents in the article were something else. I agree with you 100%. Abandoning minors in a foreign country and leaving them to deal with immigration, etc. is abusive.
I moved to the Yukon in 2011, I know dozens of yukoners and Alaskans living off grid. Decades without buying meat or vegetables, building their own log cabins, etc.
One lady I met in her 50s had just worked as a cook in a mining camp for 8 weeks, and she was disappointed - that was the most she had ever worked in a year.
But i gotta say, living off grid is fundamentally solipsist. Abandoning society rather than attempting to live well within society will always be a dead end. Imo. It’s easy to say you’ll go it alone, but staying and improving it for not just yourself but for everyone else is more valuable.
No perfect solutions, I've found it is usually just people trying to do what they think is right/better way to live in whatever ways they can.
Resilience and survival are social pursuits.
But then they have in fact not abandoned society.
> As such it's an empty pursuit.
What do you believe that they are pursuing that you think is empty?
And obviously, like, they go to places and talk to people and buy equipment etc.
There’s a whole gamut of failure modes for tech from “total civilizational collapse” down to “cell tower is down”, and time periods from “forever” down to “a couple of days”
People doing this sort of lifestyle but sharing findings and ideas and ultimately maybe pointing out how more can be done with less is part of us building up knowledge together isn’t it?
These people aren’t completely offline even! They blog and post online!
It isn't very hard to reinterpret this critique as a kind of crab bucket mentality. God forbid someone goes off on a crazy boat trip for a few months without first consulting with "society".
Devils Advocate: Various religious societies such as monestaries and nuneries have been doing this for centuries, and appear to do rather well (if religion is your thing).
That said there is an appeal to retreating to one of those and live a simpler life dedicated to one thing. Religion isn't for me but I'm sure there's something like secular monestaries out there (that aren't suicide cults).
I find interesting that from the perspective of sustainability, the opposite actually holds true - trying to have a sustainable life in modern society is a dead end; even a very modest life ends up being globally unsustainable.
(I'm not implying that either way is right or wrong).
Having said that, they haven't entirely abandoned society; they do socialize somewhat, for example:
> In comparison to the past few months spent mostly on our own, we've had a very social August. It seems our friends made it up north all at the same time, it has been nice to run into familiar faces, meet some new ones, and fill our days wandering in the woods catching up on the time we spent apart.
They have a “flag-stop” Alaska Railway line somewhere close-ish to them that they use to ride into the nearest town to buy crates and crates of supplies. Basically a personal freight station.
How much of this is sustainable living vs massively subsidised (and unsustainable) LARPING?
People living “off-grid” often seem still dependent on society in ways that are uniquely unsustainable and/or subsidised.
When you say subsidised you mean the state is paying for essentials here?
There’s definitely an economic reason that stations exist.
The ticket they have is subsidised by the money the state-owned corporation makes from freight.
- requiring a private diesel train, operated and subsidised by the government for a economically unviable number of people, in order to survive
- living off grid in a sustainable manner
To me off-grid sustainability isn’t just “carbon neutral”, it’s being able to exist somewhere without assistance from the wider society.
And what amounts to a private train is an egregious amount of assistance, IMO.
Like how is this Alaska thing relevant at all?
Do you think that “off grid” communities in Africa are doing harm somehow?
Possibly, if one only buys very basic supplies (food and basic medicine), it could be considered in a grey area while still being sustainable.
I've thought about living like that and more remotely where land is actually affordable and have found that not only has society been making it less and less possible. It's made less and less posible mostly by people who are all about "improving it for not just yourself but for everyone else"
Everyone else includes endless migration till I feel like a weirdo for having retained cultural elements (which are seen with a bit of a double standard) and incapable of owning a bit of forest and land. Improving it includes pushing insulation standards that make it so you for example can't save glass from the landfill to build a small unheated conservatory due to insulation standards and making it so owning a few farm animals becomes increasingly impractical.
I can go on and on endlessly but I've come to feel like those (usually)well meaning society centric people are the hardest and most frustrated to argue with to work togheter to that aim. I've found many are so convinced of the moral highground, suprisingly unempathic to others contrasting lived experience if there's no ethnic element and such strong adherents of change with no endpoint that it feels useless. Pasolini was on to something.
>society been making it less and less possible. It's made less and less posible mostly by people who are all about "improving it for not just yourself but for everyone else"
You kinda lost me in this paragraph, why does this follow, I don’t really understand the connection you refer to here.
Since we’re sharing anecdotes, plenty of my friends and acquaintances have bought old abandoned farms on the countryside and now live somewhat off grid. It’s definitely possible and I would say at least in my bubble&age group it’s become a trend almost.
But as said the other guy said there's increasing legal hurdles.
Like for the construction he mentions: My grandparents built everything themselves including pouring the reinforced concrete ceilings/floors. My dad did much of the house himself with more premade and delivered components, his own expertise in electrics and with some help from a tradesman family member. Now if I were to build i'd need even more tradesman help, I'd need to get the house very insulated and have it certified. That conservatory example is also a thing for people i know who moved abroad and this seems to be a trend across western europe. Should I want to renovate instead and recoup some of my tax money trough subsidies then the work needs to be done by a tradesman even if i can do it myself. The plumbing must be connected and must be certified. After the electrics are done and connected as is required I need to quickly add a heatpump and solar panel otherwise i'm getting my electricity setup certified 3 damn times. For me building a fireplace becomes impossible. Even if I'd want something much more efficient with external air intake I'll soon to get something by a big manufacturer with certifications (usually optimised for ease of installation) if i want to avoid high cost. (and it'll still give a major penalty to my epc insulation certification so idk if it'll remain possible.) This trough an EU law that first popped up in germany.
Alternative construction methods can be possible but again, there's more and more hurdles and limitations.
Then when it comes to the rest. Having farm animals beyond a certain small amount becomes an administration hell. I can no longer butcher anything myself for own use beyond poultry even tho i'd get a captive bolt pistol. My grandma tried to get rid of my uncles animals when he got paralysed and only got trough it after a government worker took pitty on her and went out of his way. I did software and sensors and whatnot for an abatoir at some point and i started to realise why a load of farmers don't own their own animals anymore and instead are farmers for hire.
The informal exchange my grandparents did with food and the like would not be legal anymore.
Family friends had a business selling heirloom tomato seeds. They needed to get each variety individually lab tested for plant/seed pasports which would cost such a huge sum that they'd have to close shop. The inspector seemed genuenly baffled that this was the domain of anyone but multi million euro operations.
Meanwhile most of those old farms you talk about go for more than a million here. Far out of my range. Our natality has been below replacement since the start of the 50's but we keep growing and cutting up the land.
And so our progressive folk who care for our society push for this stuff along with others. Because they want cleaner air, cleaner energy, no invasive species(of tomatoes i guess),couldn't imagine building their own home since they're largely white colar and have lost that knowledge or live in the city and think they're fending of crooked developers with this, want to embrace migration(endlessly),want to prevent animal suffering but push to factory style animal husbandry, etc, etc
It feels like society begets more society, leaves little room for escape and it's complexity and growth is in some aspects self-reinforcing ...so now I want away from it.
200 years ago almost everyone lived probably within 30 miles of their great-great grandfather. Now it's probably less than 5% (would be interesting to know).
Because their resources are limited, they use them very careful. Because the open sea and the weather are unforgiven, they help the others unconditionally and proactively, it's the duty, not emotion.
They contact to earch other everyday by many means, e.g. on long range radio to help alert about weather, emergency...
That is the difference lifestyle, not isolation.
> Because of the decentralized nature of our work, this has to be spelled out quite clearly: Preparing for impending apocalyptic events should mean collective action and structural reform, not individualism and isolation.
Just because they get power from a solar panel and can sail to different places doesn’t mean they are “outside the system”. They are just living an unusual lifestyle with a light footprint. They still have a number of obligations to attend to. In fact, some of these obligations (particularly the ones related to the boat) are life-or-death, and much worse than what the average person deals with. You can’t hire a handyman to come patch your boat up during a storm.
> Because of the decentralized nature of our work, this has to be spelled out quite clearly: Preparing for impending apocalyptic events should mean _collective action and structural reform_, not individualism and isolation.
The first thought I had was: this is not too terribly far from the technical mentality that a group trying to settle Mars would need. (For real, not the fantasy LARP that looks like an Apple Store on Mars.)
One would take on an intellectual journey of discovery, sailing off into the pacific to learn to live off grid, writing colorful narrative-driven articles, full of artwork, mission statements, and subtle suggestions of donations. They would emphasize the human nature of discovery and seek to engage you as they went. Come to the enlightened tech path! Some neat new technology would be built along the way around these principles, mostly for their own use.
https://100r.co/site/projects.html
But the other group would write a self-hosting Forth targeting the top 10 most used CPU platforms of all time and post a text-only HTML site with download links. It would work everywhere. You’d know nothing about them and they’d probably run linux on a 17 year old mac.
Personally, I’m squarely in the second camp, but I wish dearly I had the creativity and spine to be in the first camp.
Otherwise, you are just negotiating your terms of confinement.
You should watch the old British sitcom "The Good Life" to discover how wrong you are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Life_(1975_TV_series)
It does feel egregious that a person with no skin in the game can point and criticize what people more courageous than them are trying to achieve.
"Because of the decentralized nature of our work, this has to be spelled out quite clearly: Preparing for impending apocalyptic events should mean collective action and structural reform, not individualism and isolation."
Now, there's a very good historical record of human nature that warns against going all in on a collective mindset, but these guys are already on your wavelength.
What happens when you attempt to live within society and they treat you poorly? The ability of people to freely associate with the society of their choice is supposed to be their right. There are many different societies throughout the world. Living independently when the society you happen to be geolocated with should not be a negative so long as you are not actively harming them.
If somebody views “escaping” the industrial-corporate-government grinder, still operating on 18th century mystical conceptions of rights and property as giving up, then there’s nothing to argue against
I would also argue living off grid isn’t abandoning society if you’re still paying taxes.
> solipsist
This is exactly the point they're making though. This is an exercise only available to the privileged. It is not available to people who haven't worked in tech for some amount of time, if not actively working in tech or holding equity like the homesteader above us.
It takes for granted the concentrated specialization of production that is modern, "on-grid" cities to produce things like microprocessors and food safety and insulin. This lifestyle is not available to masses of people, and we have a word for a society where everyone lives off-grid: "hunter-gatherers".
There can be other value in doing this, like Hundred Rabbits' exploration of how tech itself could be made more resilient given different macroeconomic conditions / incentives. But talking about this as if it's about how The Man just doesn't want you to be an independent free thinker is a misunderstanding of why most people live in the societies that they do.
"But talking about this as if it's about how The Man just doesn't want you to be an independent free thinker is a misunderstanding of why most people live in the societies that they do."
Now apply these concepts to an individual who isn't being served by their society.
Granted, living full time in a sailboat is a little more extreme than a homestead with a few solar panels and crops, but even then I think it’s hard to argue that 100r have fully withdrawn from society
Then there are the sane people who want a house in the woods but with a driveway, fast internet and heated floors in their bathrooms. And then there are people who look at the cost of installing a mile of electrical poles and say "well, I can buy a kick-ass solar setup for a tenth that cost!"
That society is a straw man and rotten to the core, it’s a a dead cause for you to try to stay to improve while you ignore those forces at the top that keep corrupting it. And this is the society you claim we should stay and improve.
I live somewhere in the middle. We aren't off grid but we are slowly moving more in that direction with solar and rainwater projects on the list. We raise a good portion of our own food, I'd assume a little over half given that most meat, dairy, and eggs are from our land. I also work in tech though, and regularly go into town for various reasons. I'm not building a doomsday bunker, after having lived in close to a dozen cities and two countries I just find that I disagree with certain aspects of modern infrastructure (mostly related to food production, energy use, and waste).
And if you allow "off grid" to be "self-sufficient but connected to power which may or may not fail" it's even larger.
Sometimes society likes to target and scapegoat people without any shred of justice.
No one should be forced or guilted to "contribute"
Those people are nobler than perpetuating the cancer upon this planet that we call "society"
Coincidentally, YouTube just randomly recommended a video about people who are on the extreme opposite end of that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1Mt3YJYb2A — Bali Is Everything Wrong With Society
There's almost no way to easily improve society now. Almost all practical pathways for people are just furthering technology past the point of diminishing returns...
I agree there's still some value in helping people but now it's mostly just helping people adapt to this dystopia of furthering our destructive influence, and it's still depressing.
Devine and their partner are very community oriented and socially connected.
If that was the only thing that “living off grid” meant, then you’d be right. But it’s being used in this case as a shorthand for many things that don’t involve power grids.
to your original point, though, none of those "many things" is solipsism or total isolation.
Quote attributed to Jiddu Krishnamurti: "It Is No Measure of Health To Be Well-Adjusted to a Profoundly Sick Society"
Also, of all the "off-grid" people I know, including those who could probably 100% forgo trips to the grocery store (most will buy goods a few times a year), I think there are none who would thrive if they had zero contact/benefit from the "grid."
Energy, goods, internet, clothing, etc...
And here come the hardcore preppers!
there is a corporate employees son, that desires to be a simple farmer.
They can learn a lot from each other, wouldn't you say ? :D
We are all temporary stewards of any land we inhabit, or possessions we own.
The locations are different, the methods are different, but the stewardship is the same.
They haven't abandoned society. They are trying to improve it. I don't understand the solipsism criticism. It seems specious. There's a clear philosophical drive:
I strongly disagree; the way I see it is people like this are trying something different and their ideas could in the long run turn out to be better than the ideas that present day society is exploring.
And if God forbid, society experiences some kind of collapse, the skills and knowledge of these people will be invaluable for recovery.
the documentary about a guy who invented his own self-steering gear to travel solo back in the 70s
(co-author of 100r.ca)
Edit: On closer investigation, it is almost exactly like scoundrel.
0: https://100r.ca/site/donsol.html
1: http://www.stfj.net/art/2011/Scoundrel.pdf
I'm curious what people think about the following:
The idea of living off-grid, of having your own little self sufficient homestead, a cabin in the woods, a small farm, etc. doesn't seem to work without having a bunch of cash up front, another source of income, or turning it into a engine for running classes or making content. Where it is "self-sufficient" is generally where, to put it bluntly, it has to be because people are poor and don't have a choice.
I'm not familiar with sailing self sufficiency but in permaculture in the US, it seems the only people doing it successfully fund it via running classes, trainings, writing a book, making content, etc. or they do it essentially as a hobby funded by another career, family money, etc. The closest I've seen that does work is CSA's (community supported agriculture) but with those, as with most farming related work, there is generally ten underpaid laborers with no actual stake in the farm to one owner who gets by (also see woofing).
I'm not sure where I'm going with this but I thought given the topic there might be some people who visit with thoughts on it. Maybe it would be better to treat it as a goal of how to live ones life even if it isn't self-sufficient? I don't know. I just know there always seems to be a dichotomy between imagined and real in self-sufficiency that I struggle with.
https://merveilles.town/@neauoire/117405811781851569
> I was wondering why I was getting death threats again, right, HN front-page. Thanks guys
For a mere mortal like me, this would seem like a noob Q. But what kind of weird tax situations might you encounter when you are at sea for a majority of your time? And what advice might you have for people that encounter it?
Americans often change their State citizenship to a State that is explicitly set up to support non-resident nomads and expats with minimal hassle. South Dakota is a well-known example and requires no tax filings. Federal taxes follow you globally.
Some States (e.g. California) require you to pay taxes etc as if you were physically resident long after you've left the US. If you are planning on spending minimal time in the US then people are often advised to legally re-domicile to a expat-friendly State if they can.
Being at sea most of the time is similar to the situation of nomads that move enough to not establish tax residency anywhere.
(from their license)
Is it more quixotic to insist artisan software has intrinsic value, or that taste alone is all that matters now?
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I thought the amount of work gone into the website showed a Japanese level work ethic-- hard work and dedication.
Maybe the authors were influenced by the Japanese?
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I agree though! I think their website has been influenced by and has influenced various Japanese-language sites in my bookmarks. It is a very rectangular style.