开云体育

This sounds very neat — and a pretty capable way of creating a remote work environment. Especially in India where 4G and 5G are so cheap, you could probably do this indefinitely. https://suraj.dev/blog/my-4g-setup-for-working-remotely-from-anywhere -s-

I was quite serious in the last thread when I said that fibre internet would be advantageous in a location choice. Igatpuri (the location of the U Ba Khin Vipassana Village) does have fibre internet, which is pretty hopeful considering it's over 100km from Bombay. Igatpuri: https://goo.gl/maps/2g9D4E9aLBnGi9uC9 The other location currently under consideration are the Kalvarayan Forests outside of Salem: Kalvarayan Hill Forests: https://goo.gl/maps/NG68FUxZYonS6ksB8 The entire time we've been up here in the north, I've been pondering what location, in which state, would make a good base for establishing a Hacker Village up here... so far, I still have no idea. Thoughts? -steven

We are staying at a friend's "spare" house at the moment and it is thankfully well-equipped with everything we need to survive here: vessels for cooking, a stove, water heaters for the bathrooms, and (most importantly) an internet connection. The dishes of the house have a strange peculiarity to them. While most of them are fine, the plates quite frequently crack in half when hot food is placed on them. We've broken all but two at this point. This got me rolling on the concept of "Commodity Thinking" and the possible misinterpretations. As a young university student, I remember Walmart coming to Canada and our initial joy in having a store for household goods (like plates) that we could actually afford on our savings from high school summer jobs. A weekend trip to Walmart was fairly common and for a reasonable price (it felt like almost *everything* was $20) you could pick up a small bit of furniture, kitchen goods, or cables for your electronics. I remember the feeling at the time that these items weren't particularly well-made, but given my financial circumstances, I didn't very much care. As I stumbled my way through my Computer Science degree I distinctly remember making one of these (less and less frequent) Walmart visits and thinking to myself as I stuffed some pressed-fiber furniture into my car: "This isn't really anything... it's just garbage. I'm buying disposable furniture." It became increasingly apparent over the coming years of my adult life that a great deal of the middle-class Canadian lifestyle revolves around disposable things that really shouldn't be disposable: a cheap night table for a university student, a $80,000 truck for a wealthy individual entering their middle age. I grew into a new ideal: buy quality. Things should really last. Who needs to buy more than one set of utensils over their entire lifetime? This is why people of class hand down well-made heirlooms, whether sound systems or bedframes or classic cars. Conflate quality with prestige and you have a recipe for the purchase of brands which only hint at elitism. See: "How to Be Fashionable or Consume Like Me.pdf" At one point, I realized I was a part of a much larger movement of thinking which flowed along similar lines, looking for answers. "Consume Like Me" actually had very concrete answers, even if they were the wrong ones. The rest of the internet go tied up in arguments formulated as blog posts I remember with the titles of "The Best" (arguing for the highest-quality things) and "The Worst" (arguing for disposable or borderline-disposable things). Obviously googling for those blog posts now is not possible. I'm sure they're our there somewhere. Anyway. All of this is intended to provide some background on the idea that Commodity Thinking is really NONE of these things. Commodity Thinking does not pretend that a Maserati and a Honda Civic are the same car. But while working in San Mateo, our business lead drove a (leased) Maserati and our tech lead drove an (ancient) Honda Civic. They both managed to get to the office just fine. There is an internal examination we need to make here. Why are we buying or leasing the Maserati? If it's genuinely that much more fun to drive or fuel efficient then perhaps the cost is worth it. The point of Commodity Thinking isn't to cut every blade of grass to the same height or to pretend these differences do not exist. Commodity Thinking says "a car is a car" (though, it should be noted, a car is not a truck) but this isn't to be taken in some sort of self-righteous, absolutist sense. It's to be taken in the literal and rational sense. However, there is a big world of diminishing returns out there. A Maserati is unlikely to provide benefits corresponding to its price tag just as a TATA Nano is unlikely to provide returns which outstrip its convenience as a motorcycle with four wheels. Both cars are an inefficient glitch in the market, to some degree. If we were to lay out "cars" on a bell curve and stick the Honda Civic at the peak, it's entirely possible that folding the curve around that centre point

Hi friends, I remember having a conversation with kitty (BCC'd) years ago about "Minimum X". That particular conversation was geared toward visual layouts such as those which used to be popular on Tumblr, with the innards from a piece of luggage spread out neatly over a level surface. I think we also pondered a web app which would support creating those layouts. We also discussed personal catalogs of one's personal effects. Although "Minimum X" has come to mean something completely different for me, it originally had something to do with identifying the most useful (or perhaps beautiful) objects at a variety of scales: - backpack - luggage - bicycle - car - #vanlife - house I still find this imagery interesting, in terms of what we require to live functionally and what we can do without. Somewhere inside, most of these categories have gotten smaller thanks to the chunks of technology which float around our lives. Other internal components have yet to shrink into wonderfully boring commodities like phones and laptops and batteries and induction plates. ## Commodity Lifestyle I'll speak a great deal more about commodity philosophy somewhere else, but in short the idea that's been kicking around my head for ages is this: Why do we own precious things at all? Most things these days are pretty standardized. Electronics, especially, carry the same properties which convinced Bezos that an early Amazon shouldn't initially sell housewares (or statues or tools or anything else they carry now) but instead restrict itself to books: they're always the same size and weight, when it comes in the mail it either works or it doesn't. These days, our electronics also have few moving parts. There are a few things in my Minimum X Version 1.0 luggage spread, mentioned above, that are still special to me: my glasses and contact lenses, medicine / supplements, and perhaps my clothes if I prefer a specific fit. These things are inherently precious and I cannot simply buy commodity replacements if mine are lost, stolen, or destroyed in a fire. Beyond that, most of our possessions are interchangeable. Kitchenware, power tools, furniture, exercise equipment, electronics, cars, bicycles, and so forth. The boring (but perhaps useful) idea behind Commodity Philosophy is to move as many things as possible out of the "Precious" category into the "Commodity" category. We can do so in one of four ways: 1. Reduce our expectations 2. Limit the options 3. Raise the baseline 4. Convert physical objects to data Reducing our expectations would be to get rid of ideas like "I must have **this** TV." In 2020, probably any TV is good enough for whatever it is we want TV for. If a TV is still precious to you, swap "TV" for anything in your life you'd be willing to commoditize because a less- than-ideal alternative is still good enough. Limiting the options is probably not something we'll do intentionally, as individuals or a society. We've all seen the "Before the iPhone / After the iPhone" images. Once you have a pocket-sized Star Trek tablet thing, all the phones are going to look and behave roughly like that. Today, I could hardly care less what phone I own. Raising the baseline brings up society's oppressed to enjoy an assumed Minimum (there it is) which is higher than it was before. For example, in a country where no one cooks over cowshit, the cheapest stove anyone owns will be gas, induction, or electric. A more luxurious example might be sound systems: in the same way that we may find burning cow dung, coal, or cheap wood offensive because it is hazardous to the chef's health, we may one day find objectionable the very idea of permitting the economy to supply low-quality speakers to the general population. B&O might still exist, but at a minimum, no one would find even the cheapest of speakers grating to their aural senses. Converting physical objects to data is the most organic and the hardest to force. Communication is now very much an online activity. Entertainment, taxes, work, photography, where I store my jazz album masters. AirBnb kinda-sorta-but-not-

I think there's something to be said for stuff that doesn't require a soldering gun to assemble. While I was reading through "Hackers" [1] it dawned on me that I'd never actually seen a photo of the Apple I before. We've all seen hundreds of photos of the Apple II and IIe. But the Apple I? What did that look like? I laughed when I googled it but it fit with the story arc and the prescient acknowledgement of Woz that he was transitioning from the "pure" world of hacker-dom to the "tainted" world of wealth creation when he left HP, joined Jobs, and created the Apple II. The world of localized energy independence feels like this right now. Solar setups tend to be one of two kinds: 1. A pile of leaky batteries and hideous, one-off hackerisms. "Why would I buy a Tesla Powerwall when I can glue 4,480 expired laptop batteries together instead?" :cran: 2. $60,000 of off-the-shelf Tesla hardware attached to a house that's on the Bay Area grid anyway. :cran2: ## GoalZero The GoalZero folks [2] have the right(-ish) idea, I think. All their hardware has USB-C outputs. Given that USB-C demands a level of precision much higher than your average solar setup could produce, this says something about how hardware in this space is becoming standardized... however slowly. I think of the cluster of hardware that GoalZero represents like the plug-and-play computer hardware of the late 1990s. It was still a good idea if you had SOME idea what you were doing. You might have to change some jumpers on the motherboard. But you didn't need to build everything from scratch and, unless you forgot the thermal paste or caused a short, you were pretty unlikely to actually do any damage. I know it has its issues, but USB-C makes me pretty happy, overall. "Here's the cable. It does data, I/O, and a lot of power. It is literally impossible to connect it incorrectly. Go." It will still be a while before we see USB-C everywhere and all the (really awful) bugs are fleshed out. And, of course, by the time we can happily rely on USB-C for almost all our household and travel needs, we'll need USB-D or whatever. But! It's a nice watermark for meaningful power draw and stability across household electronics. I'm not sure if there's a GoalZero (or even Powerwall) equivalent at the village or neighbourhood scale? ## A Business Model Without making any strong assumptions about what people would want to do in the Village, it feels like this space is on the verge of some significant expansion. If the same folks who are playing with these systems were to build the off-the-shelf stuff, it's likely those folks would build them in a simple, modular, easy-to-use way that fit a number of scales (portable, household, neighbourhood, city-wide). An open network will emerge which will replace Uber but there's no harm in letting Uber do all the hard work of getting people comfortable with using an app for transportation. Similarly, Tesla is likely to break a lot of ground in making this stuff "comfortable" for the average consumer and building up battery tech that actually matches society's needs. After that, this will be commodity technology. Just an idea. -steven [1] http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/729 [2] https://www.goalzero.com

I tweeted a thing recently about "hey, maybe owning a house is a really good idea... especially in times like these": https://twitter.com/deobald/status/1256257608614244352 SVS (for those who know him) replied with "why not rent a house?" I think I've largely come to a conclusion on this one. I think these are three distinct categories. 1. Homelessness We currently live in a hotel / guest house. It's fine. We've taken two rooms so we can be on conference calls without murdering each other. We happened to be on the way to a new apartment when the lockdown happened so I actually have a computer monitor and keyboard with me. Things are tolerable. However, it's been nearly two years of homelessness prior to this. No fixed address. This is a really uncomfortable position to be in. I'm only starting to acknowledge now what a toll it takes on a person, mentally. It's a bad system -- and surprisingly expensive. 2. A Home. A home could be either a rented space (usually apartments) or an owned space. But I've come to see why at least one owned space is much, much more valuable. Our "home" provides us with connectivity to our closest friends, the city or village or community we want to be a part of, and the infrastructure we depend on regularly. I won't talk to much about the idea of "a home" since I think we all know what it is, even if it's a bit liquid. 3. Home Base Home base might also be the same as Home. But it doesn't have to be. "Home base" during our college years was (and for many of us, still is) our parents' house. Early in life, "home base" is "home-home" ... our real home. As the years go on, our real home becomes the place we identify as "home" (#2) but it's pretty easy to get into a position where we're either homeless (#1) or have a home (#2) but do NOT have a real home base. I think "home base" is important. If the city became unsafe, it's where you would go in precisely this kind of global catastrophe. "Home base" has few expenses because it's owned property, not rented. "Home base" has friends or colleagues or acquaintances or neighbours of all of these to keep an eye on it while we're away. "Home base" is a good place to store our junk since we all have things we want to keep but don't necessarily want to keep __with us__ in our current home (#2). Home base, because it's owned property, is probably somewhere outside of the city. The city is noisy, dirty, and expensive. The city is a place for a home (#2) not a home base (#3). It's probably somewhere we can get to easily. Somewhere we could go to relax, think, work, or decompress for a weekend or a summer. Making home base cheaper and cheaper might be a peripheral goal of owning a home base... or it might be the primary goal. Your home base could be a retirement home or a farm house, in which case "really cheap" might not be topping your list of priorities. My current home base is an off-grid cabin with no running water or grid electricity. It sits pretty hard on the "inconvenient but darn cheap" side of this equation. "Cheap" comes with some side benefits. Genuinely cheap property has no ongoing expenses beyond the bare legal requirements... but it also pushes a household or community toward independence. In the case of the 4440 cabin, that's our yearly land tax. No property tax. No utilities. No vehicle licenses. The cabin is dependent on petroleum for cooking but not for transportation or heating the building. It's dependent on the grocery store for milk but not for carrots. Localizing "home base" for a few people could mean economies of scale push some of this independence further than it would otherwise work for individual- or family-sized installs. A community garden or a small farm is a very manageable (and common) method of local food production. Community-sized energy storage is easier (and often cheaper) than trying to get a couple of Tesla PowerWalls into every home. Energy and food are obvious cases but we can pick almost anything. It wouldn't take a very large community to set up some studio spaces: a dance/yoga/karate/etc studio space would benefit

It wasn't actually spending time in Himachal Pradesh in the early spring that got me thinking about this, but that's probably pushed me to keep it in mind on a regular basis, since "summer" hasn't fully arrived here yet. It is, in fact, the presence of air conditioners that brings this to mind as I hear of friends and colleagues in Bangalore (and elsewhere) turning to Freon to manage the summer heat. We have the same difficulty in the 4440 cabin. The sleeping area is upstairs in a just-tall-enough-to-walk-in loft. A neighbour across the cove visited us last year -- it was the first year we'd both been there in the same month -- and spoke at length about energy efficiency of homes, as that was his day job. We were discussing insulating the walls (since that would allow us to start installing shelves and countertops) and he strongly advised against it. In his mind, the cold of the early spring and late autumn were best beaten by ceiling insulation. Likewise, the uncomfortable heat was best fended off by the same ceiling insulation. Insulated walls are a good idea... but sort of a luxury, in comparison. I started looking at passive temperature architecture last summer, out of curiosity. The cabin is too far-gone... we can't really do any kind of passive heating or cooling in its present location or construction. But the idea makes a lot of sense and requires very little active energy: suck the air from the bottom and blow it out the top -- or vice versa. In a lot of cases, an array of small CPU fans might do the trick and as an added bonus, many of them are 12-volt. There's a real utility to basic differentiating construction techniques that I've never fully appreciated until recently: Historical methods of architecture almost always involve low ceilings in cold climates and very high ceilings in hot climates. Variably, the hot climates often also include some variety of passive air movement as well: the vertical passive wind tunnels of narrow Japanese city homes or the breathing inner courtyards of South Indian bungalows. There is always, of course, the sun. South-facing insulated windows provide light and heat both -- but the drop which corresponds to winter seasons is inconvenient at best in cold climates. Passive energy is very hard to do **directly** and an intermediary is often a better first thought. In the world of energy, this is of course energy storage: Batteries and hot water tanks. Since a good solar hot water setup works even in -30C, it is the insulation of the water tank that makes all the difference. This is where hardware hacking comes into play. How far are we from household installations of aerogels? And how far from that point to creating them on our own? The same insulators which protect hot water from going cold could potentially protect a home from temperature variation as well. Those of you who've heard me ramble on the subject know that I'm more or less completely in love with mineral wools -- the recycled waste from steel factories which can be formed into standard-sized insulation batts. They are fire-proof, water-proof, do not rot, do not encourage the growth of molds, are not made of plastic, are largely non-toxic (I say "largely" because they're not very fun to install but they're safe for the end user), and never sag or compress. They are also very expensive. This is one of those early investments, however, that feels like it would pay big dividends in the long-long run. We know what a comfortable house feels like and the next generation (and the next and the next) are unlikely to come up with some exacting physical standard which is higher than the Level 4 comforts we know today due to some magical new technology. It's a lot more likely that we'll asymptotically approach zero (external) energy consumption for homes, which in extreme climates can make a substantial difference to human impact on the environment... and on energy dependence and the focus of the economy. A microcosm for this early investment is a great thermos. Even an inexpensive metal thermos which insulates by vacuum keeps liq

I am currently trapped in a hotel in Himachal Pradesh. At present, we are on the upward slope of the First Wave of the CoVID-19 pandemic. This will be a phase of my life I look back on in a very specific light, I'm sure. Curiously enough, we were on our way to Sikkim to finally "settle down" after over a year of traveling. This means that, although we didn't make it, we do have a couple desk-fulls of computer equipment and one solid library shelf of actual dead-tree books. One thing we do not have is our own kitchen. This is unfortunate during a highly contagious pandemic but every morning as I stand anxiously over the pot of chai in our shared kitchen, I find myself pondering over the properties of kitchens a great deal. Here are some of those thoughts. I mentioned in the Canon thread that I think Bertrand Russell's In Praise of Idleness (the book of essays, not necessarily the title essay) is well worth a read. In it, he discusses what a world of automation and fully-distributed workforce might look like. At the time, women were largely not members of the workforce but Russell was prescient enough to take the equal participation of all adult members of society for granted -- to him, it was only a question of time. He envisioned societal clusters not unlike the gated communities so prevalent in India today. However, rather than gated versions of the nuclear family spliced with traditional Asian multi-generational households, he wasn't focused on the family unit. Instead, he was specifically interested in child care and food preparation. The Kitchen is a cradle of mental and physical health. It is obviously where raw ingredients mix to form the nutrient-rich meals that keep us alive. Any of us who have indulged in unhealthy diets as a part of adult life understand the immediate and frighteningly acute value of healthy food. Let us define adulthood as the time beyond that window of life between the teenage years and the late twenties when the body can survive on almost any garbage input as long as it is majority carbon-based. Perhaps this sensation can act as an approximation of adulthood itself: Eating trash makes one feel like trash. But the mental health provided by the kitchen is more than a direct consequence of reciprocity between the brain and the gut. The kitchen is where the best house parties finish, at 4:00 AM. The kitchen is where your mother let you taste half-finished-but-sufficiently-sweet dessert preparations. The kitchen is the physical origin of waffles and dosas (or other cultural equivalents of complex carbohydrates which demand the constant attention of the Kitchen Master). The kitchen is where my brother's classmate with a far more traditional country upbringing took a beating with a large wooden spoon after eating an entire "Jethro Bowl" of his mother's fresh-picked raspberries. I find it almost impossible to cook for one. When I'm alone, I tend to prepare food as if it were for a family of eight then reheat and repurpose that preparation over the course of three or four days. I've found I'm not alone in this. Dinner is where we discuss the day with family, meet a blind date, take a business meeting, encounter new friends with old. Not all food is social but it's natural for us to consume the majority of it that way. Russell suggested that these tendencies lend themselves to communal meal preparation and communal dining, by default. He wasn't suggesting doing away with personal kitchens or making communal meals mandatory for a small colocated society of people. He simply felt that people would gravitate toward this were the option presented. In Russell's vision, the adults of the community share responsibility for managing the kitchen, buying groceries, and preparing the food. There exists a hacker village (of a sort) near Igatpuri known as U Ba Khin Village and in that village they have a variation of this. While I'm still not sure what I think of a village built exclusively for Vipassana meditators, I do like the idea of a shared kitchen and dining hall. They have hired the cooking staff, I believ

Obviously any sensible village, town, or city will have a full-blown public library. But I'm curious what you folks would put in a curated library specifically targeting the development and advancement of the Village on its way to becoming a City (and beyond). The Canon would obviously be crossdisciplinary, but I'm guessing Architecture, Engineering, and the Social Sciences might get a special focus. I don't think there is a canonical text on off-grid and micro-grid architecture yet, which means there's certainly a gap to be filled. But here are a few of my picks: - The Timeless Way of Building - A Pattern Language - Hackers - Palaces for the People [1] - Factfulness - Hidden Life of Trees [2] - Inner Life of Animals [2] - The Giving Tree - Sapiens / Homo Deus / 21 Lessons - Everyware - The Knowledge (Dartnell) - The Way to Ultimate Calm - Not Always So - Tao Te Ching (Gia Fu Feng) - The Little Prince - Winnie the Pooh What's on your list you wish everyone in your town would read? -steven [1] Not a great book but I'm not sure there's any better resource on the topic. [2] The writing is terrible. Are there better alternatives that cover the same breadth of material? I'd love to replace these.

I keep imagining a spectrum on which a new village might fall prey to outmoded ideologies. I actually think the landscape is more complex than a simple one-dimensional spectrum, with many dimensions of varying importance. But the simple spectrum looks something like this: Unsustainable (ex. Chicago Suburbs) <-----------------> Hippie Crap (ex. Auroville v.1) We saw an interesting talk at JLF by a guy who grew up in Auroville, moved to the US, then moved back to Auroville as an adult. He made a very strong case against "intentional communities" and although he didn't say anything revelatory, it was helpful to hear him call out the ideals which repeatedly fail in Auroville and other intentional communities: getting rid of money and adopting a subsistence or favour-based lifestyle is objectively a bad idea, for example. I think just about any isolationist ideals will fall under this umbrella. It's possible to plot any given concept along this spectrum if we look at it a little more abstractly: Outsourcing <-----------------> Isolationism (Again, this clearly isn't the only conceptual spectrum. There's planned-vs-organic, revolutionary-vs-incremental, etc. But this spectrum really flags the traps of past experiments.) I think one of the bigger mistakes we could make early on would be adopting some radical construction techniques. If there's one thing I've learned from working on the cabin, it's this: Having a functional home base is GREAT. Those initial aspects of the hierarchy of needs can be captured with some measure of independence: water, sewage, energy. But we should expect these things to require a lot of external help. Digging a well? Hire a bore well machine or an earth mover (depending on the well depth). Sewage is pretty flexible, but expect that you'll prefer the comforts of home over humanure or a pit toilet before attempting those things. Energy is either the grid or solar from China. During construction, it might be a diesel generator. Of course, if we lean too far in the direction of "outsourcing", we're again just building summer homes or suburbs: Buy land, hire contractors, connect to grid power, and forget about the consequences of anything we're doing. There's a balance to be had, here, and I think this is where the conversation is the most valuable: Where do people want to be on this spectrum? Is positioning ourselves on the spectrum something we want to try to do collectively or would each home choose its level of independence (from grid services) on its own? There are aspects I lump into "the grid" that most people don't, traditionally: food, clothing, bedding, furniture, etc. Some of these intentional communities from the 60s and 70s really pushed hard to avoid external consumption of any kind. Personally, I find this a little silly. But I'm sure many people think a goal of a modern, energy-independent village is also silly (I don't). Curious what other folks hope to get out of this, or if this is even a spectrum that matters to everyone. <3 -steven

I was chatting with Ragul about different locations for setting up shop today (mostly around land prices) and stumbled upon this while looking into the climates of different regions: https://en.climate-data.org/asia/india/tamil-nadu-759/ ...I really like how locations are categorized by climate classification. Seems like an interesting way to hunt for locations which meet climate criteria first and foremost, since a number of these places are completely unknown to me. For anyone who's still fully in the fantasy stage, pinning down a livable climate or two is probably a meaningful first step. As someone who grew up in a climate best described as "6 months of the year, if you go outside maybe you'll die so stay indoors all the time and burn tons of gas to keep the house a safe temperature" I really appreciate the value of *starting* with temperate climates. ;) I'm curious if folks have stumbled upon other climate resources like this? It seems like a more sensible, data-driven approach than my current brainless, blindfolded-darts strategy of daydreaming out loud: "Kodaikanal seems nice... have you ever been to Coonoor? Or Kotagiri? Is there somewhere like Coorg... but cheaper?" etc. I'm sure there are a lot of data-driven systems here I've never even thought to consider. How do you folks think about this stuff? -steven

Given that the terminology graduated to household usage surrounding the release of Windows 95 and the years of PnP failings that followed, it's understandable that the idea of plug-and-play, where the user is assumed to know little or nothing about the internal workings of a black box that "just works" every time, is kind of at odds with the Hacker Ethos [1] but there's a lot to be said for IJW as a design goal for any system... hacker-driven or otherwise. Some infrastructure can easily (though optionally) come from inside a village: furniture, garbage incinerators, some vegetables [2], maybe even some clothes. However, by and large, infrastructure constructed within the village will be composite: sewers made from imported pipes networks built from imported electronics bicycles built from imported parts solar and wind setups built from imported panels, turbines, and batteries etc. But I'm increasingly intrigued by plug-and-play options. For example, the MaxOak Bluetti EB240 is about 20% of a PowerWall 2: http://www.maxoak.net/index.php/show-9-25.html A PowerWall is (arguably) not plug-and-play but this thing definitely is. In this form factor, it's restricted to uses like camping or mains backup. But I really like the idea of PnP architectures which scale up. This is sort of a USB Lithium battery pack on steroids. If it were modular, you could perhaps make a stack of these for a home's solar storage or electrical backup, with enough juice to power the fridge and a hotplate. Whether power for a home or neighborhood is entirely off-grid, micro-grid, or fully on-grid with backups, it seems that there will never be a way around clean energy storage. The fewer the dials and knobs and inverters, the better the solution is, in my opinion. Another, more hacker-friendly, example of PnP infra on a much (much) larger scale, is the Global Village Construction Set: https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Global_Village_Construction_Set ...their wiki is still active, so I assume the project is still going on. But I also imagine a middle ground between a hard-line "open hardware everything" and an a la carte model which invests in real machines or outsources to get the initial buildings and public infrastructure up and running (if it doesn't already exist in the chosen location). If someone settles on a location and buys some property, I'd rather see them up and running than swimming in molasses to adhere to a platonic ideal. I would consider the fortyfourforty cabin project to be "swimming in molasses" in this very sense, though 4440's nearly-arbitrary platonic ideal is basically "zero recurring costs". On the scale of the home, the big issues are: (1) clean water (2) a place to poop and (3) energy. There are a number of drop-in solutions to water purification but digging or drilling a well is still always a task. As is water testing. Incinerating toilets are certainly a drop-in solution to waste but I doubt anyone would choose to go that route over a normal flush toilet, assuming there's enough space for a septic field. I am curious if anyone knows of other plug-and-play and/or modular infrastructure components, big or small. If someone chooses to set up shop somewhere and finds they're struggling with one of these three main bits of infra, having a drop-in solution to bootstrap themselves is always handy. Take care! -steven [1] It's my intention to lean on this terminology, as an expansion of the Hacker Ethic defined in Steven Levy's book "Hackers", in future posts. I'll try to describe the expansion soon. [2] Is a carrot patch "infrastructure"? You decide.

Arun dropped me a message yesterday mentioning that he has some thoughts but wasn't sure he wanted to post them to the list. His hesitation is that "whoever does the work will end up deciding how it will/should be". (I hope he doesn't mind me quoting him.) I totally agree. It would be pretty naive of us to believe that a mailing list was going to set the direction for construction of a single house, much less an entire village or city. I think the mailing list can serve a few purposes: 1. Brainstorming. Generally, I've been thinking about this stuff for years now, but I mostly think about it in a box by myself. The more I run into other people who are thinking about it, the more I want to have a broader conversation. I'd like to avoid doing the Calvin & Hobbes Design An Ice Castle thing where we fantasize about unrealistic scenarios. But there are always new ideas worth discussing that other people maybe haven't had the time or inclination to explore. For example, Kamal sincerely brought up the idea of standing up a local cellular tower when we were discussing this in Maitri Collective, months back. That's a concept that's never even occurred to me -- I always assumed villages would rely on the same telecom infrastructure as the surrounding towns. 2. Broadcasting. It's hard to keep up with energy storage hardware, radical construction techniques, and air purification systems (as a few random examples) much less sort out the hype machine from functional solutions. I don't want to live in a mud hut crawling with bugs but I'm open to the idea of using local materials if they build a house that will last 50+ years. Maybe someone on the list knows about construction materials that I don't. Or maybe someone's running a local experiment (AQI, water purification, mesh networking, library models, who knows)... here's a place to discuss the results. 3. Connecting. If someone's seriously considering a construction location, here's a place to tell like-minded people and possibly get a couple houses nearby each other. Ragul and Kamal are seriously considering a spot outside of Salem (TN). I'm super excited about the Nilgiris but I hadn't heard of Salem's climate, so that was cool. I'm on the lookout for spots in North India but everything good (so far) seems to be in Himachal or Sikkim... where none of us can legally buy land. If someone kicked something off up there, I'd be tempted to follow. 4. Educating. I've learned some really helpful stuff from my friend Sandy, who built a cabin next to the fortyfourforty.com property in Nova Scotia. He's researched off-grid hardware and construction techniques much more than I have. I'm hoping this can become a pool of resources for people across all sorts of disciplines, not just off-grid plumbing and electricity. YouTube videos about reforestation or ground-breaking books ostensibly about architecture (I'm thinking Alexander, obviously) are just as valuable. Economics are another example: Ragul was shocked when he learned that 20 acres of land in Nova Scotia costs $20,000 (10 lakh rupees). The economics of rural Japan are just as shocking. and the Japanese government is finally opening the borders. 5. Encouragement. Self-doubt plagues all of us and it's easy to file away these ideas as silly and unrealistic. It helps to know other people who are experimenting or even just hearing from folks who think this stuff is cool. Arun is spot on that the list won't determine what actually gets built. It's possible that people on the list will never even meet each other, so it's undesirable (and unrealistic) to expect that we'll construct some sort of manifesto or even a guidebook. Those things might exist in 30 years... but as a reader, I'd hope the author built something herself before putting pen to paper. Initially, the weight of reality (the truth on the ground) will set direction. We still have a gasoline generator at the fortyfourforty.com property because our solar is eaten up by refrigeration. We're still struggling to filter the manganese out of the well water for drinking. Etc. Infrastructur

Leaning on the term "hacker" requires stretching the definition a lot. There are a lot of circular dependencies here, not least of which is figuring out what exactly this mailing list is for. I think it's safe to assume we'd all like to live somewhere that is welcoming to small business owners, artists, scientists, and educators -- none of whom likely identifies with the term "hacker". I'm fond of the "village" suffix, despite the long-term incremental goal of creating cities. As far as our intentions are concerned, we can't really say "let's build a city" because that's not how cities are built. Cities grow organically out of smaller and smaller structures, and it's entirely possible (and perfectly okay) that a {hacker} village might plateau before it even reaches the state of "town" or "small city". You could start smaller -- at the scale of an individual home, say -- but the idea demands some level of collaboration and cooperation or we're just talking about buying a summer house or a retirement home. Anyway, we can reboot or rename the list later (groups.io seems to provide both options). For now, the list subscriptions are moderated, which will hopefully curb Ankur's concerns about "cryptocurrency hacker dudebros" filling the list with unproven techno-garbage. ;) {Hacker} Villages => What would you prefer they be called? -steven

I propose two initial hacker villages: one in North India, one in South India. Land is expensive, infrastructure and construction (the hard part) is cheap. #3 Japan? Canada comes later (cheap land, expensive infra). Europe after that (expensive land, expensive infra). I don't know when South America happens. <3S PS: I'm not assuming any of us will have more than one home, much less five homes.