Comment by kookamamie
11 hours ago
It is still unclear to me what the author wants to build. The story is cool to the level hippies-on-a-boat can be, but I'm unsure of its message, apart from software requiring internet can be tricky while at seas.
11 hours ago
It is still unclear to me what the author wants to build. The story is cool to the level hippies-on-a-boat can be, but I'm unsure of its message, apart from software requiring internet can be tricky while at seas.
> but I'm unsure of its message
My takeaway:
Modern software stacks are usually cloud-dependent, and much bigger and more complex than they need to be, especially for offline, low-bandwidth, or low computing power use cases.
Small, simple, useful software can be written for these use cases and has ownership and longevity benefits.
Not a groundbreaking message, but a true one. And brought home by their interesting cirumstances.
s/want/have built: https://100r.co/site/uxn.html
They're building games, interactive fiction and music software, for example. Famously they've invented a rather portable platform for software development that is more like a Commodore 64 or Amiga than MICROS~1 Visual Studio.
Yeah. I'm skeptical that software made for 2 people on a boat in international waters is going to generalize to people living on land under the ongoing American situation
It's good for them, but the only person I know who owns a boat is richer than me, and I'm already richer than basically all my friends
The vast majority of people living on boats are very, very broke. You can buy an old sailboat for about the price of a second-hand car, fix it up yourself, set sail, and now you don't pay rent/mortgage/utilities...
(source: I grew up on such a sailboat, and we were broke as shit)
I agree with your first paragraph, but there are lots of basically-broke people who live on boats
Old sailboats can be had for practically (and in many cases actually) nothing. If you’re reasonably handy and willing to learn you can do all the maintenance they require yourself
Boats can be some of the cheapest housing there is, even more so if you want to live somewhere picturesque
(There are, of course, significant downsides)
I've met people who live on boats, they work odd jobs to buy scrap parts to fix their boats themselves and eat mostly fish that they catch. Just like travelling in general, you can basically do it on nothing if you wish.
I'm sorry but no this is fantasy, unless you plan on everything failing in under decade to actually look after your boat takes money. Even salvaging a boat that's sunk can be very expensive.
For example, a through-hull needs replacing. Sure you could find a secondhand one that fits, but you still need to have it hauled out to replace.
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They thoroughly document their lives, you could just go check whether this skepticism is warranted.
Very often people doing this kind of thing neglect to mention a significant safety net (e.g. parental wealth) that radically changes the kind of things you can do even when you never touch it.
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These people seem to treat it as hipster bs art and not a means to actually get work done. For real work I'd say the solution is still the same, use tech that doesn't change every week and avoid needing internet for installation such as a package repo we know won't exist a few years later.