I went on to install this, but it seems very US centric, which isn't apparent in anything else than the domain name. The maps only cover the US, you can only download English dumps of Wikipedia, etc.
It's not the biggest deal if you're proficient in English, but I wasn't even able to download the full dump of English Wikipedia as their hardcoded link to it just seems to return 404.
The Docker setup leaves much to be desired, as network names are hardcoded, and extension services are expected to be reachable over hardcoded port numbers, making it impossible to run behind a reverse proxy.
Going to give this another go in a couple of years when it has had some more time in the oven, but it still looks very promising!
That is the way of the internet unfortunately. Instead of simply appreciating something, it's important to find a criticism and voice it. That way you're 'adding' to the conversation.
I mean look back at HN classic posts like the initial Dropbox announcement and the classic: this is nothing more than a wrapper over rsync, etc.
Normally I cringe at doomsday preppers but given how many dictators out there love the idea to cut their country off Internet whenever anything starts going not in their favor, I imagine a lot of people may find this useful.
I wouldn’t want to lose access to knowledge how to fix a sink or which medication is better, just because the local kingface currently feels that free exchange of opinions about him threatens his kingship.
I am not a prepper, but I always found immediate dismissal of their stance odd. If you see clouds on the horizon, reasonable people start preparing. Some preparations take longer than others so longer than others. And this does not account for the fact that one the steady lull ( in US and most of Europe ) of the past 70 or so years is not the norm in our world.
Well usually when people refer to someone as a prepper its the specific type of person that is buying hundreds of guns, tons of dehydrated meals but still living on city water - like they're preparing for a disaster movie but not anything real. Specifically the idea that you would be able to stay in place, with all your hoarded disaster crap, during the end of the world is kind of funny.
I don’t think we have a term for people who quietly keep a well stocked pantry, have a water setup, garden, have hobbies like canning, etc. That’s just being a bit rustic/prudent I guess. So then, the “prepper” derogatory label is only applied to the people who do it in the action movie/silly way. But, the question of how prevalent they are is a good one…
Certainly some people probably emulate the Hollywood version, but I think that’s about it.
Most “peppers” are fathers that have had the good sense to pause and think “so, what would I be able to do to serve my family if something disastrous happened? What might that look like?”
Usually, a disaster go-bag of some kind with enough basic supplies to weather a day or two of displacement suspension of normal services. Sometimes, if they live in a place where it’s reasonable to imagine staying put is a good option, they might also have a generator and fuel, a week or two worth of long shelf life food, and some water storage. That ensures the wellbeing of their family will not be contingent on outside help, at least during most common disasters. Many of these people may also have a gun or two, for defense or for hunting if they are rural.
Some people go beyond that, and sometimes with a military focus, other times with months of rations, a bunker, or other unusual preparations. Mostly, those are not based on realistic scenarios. In almost any protracted disruption, having a lot of supplies , armaments, or resources will be as much a liability as an asset. People that buy guns -for prepping- are just living out some kind of hero fantasy. If you own guns, and use guns as part of your normal life, it would make sense to have a solid reserve of ammunition. If guns are your disaster scenario, you’re going to have a bad day.
As an individual or nuclear family, to weather an extended problem, you’d need to have a literal secret underground lair that was either so hard to get to or so well hidden that no one would know, and you’d have to be completely self contained. That’s simply not practical for all but actual billionaires, but people cosplay this to varying degrees. Even billionaires might find ymmv.
A much more practical and wholesome approach is to be part of a community that includes farming, independent sources of power and water, and generally sustainable independence from less robust centralized systems. This provides for basic necessities as well as a common defense. Humans lived in tribes for a reason, and 30 people with well aligned incentives and sustainable infrastructure for food, water, and energy is probably the absolute minimum viable structure for security during a disruption of more than a couple of months. Otherwise you would be dependant on total stealth or extreme isolation. Some neighbourhoods would probably coalesce into something resembling this, but organisation ad-hoc under pressure would probably end up with tensions if not violence.
Projects like this one can be real resources for well organized communities. I’ll probably look at running this on our servers as an additional resource, along with our library.
I agree with you on actual preparedness and getting to know your neighbors.
However, I think the derogatory prepper must exist in some number because you see so many products clearly targeting them. All the tacticool stuff, the buckets of dehydrated food, etc etc
Why is a bucket of dehydrated food specifically targeting the stereotype/strawman you are constructing? Costco sells buckets of dehydrated food, and Costco is what comes to mind when I think middle of the road middle-class America. Do you think it's unreasonable to have a bucket of dehydrated food and enough water to last a week?
As someone who lived through the "Snowpocalypse" in Texas in 2021, had no power for 11 days and no water service for 6 days, I was very thankful that I had a backup source of indoor heating, a couple of boxes of MREs, and clean water for a week as just part of having good disaster preparedness, as well as the mylar emergency blankets I hung by fishing line from my ceiling fans so to help create a warm space for my family. All that stuff is just part of a prudent approach to disaster preparedness that anyone who grew up in the middle of the country and has a house would do.
I know quite a few people who you'd write off as "preppers" that are not consumed with fantasies of a zombie apocalypse, but are instead wanting to ensure that their family is taken care of with basic necessities, vital medication, and a set of viable contingency plans when you lose power, water, etc for days or weeks.
Also, nobody but the very wealthy have "hundreds of guns". Guns are expensive. Guns hold their value. Guns are an asset in some communities. But they are expensive, and therefore even rather serious gun people have tens, but not hundreds. I'm probably more of a gun nut than the average, and I definitely do not have "hundreds of guns". To even store "hundreds of guns" safely (e.g. safe from theft, if not for other reasons) I'd need enough money to build a dedicated room in my house just to hold them. "hundreds of guns" is an armory, not a collection. I'm in the top 1% of wealth in my community in Texas and used to shoot competitively, so I'm more of "gun nut" than average, and I can't even imagine owning "hundreds of guns". That's such an outlandish fantasy strawman you have in your mind, it's nothing close to realistic.
You're really just smearing people with stereotypes in this thread that have no basis in reality, and it's clear you're completely unprepared for the reality of what life is like anywhere in the middle of America, much less in much of the rest of the world.
the specific type of person that is buying hundreds of guns, tons of dehydrated meals
Both of which are available at Wal-Mart.
I always knew about the guns, but only recently discovered that Wal-Mart stores (at least in Louisiana) carry huge buckets with weeks worth of dehydrated survival food.
This is a reductionist view of even the suburban United States IMO. There are plenty of locales in what I'd call 'middle suburbia', which I'd define as less than an hour from whatever their geographical city center is. Even in these areas, multiple day power outages, or other localized or regional disasters have been endemic in the last 25 years; often due to utility or local resource mismanagement.
Take, for example, the 2018 California Camp Fire, the various southern winter flash power outages, or the endemic hurricane season pretty much everywhere exposed to the middle or southern pacific.
"For hurricanes" is a cute way to minimize it, but in much of the country it's rather little that separates you from being left to your own devices, at least for a little while, even when you're just suburban and haven't even looked out to the rural U.S.
There is a real deferred maintenance and resource mismanagement issue in this country. The increasing evidence of "preppers" and items like ration buckets becoming prevalent at bulk store operations like Walmart & Costco are early indications of the increasing prevalence of these issues.
Take a survey of the items that are always available at most Costos or Sam's Clubs across the country and you'll see similar results. They essentially market decentralized infrastructure for those that can afford it (or those who can't afford not to have it).
Say what you will about Mormons, but they take the idea of local stockpiles amazingly seriously. It rises to the point where they subsidize stores selling bulk food product direct to customers, at a scale that otherwise you'd need a Sysco or commercial restaurant license in most places to get access to.
Not required. It's recommended by the church leadership though to have a garden and to have a years supply of food storage if you can. I'm not a Mormon but appreciate it as a good idea.
I live in a country with a functional government with an unlimited creditcard. The prepping is their business not mine.
I remember when Russia invaded we were all supposed to freeze to death- in reality 2.5% of GDP was diverted and it was Bangladesh that didn't get their LNG tankers.
The kind of prepping in "prepper" culture though is bullshit. People living and having actual experience in such dangerous places don't prep like that.
I have lived in places like that, and absolutely prep like that when the environment calls for it. I'd expect a non zero proportion of the HN readership has as well. See: Burning Man, the fanciest refugee camp on Earth, where you need to schedule, plan, haul in, and haul back out again everything you need to survive.
(I've also spent time living in legit BFE where the closest store for something can be more than an hour away, YMMV)
If you think the Burning Man is in any way representative to what people do in places like that (think war torn African states, the Middle East, etc) then...
The most important aspect of Burning Man and why it works is the thing most preppers/American Libertarians ignore: the community.
Burning Man isn't interesting because a bunch of individuals pitch tents in the desert, it's interesting because a society is built in the middle of the desert, spontaneously.
The "preppers" I encounter are on ham radio, and I'd say they are more community conscious then the average person. Many of them work in public services (EMTs and the like) or are retired and formerly did. Most have stocked pantries, gardens are common. Most are willing to help out when there's a power outage or a fire. The anti-social picture that popular culture paints of preparedness-minded people is entirely not true in my experience.
calling someone a prepper is an adhom, just like calling a greenie a tree hugger. just another way to dismiss something that is emotionally confronting so one can continue to feel some comfort in their own bubble.
I feel like fallacies can always be applied to anything because unless you're doing pure math (and even then, tons of caveats - one major one being that you already bought into the framework), you can always question deeper assumptions and yes, structurally it might even fit a fallacy. I mean, is-ought is one of the famous unresolved ones.
Yet we still have arguably correct beliefs in spite of fallacies. That suggests that merely pattern matching isn't a good solution to detect what "truth" is...
Well yes and no. You will always have some have actually prepared; people, and you will have people who cosplay people who are prepared. The latter see buying things that help survival more as a hobby than a thing that needs to get done in order to survive. It is the difference between a hunter who needs a gun as a tool and a gun nut that collects guns because he likes theorizing over minor differences between them online and nerd out about them.
That doesn't mean anybody who does a lot of research online or buys a lot of things is a obsessive hobbyist of course. The difference can at times be hard to tell from the outside, but someone whose first thought when an apocalypse brews on the horizon is to get weapons and turn their home into a bunker, instead of e.g. relying on a strong neighbourhood network and helping others is certainly a specific type of person. The problems that will arise are of the type that will be hard to solve alone. E.g. prep all you can, but what if your family member needs a doctor? Or something is fucked with your electrical system and you need someone.
This is why people make fun of preppers. Not because being prepared is a bad thing (it is not!), but because you get the feeling some of them can hardly wait for the end times to come around so they can test drive their gear.
I mean preppers are mostly cosplayers and I don't criticize people who go to comicon either. If you're not hurting anyone there's nothing wrong with having an unrealistic hobby or one without a lot of practical utility (even if the premise of the hobby is having practical utility).
But the western Roman empire fell and cities depopulated and folks switched back to subsistence farming for hundreds of years.
And plenty of places have been at war and had much of civilization's usefulness diminished from days to decades. Not to mention straightforward natural disasters.
My prepping is limited to buying toilet paper at costco and having bags of beans and rice and such in my pantry and just... knowing how to do things in general.
> But the western Roman empire fell and cities depopulated and folks switched back to subsistence farming for hundreds of years.
> And plenty of places have been at war and had much of civilization's usefulness diminished from days to decades. Not to mention straightforward natural disasters.
The only one of those things someone survived by being an individual prepper is the natural disaster, because in the other cases the government didn't just go away, it was replaced by other groups who could kill any given individual and take their stuff. The only way to survive is to leave and become a refugee or to band together in an even bigger group that can kill all individuals and smaller groups and take all their stuff. This is how you get the Carolingian Empire, Los Zetas, MS-13, the Soviet Union, and the Khmer Rouge.
Individual preppers are living in a fantasy land to the extent they think they can wait out political collapse. They might well be competent enough to wait out a terrible natural disaster, but at that point they aren't "preppers" so much as people who listen to what FEMA and NOAA and other disaster-focused government agencies recommend for their regions.
Many places around the world will have gone through five or six vastly different governments seated in very different locations over the last century or two and during the transition 1) most of the people stayed 2) most of the people had no part in whatever new group held power and 3) there usually wasn't mass slaughter of the people living there during the transition.
You overestimate the importance of government and underestimate how it very much can just go away... and how distant it can be even when it exists, particularly historically. And how the local warlord equivalent isn't going around to everybody's house and murdering them.
And yeah in those times having food and a means of defense and whatever else is useful as often times very very many people had no option but to stay wherever they were. Famine and revolution are much more common and more mundane than you expect.
> I am not a prepper, but I always found immediate dismissal of their stance odd.
I always just assumed that the all-around "prepper" framing was just the market gravitating towards people with cash!
In my conversations with neighbors, people understand preparedness for specific situations well. For example, disaster preparedness – "if the internet goes off, I'd like an LLM to tell me what the best way to stablize X medical emergency". Given the complete long-term erasure of Gaza's educational system, a lot of people also empathize with how useful educational resources would be for children.
In that context, I've assumed people just react against commercialism and the kitchen-sink paradigm of preparedness. (I certainly react against the first, but not the second... but then again I love playing the handyman even in times when things are going well.)
"I don't like people who prepare for the worst, but I now realise I should have prepared for the worst."
Why cringe at something people do privately in their own time that doesn't affect you? Why cringe at people who want to be prepared, even if you think their preparations are misplaced or nonsense? People deserve to be incorrect without being judged.
Often because they keep intruding into hobbies I enjoy with a clear misunderstanding of the space or even a hostility to playing within the rules. Examples include people coming into Meshtastic chats and wondering if a 50W amp will help them talk to their buddy on the other wide of the mountain when civil war breaks out ("no, you'll just be ruining the airwaves for everyone else in the mean time, you still won't have line of sight to your friend, and your radio will look like a spotlight in the dark when the National Guard goes fox hunting"), or which ham radio they buy without a license ("no government's gonna tell me what I can say on the air").
If they'd be doing this in private, I couldn't care less. But in these cases, their actions would actively make my hobby less enjoyable, and I'll judge them for that.
I’ll tell you why.. because the whole thing is commercialized, drives fear and doom into people minds then profits off people’s fears by selling media, merch and so on or spreads misinformation. They’ve been around for a while
Because I want the people around me to be actually prepared. The whole prepper thing is a market targeting a specific kind of man with the fantasy that they are in control when shit hits the fan to the loint some of these men want shit to hit the fan.
In reality far more important than most gear will be a good neighborhood network for example. But that means working on your own character.
In a doomsday scenario one wouldn't need a "rebuild all of civilization" book, but more a "basics like building a fire, filtering water, repairing a car engine, basic wound treatment" and such book. Nobody is going to be building cathedrals, and factories and computers for a good while...
> Nobody is going to be building cathedrals, and factories and computers for a good while...
Interesting mental exercise. It was explored in A Canticle for Leibowitz[0], novel in 3 parts (Fiat homo, fiat lux, fiat voluntas tua), the first set in the immediate post nuclear-war world, second 600 years after towards the end of the new middle ages, and the third 600 later in a typical futuristic scenario. The first part covers the religious efforts to preserve knowledge (even if said knowledge was not understood), and the second in the new renaissance from wielding such knowledge.
I wonder how LLMs, with their mistakes and all, would play a role in rebuilding civilization. Most media these days is not prepared for staying stable for 20 years, not sure how much and for how long it could be preserved. Perhaps mechanical hard drives in certain isolated environments?
Even knowing the broad concepts of Crop Rotation, Germ theory, or Computation, means that you shouldn't take that long to get back to an advanced stage, you probably won't actually get to whatever SOTA you had on those fields for a long time, but knowing where to look is quite significant in cutting wasted time
We did it in a pristine world the first time. The next time we do it in a world stripped of natural resources and easy energy with a collapsing biosphere soaked in poison and radioactive waste.
Not impossible but I doubt we get another Industrial Revolution.
>We did it in a pristine world the first time. The next time we do it in a world stripped of natural resources and easy energy with a collapsing biosphere soaked in poison and radioactive waste.
I mean, there's still quite a number of resources on the surface, plenty just sit there because the ratio of setup cost / profit isn't there
The demand a smaller civilization would have should be quite less significant than what we currently have, so it stands to reason it would make sense for them to use those
I've thought about this. I imagined stuff like "Chapter 1: Sanitation. Things called germs will make you very sick. They live in human and animal poop. That's why you need to built a latrine far away from your water source. Here's how to do it." You don't need to worry about how to mine for ore when you routinely lose neighbors to cholera.
It is telling that in one of the seminal works about accessibility and rural public health, "Where There Is No Doctor", by David Werner, roughly 10% of the book needs to be devoted to wound and general sanitation and exhortations to keep anything sanitation sensitive the hell away from dirt and nightsoil.
Yes though watching that crowd is worthwhile. They often think about things different from mainstream and notice different things so good additional signal even if you ignore it
I am actually only vaguely familiar and I was wondering about that every time I saw the format referenced but never bothered to check, your comment is informative!
I really curious about what the world of archival formats is like - is there consensus? are the most-used formats actually any good and well-supported,and self documenting?
There's a company which sells something like this, as "Prepper Disk".[1]
In the 1950s, US Civil Defense had a set of microfilms on how to rebuild society. These were packaged with a sunlight reader and stored in larger fallout shelters. Someone should find one of those.
I like that it's an SD-card based RPi: something known to fail under completely normal usage
For the margins a $280 MSRP allows you'd think they'd at least try a little bit: maybe hook people up with the RPi Compute Module which has eMMC onboard
FWIW my pi-hole server ran for 2 years and broke 3 SD-cards, and it didn't even have the courtesy to fail fast, it started kinda-failing and DNS requests started taking forever (the pihole had to time out twice before the fallback DNS was called).
Moved to an Actual Computer with a M.2 SSD and zero issues since.
Solar panels and the parts to build a hydro generator, then. A hydro generator would also be good incentive to plan around a reliable water source, without which all bets are off anyway.
Some part of my brain filtered out nuclear winter, which cannot reasonably be prepped for by individuals or small groups. However, that is just one, relatively unlikely, thing to prep for. Most other disasters are shorter-lived, and have a great deal of overlap in effective mitigation strategies. Prepping, in my mind, is not only practically useful for various classes of emergencies, but is good mental exercise for understanding supply chains and what's actually needed in the sort, medium, and long term. It can also be good for sharpening skills that benefit others and build community, which in many ways is more rewarding than knowing that you'll be the sole survivor. Prepping doesn't, and shouldn't, look like Burt from Tremors (as amusing as that may be).
I'm being a bit glib anyway; call it gallows humor to help me process currents events. Even worldwide, long-lasting nuclear winter must passes & settle eventually, and such sunlight-enabled microfiche files could be useful to subsequent generations if not earlier.
Fellow survivor on a bicycle which powers a lightbulb by which you can read the microfiche. Voila.
For anyone who never watched the original Soylent Green movie, it's worth a rewatch because it actually shows a future where people are having to make do without a power grid in cities, by doing things like riding a stationary bike hooked up to a generator to power their TV or radio long enough to get some news.
I mean, there's got to be a spectrum of nuclear winters, just like there's a spectrum of volcanic and impact winters. Assuming a full scale nuclear war, there's still questions of how much of the arsenals actually detonate(as opposed to failures to launch, getting destroyed by other nukes first, etc), how much the fires burn, the time of year impacting fires and dust and the state of the biosphere, and how much the aerosols are limited to the northern vs southern hemisphere.
Think about all the ways you could die from nuclear war + winter. There's some worth avoiding(slow painful death from radiation, moderate burns, trapped in collapsed buildings, etc), and others that you might be willing to delay/prevent in a hope of things getting better(starvation, cancer, civil unrest, etc). There are ways you can reasonably prepare to increases your chances, if you're lucky in the critical moment of nukes dropping, to survive long enough to attempt forming communities and farming again.
Stationary exercise bike, large hobby BLDC motor (or random PMAC motor from some AC appliance) plus some diodes (fullbridgerectifier meme goes here) to rectify the generated voltage. :)
I've looked a few times over the years but can't find it online. National Archives probably has it somewhere, but not indexed where Google can find it.
I come from a time when internet connectivity was not permanent.
It was only available a few times per day when you connected via the phone line. My first ISP gave me an allowance of 20 hours of internet per month.
You would dial-up, check the news, check your email, read a page or two, download what you had to download, and then disconnect.
The internet was very slow by today's standards, and the connection would get lost very often.
It was during that time when it was drilled into my head that the network access comes and goes.
That it should not be taken for granted.
So a lot of the stuff that I use nowadays, I also have in an offline format.
I keep offline docs either in pdf or in html format of most of the programming languages and frameworks that I use.
I keep the source code of various projects that are essential to me.
I keep a local wiki with notes on various things that are useful to me.
Obviously it's not enough for a major catastrophe but it's better than nothing.
I'm by no means a prepper, but I also believe that each of us should be prepared for short term disruptions of various kinds. The network should not be taken for granted.
I love that the Tex Live distribution comes with thousands and thousands of well-written manuals in PDF format; I often end up reading them when on a plane.
I'd love something like Kiwi designed to be like modern online-sharing software like Box etc where it just caches stuff until your drive is mostly full, deleting as necessary.
I travel a lot and do the same. Yes most places have internet. But I don't need much. And it's easier to have an "offline" folder with docs you need compared to carrying around a satellite dish. Also works in an airplane.
Mine contains language, library and game engine docs. Sometimes I back up some sites completely. But it's getting harder to do that as many sites block crawling now.
> have in an offline format. I keep offline docs either in pdf or in html format of most of the programming languages and frameworks that I use. I keep the source code of various projects that are essential to me.
This is such a good idea. Thanks. I'm going to start to do the same.
> I keep a local wiki with notes on various things that are useful
I've been using Zim Wiki for years; back then there was nothing better available and now I can't be bothered to migrate formats. Plus I've already contributed a bunch of plugins to Zim :)
20 hours? My first internet (actually not even internet, it was called eWorld) gave you 4 hours a month… which actually was ok because there wasn’t much to do on it, and you couldn’t go long without someone in your family accidentally picking up the phone anyway, and everyone would be mad if you kept the phone line busy for very long, too.
Yeah, that is normal for me too. If i find any article that i think is interesting i use SingleFile to download a local copy and ytdlp to download any video i find interesting/informational (e.g tutorials/howtos/etc). I avoid cloud-based stuff, preferring to use local/desktop software instead (and 99.9% of it is open source). And when it comes to AI i use local models only - with inference engines written in C++ (to avoid the dependency hell that is Python - which for some reason seems 100x worse when it comes to AI projects too).
And yeah, i have downloaded Wikipedia (in ZIM format) :-P
It isn't really for some doomsday preparation reason, it is just that sometimes the internet doesn't work (it doesn't happen often but it does happen) or i do not have internet access for whatever reason or stuff simply disappears/changes.
In fact just yesterday night i wanted to lookup how something is done in Bash and after trying to search for it, i noticed my Internet wasn't working (it took ~1h to resume, it was quite late in the night). So i just started a local LLM and asked that instead :-P (i do have the info manuals for bash - and other stuff - installed but they are a PITA to search if you don't know exactly what you're looking for).
One thing that annoys me though is that it is basically impossible to have an offline copy of a modern Linux distro. Sometime during the late 2000s i bought the full set of Debian DVDs, but Debian stopped providing ISOs years ago. Of course with how big distros are nowadays you'd probably need something like 100 DVDs :-P. At least there is Slackware.
Well the point of this is to have a distro that contains "everything" (or at least a large number of stuff) since i can't know ahead of time what i'd need.
I think it is still possible to use jigdo to make Bluray disks, but i do not have a bluray drive :-P
I recently re read Walkaway and it made me yearn for an offline-first internet, where every computer is a node, and nodes are constantly refreshing each other's cache when they get the chance (the network works), but otherwise are basically mirroring much of the internet.
I think there’s a difference between doomsday framing and preparedness.
Offline access and local models aren’t about assuming collapse—they’re about treating knowledge as infrastructure instead of something implicitly guaranteed.
They sell pi's with the names PrepperDisk and Doom Box. They probably thought it is funny.
The general Idea of having knowledge backups / offline access is reasonable to me, the doomsday framing is seeding the idea that it's about collapse and that takes away from a something that is generally more useful.
If current frontier online LLMs are made inaccessible due to a local or global cataclysmic event running models locally will be the least of your concerns.
This isn’t prepping for anything it’s cosplaying as a vault dweller.
P.S. Having TED talks as part of the “educational” curriculum of this project is probably the biggest circle jerk imaginable.
There are internet and electricity outages in many places over the world, controlled and uncontrolled. Also natural desasters take out infrastructure at least temporarily.
One "popular" example for those whose horizon doesn't extend over US country borders:
"Hurricane Katrina devastated communications infrastructure across the Gulf Coast, incapacitating telephone service, police and fire dispatch centers, and emergency radio systems. Almost three million customer phone lines were knocked out, telephone switching centers were seriously damaged, and 1,477 cell towers were incapacitated. Most of the radio stations and many television stations in the New Orleans area were knocked off the air. Paul McHale, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense, summarized the damage by stating, “The magnitude of the storm was such that the local communications system wasn’t simply degraded; it was, at least for a period of time, destroyed."
"Our preparedness culture must also emphasize the importance of citizen and community preparedness. […] Thus, citizens and communities can help themselves by becoming more prepared. If every family maintained the resources to live in their homes without electricity and running water for three days, we could allocate more Federal, State, and local response resources to saving lives. Similarly, if every family developed their own emergency preparedness plan, they almost certainly would reduce the demand for outside emergency resources. As the 9/11 Commission Report states, “One clear lesson of September 11 is that individual civilians need to take responsibility for maximizing the probability that they will survive, should disaster strike."
Doomsday may not be the end of the world, but simply living in a country where you're being unjustifiably bombed by a foreign government lead by a delusional sociopath, and so access to information sources becomes limited.
I'm a fan of "civilization in a box" kinds of projects. However the ZIM file format leaves a lot to be desired in 2026. I've been exploring a refreshed, alternative approach: https://github.com/stazelabs/oza
I do think having an LLM as an optional "sidecar" is a useful approach. If you can run a meaningful Ollama instance alongside your content, great!
Even with that setup I have unfortunately had a bad experience just using Qwen2.5-27B. I asked it once to take a large PDF of a book and find and quote all instances which mentioned food. After churning for a long time it eventually gave me several interesting excerpts, only one of which was real and the rest were hallucinations/confabulations.
I hope we can get to the point where even a small distilled model at the 7B-30B level avoids hallucinating.
Found a click or two in looking for storage and other system requirements:
What About Raspberry Pi?
Project NOMAD is designed for more capable hardware to support local AI.
If you're looking for a Raspberry Pi-based solution, check out Internet
in a Box — it's a great lightweight option for basic offline content.
Project NOMAD is for when you want the full experience: GPU-accelerated
AI, comprehensive content libraries, and a professional management
interface.
Sounds like I should look at one of the other options mentioned there and in this thread, assuming their libraries and maps are basically the same. I'd like the “comprehensive content libraries” while travelling or when otherwise away from a reliable connection, perhaps with a useful management interface for easy updates and such when on good connectivity, but just in a format I can click or grep through. While I'm assuming I could just turn off, or otherwise ignore, the LLM side, just not having it in the first place would be more efficient.
Well yeah, but, hypothetically speaking (and just for the sake of pure curiosity) - what about "no sun" scenario, such as nuclear winter or something similar?
Missing a chance to note (or configure for?) installation on a Raspberry Pi --- that'd make an affordable option to leave powered down, but ready to go in an EMI-shield/Faraday Cage.
They specifically state that they’re aiming for a “fatter” model that expects higher-end hardware, and other projects like Internet in a box already target rpi-style devices.
I think there are technically some 3 bit byteshape quants that are aimed specifically at running up to 30B MoEs on the 16GB Pi 5, so it would be possible to do something reasonably fat at very low speeds and extremely short contexts (like 4k maybe). One of those 32 or 64GB Rockchip based boards would do better, but there's rarely usable software to go along with them.
An industrial grade Jetson Thor would probably be the ultimate platform for this if you ignore the money part.
It might be an interesting idea given that the Steam Deck has reasonable amount of RAM/GPU. The main issue for a knowledge base might be the lack of a physical keyboard though.
Not sure how good of an idea a Steam Deck would be for this. If you can't access Wikipedia, I imagine a replacement for its unprotected glass screen would be harder to come by if you drop it.
All in all I think these projects are really great for communities that are unable to get online. There are some nice Linux education distros that would go together well.
If I gonna face an apocalypse, I would choose Panasonic Toughbook 55 with NetBSD + printed manual for OS. I will have an eternity to compile everything they provide in pkg archive from scratch :)
I like this idea! I don't need the LLM bits, and want it to run on an old Android tablet I have lying around. Can anyone recommend similar software where I can get wikipedia / street maps / useful tutorial videos nicely packaged for offline use?
Kiwix has an Android app, that'll do Wikipedia and a bunch of other resources. You can get free offline maps from HERE maps or use something like Open Map from Fdroid that uses Open Street Map.
The ones mentioned in this thread all use Kiwix for off-line wikipedia, OSM for maps, Khan for educational videos. It looks like internet-in-a-box is aimed at working well on low-powered devices, whereas nomad expects beefy hardware and includes local AI. Not sure how WROLPi differs from internet-in-a-box.
Maybe it's like linux distros: all based on the same software, but optimized for different use-cases or preferences.
I mean, technically they use Kolibri for educational videos and exercises. A lot of them do come from Khan Academy, but we do a lot of work to make an offline first education platform, and also bring in a huge swathe of other open educational resources.
i am looking for something like this but for a cheap used phones i can give to kids without internet that has all the books, offline maps, wikipedia and some basic llm. They would have complete environment to explore depending on their curiosity.Is there something like this? otherwise i am thinking of creating my own collection and opensourcing it.
The installation seems a bit cumbersome and unfriendly to non-technical people. If it's self-contained, it ought to be simple and platform agnostic, not tied to Ubuntu or a specific OS. I'll fork this and re-frame it into a SPA with a Tauri path.
I recently watched a video talking about how much censorship there is currently with everything on the internet and how massive web pages and databases of information are just completely evaporating. I am not personally one of those "everything is burning to the ground" people, but it's getting hard to not at least see where those people are coming from, given recent events. Honestly, if you have the space available, getting this is probably not the worst idea ever.
I get the hate on AI for many reasons (hype, resource greediness, threat to civilization, etc), but having a local LLM that could help guide and reason about the data within seems like a win, especially if it's optional.
See I really want this in a simpler format. Like a single file embedded database on my filesystem that I can point a single/or few tools at for my model to use when it needs.
This is really cool. Having offline Wikipedia + local LLMs in a single bundle is a great combo for emergency preparedness. Do you have any benchmarks on how it performs on lower-end hardware? Curious about minimum specs.
You download it and set it up on your local server to never use it again. It's a project for preppers stuck in their own fantasies.
If this project was actually serious about helping people in SHTF scenarios they would be building a neatly organized library of curated resources in a simple, easily parsed format indexed by some lightweight, local search engine. Who the fuck wants to fuck around with a convoluted docker setup just to browse their wikipedia dump? Local LLM? Are they fucking serious? Who would have the hardware and power to run this when the power grid goes down? This thing should be browsable with a file manager and hostable on a raspberry pi. Ideally it would be a zip file with documents and an executable that can be run on your local machine for search. The amount of unnecessary complexity here is ridiculous.
Also maps on a server? What's the point? If you're prepping you want those on paper.
I've used Kiwix to archive Wikipedia articles on an SSD before, and it made me realize how utterly useless Wikipedia is if you don't have a powerful search engine to get you to the pages in the first place.
I quickly came to realize this when I came across similar projects 8 years ago. Moreover, the vast majority of the info is just irrelevant/useless clutter in such contexts. Worse, it's largely in English, so not useful to people elsewhere.
It's not the biggest deal if you're proficient in English, but I wasn't even able to download the full dump of English Wikipedia as their hardcoded link to it just seems to return 404.
The Docker setup leaves much to be desired, as network names are hardcoded, and extension services are expected to be reachable over hardcoded port numbers, making it impossible to run behind a reverse proxy.
Going to give this another go in a couple of years when it has had some more time in the oven, but it still looks very promising!
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