Ask HN: What would you work on without internet access?

I think this is fantastic advice, but only up to a point. Unplugging regularly to recharge is so important, but the length and percentage of time matters. OP might spend 80% of their time in parts of the world without internet, for weeks or months at a time. In that context, I don’t think this advice applies in the same way that it would for someone who spends a day or two offline every other month.

I have been using Go recently, and I do almost all my development with it offline. The docs are included and you can run a local doc server so everything you need to look up is as close as localhost:6060. It's also an ecosystem that encourages building on the standard library, unlike some other popular languages I could mention. I absolutely love the productivity and focus that this setup allows.

I also have a ~/research directory full of academic papers, saved copies of web pages, for anything I want to implement or play with. When I don't feel like programming, there's plenty waiting for me to read, rather than needing to get online and probably distract myself.

There's something very satisfying about being able to sit down and do productive work with what you have locally, and not needing to worry about losing productivity because the coffee shop wifi dropped out.

On the other hand, unplugging in general is good for us and I agree with the other commenters' encouragements to get out in nature or talk to people face to face. If I'm on a train or plane, I'd much rather put my laptop away and engage with what's around me.

Constant access to computing systems and networks is very new, and we know it is changing us, but we don't have the perspective to know how. The precautionary principle suggests we should spend as much time away from these systems as possible, especially for those of us who make our livings with them.

Totally forgot about images. I just dug little further and found this:

"The size of the media files in Wikimedia Commons, which includes the images, videos and other media used across all the language-specific Wikipedias was described as well over 23 TB near the end of 2014"

Considering 30 TB hdd costs around 1500$, still interesting.

Whenever my internet goes out I start tinkering on random things that almost immediately require internet searches to make progress. I also seem to forget the internet is out and continually open up search windows for all the new exciting things I'm working on.

Not an expert in C, but there's definitely a refreshing feel of purity about something old and "sharp", that is powerfully entrenched in the UNIX ecosystem but can also be dangerous and bite you.