The box should also contain ChatGPT, so the internet-in-a-box can keep growing and you could have conversations on forums like HN.
Internet in a Box
31–40 of 121 posts
Re: Internet in a Box
#32Imagine an LLM that is trained on public data like the internet archive and it is made available on these boxes without the internet, now we can have almost the entirety of human knowledge accessible on a single box. I know that LLMs sometime hallucinate and practical limits of computation power availability etc. but imagine how quickly we can spread the knowledge. It is almost like the printing press during the rena…
LLMs are not magic. If wikipedia takes up 100GB of space and your model trained on it is only 5GB big, there is NO WAY it will hold all the original information.
NNCP, a state-of-the-art lossless text compressor based on a transformer neural network (i.e. containing similar structures to a LLM), can reach a compression ratio of 10.8% (0.867 bits per byte) on Wikipedia text: https://bellard.org/nncp/
Compared to NNCP, a hypothetical LLM that "knows" every fact in the English Wikipedia, would not need to keep a lossless record of the entire text of Wikipedia, since many Wikipedia pages repeat facts that also occur on other pages, and instead of reproducing every word it would be enough to paraphrase the ideas. Thus the size of such a LLM could be much smaller than 10% of the size of Wikipedia. How much, it's hard to say...
Re: Internet in a Box
#33You arrive at the village. You've been separated from your family and you are desperate to get some kind of Internet access so that you can try to get in touch with them. Your phone still has 20% battery but no reception. You finally find a Wi-Fi hotspot! You connect... and it turns out to be one of these things instead of the real deal.
Either use gsm or ask the locals to relay a message via radio?
Re: Internet in a Box
#34You arrive at the village. You've been separated from your family and you are desperate to get some kind of Internet access so that you can try to get in touch with them. Your phone still has 20% battery but no reception. You finally find a Wi-Fi hotspot! You connect... and it turns out to be one of these things instead of the real deal.
Just wondering aloud: once a region has a number of villages with these services going well, perhaps a low bandwidth mesh network between them would allow a slow messaging service like email to exist?
Re: Internet in a Box
#35It would be great if it had some "snail mail" like features: collect "sent" emails and "posted" posts, and synchronize them with real internet on regular intervals, probably on monthly basis.
Re: Internet in a Box
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know this will get absolutely smashed but is this such a bad thing anymore ? If you can’t connect to the internet you’re immediately protected from a lot of garbage information, attention hijacking, scams and hacking, child grooming, IP theft, you’re job is probably a lot more secure etc. I know there is access to information which is beneficial but at some stage I’m not convinced having internet access will necess…
Thanks, I think we need to discuss this too. I don't believe we can wish the internet away, but we're still in internet infancy, the "wild west" of plugged in, always online, life. Regulators need to catch up, but at the moment they seem to miss the point, mainly trying to cash in and serve their own narrow interests. We likely need a movement that promotes a healthier use of the tech, which could include things like…
Actually, such local "internet in the box" as per the linked article might prove to be a basis for one such "anti-internet" solution: detach from the internet as a whole and enable local communication, resources and traffic only.
Every prepper should really have one!
Re: Internet in a Box
#37This is a fantastic project, and we need more of those. Let's keep in mind that 50% of the world's population did not connect to the internet in the last three months (last un UN starts). On my end, I worked on an Android version since getting & maintaining a Raspberry Pi or a Linux machine is difficult in remote communities - where finding reliable access to a network or electricity can be tricky. Still, you will se…
Very cool idea!
How this project funded? Do you plan to make enough money selling boxes to support development or rely on donations?
Kinda wondering if you'd consider the org a social enterprise.
Btw your site doesn't redirect to https, not sure if that's intentional.
Re: Internet in a Box
#38I really don't get it. Many of these countries don't even have the resources for clean water, sewage, and reliable agriculture. The idea that they're going to just think their way out of poverty is a very western idea that comes from quite a privileged background. You're not going to be able to do any of that luxurious learning when your stomach is empty and you're having to sleep each night in some war-torn slum. These countries need a lot of basic things before getting them online will have any real impact... Some of the poorest countries don't even have stable governments.
I think most idealist people here would be utterly crushed by how bad the situation is in some countries. Going in with ideas of how tech will be used to raise everyone up... Then having to live in camps with armed guards outside because there's frequent raids... No way to even get supplies in because corrupt beaurocrats keep asking for bribes. The same beaurocrats who are supposed to be on the side of their country are also massively part of the problem. Then you end up realizing that there's so many problems and inter-dependencies that it's not clear if any single person can do anything positive.
All aboard the FEEL TRAIN. Yeah, its hard, I wish I knew the answer.
Re: Internet in a Box
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure this is true. Lossless compression algorithms exist, and HTML compresses almost absurdly well. A 20x compression rate would be quite impressive, but I don't think it's impossible, since 10x compression is fairly common in this domain, and there are reasons to expect wikipedia to compress even better given the significant amount of markup on each page. I've worked with cleaning up rendered wikipedia texts…
That is not the point. There is a physical limit of how much you can compress stuff. If your LLM is significantly smaller than even the most optimized compression we can achieve, then it simply doesn't actually preserve all the information
Indeed, if the theoretical limit to compress wikipedia is n GB, then you will need n GB at least to create the exact same copy of wikipedia. However you may create a jpg of it. (And you can then remove the artifacts, and even enhance it with AI, and you will get something better than the original wikipedia, to keep the image analogy.)
Re: Internet in a Box
#40This is a fantastic project, and we need more of those. Let's keep in mind that 50% of the world's population did not connect to the internet in the last three months (last un UN starts). On my end, I worked on an Android version since getting & maintaining a Raspberry Pi or a Linux machine is difficult in remote communities - where finding reliable access to a network or electricity can be tricky. Still, you will se…
Years ago I worked with a project that used eGranary and FabFi mesh networking:
https://widernet-egranary.org/?page_id=5
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FabFi
We were trying to bring Wifi and digital content to some struggling communities.