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Internet in a Box

internet-in-a-box.org

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141–150 of 263 posts

Re: Internet in a Box

#141

Post by rollcat »

dragonw wrote: post #140

This could be helpful even for people who already have internet access. The internet is full of distractions, and we often end up seeing ads instead of actually learning something. It would be great to create personal collections of useful websites and have a powerful search tool to explore them—without relying on Google and getting sidetracked. Right now, Kiwix’s search function is quite basic and doesn’t work well…

These devices are insanely underpowered for running LMs. We've had pretty decent search long before the current hype wave. Postgres has built-in support for FTS in multiple languages[1]; if you want to get fancy you can maybe throw in a table of common synonyms.

[1]: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/17/textsearch-intro.html

Otherwise agreed.

Re: Internet in a Box

#143

Post by aspenmayer »

yapyap wrote: post #49
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #31

Vaguely interesting, but I am far more interested in actual connective technology. The Commotion "Internet in a Suitcase" project (~2012) was much more up my alley. Is much more the sort of thing I wish that, for example the State Department would still fund. > Commotion relies on several open source projects: OLSR, OpenWrt, OpenBTS, and Serval project. So, mesh, wifi, cellular, and voice technologies, packaged onto…

I think that giving the poor(er) people access to just the information that’s accessible on the internet, like Wikipedia, like Khan academy to learn programming. Is so much more helpful than handing them access to “the internet” as in what the internet is for people in the rich parts of the western world. Sure, we can hand them access to all of the internet and have them scrolling social media till they’re hollow peo…

> Or you give them just the useful parts of the internet.

Implying you (or anyone) knows better what is most useful to someone else isn’t fair to them. What if the sites that are most useful aren’t included in the backup because of blind spots or license/copyright issues?

Saving a single page to view offline is simple enough for me, but many non-technical folks would struggle. A whole site? That is a bit harder. Most people could not do this outside manually crawling the site.

Web archiving tools that are easy to use and allow offline use also have a role to play that other tools can’t fill due to many issues that are outside developers’ ability to change, and putting archiving capabilities in the hands of users directly allows users’ fair use rights to be used to good effect.

Re: Internet in a Box

#145

Post by detaro »

yreg wrote: post #124
audiodude wrote: post #82

Volunteer for Kiwix here ( https://kiwix.org ), we do a lot of offline Wikipedia stuff. I've personally worked on MWOffliner ( https://github.com/openzim/mwoffliner ) which scrapes MediaWikis, primarily Wikipedia. We have apps for basically every platform. Our PWA even supports IE 11! You can use the WP1 tool which I'm the primary maintainer of ( https://wp1.openzim.org/#/selections/user ) to create "selections" whic…

Regarding mwoffliner: Why scrape Wikipedia when you can just download a dump?

If you want to test Mediawiki tooling, wikipedia is good test target, because it uses a lot of the features (unsurprisingly), compared to smaller wikis. (OTOH, the latter often have custom extensions, so it's not quite enough)

Re: Internet in a Box

#146

Post by moffkalast »

flaburgan wrote: post #26

With the crazy news we have those past months, I actually started to wonder what would happen if internet went offline "for real" (let's say, several weeks) here in developed countries. I know we can easily download Wikipedia and Openstreetmap. But what else? And how to share it? I can do a hotspot home, but would my neighbors understand it? I would need some kind of captive portal to tell them when they connect to m…

> easily download Wikipedia and Openstreetmap

Isn't OSM like 2TB to host if you include all tile scales? I guess you could skip the last few where most of the size explosion lies but that doesn't give you much precision.

Re: Internet in a Box

#147

Post by moffkalast »

ericb wrote: post #51
flaburgan wrote: post #26

With the crazy news we have those past months, I actually started to wonder what would happen if internet went offline "for real" (let's say, several weeks) here in developed countries. I know we can easily download Wikipedia and Openstreetmap. But what else? And how to share it? I can do a hotspot home, but would my neighbors understand it? I would need some kind of captive portal to tell them when they connect to m…

I would add an LLM like QwQ-32B to the mix--that has a ton of compressed knowledge embedded in it. I would also store it in a steel Oscar the Grouch style trash can for a cheap faraday cage, which gets you protection from solar flares, and EMP blasts.

Learning things from scratch is really hard too, just a copy of wikipedia gets one absolutely nowhere if you don't know what to search for.

Having something that you can plainly ask how to start that will point you in the right direction and explain the base concepts is worth a lot more, it turns raw data into genuine information. Yes it can be wrong sometimes, but so can human teachers and you can always verify, which is a good skill to practice in general.

Re: Internet in a Box

#148

Post by yreg »

detaro wrote: post #145
yreg wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding mwoffliner: Why scrape Wikipedia when you can just download a dump?

If you want to test Mediawiki tooling, wikipedia is good test target, because it uses a lot of the features (unsurprisingly), compared to smaller wikis. (OTOH, the latter often have custom extensions, so it's not quite enough)

Sure, but I understood the parent as saying that the tool primarily serves for scraping Wikipedia.
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