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Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

projectnomad.us

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Re: Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

#161

Post by theshrike79 »

sgbeal wrote: post #74
BoorishBears wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> I like that it's an SD-card based RPi: something known to fail under completely normal usage FWIW, my pi-hole server has been running 24/7 on a Pi Zero with the same micro-SD card for some 4-odd years.

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.

Re: Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

#162

Post by sippeangelo »

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!

Re: Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

#163

Post by Havoc »

hamstergene wrote: post #54

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…

> Normally I cringe at doomsday preppers

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

Re: Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

#164

Post by zikduruqe »

kstrauser wrote: post #121
nojvek wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a serious “rebuild all of civilization” book? Sounds like a good read.

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.

You might like https://www.howtoinventeverything.com

Re: Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

#165

Post by toofy »

komali2 wrote: post #151
prima-facie wrote: post #59

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 ge…

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.

oh, thanks! you just sparked me to reread this, such a good book.

Re: Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

#166

Post by yk »

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote: post #87
coldtea wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

And we did it all without a manual the first time, so it stands to reason we (or more accurately, our descendants) could figure it out.

Yes, and it took our ancestors 200k years. I would like to give our descendants an head start.

Re: Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

#167

Post by krapp »

coldtea wrote: post #156
krapp wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Well, we did it in an ice age the first time.

Fair enough, but at least the ice was clean.

Re: Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

#168

Post by Yokohiii »

waynerisner wrote: post #25
Yokohiii wrote: post #16

I like the idea of an LLM that acts as a public knowledge base. But that doomsday framing on the site is pretty annoying.

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. That feels more like resilience than pessimism.

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.

Re: Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

#169

Post by expedition32 »

iugtmkbdfil834 wrote: post #69
hamstergene wrote: post #54

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…

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.

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.

Re: Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

#170

Post by synack »

skrtskrt wrote: post #130
adsharma wrote: post #21

So this thing is based on Kiwix, which is based on the ZIM file format. In the meanwhile, wikipedia ships wikidata, which uses RDF dumps (and probably 8x less compressed than it should be). https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Database_download There is room for a third option leveraging commercial columnar database research. https://adsharma.github.io/duckdb-wikidata-compression/

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?

Library of Congress has some well considered recommendations for archival. https://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rfs/TOC.html

For web content they recommend gzipped WARC. This is great for retaining the content, but isn’t easy to search or render.

I do WARC dumps then convert those to ZIM for easier access.

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