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Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

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Re: Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

#121

Post by kstrauser »

nojvek wrote: post #71
brightball wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stuff like this is why I keep a small library at my house. Full encyclopedia set, Merck Manual, home repair book, etc. May never use them, but I like having them. Facebook ads even successfully targeted me for that “how to rebuild all of civilization” book. :)

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.

Re: Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

#122

Post by desireco42 »

dryarzeg wrote: post #101
desireco42 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solar cells work no matter what, I agree that maybe less processing is more useful but LLM is uniqely useful as well

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?

There is a point where you have bigger problems then your smartphone or laptop

Re: Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

#123

Post by msla »

colechristensen wrote: post #78
iugtmkbdfil834 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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…

> 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.

Re: Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

#124

Post by myself248 »

kgeist wrote: post #10
myself248 wrote: post #3

See also: https://internet-in-a-box.org/ https://wrolpi.org/

Also https://kiwix.org/en/about/ I used it on a long train trip. There was no internet due to drone attacks, and with Kiwix I could browse pre-downloaded Wikis

Kiwix is one component of all of the above.

Re: Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

#125

Post by bombcar »

reaperducer wrote: post #107
jmuguy wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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. I'm sure it's for hurricanes. Yeah, that's it.

Costco sells those, too.

https://www.costco.com/p/-/mountain-house-1-year-emergency-f...

Sometimes they even appear in stores.

Apparently Mormons are required to keep some amount of emergency food on site.

Re: Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

#126

Post by bombcar »

atoav wrote: post #108
globalnode wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Every peppers' dream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeSd1GoUW-M

Re: Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

#127

Post by bombcar »

Animats wrote: post #92
Infernal wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m searching for the source material here but must not be using the right keywords, any hints?

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.

Is it present in "The Ark"? It's 290GB of stuff and might have it, or the component parts.

Re: Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

#128

Post by bombcar »

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 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.

Re: Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

#129

Post by MrDrMcCoy »

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.

That's likely with constant power and low writes. If either of those flip for long enough, bye bye flash.

Re: Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

#130

Post by skrtskrt »

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?
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