Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline • Hacker News Board

Re: Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

#141

Post by vetrom » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 5:30 AM UTC

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.

It is telling that in one of the seminal works about accessibility and rural public health, "Where There Is No Doctor", by David Werner, roughly 10% of the book needs to be devoted to wound and general sanitation and exhortations to keep anything sanitation sensitive the hell away from dirt and nightsoil.

Re: Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

#142

Post by ricksunny » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 5:52 AM UTC

MrDrMcCoy wrote: post #132

ricksunny wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

joke’s on the survivors who have to go find sunlight in nuclear winter

Solar panels and the parts to build a hydro generator, then. A hydro generator would also be good incentive to plan around a reliable water source, without which all bets are off anyway.

Oh do you mean a water source replenished by the hydrologic cycle, powered by (checks notes) the __?

While we're on that, for how long will water sources remain in liquid phase?

Re: Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

#143

Post by pdyc » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 6:16 AM UTC

i am looking for something like this but for a cheap used phones i can give to kids without internet that has all the books, offline maps, wikipedia and some basic llm. They would have complete environment to explore depending on their curiosity.Is there something like this? otherwise i am thinking of creating my own collection and opensourcing it.

Re: Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

#144

Post by MrDrMcCoy » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 6:20 AM UTC

ricksunny wrote: post #142

MrDrMcCoy wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solar panels and the parts to build a hydro generator, then. A hydro generator would also be good incentive to plan around a reliable water source, without which all bets are off anyway.

Oh do you mean a water source replenished by the hydrologic cycle, powered by (checks notes) the __? While we're on that, for how long will water sources remain in liquid phase?

Some part of my brain filtered out nuclear winter, which cannot reasonably be prepped for by individuals or small groups. However, that is just one, relatively unlikely, thing to prep for. Most other disasters are shorter-lived, and have a great deal of overlap in effective mitigation strategies. Prepping, in my mind, is not only practically useful for various classes of emergencies, but is good mental exercise for understanding supply chains and what's actually needed in the sort, medium, and long term. It can also be good for sharpening skills that benefit others and build community, which in many ways is more rewarding than knowing that you'll be the sole survivor. Prepping doesn't, and shouldn't, look like Burt from Tremors (as amusing as that may be).

Re: Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

#145

Post by badsectoracula » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 6:21 AM UTC

canpan wrote: post #91

badsectoracula wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that is normal for me too. If i find any article that i think is interesting i use SingleFile to download a local copy and ytdlp to download any video i find interesting/informational (e.g tutorials/howtos/etc). I avoid cloud-based stuff, preferring to use local/desktop software instead (and 99.9% of it is open source). And when it comes to AI i use local models only - with inference engines written in C++ (to…

For your linux distro needs, debian still provides the base iso and you can make a second disk with packages you need and apt-offline.

Well the point of this is to have a distro that contains "everything" (or at least a large number of stuff) since i can't know ahead of time what i'd need.

I think it is still possible to use jigdo to make Bluray disks, but i do not have a bluray drive :-P

Re: Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

#146

Post by armenarmen » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 6:21 AM UTC

bee_rider wrote: post #113

wisty wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know of any preppers who buy guns and rations but don't have a plan for water? OK steelmanning you, certainly a lot of them are way more interested in gun collecting and making beef jerky than other aspects.

I don’t think we have a term for people who quietly keep a well stocked pantry, have a water setup, garden, have hobbies like canning, etc. That’s just being a bit rustic/prudent I guess. So then, the “prepper” derogatory label is only applied to the people who do it in the action movie/silly way. But, the question of how prevalent they are is a good one…

Mormons?

Re: Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

#147

Post by nxobject » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 6:36 AM UTC

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 am not a prepper, but I always found immediate dismissal of their stance odd.

I always just assumed that the all-around "prepper" framing was just the market gravitating towards people with cash!

In my conversations with neighbors, people understand preparedness for specific situations well. For example, disaster preparedness – "if the internet goes off, I'd like an LLM to tell me what the best way to stablize X medical emergency". Given the complete long-term erasure of Gaza's educational system, a lot of people also empathize with how useful educational resources would be for children.

In that context, I've assumed people just react against commercialism and the kitchen-sink paradigm of preparedness. (I certainly react against the first, but not the second... but then again I love playing the handyman even in times when things are going well.)

Re: Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

#148

Post by komali2 » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 6:37 AM UTC

vetrom wrote: post #139

coldtea wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The kind of prepping in "prepper" culture though is bullshit. People living and having actual experience in such dangerous places don't prep like that.

I have lived in places like that, and absolutely prep like that when the environment calls for it. I'd expect a non zero proportion of the HN readership has as well. See: Burning Man, the fanciest refugee camp on Earth, where you need to schedule, plan, haul in, and haul back out again everything you need to survive. (I've also spent time living in legit BFE where the closest store for something can be more than an h…

The most important aspect of Burning Man and why it works is the thing most preppers/American Libertarians ignore: the community.

Burning Man isn't interesting because a bunch of individuals pitch tents in the desert, it's interesting because a society is built in the middle of the desert, spontaneously.

Re: Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

#149

Post by komali2 » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 6:41 AM UTC

mememememememo wrote: post #109

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What so we gotta go through the middle ages again :(

Not necessarily, basically the majority of our technology is the result of a very, very brief period of innovation.

So long as we don't forget that it's important to wash our hands and clean out wounds with soap, we're already centuries out of the middle ages.

Re: Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

#150

Post by ricksunny » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 6:43 AM UTC

MrDrMcCoy wrote: post #144

ricksunny wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh do you mean a water source replenished by the hydrologic cycle, powered by (checks notes) the __? While we're on that, for how long will water sources remain in liquid phase?

Some part of my brain filtered out nuclear winter, which cannot reasonably be prepped for by individuals or small groups. However, that is just one, relatively unlikely, thing to prep for. Most other disasters are shorter-lived, and have a great deal of overlap in effective mitigation strategies. Prepping, in my mind, is not only practically useful for various classes of emergencies, but is good mental exercise for u…

I'm being a bit glib anyway; call it gallows humor to help me process currents events. Even worldwide, long-lasting nuclear winter must passes & settle eventually, and such sunlight-enabled microfiche files could be useful to subsequent generations if not earlier.