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 kingship.
The doomsday preppers with a scarcity mindset and a bunker full of tin cans and military surplus make for good TV, but plenty of "preppers" don't look like that.
They also have a well-stocked pantry but focus more on strengthening the community to absorb shocks. Things like mutual aid networks, skill sharing, tool libraries, noodling with GMRS/HAM/LoRa comms, going on camping trips, helping each other out with kitchen gardens, and general community resilience. This approach doesn't cover every disaster scenario but it seems like a more pleasant (and realistic) option for the ones it does cover. And if nothing truly bad happens then at least they got to spend time doing things like gardening with their neighbors.
Being able to have offline Wikipedia, maps, and educational tools would be useful in either case but potentially even more so as a community resource because there are only so many skills each individual can learn.
OK steelmanning you, certainly a lot of them are way more interested in gun collecting and making beef jerky than other aspects.
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.
Certainly some people probably emulate the Hollywood version, but I think that’s about it.
Most “peppers” are fathers that have had the good sense to pause and think “so, what would I be able to do to serve my family if something disastrous happened? What might that look like?”
Usually, a disaster go-bag of some kind with enough basic supplies to weather a day or two of displacement suspension of normal services. Sometimes, if they live in a place where it’s reasonable to imagine staying put is a good option, they might also have a generator and fuel, a week or two worth of long shelf life food, and some water storage. That ensures the wellbeing of their family will not be contingent on outside help, at least during most common disasters. Many of these people may also have a gun or two, for defense or for hunting if they are rural.
Some people go beyond that, and sometimes with a military focus, other times with months of rations, a bunker, or other unusual preparations. Mostly, those are not based on realistic scenarios. In almost any protracted disruption, having a lot of supplies , armaments, or resources will be as much a liability as an asset. People that buy guns -for prepping- are just living out some kind of hero fantasy. If you own guns, and use guns as part of your normal life, it would make sense to have a solid reserve of ammunition. If guns are your disaster scenario, you’re going to have a bad day.
As an individual or nuclear family, to weather an extended problem, you’d need to have a literal secret underground lair that was either so hard to get to or so well hidden that no one would know, and you’d have to be completely self contained. That’s simply not practical for all but actual billionaires, but people cosplay this to varying degrees. Even billionaires might find ymmv.
A much more practical and wholesome approach is to be part of a community that includes farming, independent sources of power and water, and generally sustainable independence from less robust centralized systems. This provides for basic necessities as well as a common defense. Humans lived in tribes for a reason, and 30 people with well aligned incentives and sustainable infrastructure for food, water, and energy is probably the absolute minimum viable structure for security during a disruption of more than a couple of months. Otherwise you would be dependant on total stealth or extreme isolation. Some neighbourhoods would probably coalesce into something resembling this, but organisation ad-hoc under pressure would probably end up with tensions if not violence.
Projects like this one can be real resources for well organized communities. I’ll probably look at running this on our servers as an additional resource, along with our library.
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.
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.
My prepping is limited to buying toilet paper at costco and having bags of beans and rice and such in my pantry and just... knowing how to do things in general.
> 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.
That doesn't mean anybody who does a lot of research online or buys a lot of things is a obsessive hobbyist of course. The difference can at times be hard to tell from the outside, but someone whose first thought when an apocalypse brews on the horizon is to get weapons and turn their home into a bunker, instead of e.g. relying on a strong neighbourhood network and helping others is certainly a specific type of person. The problems that will arise are of the type that will be hard to solve alone. E.g. prep all you can, but what if your family member needs a doctor? Or something is fucked with your electrical system and you need someone.
This is why people make fun of preppers. Not because being prepared is a bad thing (it is not!), but because you get the feeling some of them can hardly wait for the end times to come around so they can test drive their gear.
(I've also spent time living in legit BFE where the closest store for something can be more than an hour away, YMMV)
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.)
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. :)
It has everything from building houses to boats to making moonshine and medicine in it. Amazing stuff.
Sounds like a good read.
https://a.co/d/0ieNUmhB (Not a referral link)
Why cringe at something people do privately in their own time that doesn't affect you? Why cringe at people who want to be prepared, even if you think their preparations are misplaced or nonsense? People deserve to be incorrect without being judged.
If they'd be doing this in private, I couldn't care less. But in these cases, their actions would actively make my hobby less enjoyable, and I'll judge them for that.
In reality far more important than most gear will be a good neighborhood network for example. But that means working on your own character.
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
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.
ZIM uses zstd so it is pretty compressed--but the thing that takes a lot of room is actually the full-text search index built in to each ZIM file.
Unfortunately the UI of kiwix-serve search doesn't take full advantage of this and the search experience kinda sucks...
Have you done anything useful with RDF? Seems like it is just one of those things universities spend money on and it doesn't really do anything
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.
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!
> "Military"-looking font
This is larping as a prepper, not anything more.
> > "Military"-looking font
> This is larping as a prepper
Preppers are often not "military"-type people, but rather distrusting of authorities (which is related to why the prep), including militaries.
I mean look back at HN classic posts like the initial Dropbox announcement and the classic: this is nothing more than a wrapper over rsync, etc.
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.
Mine contains language, library and game engine docs. Sometimes I back up some sites completely. But it's getting harder to do that as many sites block crawling now.
This is such a good idea. Thanks. I'm going to start to do the same.
> I keep a local wiki with notes on various things that are useful
Can you recommend a good wiki software?
I've been using Zim Wiki for years; back then there was nothing better available and now I can't be bothered to migrate formats. Plus I've already contributed a bunch of plugins to Zim :)
And yeah, i have downloaded Wikipedia (in ZIM format) :-P
It isn't really for some doomsday preparation reason, it is just that sometimes the internet doesn't work (it doesn't happen often but it does happen) or i do not have internet access for whatever reason or stuff simply disappears/changes.
In fact just yesterday night i wanted to lookup how something is done in Bash and after trying to search for it, i noticed my Internet wasn't working (it took ~1h to resume, it was quite late in the night). So i just started a local LLM and asked that instead :-P (i do have the info manuals for bash - and other stuff - installed but they are a PITA to search if you don't know exactly what you're looking for).
One thing that annoys me though is that it is basically impossible to have an offline copy of a modern Linux distro. Sometime during the late 2000s i bought the full set of Debian DVDs, but Debian stopped providing ISOs years ago. Of course with how big distros are nowadays you'd probably need something like 100 DVDs :-P. At least there is Slackware.
Not very usable to run current day stuff, but you have both netsurf, a video player, audio players, a PS/EPUB/PDF/image viewer, doc/xls readers to TXT (and converters) and Unix tools and games among 8/16 bit emulators.
With a bit of thinkering it can do a lot, look at the plan9 desktop page with 9front.
There's a Golang port too, and the AWK guide can be a godsend.
This is not for anuclear winter but maybe for an internet outage, which can be a real threat.
I think it is still possible to use jigdo to make Bluray disks, but i do not have a bluray drive :-P
In the 1950s, US Civil Defense had a set of microfilms on how to rebuild society. These were packaged with a sunlight reader and stored in larger fallout shelters. Someone should find one of those.
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
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.
Moved to an Actual Computer with a M.2 SSD and zero issues since.
They mentioned it in their video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_wt-2P-WBk&t=350
While we're on that, for how long will water sources remain in liquid phase?
Think about all the ways you could die from nuclear war + winter. There's some worth avoiding(slow painful death from radiation, moderate burns, trapped in collapsed buildings, etc), and others that you might be willing to delay/prevent in a hope of things getting better(starvation, cancer, civil unrest, etc). There are ways you can reasonably prepare to increases your chances, if you're lucky in the critical moment of nukes dropping, to survive long enough to attempt forming communities and farming again.
I do think having an LLM as an optional "sidecar" is a useful approach. If you can run a meaningful Ollama instance alongside your content, great!
The durable asset is the knowledge base itself. A local model can be useful on top, but it should stay a layer, not become the dependency.
I hope we can get to the point where even a small distilled model at the 7B-30B level avoids hallucinating.
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.
This isn’t prepping for anything it’s cosplaying as a vault dweller.
P.S. Having TED talks as part of the “educational” curriculum of this project is probably the biggest circle jerk imaginable.
One "popular" example for those whose horizon doesn't extend over US country borders:
"Hurricane Katrina devastated communications infrastructure across the Gulf Coast, incapacitating telephone service, police and fire dispatch centers, and emergency radio systems. Almost three million customer phone lines were knocked out, telephone switching centers were seriously damaged, and 1,477 cell towers were incapacitated. Most of the radio stations and many television stations in the New Orleans area were knocked off the air. Paul McHale, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense, summarized the damage by stating, “The magnitude of the storm was such that the local communications system wasn’t simply degraded; it was, at least for a period of time, destroyed."
https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/reports/katrina-...
"Our preparedness culture must also emphasize the importance of citizen and community preparedness. […] Thus, citizens and communities can help themselves by becoming more prepared. If every family maintained the resources to live in their homes without electricity and running water for three days, we could allocate more Federal, State, and local response resources to saving lives. Similarly, if every family developed their own emergency preparedness plan, they almost certainly would reduce the demand for outside emergency resources. As the 9/11 Commission Report states, “One clear lesson of September 11 is that individual civilians need to take responsibility for maximizing the probability that they will survive, should disaster strike."
https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/reports/katrina-...
AlexNet -> Tansformers -> ChatGPT -> Claude Code -> Small LMs serving KBs
Large LLMs could have a role in efficiently producing such KBs.
What About Raspberry Pi?
Project NOMAD is designed for more capable hardware to support local AI.
If you're looking for a Raspberry Pi-based solution, check out Internet
in a Box — it's a great lightweight option for basic offline content.
Project NOMAD is for when you want the full experience: GPU-accelerated
AI, comprehensive content libraries, and a professional management
interface.
An industrial grade Jetson Thor would probably be the ultimate platform for this if you ignore the money part.
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
Maybe it's like linux distros: all based on the same software, but optimized for different use-cases or preferences.
Thank you for sharing
I was planning to build my own offline repository, but will check out this repo.
>What is Project N.O.M.A.D.? Node for Offline Media, Archives, and Data
That's the first header, and the first sentence of the first paragraph, and I'm confused.
To "go offline" means for something to become inaccessible that was once accessible "online". ("Offline" is an adverb.)
Meanwhile, an "offline" thing is one which is usable even without ever being "online". ("Offline" is an adjective.)
So it becomes:
> "Knowledge That Never [Becomes Inaccessible]"
> "Node for [Accessible-Without-Connection] Media, Archives, and Data"
But definitely confusing to put them right next to each other like that. You'd think a copyeditor would flag it or something.
>Knowledge That Never Goes Offline
Means
>Knowledge That Never becomes inaccessible to you
While the next offline means you can access it even if you don't have access to a wider network.
At least that's how I would read it.
whatever I think might be useful later, I capture through the web clipper extension. [0]
- 200 line BASH script: https://github.com/Sub-SH/Beacon
- 17k lines of Ansible YAML https://github.com/iiab/iiab
If this project was actually serious about helping people in SHTF scenarios they would be building a neatly organized library of curated resources in a simple, easily parsed format indexed by some lightweight, local search engine. Who the fuck wants to fuck around with a convoluted docker setup just to browse their wikipedia dump? Local LLM? Are they fucking serious? Who would have the hardware and power to run this when the power grid goes down? This thing should be browsable with a file manager and hostable on a raspberry pi. Ideally it would be a zip file with documents and an executable that can be run on your local machine for search. The amount of unnecessary complexity here is ridiculous.
Also maps on a server? What's the point? If you're prepping you want those on paper.