It’s an interesting thought but I think there are better ways to do this than having some external disk. You could download all of WikiPedia, medical articles, etc to a laptop to the same effect. A survivalist book is probably even better since it won’t rely on power.
The product offering of an AI chatbot for when the power goes out made me laugh out loud.
An AI chatbot trained on massive amounts of knowledge about survival, farming, animal husbandry, small scale community management, home building, clothes making, etc would be immensely valuable.
“I have chickens and one has stopped laying eggs and become lethargic. What could be the cause?”
These things are great lookup tools, much better than web search, and being “jpegs for knowledge” you can pack a lot of knowledge into a small device. You have to check the results but having some old fashioned books on hand would help with that, as would some common sense.
I agree about a separate device. A durable laptop and a solar panel to charge it would be best.
A lot of special purpose devices are sold as a way to sell software since people won’t buy software. Sell a software and data bundle containing curated data and apps and such and nobody will buy it, but pair it with some e-waste and they will.
Same goes for a lot of digital assistants and other gadgets. They could just be apps but people don’t buy apps so they have to come bundled with e-waste.
> The product offering of an AI chatbot for when the power goes out made me laugh out loud.
To be fair, the current iteration of this is of course bullshit but imagine this in 10 years when raspberry pi sized devices can easily host AIs that outperform or at least match current best models and has been specifically trained to be an emergency assistant.
Kinda reminds me of the public access defibrillators that talk you through an emergency [0]. I can see an AI Assistant be useful during emergencies.
Stuff like this makes me think about the benefits which developing countries currently have. They have access to such a vast amount of information, like Wikipedia, any book on AA or torrents, YouTube tutorials, free AI chatbots and what not. Yet the social problems like the ones caused through corruption, localized conflicts and wars are so big, that none of this information is of any value. Who's to blame?
I wonder if such a device could be a good counterpoint to cloud services in a business environment. Just as a reaction to the difficulty and cost of compliance when data is online.
It isn’t, actually. Kiwix, IIAB, Rachel, and a custom web interface and search implementation- along with licensed and commissioned content. Kiwix is cool (and a partner of ours) but a Prepper Disk is a lot more than Kiwix.
Interesting how the comments on that article have a few "but I have much older SSDs which I stored unpowered fr over a decade and they're fine"... which is exactly what you'd expect of the MLC or even SLC flash that was common back then.
I think I’d rather have as much of this information as possible in a laminated, ring-bound book with the holes in the pages reinforced. Also the content could be tightly edited and laid out to maximize the amount of information in the book.
Of course that would actually be a lot of work to both write and manufacture, so better to just get something that will be useless the first time it gets wet or power runs out.
The critics seem to forget how much space a traditional encyclopedia takes up. A device like this is ideal for data sharing during a crisis or in closed regimes, assuming electricity and digital devices are available.
Part of the reason I bought a new macbook with a decent amount of ram was that I wanted to make sure I could have a couple of local LLMs available locally just in case for some reason the frontierlabs/other models eventually became restricted.
There are a number of various things you can find, depending on what you're looking for.
Years ago I found a torrent called "The Ark" which is a collection of various other torrents from different sources, and includes all sorts of random data that could be quite useful in a shtf scenario.
It seems unlikely that collapse would ocurr in a sequence conveinient to the use of tech toys for survival. The correct steps and sequence are to read books, practice skills, buy seeds, build off-grid infrastructure. That doesnt mean zero tech, but it's strictly tertiary.
> It seems unlikely that collapse would ocurr in a sequence conveinient to the use of tech toys for survival.
That's a common misunderstanding:
Our 'installed base' of technology / equipment would not disappear or disintegrate in most types of collapse. Your gadgets would keep working just fine (hardware-wise, that is).
What is susceptible to failure: communications (internet, cell networks, electronic payment systems, etc), power grid, logistics chains (supermarket supply, postal services etc), social structures, law & order (riots, looting), 3rd party-provided services, and probably more.
Also: unless a km+ sized meteor hits, truly large-scale collapse is more likely to happen gradually rather than overnight.
So: think power out, internet cut & riots in the street. With off-grid solar, and software (+data) that works offline, you can enjoy your tech toys just fine.
The tricky thing here is the degree to which daily-used tech requires external services to do anything useful.
Readit News
The product offering of an AI chatbot for when the power goes out made me laugh out loud.
“I have chickens and one has stopped laying eggs and become lethargic. What could be the cause?”
These things are great lookup tools, much better than web search, and being “jpegs for knowledge” you can pack a lot of knowledge into a small device. You have to check the results but having some old fashioned books on hand would help with that, as would some common sense.
I agree about a separate device. A durable laptop and a solar panel to charge it would be best.
A lot of special purpose devices are sold as a way to sell software since people won’t buy software. Sell a software and data bundle containing curated data and apps and such and nobody will buy it, but pair it with some e-waste and they will.
Same goes for a lot of digital assistants and other gadgets. They could just be apps but people don’t buy apps so they have to come bundled with e-waste.
Here's an article that argues otherwise, convincingly IMO:
https://buttondown.com/maiht3k/archive/information-literacy-...
To be fair, the current iteration of this is of course bullshit but imagine this in 10 years when raspberry pi sized devices can easily host AIs that outperform or at least match current best models and has been specifically trained to be an emergency assistant.
Kinda reminds me of the public access defibrillators that talk you through an emergency [0]. I can see an AI Assistant be useful during emergencies.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zApKRGDs1sk
Like a phone
https://kiwix.org/en/applications/
Of course that would actually be a lot of work to both write and manufacture, so better to just get something that will be useless the first time it gets wet or power runs out.
Years ago I found a torrent called "The Ark" which is a collection of various other torrents from different sources, and includes all sorts of random data that could be quite useful in a shtf scenario.
At 238GB it's not that large.
That's a common misunderstanding:
Our 'installed base' of technology / equipment would not disappear or disintegrate in most types of collapse. Your gadgets would keep working just fine (hardware-wise, that is).
What is susceptible to failure: communications (internet, cell networks, electronic payment systems, etc), power grid, logistics chains (supermarket supply, postal services etc), social structures, law & order (riots, looting), 3rd party-provided services, and probably more.
Also: unless a km+ sized meteor hits, truly large-scale collapse is more likely to happen gradually rather than overnight.
So: think power out, internet cut & riots in the street. With off-grid solar, and software (+data) that works offline, you can enjoy your tech toys just fine.
The tricky thing here is the degree to which daily-used tech requires external services to do anything useful.
https://www.404media.co/sales-of-hard-drives-prepper-disk-fo...