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 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.
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.
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.
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…
Well, we did have a term for it until it got dragged and sensationalized in the media. I'd tell you that's a standard "psyop" that the propaganda arm of the government often uses against communities and subcultures that they want to discredit and suppress for one reason or another but then you'd probably call me a conspiracy theorist[1].
[1] another example of a successful smear campaign
Mormons have a widespread cultural practice of prepping, which I understand is mostly the sensible kind where you keep stocks of food and water onhand in case of a natural disaster (rather than the generally-less-sensible rifle militia LARPing). This is something that the institutional Church of Latter-Day Saints encourages among its members, and it strikes me as a pretty good thing to do. Nonetheless, there's no reason why you need to accept the other religious tenets of the LDS church in order to do sensible emergency preparedness, and I'm not sure that not every Mormon community or household is equally diligent about preparedness.
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.
This is a reductionist view of even the suburban United States IMO. There are plenty of locales in what I'd call 'middle suburbia', which I'd define as less than an hour from whatever their geographical city center is. Even in these areas, multiple day power outages, or other localized or regional disasters have been endemic in the last 25 years; often due to utility or local resource mismanagement.
Take, for example, the 2018 California Camp Fire, the various southern winter flash power outages, or the endemic hurricane season pretty much everywhere exposed to the middle or southern pacific.
"For hurricanes" is a cute way to minimize it, but in much of the country it's rather little that separates you from being left to your own devices, at least for a little while, even when you're just suburban and haven't even looked out to the rural U.S.
There is a real deferred maintenance and resource mismanagement issue in this country. The increasing evidence of "preppers" and items like ration buckets becoming prevalent at bulk store operations like Walmart & Costco are early indications of the increasing prevalence of these issues.
Take a survey of the items that are always available at most Costos or Sam's Clubs across the country and you'll see similar results. They essentially market decentralized infrastructure for those that can afford it (or those who can't afford not to have it).
Say what you will about Mormons, but they take the idea of local stockpiles amazingly seriously. It rises to the point where they subsidize stores selling bulk food product direct to customers, at a scale that otherwise you'd need a Sysco or commercial restaurant license in most places to get access to.
Not required. It's recommended by the church leadership though to have a garden and to have a years supply of food storage if you can. I'm not a Mormon but appreciate it as a good idea.
If you're thinking about a period without power after a disaster, you're supposed to have a gallon of clean water per person per day, along with food that can be prepared in that environment. At least according to https://www.ready.gov/kit.
For me, it made a ton of sense to buy a couple of boxes of MREs and some Mountain House meals for this. They last decades, and they double as camping food.
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 agree with you on actual preparedness and getting to know your neighbors.
However, I think the derogatory prepper must exist in some number because you see so many products clearly targeting them. All the tacticool stuff, the buckets of dehydrated food, etc etc
Why is a bucket of dehydrated food specifically targeting the stereotype/strawman you are constructing? Costco sells buckets of dehydrated food, and Costco is what comes to mind when I think middle of the road middle-class America. Do you think it's unreasonable to have a bucket of dehydrated food and enough water to last a week?
As someone who lived through the "Snowpocalypse" in Texas in 2021, had no power for 11 days and no water service for 6 days, I was very thankful that I had a backup source of indoor heating, a couple of boxes of MREs, and clean water for a week as just part of having good disaster preparedness, as well as the mylar emergency blankets I hung by fishing line from my ceiling fans so to help create a warm space for my family. All that stuff is just part of a prudent approach to disaster preparedness that anyone who grew up in the middle of the country and has a house would do.
I know quite a few people who you'd write off as "preppers" that are not consumed with fantasies of a zombie apocalypse, but are instead wanting to ensure that their family is taken care of with basic necessities, vital medication, and a set of viable contingency plans when you lose power, water, etc for days or weeks.
Also, nobody but the very wealthy have "hundreds of guns". Guns are expensive. Guns hold their value. Guns are an asset in some communities. But they are expensive, and therefore even rather serious gun people have tens, but not hundreds. I'm probably more of a gun nut than the average, and I definitely do not have "hundreds of guns". To even store "hundreds of guns" safely (e.g. safe from theft, if not for other reasons) I'd need enough money to build a dedicated room in my house just to hold them. "hundreds of guns" is an armory, not a collection. I'm in the top 1% of wealth in my community in Texas and used to shoot competitively, so I'm more of "gun nut" than average, and I can't even imagine owning "hundreds of guns". That's such an outlandish fantasy strawman you have in your mind, it's nothing close to realistic.
You're really just smearing people with stereotypes in this thread that have no basis in reality, and it's clear you're completely unprepared for the reality of what life is like anywhere in the middle of America, much less in much of the rest of the world.
Well for one thing - you'd get by a lot better with beans and rice and a functioning garden than overpriced dehydrated meals. And what I'm referring to by buckets (that is a lot/years supplies) of dehydrated food and who is being targeted are companies like this https://www.mypatriotsupply.com/pages/about-us
"We’re taking steps for survival for what we all know is coming. Today." I mean, come on.
Maybe I'm just beating around the bush too much - what I'm making fun of are people that are "prepping" for the end of the world. It is a silly (and strictly American, I imagine) fantasy to think that you're going to ride out the end of days sitting on a pile of guns and MREs. That is who I'm making fun of, and yes those people exist.
Well, even though I am in general sympathetic to and even a proponent of disaster preparedness, there are undoubtedly people preparing to “ride out the end of days sitting on a pile of guns and MREs.” I have brushed against a few in my life. I count them as useful idiots, because now I know where there’s a pile of dehydrated food, if push comes to shove.
That said, I am convinced enough of the decay of western civilisation in general that I moved to a remote island nation and built a self contained off grid community, so I guess I am actually the extreme case of prepping. That’s certainly true, in a way, except it’s where my daily food, water, and power come from, and I am surrounded by a thriving community of family members and good friends. I honestly never thought I would see a cataclysm within my lifetime, so this was a legacy project for me, but it seems I may have been optimistic lol.
But I do agree with you that there are some nutty fruitcakes out there that are actually hoping for something bad to happen so that they can have their moment of glory, I suppose? It’s actually kinda sad.
I would say though it is uncharitable and even foolish to portray everyone who doesn’t have complete faith in the continuity of our Jenga Castle, especially in the context of recent events.
One of the principles of HN is to take the strongest meaning of an argument, instead of the weakest. I am not casting everyone who prepares for a disaster into the same bucket - I have specifically said I think that people who are attempting to prepare for the literal end of the world by stockpiling supplies are silly.
There are IMO a very small set of circumstances, out of many likely full collapse scenarios, where your average American (and make no mistake - I am specifically referring to Americans here) stockpiling junk is going to actually survive for very long.
This has nothing to do with faith in our society or institutions just that is uniquely American to think that you can buy your way out of any circumstance you can imagine.
> Well for one thing - you'd get by a lot better with beans and rice and a functioning garden than overpriced dehydrated meals.
The lived reality of the "Snowpocalypse" says otherwise. "A functioning garden" doesn't produce food when it's 2F (-16C) outside and there is a foot and a half of snow on the ground. Beans and rice require soaking/washing and cooking at high temperature to be edible, dehydrated food does not.
I have beans and rice on hand always as well because they're staples in my diet, but it's ridiculous to consider them comparable in the situation where you don't have power (e.g. no way to heat food easily) and the weather makes the outside dangerous and not conducive to gardening/food production.
You're just doubling-down on a strawman, and it's frankly utter bullshit. Be better.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
Many places around the world will have gone through five or six vastly different governments seated in very different locations over the last century or two and during the transition 1) most of the people stayed 2) most of the people had no part in whatever new group held power and 3) there usually wasn't mass slaughter of the people living there during the transition.
You overestimate the importance of government and underestimate how it very much can just go away... and how distant it can be even when it exists, particularly historically. And how the local warlord equivalent isn't going around to everybody's house and murdering them.
And yeah in those times having food and a means of defense and whatever else is useful as often times very very many people had no option but to stay wherever they were. Famine and revolution are much more common and more mundane than you expect.
The groups and communities that weathered the collapse of the Roman Empire the best were those with some degree of self-sufficiency and military protection.
Prepper has become an umbrella term that is applied to a huge variety of people and mostly as a pejorative based on the sensationalization in media.
Many people that would be dismissed as preppers are perfectly normal people who approach the problem rationally. They take a layered approach which involves preparing for a range of timespans and events from the most basic like an extended power outage of 1 to 2 days or an unusually heavy snowstorm or minor flooding that may temporarily make roads impassible. Then escalating to natural disasters with week or monthlong power outage, gas and food shortages and damage to infrastructure. Personal disasters such as a housefire, flood or even financial difficulty from loss of job or health crisis. Then larger natural disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes and forest fires. Only after those are sufficiently covered would they consider more speculative events such as extended nationwide financial crisis, large regional disasters like a volcanic eruption, extreme earthquake, tsunami, major civil disruption, war, economic collapse, government coup, pandemic, etc.
What they do to prepare would include basic individual preparedness like having a generator and electrical hookup to power their home, extra water and food, essential everyday medications, alternate heat source, emergency radio, enough gasoline on hand for both the generator and vehicles and equipment like a chainsaw for clearing downed trees. Also vehicle packages or "go bags" with what you would need should you have to leave your house immediately during an evacuation or fire, if these are kept in the vehicle then they also help should you become stranded in your vehicle during a snowstorm or breakdown. They also prepare in their community often by simply having good relations with their neighbors and helping them when they're in need but may also volunteer with local emergency services or be involved in charitable groups or with likeminded people.
A lot of this has a long history in rural communities that required some level of self-sufficiency due to a lack of services, more precarious roads/powerlines and being low priority for aid during disasters.
FEMA's recommendations only address short term problems and evacuation. They're not sufficient for disruptions lasting longer than a week and the difficulties that people face in more rural areas during disasters.
I've personally been through events that have cut off grid power and transportation for my area for a few days as well as large widespread power outages lasting more than a week. When that happens you find out very quickly how important it is to prepare ahead of time.
Disasters are rare but not rare enough that you can be certain you'll never experience one first hand. "Collapse" events are very low probability, low enough that most people in the world won't likely experience one in their lifetimes but they do happen, you can probably name several countries that have recently been through such events due to war and many more that have been through them in the last 100 years. Many of us are lucky to live in very stable nations so you don't need to make those scenarios your number one priority but it's at least worth the effort to consider what you should do now to help yourself and your community to continue to thrive over the long term.
>A lot of this has a long history in rural communities that required some level of self-sufficiency due to a lack of services, more precarious roads/powerlines and being low priority for aid during disasters.
My grandmother and particularly great grandmothers prepared for winter... because it's a cold climate and grocery stores with the varieties they have are pretty new. So shelves in the basement full of canned goods they canned themselves, I remember making soap with my grandmother when I was a child... things like that.
For everyone it's this huge unreasonable hobby for me it's like well this is a bit of a return to a practice that was dying because of modern conveniences... but having a gun, a supply of water, a generator, and a full pantry in the rural midwest isn't exactly a radical concept.
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 online and nerd out about them.
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 feel like fallacies can always be applied to anything because unless you're doing pure math (and even then, tons of caveats - one major one being that you already bought into the framework), you can always question deeper assumptions and yes, structurally it might even fit a fallacy. I mean, is-ought is one of the famous unresolved ones.
Yet we still have arguably correct beliefs in spite of fallacies. That suggests that merely pattern matching isn't a good solution to detect what "truth" is...
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 hour away, YMMV)
If you think the Burning Man is in any way representative to what people do in places like that (think war torn African states, the Middle East, etc) then...
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.
The "preppers" I encounter are on ham radio, and I'd say they are more community conscious then the average person. Many of them work in public services (EMTs and the like) or are retired and formerly did. Most have stocked pantries, gardens are common. Most are willing to help out when there's a power outage or a fire. The anti-social picture that popular culture paints of preparedness-minded people is entirely not true in my experience.
Right, I agree, basically my experience with preppers and libertarians is, the ones disgusted when you ask them if they're "leftist" are the ones with too many guns and not enough neighbors, and vice versa for those who embrace the label or don't care.
So you go around asking people if they're "Leftist"? Why? Either you get a non-answer or you start a fight with somebody for no reason -- what a strange thing to do
Discussing philosophy and politics is very normal in the prepper community.
I'm not just waking up to strangers and doing it. This is at meetups, dinners, that sort of thing. "Oh you're a libertarian? Is that more Kropotkin or Rothbard?"
At the gun range I'm just as likely to see a thin blue lives flag, punisher skull, or "don't tread on me" emblem on a gun or gun case as I am to see a hammer and sickle or trans flag. It's just part of the territory.
> 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.)
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...
> Nobody is going to be building cathedrals, and factories and computers for a good while...
Interesting mental exercise. It was explored in A Canticle for Leibowitz[0], novel in 3 parts (Fiat homo, fiat lux, fiat voluntas tua), the first set in the immediate post nuclear-war world, second 600 years after towards the end of the new middle ages, and the third 600 later in a typical futuristic scenario. The first part covers the religious efforts to preserve knowledge (even if said knowledge was not understood), and the second in the new renaissance from wielding such knowledge.
I wonder how LLMs, with their mistakes and all, would play a role in rebuilding civilization. Most media these days is not prepared for staying stable for 20 years, not sure how much and for how long it could be preserved. Perhaps mechanical hard drives in certain isolated environments?
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.
I mean, there's still quite a number of resources on the surface, plenty just sit there because the ratio of setup cost / profit isn't there
The demand a smaller civilization would have should be quite less significant than what we currently have, so it stands to reason it would make sense for them to use those
Even knowing the broad concepts of Crop Rotation, Germ theory, or Computation, means that you shouldn't take that long to get back to an advanced stage, you probably won't actually get to whatever SOTA you had on those fields for a long time, but knowing where to look is quite significant in cutting wasted time
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.
"I don't like people who prepare for the worst, but I now realise I should have prepared for the worst."
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.
Often because they keep intruding into hobbies I enjoy with a clear misunderstanding of the space or even a hostility to playing within the rules. Examples include people coming into Meshtastic chats and wondering if a 50W amp will help them talk to their buddy on the other wide of the mountain when civil war breaks out ("no, you'll just be ruining the airwaves for everyone else in the mean time, you still won't have line of sight to your friend, and your radio will look like a spotlight in the dark when the National Guard goes fox hunting"), or which ham radio they buy without a license ("no government's gonna tell me what I can say on the air").
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.
Because I want the people around me to be actually prepared. The whole prepper thing is a market targeting a specific kind of man with the fantasy that they are in control when shit hits the fan to the loint some of these men want shit to hit the fan.
In reality far more important than most gear will be a good neighborhood network for example. But that means working on your own character.
I’ll tell you why.. because the whole thing is commercialized, drives fear and doom into people minds then profits off people’s fears by selling media, merch and so on or spreads misinformation. They’ve been around for a while
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
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!
That is the way of the internet unfortunately. Instead of simply appreciating something, it's important to find a criticism and voice it. That way you're 'adding' to the conversation.
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 am actually only vaguely familiar and I was wondering about that every time I saw the format referenced but never bothered to check, your comment is informative!
Yeah, I'm a long time user/disciple of https://zim-wiki.org ; it was basically Obsidian but 15-20 years early. To do some of the things that are now trivially easy with Obsidian I learned scripting and such, so I'm familiar with this very weird coincidence/name collision.
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?
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 get lost very often.
It was during that time when it was drilled into my head that the network access comes and goes.
That it should not be taken for granted.
So a lot of the stuff that I use nowadays, I also have in an offline format.
I keep offline docs either in pdf or in html format of most of the programming languages and frameworks that I use.
I keep the source code of various projects that are essential to me.
I keep a local wiki with notes on various things that are useful to me.
Obviously it's not enough for a major catastrophe but it's better than nothing.
I'm by no means a prepper, but I also believe that each of us should be prepared for short term disruptions of various kinds. The network should not be taken for granted.
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.
I travel a lot and do the same. Yes most places have internet. But I don't need much. And it's easier to have an "offline" folder with docs you need compared to carrying around a satellite dish. Also works in an airplane.
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.
> have in an offline format. I keep offline docs either in pdf or in html format of most of the programming languages and frameworks that I use. I keep the source code of various projects that are essential to me.
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
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 :)
20 hours? My first internet (actually not even internet, it was called eWorld) gave you 4 hours a month… which actually was ok because there wasn’t much to do on it, and you couldn’t go long without someone in your family accidentally picking up the phone anyway, and everyone would be mad if you kept the phone line busy for very long, too.
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 avoid the dependency hell that is Python - which for some reason seems 100x worse when it comes to AI projects too).
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.
9front a good bunch offline software repos from shithub can fit under a 4GB pendrive or DVD.
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.
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
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.
There's a company which sells something like this, as "Prepper Disk".[1]
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
Fellow survivor on a bicycle which powers a lightbulb by which you can read the microfiche. Voila.
For anyone who never watched the original Soylent Green movie, it's worth a rewatch because it actually shows a future where people are having to make do without a power grid in cities, by doing things like riding a stationary bike hooked up to a generator to power their TV or radio long enough to get some news.
I mean, there's got to be a spectrum of nuclear winters, just like there's a spectrum of volcanic and impact winters. Assuming a full scale nuclear war, there's still questions of how much of the arsenals actually detonate(as opposed to failures to launch, getting destroyed by other nukes first, etc), how much the fires burn, the time of year impacting fires and dust and the state of the biosphere, and how much the aerosols are limited to the northern vs southern hemisphere.
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.
Stationary exercise bike, large hobby BLDC motor (or random PMAC motor from some AC appliance) plus some diodes (fullbridgerectifier meme goes here) to rectify the generated voltage. :)
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.
I'm a fan of "civilization in a box" kinds of projects. However the ZIM file format leaves a lot to be desired in 2026. I've been exploring a refreshed, alternative approach: https://github.com/stazelabs/oza
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!
Even with that setup I have unfortunately had a bad experience just using Qwen2.5-27B. I asked it once to take a large PDF of a book and find and quote all instances which mentioned food. After churning for a long time it eventually gave me several interesting excerpts, only one of which was real and the rest were hallucinations/confabulations.
I hope we can get to the point where even a small distilled model at the 7B-30B level avoids hallucinating.
Qwen2.5 is quite old at this point.
The new Qwen3.5 series is good, and it has a 27b dense model too.
I have to watch it but I've gotten surprising results out of the 4b model even.
They're also vision enabled and pretty good at ocr.
These were released in just the last few weeks.
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.
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.
On the front page is a table with those descriptions and a "Price". Now that you point that out, I have no clue what "Price" means, it's not explained either. I guess the whole communication on the page is rather confusing.
If I got anything wrong, I don't see it as _my_ mistake.
If current frontier online LLMs are made inaccessible due to a local or global cataclysmic event running models locally will be the least of your concerns.
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.
There are internet and electricity outages in many places over the world, controlled and uncontrolled. Also natural desasters take out infrastructure at least temporarily.
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."
"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."
Doomsday may not be the end of the world, but simply living in a country where you're being unjustifiably bombed by a foreign government lead by a delusional sociopath, and so access to information sources becomes limited.
Found a click or two in looking for storage and other system requirements:
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.
Sounds like I should look at one of the other options mentioned there and in this thread, assuming their libraries and maps are basically the same. I'd like the “comprehensive content libraries” while travelling or when otherwise away from a reliable connection, perhaps with a useful management interface for easy updates and such when on good connectivity, but just in a format I can click or grep through. While I'm assuming I could just turn off, or otherwise ignore, the LLM side, just not having it in the first place would be more efficient.
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?
It might be an interesting idea given that the Steam Deck has reasonable amount of RAM/GPU. The main issue for a knowledge base might be the lack of a physical keyboard though.
Not sure how good of an idea a Steam Deck would be for this. If you can't access Wikipedia, I imagine a replacement for its unprotected glass screen would be harder to come by if you drop it.
I like this idea! I don't need the LLM bits, and want it to run on an old Android tablet I have lying around. Can anyone recommend similar software where I can get wikipedia / street maps / useful tutorial videos nicely packaged for offline use?
Kiwix has an Android app, that'll do Wikipedia and a bunch of other resources. You can get free offline maps from HERE maps or use something like Open Map from Fdroid that uses Open Street Map.
If I gonna face an apocalypse, I would choose Panasonic Toughbook 55 with NetBSD + printed manual for OS. I will have an eternity to compile everything they provide in pkg archive from scratch :)
Missing a chance to note (or configure for?) installation on a Raspberry Pi --- that'd make an affordable option to leave powered down, but ready to go in an EMI-shield/Faraday Cage.
They specifically state that they’re aiming for a “fatter” model that expects higher-end hardware, and other projects like Internet in a box already target rpi-style devices.
I think there are technically some 3 bit byteshape quants that are aimed specifically at running up to 30B MoEs on the 16GB Pi 5, so it would be possible to do something reasonably fat at very low speeds and extremely short contexts (like 4k maybe). One of those 32 or 64GB Rockchip based boards would do better, but there's rarely usable software to go along with them.
An industrial grade Jetson Thor would probably be the ultimate platform for this if you ignore the money part.
The ones mentioned in this thread all use Kiwix for off-line wikipedia, OSM for maps, Khan for educational videos. It looks like internet-in-a-box is aimed at working well on low-powered devices, whereas nomad expects beefy hardware and includes local AI. Not sure how WROLPi differs from internet-in-a-box.
Maybe it's like linux distros: all based on the same software, but optimized for different use-cases or preferences.
I mean, technically they use Kolibri for educational videos and exercises. A lot of them do come from Khan Academy, but we do a lot of work to make an offline first education platform, and also bring in a huge swathe of other open educational resources.
I recently watched a video talking about how much censorship there is currently with everything on the internet and how massive web pages and databases of information are just completely evaporating. I am not personally one of those "everything is burning to the ground" people, but it's getting hard to not at least see where those people are coming from, given recent events. Honestly, if you have the space available, getting this is probably not the worst idea ever.
See I really want this in a simpler format. Like a single file embedded database on my filesystem that I can point a single/or few tools at for my model to use when it needs.
At my cursory glance, I couldn't figure out what's the typical storage needed for this. I understand it depends on what knowledge databases I install, but some figures of estimations would have been lovely (e.g., Wikipedia is ~ 50 GBs, OpenStreetMaps ~ 20 GBs, etc.).
The installation seems a bit cumbersome and unfriendly to non-technical people. If it's self-contained, it ought to be simple and platform agnostic, not tied to Ubuntu or a specific OS. I'll fork this and re-frame it into a SPA with a Tauri path.
I get the hate on AI for many reasons (hype, resource greediness, threat to civilization, etc), but having a local LLM that could help guide and reason about the data within seems like a win, especially if it's optional.
So has this project actually curated an extra source of useful info for emergencies/off-gridding/civilisation-restart? or is this just an alternative bundling of existing resources (Wikipedia and so forth)?
All in all I think these projects are really great for communities that are unable to get online. There are some nice Linux education distros that would go together well.
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.
This is really cool. Having offline Wikipedia + local LLMs in a single bundle is a great combo for emergency preparedness. Do you have any benchmarks on how it performs on lower-end hardware? Curious about minimum specs.
I've used Kiwix to archive Wikipedia articles on an SSD before, and it made me realize how utterly useless Wikipedia is if you don't have a powerful search engine to get you to the pages in the first place.
I quickly came to realize this when I came across similar projects 8 years ago. Moreover, the vast majority of the info is just irrelevant/useless clutter in such contexts. Worse, it's largely in English, so not useful to people elsewhere.
You download it and set it up on your local server to never use it again. It's a project for preppers stuck in their own fantasies.
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.
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 kingship.
> Normally I cringe at doomsday preppers
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.
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.
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.
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…
The term you're looking for is "homesteader"
Well, we did have a term for it until it got dragged and sensationalized in the media. I'd tell you that's a standard "psyop" that the propaganda arm of the government often uses against communities and subcultures that they want to discredit and suppress for one reason or another but then you'd probably call me a conspiracy theorist[1].
[1] another example of a successful smear campaign
Mormons?
Mormons have a widespread cultural practice of prepping, which I understand is mostly the sensible kind where you keep stocks of food and water onhand in case of a natural disaster (rather than the generally-less-sensible rifle militia LARPing). This is something that the institutional Church of Latter-Day Saints encourages among its members, and it strikes me as a pretty good thing to do. Nonetheless, there's no reason why you need to accept the other religious tenets of the LDS church in order to do sensible emergency preparedness, and I'm not sure that not every Mormon community or household is equally diligent about preparedness.
"staff engineer"
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.
This is a reductionist view of even the suburban United States IMO. There are plenty of locales in what I'd call 'middle suburbia', which I'd define as less than an hour from whatever their geographical city center is. Even in these areas, multiple day power outages, or other localized or regional disasters have been endemic in the last 25 years; often due to utility or local resource mismanagement.
Take, for example, the 2018 California Camp Fire, the various southern winter flash power outages, or the endemic hurricane season pretty much everywhere exposed to the middle or southern pacific.
"For hurricanes" is a cute way to minimize it, but in much of the country it's rather little that separates you from being left to your own devices, at least for a little while, even when you're just suburban and haven't even looked out to the rural U.S.
There is a real deferred maintenance and resource mismanagement issue in this country. The increasing evidence of "preppers" and items like ration buckets becoming prevalent at bulk store operations like Walmart & Costco are early indications of the increasing prevalence of these issues.
Take a survey of the items that are always available at most Costos or Sam's Clubs across the country and you'll see similar results. They essentially market decentralized infrastructure for those that can afford it (or those who can't afford not to have 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.
Say what you will about Mormons, but they take the idea of local stockpiles amazingly seriously. It rises to the point where they subsidize stores selling bulk food product direct to customers, at a scale that otherwise you'd need a Sysco or commercial restaurant license in most places to get access to.
Source: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/life/home-storage-center... (In older literature & analysis it used to be called the LDS Cannery or LDS Dry Cannery, but I guess they recently rebranded it.)
Not required. It's recommended by the church leadership though to have a garden and to have a years supply of food storage if you can. I'm not a Mormon but appreciate it as a good idea.
If you're thinking about a period without power after a disaster, you're supposed to have a gallon of clean water per person per day, along with food that can be prepared in that environment. At least according to https://www.ready.gov/kit.
For me, it made a ton of sense to buy a couple of boxes of MREs and some Mountain House meals for this. They last decades, and they double as camping food.
I think that pepper mostly exists in movies.
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 agree with you on actual preparedness and getting to know your neighbors.
However, I think the derogatory prepper must exist in some number because you see so many products clearly targeting them. All the tacticool stuff, the buckets of dehydrated food, etc etc
Why is a bucket of dehydrated food specifically targeting the stereotype/strawman you are constructing? Costco sells buckets of dehydrated food, and Costco is what comes to mind when I think middle of the road middle-class America. Do you think it's unreasonable to have a bucket of dehydrated food and enough water to last a week?
As someone who lived through the "Snowpocalypse" in Texas in 2021, had no power for 11 days and no water service for 6 days, I was very thankful that I had a backup source of indoor heating, a couple of boxes of MREs, and clean water for a week as just part of having good disaster preparedness, as well as the mylar emergency blankets I hung by fishing line from my ceiling fans so to help create a warm space for my family. All that stuff is just part of a prudent approach to disaster preparedness that anyone who grew up in the middle of the country and has a house would do.
I know quite a few people who you'd write off as "preppers" that are not consumed with fantasies of a zombie apocalypse, but are instead wanting to ensure that their family is taken care of with basic necessities, vital medication, and a set of viable contingency plans when you lose power, water, etc for days or weeks.
Also, nobody but the very wealthy have "hundreds of guns". Guns are expensive. Guns hold their value. Guns are an asset in some communities. But they are expensive, and therefore even rather serious gun people have tens, but not hundreds. I'm probably more of a gun nut than the average, and I definitely do not have "hundreds of guns". To even store "hundreds of guns" safely (e.g. safe from theft, if not for other reasons) I'd need enough money to build a dedicated room in my house just to hold them. "hundreds of guns" is an armory, not a collection. I'm in the top 1% of wealth in my community in Texas and used to shoot competitively, so I'm more of "gun nut" than average, and I can't even imagine owning "hundreds of guns". That's such an outlandish fantasy strawman you have in your mind, it's nothing close to realistic.
You're really just smearing people with stereotypes in this thread that have no basis in reality, and it's clear you're completely unprepared for the reality of what life is like anywhere in the middle of America, much less in much of the rest of the world.
Well for one thing - you'd get by a lot better with beans and rice and a functioning garden than overpriced dehydrated meals. And what I'm referring to by buckets (that is a lot/years supplies) of dehydrated food and who is being targeted are companies like this https://www.mypatriotsupply.com/pages/about-us
"We’re taking steps for survival for what we all know is coming. Today." I mean, come on.
Maybe I'm just beating around the bush too much - what I'm making fun of are people that are "prepping" for the end of the world. It is a silly (and strictly American, I imagine) fantasy to think that you're going to ride out the end of days sitting on a pile of guns and MREs. That is who I'm making fun of, and yes those people exist.
Well, even though I am in general sympathetic to and even a proponent of disaster preparedness, there are undoubtedly people preparing to “ride out the end of days sitting on a pile of guns and MREs.” I have brushed against a few in my life. I count them as useful idiots, because now I know where there’s a pile of dehydrated food, if push comes to shove.
That said, I am convinced enough of the decay of western civilisation in general that I moved to a remote island nation and built a self contained off grid community, so I guess I am actually the extreme case of prepping. That’s certainly true, in a way, except it’s where my daily food, water, and power come from, and I am surrounded by a thriving community of family members and good friends. I honestly never thought I would see a cataclysm within my lifetime, so this was a legacy project for me, but it seems I may have been optimistic lol.
But I do agree with you that there are some nutty fruitcakes out there that are actually hoping for something bad to happen so that they can have their moment of glory, I suppose? It’s actually kinda sad.
I would say though it is uncharitable and even foolish to portray everyone who doesn’t have complete faith in the continuity of our Jenga Castle, especially in the context of recent events.
One of the principles of HN is to take the strongest meaning of an argument, instead of the weakest. I am not casting everyone who prepares for a disaster into the same bucket - I have specifically said I think that people who are attempting to prepare for the literal end of the world by stockpiling supplies are silly.
There are IMO a very small set of circumstances, out of many likely full collapse scenarios, where your average American (and make no mistake - I am specifically referring to Americans here) stockpiling junk is going to actually survive for very long.
This has nothing to do with faith in our society or institutions just that is uniquely American to think that you can buy your way out of any circumstance you can imagine.
> Well for one thing - you'd get by a lot better with beans and rice and a functioning garden than overpriced dehydrated meals.
The lived reality of the "Snowpocalypse" says otherwise. "A functioning garden" doesn't produce food when it's 2F (-16C) outside and there is a foot and a half of snow on the ground. Beans and rice require soaking/washing and cooking at high temperature to be edible, dehydrated food does not.
I have beans and rice on hand always as well because they're staples in my diet, but it's ridiculous to consider them comparable in the situation where you don't have power (e.g. no way to heat food easily) and the weather makes the outside dangerous and not conducive to gardening/food production.
You're just doubling-down on a strawman, and it's frankly utter bullshit. Be better.
Sorry about this, but buckets. Buckets. Wow. https://youtu.be/rOH37W0jPpA?si=eIa_dcA9JLPvXRNK
> I think that pepper mostly exists in movies.
What type of pepper are we talking about: piper or capsicum?
You can buy peppers in food shops. I recommend the red ones.
This is just a straw man, though. We all have biases of course.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
Many places around the world will have gone through five or six vastly different governments seated in very different locations over the last century or two and during the transition 1) most of the people stayed 2) most of the people had no part in whatever new group held power and 3) there usually wasn't mass slaughter of the people living there during the transition.
You overestimate the importance of government and underestimate how it very much can just go away... and how distant it can be even when it exists, particularly historically. And how the local warlord equivalent isn't going around to everybody's house and murdering them.
And yeah in those times having food and a means of defense and whatever else is useful as often times very very many people had no option but to stay wherever they were. Famine and revolution are much more common and more mundane than you expect.
The groups and communities that weathered the collapse of the Roman Empire the best were those with some degree of self-sufficiency and military protection.
Prepper has become an umbrella term that is applied to a huge variety of people and mostly as a pejorative based on the sensationalization in media.
Many people that would be dismissed as preppers are perfectly normal people who approach the problem rationally. They take a layered approach which involves preparing for a range of timespans and events from the most basic like an extended power outage of 1 to 2 days or an unusually heavy snowstorm or minor flooding that may temporarily make roads impassible. Then escalating to natural disasters with week or monthlong power outage, gas and food shortages and damage to infrastructure. Personal disasters such as a housefire, flood or even financial difficulty from loss of job or health crisis. Then larger natural disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes and forest fires. Only after those are sufficiently covered would they consider more speculative events such as extended nationwide financial crisis, large regional disasters like a volcanic eruption, extreme earthquake, tsunami, major civil disruption, war, economic collapse, government coup, pandemic, etc.
What they do to prepare would include basic individual preparedness like having a generator and electrical hookup to power their home, extra water and food, essential everyday medications, alternate heat source, emergency radio, enough gasoline on hand for both the generator and vehicles and equipment like a chainsaw for clearing downed trees. Also vehicle packages or "go bags" with what you would need should you have to leave your house immediately during an evacuation or fire, if these are kept in the vehicle then they also help should you become stranded in your vehicle during a snowstorm or breakdown. They also prepare in their community often by simply having good relations with their neighbors and helping them when they're in need but may also volunteer with local emergency services or be involved in charitable groups or with likeminded people.
A lot of this has a long history in rural communities that required some level of self-sufficiency due to a lack of services, more precarious roads/powerlines and being low priority for aid during disasters.
FEMA's recommendations only address short term problems and evacuation. They're not sufficient for disruptions lasting longer than a week and the difficulties that people face in more rural areas during disasters.
I've personally been through events that have cut off grid power and transportation for my area for a few days as well as large widespread power outages lasting more than a week. When that happens you find out very quickly how important it is to prepare ahead of time.
Disasters are rare but not rare enough that you can be certain you'll never experience one first hand. "Collapse" events are very low probability, low enough that most people in the world won't likely experience one in their lifetimes but they do happen, you can probably name several countries that have recently been through such events due to war and many more that have been through them in the last 100 years. Many of us are lucky to live in very stable nations so you don't need to make those scenarios your number one priority but it's at least worth the effort to consider what you should do now to help yourself and your community to continue to thrive over the long term.
>A lot of this has a long history in rural communities that required some level of self-sufficiency due to a lack of services, more precarious roads/powerlines and being low priority for aid during disasters.
My grandmother and particularly great grandmothers prepared for winter... because it's a cold climate and grocery stores with the varieties they have are pretty new. So shelves in the basement full of canned goods they canned themselves, I remember making soap with my grandmother when I was a child... things like that.
For everyone it's this huge unreasonable hobby for me it's like well this is a bit of a return to a practice that was dying because of modern conveniences... but having a gun, a supply of water, a generator, and a full pantry in the rural midwest isn't exactly a radical concept.
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 online and nerd out about them.
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.
Every peppers' dream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeSd1GoUW-M
Calling somebody a racist is an "adhom," but it's not very controversial to say racists exist and it's bad to be a racist...
I feel like fallacies can always be applied to anything because unless you're doing pure math (and even then, tons of caveats - one major one being that you already bought into the framework), you can always question deeper assumptions and yes, structurally it might even fit a fallacy. I mean, is-ought is one of the famous unresolved ones.
Yet we still have arguably correct beliefs in spite of fallacies. That suggests that merely pattern matching isn't a good solution to detect what "truth" is...
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 hour away, YMMV)
If you think the Burning Man is in any way representative to what people do in places like that (think war torn African states, the Middle East, etc) then...
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.
The "preppers" I encounter are on ham radio, and I'd say they are more community conscious then the average person. Many of them work in public services (EMTs and the like) or are retired and formerly did. Most have stocked pantries, gardens are common. Most are willing to help out when there's a power outage or a fire. The anti-social picture that popular culture paints of preparedness-minded people is entirely not true in my experience.
Right, I agree, basically my experience with preppers and libertarians is, the ones disgusted when you ask them if they're "leftist" are the ones with too many guns and not enough neighbors, and vice versa for those who embrace the label or don't care.
So you go around asking people if they're "Leftist"? Why? Either you get a non-answer or you start a fight with somebody for no reason -- what a strange thing to do
Discussing philosophy and politics is very normal in the prepper community.
I'm not just waking up to strangers and doing it. This is at meetups, dinners, that sort of thing. "Oh you're a libertarian? Is that more Kropotkin or Rothbard?"
At the gun range I'm just as likely to see a thin blue lives flag, punisher skull, or "don't tread on me" emblem on a gun or gun case as I am to see a hammer and sickle or trans flag. It's just part of the territory.
But I bet they would've loved the opportunity to do so before it all went sideways.
I mean they practically know and prepare in different ways, because the popular idea of prepping is bullshit.
> 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.)
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. :)
You should get a copy or three of Pocket Ref by Thomas J Glover. Packed full of useful things in a good size. I keep one in the car even.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_Ref
I have one of my grandpa's "do everything" books from the 50s in my shelf just for this.
It has everything from building houses to boats to making moonshine and medicine in it. Amazing stuff.
Is there a serious “rebuild all of civilization” book?
Sounds like a good read.
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...
> Nobody is going to be building cathedrals, and factories and computers for a good while...
Interesting mental exercise. It was explored in A Canticle for Leibowitz[0], novel in 3 parts (Fiat homo, fiat lux, fiat voluntas tua), the first set in the immediate post nuclear-war world, second 600 years after towards the end of the new middle ages, and the third 600 later in a typical futuristic scenario. The first part covers the religious efforts to preserve knowledge (even if said knowledge was not understood), and the second in the new renaissance from wielding such knowledge.
I wonder how LLMs, with their mistakes and all, would play a role in rebuilding civilization. Most media these days is not prepared for staying stable for 20 years, not sure how much and for how long it could be preserved. Perhaps mechanical hard drives in certain isolated environments?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz
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.
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.
And here we are, still in the exact same Ice Age .. albeit only barely as the ice covered poles are on the way out should trends continue.
Fair enough, but at least the ice was clean.
I mean, there's still quite a number of resources on the surface, plenty just sit there because the ratio of setup cost / profit isn't there
The demand a smaller civilization would have should be quite less significant than what we currently have, so it stands to reason it would make sense for them to use those
Yes, and it took our ancestors 200k years. I would like to give our descendants an head start.
Even knowing the broad concepts of Crop Rotation, Germ theory, or Computation, means that you shouldn't take that long to get back to an advanced stage, you probably won't actually get to whatever SOTA you had on those fields for a long time, but knowing where to look is quite significant in cutting wasted time
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.
Yes.
https://a.co/d/0ieNUmhB (Not a referral link)
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
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.
Explaining to people that invisible creatures exist that make you sick... Better pack a microscope!
[dead]
"I don't like people who prepare for the worst, but I now realise I should have prepared for the worst."
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.
Often because they keep intruding into hobbies I enjoy with a clear misunderstanding of the space or even a hostility to playing within the rules. Examples include people coming into Meshtastic chats and wondering if a 50W amp will help them talk to their buddy on the other wide of the mountain when civil war breaks out ("no, you'll just be ruining the airwaves for everyone else in the mean time, you still won't have line of sight to your friend, and your radio will look like a spotlight in the dark when the National Guard goes fox hunting"), or which ham radio they buy without a license ("no government's gonna tell me what I can say on the air").
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.
Because I want the people around me to be actually prepared. The whole prepper thing is a market targeting a specific kind of man with the fantasy that they are in control when shit hits the fan to the loint some of these men want shit to hit the fan.
In reality far more important than most gear will be a good neighborhood network for example. But that means working on your own character.
I’ll tell you why.. because the whole thing is commercialized, drives fear and doom into people minds then profits off people’s fears by selling media, merch and so on or spreads misinformation. They’ve been around for a while
> 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
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!
> Command center
> "Military"-looking font
This is larping as a prepper, not anything more.
> > Command center
> > "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.
This is just some guy's hobby project that he is sharing for free. I don't get why everyone is so keen to shit all over it.
They're annoyed at people shamelessly publishing low quality crap. Calling it out is a way to raise standards back up.
That is the way of the internet unfortunately. Instead of simply appreciating something, it's important to find a criticism and voice it. That way you're 'adding' to the conversation.
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.
"This is like the HN dropbox post" is now a whole class off low-effort comment in itself.
This may be true, but I don't believe it makes it any less valid.
Perhaps the comment YOU made could also fall into that category? Pointing out a low-effort comment is ALSO a low-effort comment?
Larping or not, it seems useful. If they want to play prepper while providing a useful widget to the rest of us, let them
I don't see the problem with trying to make knowledge more decentralized, offline-ready and accessible in the case of catastrophe.
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/
And for those who are only vaguely familiar, this ZIM file format is not the same as the https://zim-wiki.org one.
I am actually only vaguely familiar and I was wondering about that every time I saw the format referenced but never bothered to check, your comment is informative!
Yeah, I'm a long time user/disciple of https://zim-wiki.org ; it was basically Obsidian but 15-20 years early. To do some of the things that are now trivially easy with Obsidian I learned scripting and such, so I'm familiar with this very weird coincidence/name collision.
> and probably 8x less compressed than it should be
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
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.
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 get lost very often. It was during that time when it was drilled into my head that the network access comes and goes. That it should not be taken for granted. So a lot of the stuff that I use nowadays, I also have in an offline format. I keep offline docs either in pdf or in html format of most of the programming languages and frameworks that I use. I keep the source code of various projects that are essential to me. I keep a local wiki with notes on various things that are useful to me. Obviously it's not enough for a major catastrophe but it's better than nothing. I'm by no means a prepper, but I also believe that each of us should be prepared for short term disruptions of various kinds. The network should not be taken for granted.
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.
I travel a lot and do the same. Yes most places have internet. But I don't need much. And it's easier to have an "offline" folder with docs you need compared to carrying around a satellite dish. Also works in an airplane.
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.
> have in an offline format. I keep offline docs either in pdf or in html format of most of the programming languages and frameworks that I use. I keep the source code of various projects that are essential to me.
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 would recommend Obsidian to new users.
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 :)
https://obsidian.md/
https://zim-wiki.org/
Obsidian is good, but I switched to Zettlr last year and I like it much better.
https://www.zettlr.com
20 hours? My first internet (actually not even internet, it was called eWorld) gave you 4 hours a month… which actually was ok because there wasn’t much to do on it, and you couldn’t go long without someone in your family accidentally picking up the phone anyway, and everyone would be mad if you kept the phone line busy for very long, too.
Have you seen this Monty Python skit of Four Yorkshiremen? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE
Email IRC Gopher etc. download. Just connect 10 min a day.
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 avoid the dependency hell that is Python - which for some reason seems 100x worse when it comes to AI projects too).
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.
9front a good bunch offline software repos from shithub can fit under a 4GB pendrive or DVD.
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.
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
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.
There's a company which sells something like this, as "Prepper Disk".[1]
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.
[1] https://www.prepperdisk.com/
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.
That's likely with constant power and low writes. If either of those flip for long enough, bye bye flash.
> There's a company which sells something like this, as "Prepper Disk".
They mentioned it in their video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_wt-2P-WBk&t=350
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?
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).
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.
Fellow survivor on a bicycle which powers a lightbulb by which you can read the microfiche. Voila.
For anyone who never watched the original Soylent Green movie, it's worth a rewatch because it actually shows a future where people are having to make do without a power grid in cities, by doing things like riding a stationary bike hooked up to a generator to power their TV or radio long enough to get some news.
Anyone who thinks they can prepare for nuclear winter is delusional.
I mean, there's got to be a spectrum of nuclear winters, just like there's a spectrum of volcanic and impact winters. Assuming a full scale nuclear war, there's still questions of how much of the arsenals actually detonate(as opposed to failures to launch, getting destroyed by other nukes first, etc), how much the fires burn, the time of year impacting fires and dust and the state of the biosphere, and how much the aerosols are limited to the northern vs southern hemisphere.
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 suppose you could have a gasoline powered battery and then charge electronics with that, no?
Stationary exercise bike, large hobby BLDC motor (or random PMAC motor from some AC appliance) plus some diodes (fullbridgerectifier meme goes here) to rectify the generated voltage. :)
I had thought of building those exact Civil Defense devices a few years ago. Maybe it’s a viable product?
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.
they're really packing in the whole kitchen sink into video games these days...
https://old.reddit.com/r/ARK/comments/p4xlpr/ark_is_over_200...
I sent a query into NARA. Maybe they know something. It's probably in some forgotten Civil Defense archive.
I'm a fan of "civilization in a box" kinds of projects. However the ZIM file format leaves a lot to be desired in 2026. I've been exploring a refreshed, alternative approach: https://github.com/stazelabs/oza
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!
ZIM or not, I think the “LLM as optional sidecar” part is the right idea.
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.
Even with that setup I have unfortunately had a bad experience just using Qwen2.5-27B. I asked it once to take a large PDF of a book and find and quote all instances which mentioned food. After churning for a long time it eventually gave me several interesting excerpts, only one of which was real and the rest were hallucinations/confabulations.
I hope we can get to the point where even a small distilled model at the 7B-30B level avoids hallucinating.
Qwen2.5 is quite old at this point. The new Qwen3.5 series is good, and it has a 27b dense model too. I have to watch it but I've gotten surprising results out of the 4b model even. They're also vision enabled and pretty good at ocr. These were released in just the last few weeks.
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.
This site isn't selling anything. It also doesn't say anything about doomsday, or system collapse, or anything sensational.
On the front page is a table with those descriptions and a "Price". Now that you point that out, I have no clue what "Price" means, it's not explained either. I guess the whole communication on the page is rather confusing. If I got anything wrong, I don't see it as _my_ mistake.
If current frontier online LLMs are made inaccessible due to a local or global cataclysmic event running models locally will be the least of your concerns.
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.
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There are internet and electricity outages in many places over the world, controlled and uncontrolled. Also natural desasters take out infrastructure at least temporarily.
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-...
This is not just a random idea.
AlexNet -> Tansformers -> ChatGPT -> Claude Code -> Small LMs serving KBs
Large LLMs could have a role in efficiently producing such KBs.
What doomsday framing? Where on the site does it talk about anything resembling "doomsday?"
Doomsday may not be the end of the world, but simply living in a country where you're being unjustifiably bombed by a foreign government lead by a delusional sociopath, and so access to information sources becomes limited.
You’ll be hanged from a construction crane if they’ll catch you with this project in Iran… :)
This situation is not unique to Iran.
Why?
Because it'd likely be seen as western propaganda. It probably shows women with uncovered heads, gay people, etc.
What Gulf state do you live in? UAE?
Found a click or two in looking for storage and other system requirements:
Sounds like I should look at one of the other options mentioned there and in this thread, assuming their libraries and maps are basically the same. I'd like the “comprehensive content libraries” while travelling or when otherwise away from a reliable connection, perhaps with a useful management interface for easy updates and such when on good connectivity, but just in a format I can click or grep through. While I'm assuming I could just turn off, or otherwise ignore, the LLM side, just not having it in the first place would be more efficient.In a world where this is useful, you aren't going to be spending your precious battery on running an LLM...
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?
Well, yes, in that edge case it probably wouldn't be worth the energy usage.
There is a point where you have bigger problems then your smartphone or laptop
This is not true for me. I would want an LLM after the apocalypse. I'd become like the Wizard of Oz, the all-knowing oracle.
No need for a battery, you just need someone to hit the pedals on that dynamo.
For anyone wanting the video explanation from the creator, watch: https://youtu.be/P_wt-2P-WBk
Anyone thought about using a Steam Deck with this? Or explored the concept of a "Nomad Deck"?
It might be an interesting idea given that the Steam Deck has reasonable amount of RAM/GPU. The main issue for a knowledge base might be the lack of a physical keyboard though.
It has built in microphones though.
At that point you should just use an old laptop or small formfactor desktop, since finding monitors will not be too hard in the apocalypse.
Not sure how good of an idea a Steam Deck would be for this. If you can't access Wikipedia, I imagine a replacement for its unprotected glass screen would be harder to come by if you drop it.
True, but I always give my devices a protective glass and put them in rugged armor. Broken screens never been a problem for me..
I like this idea! I don't need the LLM bits, and want it to run on an old Android tablet I have lying around. Can anyone recommend similar software where I can get wikipedia / street maps / useful tutorial videos nicely packaged for offline use?
A friend made this years ago. I never used it but the idea is awesome.
https://github.com/ligi/SurvivalManual
Kiwix has an Android app, that'll do Wikipedia and a bunch of other resources. You can get free offline maps from HERE maps or use something like Open Map from Fdroid that uses Open Street Map.
If I gonna face an apocalypse, I would choose Panasonic Toughbook 55 with NetBSD + printed manual for OS. I will have an eternity to compile everything they provide in pkg archive from scratch :)
Missing a chance to note (or configure for?) installation on a Raspberry Pi --- that'd make an affordable option to leave powered down, but ready to go in an EMI-shield/Faraday Cage.
They specifically state that they’re aiming for a “fatter” model that expects higher-end hardware, and other projects like Internet in a box already target rpi-style devices.
I think there are technically some 3 bit byteshape quants that are aimed specifically at running up to 30B MoEs on the 16GB Pi 5, so it would be possible to do something reasonably fat at very low speeds and extremely short contexts (like 4k maybe). One of those 32 or 64GB Rockchip based boards would do better, but there's rarely usable software to go along with them.
An industrial grade Jetson Thor would probably be the ultimate platform for this if you ignore the money part.
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.
I’m convinced that the multitude of off-line Internet tools is a ploy to keep any one of them from gaining traction
The ones mentioned in this thread all use Kiwix for off-line wikipedia, OSM for maps, Khan for educational videos. It looks like internet-in-a-box is aimed at working well on low-powered devices, whereas nomad expects beefy hardware and includes local AI. Not sure how WROLPi differs from internet-in-a-box.
Maybe it's like linux distros: all based on the same software, but optimized for different use-cases or preferences.
I mean, technically they use Kolibri for educational videos and exercises. A lot of them do come from Khan Academy, but we do a lot of work to make an offline first education platform, and also bring in a huge swathe of other open educational resources.
On the contrary, "traction" is an antifeature. I hate technical monocultures. Like there being exactly one home automation software everyone uses now.
One more
https://worldpossible.org/
Really clever targeting of a niche. I’d be interested to hear if they find success!
I recently watched a video talking about how much censorship there is currently with everything on the internet and how massive web pages and databases of information are just completely evaporating. I am not personally one of those "everything is burning to the ground" people, but it's getting hard to not at least see where those people are coming from, given recent events. Honestly, if you have the space available, getting this is probably not the worst idea ever.
Thank you for sharing
See I really want this in a simpler format. Like a single file embedded database on my filesystem that I can point a single/or few tools at for my model to use when it needs.
At my cursory glance, I couldn't figure out what's the typical storage needed for this. I understand it depends on what knowledge databases I install, but some figures of estimations would have been lovely (e.g., Wikipedia is ~ 50 GBs, OpenStreetMaps ~ 20 GBs, etc.).
Love the concept. Hopefully I'll never actually need to use it, but if that day comes, this would be incredibly helpful.
Closing on 40 acres in Panama for an eco-resort.
I was planning to build my own offline repository, but will check out this repo.
How much dod it cost and plan to invest in the resort?
The installation seems a bit cumbersome and unfriendly to non-technical people. If it's self-contained, it ought to be simple and platform agnostic, not tied to Ubuntu or a specific OS. I'll fork this and re-frame it into a SPA with a Tauri path.
Yeah that's a very strange choice.
Why does it have to have AI? Ugh.
You can use Kiwix, OpenStreetMap and Kolibri as an AI-free equivalent. Adding AI to those is exactly the differentiator of this project.
Because if you're stuck in your underground bunker, who else can you talk to?
AI seems expensive from an energy standpoint, but humans consume your food supply. :D
I get the hate on AI for many reasons (hype, resource greediness, threat to civilization, etc), but having a local LLM that could help guide and reason about the data within seems like a win, especially if it's optional.
So has this project actually curated an extra source of useful info for emergencies/off-gridding/civilisation-restart? or is this just an alternative bundling of existing resources (Wikipedia and so forth)?
All in all I think these projects are really great for communities that are unable to get online. There are some nice Linux education distros that would go together well.
>Knowledge That Never Goes Offline
>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.
Two different uses of "offline", I think. From my own understanding:
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.
My guess is
>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.
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.
Kiwix, maybe Kolibri? If up for tinkering, maybe something like Internet in a Box (can be done through Tmux+Proot-distro)
https://kiwix.org/en/
https://learningequality.org/kolibri/
https://internet-in-a-box.org/
Are updates done incrementally?
turns out I have the same setup (sans local LLMs - they are pretty useless on 2018 cards) but in Obsidian :)
whatever I think might be useful later, I capture through the web clipper extension. [0]
[0]: https://obsidian.md/clipper
Also the makings of a pretty decent RAG server?
There's a Doom Box plan but no Boom Box
This is really cool. Having offline Wikipedia + local LLMs in a single bundle is a great combo for emergency preparedness. Do you have any benchmarks on how it performs on lower-end hardware? Curious about minimum specs.
Anybody know of an alternate version of this with no AI?
Depends how simple you want it:
- 200 line BASH script: https://github.com/Sub-SH/Beacon
- 17k lines of Ansible YAML https://github.com/iiab/iiab
Just delete the model file?
It could use some own wisdom not to use nodejs..
Great premise for a science fiction story
I've used Kiwix to archive Wikipedia articles on an SSD before, and it made me realize how utterly useless Wikipedia is if you don't have a powerful search engine to get you to the pages in the first place.
I quickly came to realize this when I came across similar projects 8 years ago. Moreover, the vast majority of the info is just irrelevant/useless clutter in such contexts. Worse, it's largely in English, so not useful to people elsewhere.
what a coincidence, i am just downloading 110gb wikipedia dump on kiwix right now
Nah I'm not installing another JavaScript slop.
close enough - welcome galactic encyoclopedia
Whats not in there ? Why ? Are the LLM's cencored ?
So how does that work?
It never goes offline by already being offline.
You download it and set it up on your local server to never use it again. It's a project for preppers stuck in their own fantasies.
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.
I was expecting the game from my childhood and was disappointed.
Yeah, that game was really ahead of its time. I still hold out hope some indie studio will attempt a spiritual successor.
Vibe-coded crap, again
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