It’s pretty amazing that we’re almost at the point where a single laptop computer with no internet connection can contain (1) most of humanity’s recorded knowledge and (2) an intelligence that can explain it to you.

It's very far from all the humanity's accumulated knowledge. Wikipedia is but a digest of of the deeper end of science, and barely scratches the applied sciences that are required for the modern advanced technology.

To preserve a copy of the humanity's recorded knowledge, you'd have to keep a copy of the library of Congress + archives of all scientific journals + arxiv.org, and equivalents of it for other languages, like Chinese, Japanese, German, French, Russian, Spanish, Hindi,.. Then there is a ton of proprietary and sometimes secret information held by companies and crucial for their functioning.

> applied sciences that are required for modern advanced technology.

Where would you find this?

That’s a great business idea: sell a laptop survival kit for tough times.

Google: One Laptop per Child ;)

replace education in places without electricity with survival in case of civilization end.

Or a USB stick filled with knowledge and entertainment for a budget price.

A USB stick with all public domain content would be amazing. New one each year; loads of stuff on it!

You'd need a full size SSD (hundreds of terabytes), not a USB stick (2 terabytes today).

I actually really like this idea.

Choose some reasonably good llm model + corpus of data to enhance the generation (e.g. wikipedia).

Package it in a long-lasting battery, rough device. Think of a tablet/laptop you would take deep into the desert for a multi-week trip.

A solar panel would be capable of charging a laptop. Perhaps one of those could be ruggedized along with the package.

.. and to maximize profit, make it live-updateable and subscription-based. And don't forget periodic online license checks which are mandatory for app to run.

/s

You forgot the targetted ads, with the subscription tier to reduce it from 100 ads per page to just 10.

You also want to make sure you know exactly what your users are doing so you can offer the best experience.

Include a key logger and a daemon to grab full screenshots every few seconds.

Bring back some old school methods with a modern twist too - upload all your contacts.

Instead of just emailing everyone inviting them to join and telling them which kind friend reccomended they join - use the birthday and home address information and send them real tangible marketing material for their birthday (+ on Anniversaries, Christmas, Easter and on any day ending with a "y").

That's may need over million TB to collect all data, actually is there anyway to host they data without doing cloud or Hardiver things in the world?

(2) assumes technology not in evidence, unless you have a really low threshold of "explain it to you".

Like, "explains it as well as a person who doesn't know anything about it but is reading the wikipedia page".

Like, "explains it but lies, and when you catch them at it, insists that they weren't lying".

Like, "can't actually do math, but has had heard lots of math problems so they guess and hope you don't check on them".

A sleazy marketer's idea of "explains it to you".

> (1) most of humanity’s recorded knowledge

A lot of historical information on the Internet only scrape the top 50% of the knowledge on niche subjects, if even that. So often I see forum requests along the lines of "can someone scan page 242 of book X please".

It would be very interesting to package this as a machine to be deployed into the field without any supporting tech infrastructure. Picture an epoxy cube with a connection for a speaker, a microphone and power. And maybe a serial port. There’s no network connection because it’s designed to be off the grid and last for decades

With a big friendly cover and the words "Don't Panic!"

irl Standard Template Constructs

This reminds me of how the Cuban people get a weekly distillation of the internet from an external hard drive that gets passed around.

https://www.wired.com/2017/07/inside-cubas-diy-internet-revo...

Just note with the encyclopedia of country living, much of the advice is outdated and all of it is very much depending on where you live.

For example, the saying where I live is an acre and a half for a cow and a calf. Where my folks live you need closer to 10 acres for the two animals.

The USDA has hyper local guides for native and garden plants and native and farmed animals. Mostly in PDF so they can be easily printed.

Good to know. I'm trying to dig up direct links to those USDA guides.

I mostly value the Encyclopedia of Country Living for it's old world skills (canning, food preservation, etc), but I'm fortunate also to live in a rural area with a lot of farmers and I have ready access to relatives and friends who are well-versed in those old world skills and they've been happy to teach them to me.

Best resource are the people who lived it. My grandfather was 102 when he passed and (when I could get him to stop talking about world war 2 for five minutes) filled in a lot of blanks for me in old time food storage.

My number one piece of advice for people learning this stuff: Nursing home activity staff know who the residents are who grew up on farms and in the country and are DESPERATE for volunteers. Go to a home and ask to spend time with those residents. That's what I do. It's how I learned most of the wild craft skills I have. The residents love it, it helps the community, and you learn.

In the US, "County Extension" is usually the phrase you want.

Correct. "Indigenous plants/animal [insert state] USDA" brings up good listings on Google, too.

Your county extension probably has all the guides in print form for you, generally for free.

The farm animal and plant guides are in the resources for new farmers. They're buried and I can't find them back, but they're there.

Also:

- PDFs of the Black and Deck Guides to Home (repair/plumbing/carpentry/etc). Available for purchase/torrenting. Available on torrent sites. Not always up to code or best practice, but good enough to get you going and explain how the parts of your house's systems work.

Add some maps, like OpenStreetMap data, with a client: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Software/Desktop

How much space does this take? Both digitally and physically, for the stuff you have in print form?

<1 TB. I try to keep the entirety of my important files in under 1tb and so far, I have succeeded. Somehow I've managed to do this even with my photo/video iCloud Photo library. I am not counting large hoards like my ISO and movie collections.

I'm not really sure of exact sizes, but books and PDFs don't take up much space at all. I'd guess a few hundred megabytes? Wikipedia is ~20gb, IIRC.

Physically, I have paper copies of books stashed all over the place. It consumes a decent amount of space all together (~ 4 feet by 9 feet ~18 inches in volume)

Is this the libgen fiction mirror or some other large collection?

SF Medical Manual link: https://irp.fas.org/doddir/milmed/sfhandbook.pdf

My only caveat here is that people should obtain the 2014 or newer Special Operations Medic version, which is the successor to this older 1982 guide.

It’s almost like going for a programming book from 1982 vs now. The state of the medical art has changed substantially for the better since 1982.

The newer post-2004-ish guides include substantial updates to field medical care techniques (especially WRT blood loss, eg gunshot wounds).

There are PDFs of the newer SOC guide on the net. I’ll try to find some good links when I get back near a computer.

The apocalypse started, look for a link yourself and download it before it's too late ;)

ok. waiting for you links

> especially the Special Operations Medic manual, which is gold for civilian use in tough times.

idk if it applies to you, but single week of training will be worth 10 000 pages of pdf, when shtf you won't have time to read much

> Download as many LLM models and the latest version of Ollama.app and all its dependencies.

I recently purchased a Mac Studio with 128gb RAM for the sole purpose of being able to run 70b models at 8-bit quantization

M4?

Mac Studios don't have the M4 yet. With that much RAM, GP must have the M2 Ultra.

If you need the Special Operations Medic manual, the podcasts and LLMs might not be so relevant ;)

"Download every US Army field manual", never thought of that, seems useful

Thank you for your service - that list is awesome.

Don’t forget local maps too. Gotta have your local maps downloaded

Do you have some references for those army field manuals? Would love to look into them.

If you don't mind me asking, where do you torrent your music albums from?

yandex (search engine) is pretty good to find stuff. Just search for "band/film + torrent" and it almost always works for me. It's my way to go for lesser known works.

Yandex has not been routable for me for some time, when was the last time you used it ?

Soulseek?

rutracker

Can you elaborate on how you're storing this data?

Files and folders on my MacBook and backed up to multiple places (3-2-1). My data store isn't more than 1tb (this doesn't count commercial movies, which sit on a NAS and I could take or leave those).