[simonw]

This is a sensible comparison.

My "help reboot society with the help of my little USB stick" thing was a throwaway remark to the journalist at a random point in the interview, I didn't anticipate them using it in the article! https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/07/17/1120391/how-to-r...

A bunch of people have pointed out that downloading Wikipedia itself onto a USB stick is sensible, and I agree with them.

Wikipedia dumps default to MySQL, so I'd prefer to convert that to SQLite and get SQLite FTS working.

1TB or more USB sticks are pretty available these days so it's not like there's a space shortage to worry about for that.

[0xDEAFBEAD]

Someone should start a company selling USB sticks pre-loaded with lots of prepper knowledge of this type. In addition to making money, your USB sticks could make a real difference in the event of a global catastrophe. You could sell the USB stick in a little box which protects it from electromagnetic interference in the event of a solar flare or EMP.

I suppose the most important knowledge to preserve is knowledge about global catastrophic risks, so after the event, humanity can put the pieces back together and stop something similar from happening again. Too bad this book is copyrighted or you could download it to the USB stick: https://www.amazon.com/Global-Catastrophic-Risks-Nick-Bostro... I imagine there might be some webpages to crawl, however: https://www.lesswrong.com/w/existential-risk

[0xDEAFBEAD]

BTW, just for some perspective here. According to Our World in Data, your annual probability of dying in a road accident might be on the order of 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 100,000:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-road-incident...

Compare with coronal mass ejection:

"In 2019, researchers used an alternative method (Weibull distribution) and estimated the chance of Earth being hit by a Carrington-class storm in the next decade to be between 0.46% and 1.88%.[45]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronal_mass_ejection#Future_r...

If we take that number at face value and annualize it, your annual risk of seeing a serious solar storm (power restoration could take months or years) is on the order of 1 in 1,000. 10-100x more likely than dying in a road accident.

So why is it that you wear a seatbelt, yet we're not prepping for a serious solar storm? Humans are much better at thinking about "ordinary" recurring risks like car accidents, than "extraordinary" civilization-scale risks.

[jvolkman]

https://www.prepperdisk.com/

It's not a USB stick, though. Probably a raspberry pi.

[troupo]

> Someone should start a company selling USB sticks pre-loaded with lots of prepper knowledge of this type.

It amuses me to no end that people think civilization will collapse but they will still have access to robotics and working computers to peruse USB sticks at their leisure.

[0xDEAFBEAD]

It depends on your collapse threat model. In any case, my assumption is that serious preppers already have EMP-shielded laptops and solar panels for a SHTF scenario. And serious preppers are probably doing some datahoard as well. The point is that there are economies of scale in the datahoard. Most of the work of datahoard is identifying data worth hoarding, setting up your scripts, monitoring your webcrawler, etc. Once you've got a drive full of data, replicating that drive is comparatively easy. That's why it could make sense to start a business selling replicated drives.

Maybe there is room for an "all-in-one" product offering with an energy-efficient laptop, solar panel, and TBs of useful data, all protected in an EMP storage case for the event of solar flare.

[Dylan16807]

Nuclear EMP is a big risk to all electronics in a huge area. Solar EMP is millions of times weaker and measured in volts per kilometer. Anything unplugged or even just off-grid won't notice. Even on the grid the biggest risk isn't really the extra voltage on long wires but that some big transformers and other equipment are too noise intolerant and magnify issues.

[WaxProlix]

Many preppers work towards this goal so it's not unreasonable if you've already made the leap to 'something bad happened but I survived with my house/bunker/bug out bag/whatever'. I'm not really a prepper at all and even I've got a little solar capacity, batteries and such.

[nonameiguess]

The US government already does this. Presumably, many governments do, but I've only ever worked for the US, so it's the only one I know of. Every day, the NSA does a dump of Wikipedia, the Stack Exchange network, and God knows what else to import into self-hosted versions of clone sites on classified networks, so US intelligence and military personnel can access this information without needing an Internet connection. The places these get hosted are already inside of military installations, in SCIFs that are behind several-foot thick concrete and radiation shielding that is probably quite a bit more likely than you to survive some kind of event that otherwise collapses civilization. They, of course, also have all of the military field manuals and technical manuals that more or less form a complete guide to how to survive in the wild with no equipment.

That said, I still think I understand why individuals like to do this kind of thing. You're not really concerned about human civilization itself preserving its structures and knowledge. You're concerned about the possibility that you personally will survive some civilization ending event and whatever is left of global militaries and various larger-scale data archiving systems won't care about you or have any way to share the information.

Just be warned, as someone with past experience being in the military and having to actually do these "remote survival with no gear" things, just reading about it is typically not enough to succeed on your first try. You need practice, and it helps quite a bit to have friends, co-workers, some sort of trusted companions who have at least as much and ideally more experience than you. Whoever figures out how to build the first new piece of "technology X" after catastrophe wipes out the last one we had before is far more likely to be someone who built this kind of thing before than someone who spent the pre-apocalypse data hoarding but never actually practicing what they're trying to learn how to do.

[jazzyjackson]

https://shop.sacred-texts.com/product/ista-usb-flash-drive-9...

[rasz]

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2009/11/hands...

https://www.amazon.com/WikiReader-PANREADER-Pocket-Wikipedia...

[kybernetikos]

I've been carrying around a local wikipedia dump on my phone or pda for quite a bit more than 10 years now (including with pictures for the last 5 years). Before kiwix and zim, I used tomeraider and aard.

I do it both for disaster preparedness but also off-line preparedness. Happens more often than you'd think.

But I have been thinking about how useful some of the models are these days, and the obvious next step to me seems to be to pair a local model with a local wikipedia in a RAG style set up so you get the best of both.

[potato-peeler]

How do you maintain updates? One thing which of concern is rogue edits getting downloaded, have you figured out a mitigation?

[camel-cdr]

reposting a comment of mine from a few weeks ago:

> All digitized books ever written/encoded compress to a few TB.

I tied to estimate how much data this actually is in raw text form:

    # annas archive stats
    papers = 105714890
    books = 52670695
    
    # word count estimates
    avrg_words_per_paper = 10000
    avrg_words_per_book = 100000
    
    words = (papers*avrg_words_per_paper + books*avrg_words_per_book )
    
    # quick text of 27 million words from a few books
    sample_words = 27809550
    sample_bytes = 158824661
    sample_bytes_comp = 28839837 # using zpaq -m5
    
    bytes_per_word = sample_bytes/sample_words
    byte_comp_ratio = sample_bytes_comp/sample_bytes
    word_comp_ratio = bytes_per_word*byte_comp_ratio
    
    print("total:", words*bytes_per_word*1e-12, "TB") # total: 30.10238345855199 TB
    print("compressed:", words*word_comp_ratio*1e-12, "TB") # compressed: 5.466077036085319 TB

So uncompressed ~30 TB and compressed ~5.5 TB of data.

That fits on three 2TB micro SD cards, which you could buy for a total of 750$ from SanDisk.

[fumeux_fume]

Of course that’s angle they decide to open the article from. That they feel the need to frame these tools using the most grandiose terms bothers me. How does it make you feel?

[matsemann]

I was once interviewed by my country's biggest paper about "strava art" I make, aka biking/running with a gps logger in order to create some kind of figure on the map.

It was edited into this video about people drawing dicks on maps using this technique. Aka the intro was loads of penises on maps, and then "someone that enjoys making this kind of art is Mats here" and then the video interview started. When they ask why I "make this kind of art" I answered because it's nice for the motivation and makes me run longer routes. They then overlaid a growing "longer" text as a dick joke.

Now, the theme was anyways a silly one, so I don't mind. But made me realize how easy it is to edit stuff to suit what they want to show, no matter the context.

* I do admit I have also ran a penis, so it's not entirely incorrect. But all questions in the interview was in a general context and didn't know this was gonna be the angle.

[ileonichwiesz]

I’ve had a very similar experience. I was only on TV once. Right before Christmas, ~20 years ago, I was running some errands downtown and ran into a camera crew doing a puff piece about holiday preparations.

They asked me what was most important to me about the holidays, and I said that I really don’t care about the presents, but I love the atmosphere, the music, and spending time with my loved ones.

A couple days later the segment was aired, and it went something like this:

>Reporter: “Our crew asked people on the street what they like most about the holidays.”

>Teenage me: “…the presents…”

[simonw]

It was a joke, and I was laughing when I told the reporter, but it's not obvious to me if it comes across as a joke the way it was reported.

But then it's also one of those jokes which has a tiny element of truth to it.

So I think I'm OK with how it comes across. Having that joke played straight in MIT Technology Review made me smile.

Importantly (to me) it's not misleading: I genuinely do believe that, given a post-apocalyptic scenario following a societal collapse, Mistral Small 3.2 on a solar-powered laptop would be a genuinely useful thing to have.

[makeworld]

No need to muck around with SQL, just use Kiwix.

[cyanydeez]

the real valuable would be both of them. the LLM is good for refining/interpreting questions or longer form progress issues, and the wiki would be actual information for each component of whatever you're trying to do.

But neither are sufficient for modern technology beyond pointing to a starting point.

[jjice]

Oh interesting idea to use SQLite and their FTS. I was very impressed by the quality of their FTS and this sounds like a great use case.