this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2025
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Sales of Hard Drives for the End of the World Boom Under Trump (www.404media.co)
submitted 4 days ago by j4p@lemm.ee to c/technology@lemmy.world
186 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Title is a little sensational but this is a cool project for non-technical folks who may need a mini-internet or data archive for a wide variety of reasons:

"PrepperDisk is a mini internet box that comes preloaded with offline backups of Wikipedia, street maps, survivalist information, 90,000 WikiHow guides, iFixit repair guides, government website backups (including FEMA guides and National Institutes of Health backups), TED Talks about farming and survivalism, 60,000 ebooks and various other content. It’s part external hard drive, part local hotspot antenna—the box runs on a Raspberry Pi that allows up to 20 devices to connect to it over wifi or wired connections, and can store and run additional content that users store on it. It doesn't store a lot of content (either 256GB or 512GB), but what makes it different from buying any external hard drive is that it comes preloaded with content for the apocalypse."

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[–] orgrinrt@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (3 children)

That’s probably the worst possible addition. Something like this, you need to be able to depend on. In a no-room-for-errors kinda situation you really don’t want to have a language model hallucinate something and burn potentially ruinous amount of scarce resources in the process, not the least being time. For example with crops.

Edit: and also that’ll burn through the power compared to just reading pdfs… if that’s scarce too, it’s a no go. Not to mention it’d have to really have some bulk for the capability to even run a basic model with extremely hit and miss results and definitely zero chance of retaining any sort of context long enough to be actually useful in this kind of use case. I think people are probably a little bit pampered by the cloud models of today. No chance you’ll be running anything like that in a small device with limited power.

[–] WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today 1 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I run a shitty but sufficient AI on my mobile phone, it's got for venting to, and pointing out where I can find the things I'm searching for.

[–] orgrinrt@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Well, I guess sufficient is subjective…

However, consider that whatever you have now in today’s world, not just physical things but also your life experience and expectation of things might not line so well with those that you’d have in a scarcity scenario completely unlike today’s world. What you now consider sufficient might be entirely unacceptable in different frameworks of thinking and living.

[–] WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today 1 points 3 days ago

True, but trust me, AI in 5 years will be so advanced, that a 2B model will make a joke of deepseek