[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What would you preserve if the internet were...
___________________________________________________________________
Ask HN: What would you preserve if the internet were to go down
tomorrow?
thought experiment: if the internet were to go down tomorrow for an
indefinite period, what content would you most want to download and
preserve?
Author : gooob
Score : 121 points
Date : 2024-11-03 02:39 UTC (20 hours ago)
| overu589 wrote:
| I have downloaded nearly 2TB in archives from the interweb, just
| in case the whole civilization thing were to "go down tomorrow."
|
| If you would like to begin preparing for your tomorrows, this is
| a good place to start: https://the-eye.eu/public/Books/
| bearjaws wrote:
| llama 3.1 405b - You get a massive wealth of knowledge that
| effectively can act as your Google.
|
| Open Street Maps - definitely detailed North America + planet for
| good measure
|
| deepseek-coder-v2 236b - Great coding assistant
|
| llama 3.1 70b - Much more practical to run
|
| My Google Photos since I have lots of good memorries on there.
| orionblastar wrote:
| I already downloaded collections of various ROMs for use in
| emulators along with the emulators to use them. These ROMs don't
| need the Internet and have no DRM in the emulators.
|
| My Steam collection won't work because it needs the Internet and
| DRM to work.
| dberst wrote:
| I've used the emulator "Retroarch" on the Steam Deck and had
| good success playing with it in offline mode. It has a bit of a
| learning curve, but it's been a great fit for me
| big-green-man wrote:
| Libgen, Anna's archive, xlib and scihub.
|
| All OSM data and openaddresses data.
| Jupe wrote:
| Apologies, but this strikes me as a rather silly question. What I
| would keep in the event of a prolonged network outage would be of
| minimal significance.
|
| What I'd really be concerned about would be our modern society.
| Purchasing food, water, fuel, clothes and other necessities would
| be near impossible. Supply chains would not just have problems,
| but literally fall apart. Money would stop moving.
|
| If anything is "too big to fail" it would be the internet.
| bruce511 wrote:
| You're not wrong. If the internet fails for everyone (at least
| at the city level) then basically there's no banking.
|
| Along with no banking there's no way to order supplies. No way
| to accept delivery. The very _least_ of your problems is music
| or Wikipedia.
|
| And I know you're thinking cash will help you, but its not
| enough. We used to have forests of paper and squadrons of
| clerks- that simply doesn't exist anymore.
| imoverclocked wrote:
| I think that there is a lot of merit to your argument.
| However, I think there is also the human factor as well as a
| malleable technology factor. I'll speak to the second factor.
|
| While we don't have forests of paper, we have pocket-sized
| computers that can talk peer to peer and store practically
| infinite amounts of transactions.
|
| We don't have squadrons of clerks but we have software that
| can collate transactions locally.
|
| The internet is certainly a useful tool for quick
| connectivity but there are definitely ways to do things
| without the internet and without reverting all the way back
| to cash/check and paper ledgers.
| woleium wrote:
| not right now we don't, imagine trying to make software
| without the internet.
| wongarsu wrote:
| My autocomplete and documentation work offline. Not being
| able to download new libraries would suck, but as long as
| you have the necessary tools installed it wouldn't be too
| bad.
|
| It's not that long ago that software was distributed on
| CD and tutorials in printed books. The internet adds a
| lot of convenience and productivity, but it's hardly a
| requirement.
| powersnail wrote:
| The entire open source ecosystem will be gone.
| Distribution on CD (or USB sticks) would be okay for
| delivering software, but not viable for frequently
| exchanging patches among a large group of developers in
| different parts of the world.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Most open source projects are the work of one developer
| with occasional outside contributions. Those can still be
| distributed by CD or USB stick, either directly by mail
| or the more traditional route of magazines having CDs
| with collections of software their subscribers might
| like. Or a modern version of people meeting up to
| exchange files peer-to-peer. If you want to contribute,
| write a patch and send it back to the developer, e.g. by
| snail mail.
|
| Large open source projects would be much more difficult.
| Though some of them are already either largely done by
| one company (so people can meet in person) or very
| hierarchical (like Linux).
| powersnail wrote:
| To be honest, I would expect most small open source
| projects to just vanish, because of the lack of
| discoverability. The users won't be able to test them
| easily, and probably won't be paying for the shipping of
| a tiny tool that they have not yet tried and don't know
| whether it's useful or not.
|
| Large open source projects can survive, but I'd imagine
| it will lean much more towards being developed mainly
| singular organizations. Without the internet, we don't
| just lose contributors, but also a lot of testers. The
| feedback loop will probably shrink, such that the
| software is mainly based on the need of the organization
| itself, and the perhaps a selected few collaborators who
| are very involved.
| jpc0 wrote:
| Food for thought that the parent didn't mention.
|
| You will be unable to communicate except through face to
| face meetings. There is no more POTS(plain old telephone
| system), the entire world routes phone calls over the
| internet. There's no IM, the physical mail system will at
| least become dramatically backlogged if not fail entirely
| due to infrastructure failure internally and the new
| increased demand.
|
| In my country is it not just that there isn't a POTS
| system, there isn't even copper. You have a FTTH(fiber to
| the home) link or a mobile connection. To my knowledge even
| in the US fiber terminates at the distribution point and
| your cable supply is last mile only.
|
| I don't know what even will cause a global internet outage
| at the scale but it will be global panic.
| self_awareness wrote:
| > While we don't have forests of paper, we have pocket-
| sized computers that can talk peer to peer and store
| practically infinite amounts of transactions.
|
| And how do we know that someone's pocket computer doesn't
| contain a forged list of transactions that never happened,
| or is missing some transactions that did happen?
| sim7c00 wrote:
| i like that you speak towards humans not being hopeless
| without the internet. its true. they depend on it a lot,
| but can easily adapt..
|
| i do beleive though that it would be only a temporary
| thing.
|
| on a local level you can likely still enable a lot of
| stuff. the internet would most likely die due to a decision
| to disable it rather than mass equipment failure. also very
| unlikely, as a ton of people must disable it at the same
| time, knowing all full well the result of doing so...
|
| if they do that so u can try to get a radio broadcast up
| with some equipment thats strapped to houses and appartment
| buildings eveywhere these days. see if some antennas can be
| enabled for telephony locally etc. get the spark going for
| getting a network back up. for isp equipment the same. you
| can enable and if needed reprogram/configure a lot of field
| equipment and enable local networks. perhaps depending on
| your locality even more (internet exchange and isp data
| centers are close to some people atleast).
|
| quite sure it would be up and running again in no time
| locally. at some point networks would merge and an internet
| would form again...
|
| all in all there's really not a lot anyone can do about it
| if people want to use these existing networks and
| equipment. unless they start cutting power to very large
| areas etc. etc., remove the equipment everywhere, or
| ourposefuly destroy it... - this line of thought is
| extremely unrealistic.
| viraptor wrote:
| I have to recommend "Zero Day Code", which is more or less a
| story about all of that.
| https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/51080208
| rgbswan wrote:
| 6 weeks tops until everything would run on LoRa (again), with
| nothing but important info, no ads, and all in TUIs,
| mmmmmmmhhhhhh
| tenpies wrote:
| I was thinking about this too.
|
| My most likely "internet down" scenario would be my local
| government deciding to launch a national firewall, probably
| under the guise of "combatting disinformation, malinformation,
| misinformation, and foreign interference".
|
| For that scenario I need as many VPNs as possible, a VPS in a
| friendly jurisdiction, and a TOR browser.
|
| If the "internet is down" for "good", it's hard to me to think
| of a scenario where it didn't bring down the rest of
| civilization down along with it.
| WantonQuantum wrote:
| I'm surprised no one has said Wikipedia yet.
| orionblastar wrote:
| You can download Wikipedia using instructions on this website:
| https://www.howtogeek.com/260023/how-to-download-wikipedia-f...
| dberst wrote:
| When I did this a number of years ago, and it was only around
| 5-6GB, or about 20GB with all the images. I also added about
| 4GB for windows, android, iOS, Linux, and Mac OS apps to
| parse/view the data. All of that fits on a 32GB flashdrive
| that I used to keep on my keychain but currently is in my
| glove compartment I think.
|
| It sparks some amazement in me still to wrap my head around
| the reality of so much information in a thing the size of my
| pinky. Or the size of my pinky nail if you use a micro SD
| card. And yeah, just took a weekend of downloading and
| setting it up, and flashdrives/microsd cards are easily found
| at department stores, or even gas stations sometimes.
|
| Even disregarded any potential doomsday utility, the
| amusement/amazement it's brought me was well worth the modest
| time/money it took. I hope more people give it a try
| syndicatedjelly wrote:
| People talk about investing in physical gold for an
| economic meltdown, I think stacks of microSD cards with the
| full contents of Wikipedia and a Netflix archive is worth
| orders of magnitude more in the event of a catastrophe
| NateEag wrote:
| Maybe, but only if computers survive in a usable form.
|
| If they don't, digital storage is utterly worthless.
| johnklos wrote:
| How does one archive Netflix?
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| Has kiwix gotten any better? I tried to use it years ago, but
| it crashed more than once and had all sorts of blocking UI
| interactions.
| elashri wrote:
| Wikipedia, Sci-hub, Anna's archive and Library Genesis. This is
| the sites that contains a significant part of humanity knowledge
| that will be needed.
| readyplayernull wrote:
| Textfiles.com, OEIS.
| glimshe wrote:
| Most of these sites being illegal says something about our
| laws. But I'd add GitHub to your list.
| self_awareness wrote:
| > Most of these sites being illegal says something about our
| laws.
|
| The perspective on this changes if you stop being a consumer,
| and start being an author.
| elashri wrote:
| At least for one of the websites in this lis, no it does
| not as you don't gain anything from the money that the
| users pay. And frankly some people will email you asking
| you to send them your work for free and you will happily do
| that.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| If it does, then the author is sadly misguided and got
| convinced of someone that isn't true.
|
| The people that download the book from these sites would
| never have bought them. Having your book downloaded by 10k
| people doesn't mean you've lost 10k sales, what it does
| mean is that you've got up to 10k people that wouldn't have
| bought the book anyway talking about it, effectively
| becoming word of mouth advertisers.
|
| This isn't quiet as true for movies/tv series etc, because
| their value (entertainment time/price) is so much lower.
| Books on the other have usually cost $5-30 and will take
| 4-30 hours to read through. At that price point, very very
| few people will download the books to save what amounts to
| a single meal. Especially if you consider that so few
| people actually read several books _per year_ (that 's
| essentially $<30 per year "saved" via illegal downloads)
|
| It could _become_ an issue if a for-profit company could
| serve them legally however, I agree with that. It 's hard
| to really talk about that, though ... It's a pure what-
| if/speculation after all
| grepfru_it wrote:
| Ah yes, the piracy never hurt anyone approach.
|
| How many of those 10k purchases didn't buy it because it
| was available for free somewhere? The point is, as you
| said, you don't know.. However we do know the opposite is
| true, once Napster went away people started paying for
| Pandora. Netflix password crackdown lead to increased
| subscriptions.
|
| When your desirable product isn't available for free,
| people will trend towards buying it.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| Your example is strange, as that was clearly a
| distribution problem. It's been well covered and could be
| observed with Netflix too, until they've reintroduced
| this issue.
|
| This distribution problem doesn't really exist with books
| at the moment as Kindle exists.
| yazzku wrote:
| You're mistakenly throwing books and music into the same
| bag.
|
| I often download books before buying them because I
| otherwise have no reasonable means to judge their
| content. This is not much different from flipping through
| the pages of a book in a library before buying it. The
| appeal of reading from an actual physical book is not
| something that any digital form can replace, so the book
| being available in digital form won't stop me from buying
| a copy. I also have no interest in Kindles and DRM.
|
| Music, on the other hand, might be a different story
| except for select audiophiles who prefer vinyl.
|
| So I don't think we can generalize to "product" like you
| do in your argument. Details and facts actually matter.
| fsflover wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15305476
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| For authors of scholarly journal papers at least, I don't
| think piracy is remotely a concern, because they do not
| receive any compensation from subscriptions or purchases of
| their papers, whereas they do benefit from the increased
| readership of their works.
| glimshe wrote:
| I _am_ an author, and I don 't think I'm entitled to have
| my work protected for 90+ years. Also, "piracy" is
| inevitable so the assumption is built-in my strategy.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| You mean... all those people that got rich writing
| knowledge-heavy books disagree with the GP?
|
| What is the algebraic empty solution to "all" again? I
| can't remember if you are right.
| animuchan wrote:
| It honestly doesn't, not at all.
|
| Source: I'm an author.
| timbit42 wrote:
| Internet Archive
| signaru wrote:
| My personal/work files for which the physical media of origin no
| longer exists. Source codes, mine and of others that I care
| about. Compilers. Lots of books and Wikipedia.
| wafflemaker wrote:
| pr0n, and make a lot of money selling it!
| imoverclocked wrote:
| More than downloading a bunch of information, I would also think
| about hoarding computers that might last a long time if taken
| care of... along with a durable power source that doesn't require
| fossil fuels. (eg: This potentially includes gasification based
| generators)
|
| For the internet to "go down for an indefinite period" there
| would need to be some pretty big changes to our current world.
| The reason it "goes down" also matters a lot.
|
| 1) Political reasons (eg: whomever is in power wants to control
| information flow)
|
| This will likely mean that certain kinds of information can still
| flow because we don't want to crash the entire economy.
|
| In this case, I would want all of the information I could get my
| hands on about known history. This includes previous regimes and
| how they ultimately played out.
|
| 2) Geo-political (some other country bans your access to their
| resources)
|
| This is a harder case to enforce without complete isolation ...
| but theoretically possible.
|
| In this case, technical howtos are still useful as you can
| probably still get modern supplies. Depending on what my country
| produces, I would probably want to get all information about
| those processes as I could. Also, if my country doesn't produce a
| lot of food, information on what can be grown locally would be
| helpful... along with ways to protect it from nature.
|
| 3) Global catastrophe (plague/virus/nuclear winter/etc...)
|
| Maybe enough of the internet is just "lost" and the technical
| means to resurrect it has also disappeared.
|
| At this point, you need to think about being completely self-
| sufficient. ie: Grow your own food, make your own tools, protect
| yourself from animals and people. It would be helpful to have
| some tools at the start for this. Maybe even just basic gardening
| tools and a greenhouse ... and whatever form of protection makes
| the most sense to you. Find some land that can sustain you;
| Leftover city supplies will likely disappear very fast.
|
| 4) All of the above, simultaneously.
|
| It's time to just get a Bible and start praying. Maybe a bunker,
| too. Survival will likely be a lot of luck and a lot of cunning.
| neverartful wrote:
| "computers that might last a long time if taken care of"
|
| Any examples? Do all computers have capacitors that will die
| within a certain number of years?
| tiznow wrote:
| Basically every historical/political analysis of turmoil every
| publically available US Army pdf I can find.
| mmooss wrote:
| If that's all you read, then I'd expect that you will find
| turmoil and create more. I'd read about the things humanity
| actually wants to do and benefits from.
|
| I don't read _How to write horrible code and what to do when
| that 's your codebase_. I do have to know the latter a bit, but
| no more than necessary.
| jpc0 wrote:
| Define internet here.
|
| Having recently had a week long internet outage I can say quite
| confidently, nothing really.
|
| The things that caused me massive anxiety during that outage was
| things that are real time.
|
| No communication, since all my communication is through VOIP
| services of some sort, even mobile calls might be down depending
| on how you define internet.
|
| And no banking at all, my bank doesn't even have physical
| branches and most banks in my country have gone that way, even
| going to a physical branch for one of the larger incumbent banks
| they just put you on a call with their call center, they cannot
| help you locally. The tellers and just fancy ATMs and they charge
| you a premium to use them instead of the ATM outside. If you
| thing that wont be an issue, well the internet is down, that
| local branch is useless.
|
| There's still many cash based business so that's less of an issue
| for me but we will definitely have pandemic level panic again. I
| mean during the pandemic people bought all the toilet paper here,
| not the food but the toilet paper...
|
| Online media will be the least of your problems and large swaths
| of that information is available and backed up at libraries
| around the world. Likewise if only the network is down the
| servers still exist so the data didn't go away.
|
| Also if Y2K taught us anything is that we will solve the problem
| relatively quickly and even if what we currently know as the
| internet fails a different form of the internet will be back up
| soon enough.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Agree. If we could time-travel back to 1985 then fine, I would
| miss very little about the modern internet.
|
| If the internet were to just suddenly "go down" globally it
| would of course be a disaster and result in much unrest, panic,
| supply chain breakdowns, and general collapse of society. It it
| so interwoven into everything we depend on.
| toofy wrote:
| the real horror would be if it were to happen in 20 years or
| so, if it were to happen in the near future we still have
| people around who remember how things were done before
| computers.
|
| society would end. some bumpy roads, sure, but we did very
| well before the internet and we'd do fine without it. we
| would just rebuild.
|
| it's just not as instrumental as some people make it out to
| be. nice? absofuckinlutely. necessary? nopes.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| It's weird that we are in the minority (I guess I'm not shocked
| since this is HN). Very little on the Internet is useful for
| survival in an Internet down scenario. And if the Internet is
| gone, we must have far bigger problems. Libraries are going to
| be far more useful, and books don't require electricity. I grew
| up in a place with lots of power outages and the main thing you
| are worried about is having hot water for a bath or a being
| able to cook a meal.
|
| Tangential thought but we should probably work hard to preserve
| libraries in the future. Real ones, with books. They are really
| unmatched when it comes to longevity and safeguarding
| information in a way that computers cannot replicate.
| Asraelite wrote:
| > They are really unmatched when it comes to longevity and
| safeguarding information in a way that computers cannot
| replicate.
|
| How so? There are long-term digital storage technologies that
| would long outlast any book and are many orders of magnitude
| denser.
| qskousen wrote:
| The only requirements for reading a physical book is that
| you know how to read and can turn pages.
|
| If it's digital storage, you have to have electricity, a
| compatible device, an understanding of the storage, and
| software that can read it.
| freedomben wrote:
| > _If it 's digital storage, you have to have
| electricity, a compatible device, an understanding of the
| storage, and software that can read it._
|
| And, increasingly, DRM servers that will allow you to
| read it.
| bbarnett wrote:
| No there is not. What do you mean!
|
| Nothing has been verified to work beyond 50 years, and
| those with data errors and failure rates.
|
| There are those CDs made out of rock, but they have never
| veen proven to pass the test of time.
| Asraelite wrote:
| > There are those CDs made out of rock, but they have
| never veen proven to pass the test of time.
|
| You're saying that something that has existed for less
| than 50 years doesn't count because we haven't been able
| to actually test it for more than 50 years, even though
| we understand the physics behind it and can theoretically
| predict how long it will last...
| hulitu wrote:
| > Ask HN: What would you preserve if the internet were to go down
| tomorrow?
|
| Surveillance. That's the main purpose, isn't it ? /s
| GianFabien wrote:
| MDN Plus. For some weird reason we can't get the offline version
| in Australia, but it is available in New Zealand.
| the5avage wrote:
| All the papers and books of library genesis
| fsflover wrote:
| This is a good question and the same one, which Archive Team is
| trying to answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41141349
| notorandit wrote:
| The GNU project as a whole and Linux kernel. And maybe RISC-V
| stuff.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Nothing.
|
| Nothing at all.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| _thought experiment: if the internet were to go down tomorrow for
| an indefinite period, what content would you most want to
| download and preserve?_
|
| Music that I do not already have on CD. Videos that contain
| useful knowledge on DIY medical procedures, DIY home repair and
| assorted other DIY knowledge. I archive this stuff already.
| That's about it really. I try to avoid any dependency on the
| internet or _smart_ phones given the commercial internet did not
| exist for a big part of my life.
| 486sx33 wrote:
| Actually nothing. Books, dvds, and blu rays
|
| They are important, and slowly being lost to time and produced
| less and less ...
| gmuslera wrote:
| The devil is in the details.
|
| It would be just the global internet? What would want to have in
| our local (continent, country, city, home, etc) internet provided
| that I have enough resources? The balkanization of Internet is
| still in the menu.
|
| Or it may be some global event disabling all computers, like a
| cosmic EMP?
|
| There are several "easy" things to download and have usable
| somehow. Wikipedia used to have available as download copy of the
| database. Google still have takeout for all my things that it
| have stored. A lot of the public code in GitHub or other public
| repositories are easy to download.
| Tepix wrote:
| There are plenty of wikipedia backups. That would be my first
| thought. But also i would download some LLMs that i can't use
| right now.
| edanm wrote:
| I mean, it's not a practical answer to your question, but I'd
| love a backup of YouTube. I think it's probably got most of
| humanity's knowledge in there somewhere, in all kinds of forms
| for all kinds of levels.
| jareklupinski wrote:
| as many AI models as i can get my hands on, to generate content
| for me
|
| who knows how long the net goes down for, and if i try to just
| save what exists, it would run out after _some_ time (maybe not
| my time, but when unknown time horizons are probable, a generator
| > a pile, imo)
| motohagiography wrote:
| there's a plausible incentive where a generation of models gets
| trained up to provide what most people will want, and then
| destroying the "old" internet behind it to prevent things like
| regime-derailing memes to ever happen again.
| garyfirestorm wrote:
| Pypi
| Johnny555 wrote:
| I'm surprised nobody said "porn" given how much traffic those
| sites drive -- is offline porn still easy to find? Last time I
| looked for offline porn, it was at the local video rental store
| in the back room section that said "Adults only", but now those
| stores are long gone.
|
| Are those "Lingerie and Adult Toys" stores on the outskirts of
| town filled with DVD's and magazines?
| NeoTar wrote:
| At least in the gay community there are still hundreds of DVDs
| available from physical stores. I did wonder how long that will
| last though.
|
| Of course the relevant stores will not be very common.
| Clamchop wrote:
| yt-dlp works for more sites than just YouTube :)
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| I have an interest in historical television, and YouTube has
| become the default location for other collectors to upload rips
| of VHS tapes and other formats of captured broadcasts.
|
| So a few years ago I started up a server that slowly (so as not
| to annoy any YouTube rate limits) downloaded copies of every
| video from channels I enjoy. I also threw in a few "normal"
| YouTube channels that I just happen to like.
|
| Today it's archived over 7500 videos and it's still rolling
| along.
| icpmacdo wrote:
| Can you link some of the best youtube channels for those?
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| Here's a few vaguely topical ones for Hacker News.
|
| BBC Archive: https://www.youtube.com/@BBCArchive
|
| AT&T Archives:
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDB8B8220DEE96FD9
|
| BBC Computer Literacy Project (UK only?):
| https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk
|
| The Computer Chronicles:
| https://archive.org/details/computerchronicles
|
| Blue OS Museum: https://www.youtube.com/@BlueOSMuseum
| musha68k wrote:
| It's amazing how much cheaper spinning disks have gotten over
| the years. We should all be archiving more IMO.
| leptons wrote:
| Spinning disks are kind of expensive. I'm paying about
| $3.00/TB for LTO5 tape. The cheapest refurb hard drives are
| still about $15/TB.
| mathgeek wrote:
| It's great that both are relatively cheap as they both have
| their advantages and use cases. Mostly depends on how "hot"
| your archives need to be.
| cbozeman wrote:
| I usually buy from ServerPartDeals and goHardDrive. I
| missed out on a really great refurb sale of 12TB Seagate
| drives that were $74.99 each, but even now, you can find
| 12TB disks for $89.99.
|
| My only problem with LTO5 tapes is the amount required to
| do backup. Were I going to do LTO, I'd have to go with LTO9
| since they hold 18/45TB and are around $90 a tape.
| leptons wrote:
| $74.99 for 12TB is still twice as expensive as the LTO 5
| tapes I'm getting on ebay. The LTO drive was pretty cheap
| too, so I'm still way ahead in my 200TB archive with
| regards to price. The other thing I like about tape is
| that is has a physical write-protect notch, so if my
| systems were infected with some ransomware, it wouldn't
| be able to touch my tapes even if I have a tape in the
| drive. Plug a hard drive in and you could be instantly
| fucked by the ransomware.
| pryelluw wrote:
| I went through this already. Lived through a category 5 hurricane
| that took out the power grid, and antennas (among many other key
| infrastructure).
|
| I downloaded as much documentation about the technology I relied
| on as possible. Ma pages, cloning repos, saving websites as HTML,
| etc. My goal was to have everything I needed in case I had to
| build my own internet again. Even if it was like cubas version
| that uses thumb drive based networking.
|
| It worked for the most part. The one downside was having to
| ration my electricity usage as it was generated by a generator
| and fuel was not easy to come by.
|
| This taught me that any kind of network requires a robust
| electrical grid. So, I'd install solar panels with batteries, a
| backup generator, some wind turbines, and then work on
| downloading all the documentation needed to make the network
| work.
| yazzku wrote:
| I think you meant "man pages", but "ma pages" works for me.
| sourcecodeplz wrote:
| I would invest in an M Macbook just for this reason, that
| battery life is insane even with wi-fi on, imagine no
| connectivity, should pass 15 hours.
| pryelluw wrote:
| At the time (2017), I was using an intel 2012 MacBook.
| Battery life was fine. The biggest challenge was not having a
| useful local search engine. It has prompted me to download
| lots of models and run them with ollama. I create local
| knowledge bases. This greatly augments the strategy.
| mattpallissard wrote:
| The latest Lenovo P14s I have running Arch/sway has a crazy
| long battery life as well. It idles at 3.4W with wifi on.
| Writing code with an editor and all the fancy LSPS/plugins
| pushes me to 4W. I can get more than a full days worth of
| work on a single charge if I'm not doing anything compute
| heavy.
|
| That said, it's not out of box like a Macbook.
| mattpallissard wrote:
| I used to travel across the US a lot. On my laptop I started
| keeping websites, documentation, base container images, source
| code for Linux, tools I used, and languages I was programming
| in for references the languages I was using. This wasn't for
| emergencies, it was so I could work productively while in
| transit. (I also tuned the hell out of the Linux power settings
| on my Lenovo)
|
| I hardly travel anymore but still wind up using all of those
| local resources. It's zero web searches, next to no latency,
| and I have the structure memorized. Finding information I need
| is so fast.
|
| I wish it was more popular to have a local-first mindset when
| writing software.
| whartung wrote:
| I guess the hot tip is to dig out the O'Reilly UUCP and Netnews
| book, and see if any of the phone modems still work. MacOS still
| ships with uucico and uucp.
|
| Mind, it probably wouldn't work for me, I have fiber to my house,
| no POTS. I dunno if the old 56K modems work or not.
| epirogov wrote:
| opensuse disk to restore civilisation :D
| motohagiography wrote:
| 4chan, reddit, and HN because they were humanity's only honest
| repositories. linkedin might be useful as our species' first
| attempt to create a simulation and to generate a a set of things
| people in an economy do.
|
| we could probably rebuild civilization just from 3blue1brown.
| stonethrowaway wrote:
| Primitive Tech is more useful than 3B1B from that perspective.
| NeoTar wrote:
| Allegedly primitive tech is at least partially fake - they
| use heavy equipment off screen to build their projects.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| The specific youtube channel Primitive Technology [1]
| definitely does not. John Plant does everything as you see,
| although he does have the benefit of doing research - he
| doesn't do things as people in the past have done, but as
| they might have done had they known things he does. But
| there's no tricks and no machinery. (And of course, some of
| what he's able to do is dependent on his environment - the
| plants he uses aren't around my part of the world.
|
| But there are a lot of knock-off channels, which you're
| presumably referring to, where people build things that are
| basically mini-castles, and pools filled with water using a
| pipe network, etc. And those are definitely at least
| partially fake.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/@primitivetechnology9550
| mmooss wrote:
| > 4han, reddit, and HN because they were humanity's only honest
| repositories
|
| They are interesting, valuable records of humanity in the early
| 21st century, but they - and other social media - contain a
| higher volume of misinformation and disinformation than
| anything the world has seen, and I'd say a higher proportion
| than anything since (the Middle Ages? Hard to compare.). Think
| of the infinite conspiracy theories and just plain bad
| information on Reddit, for example.
| motohagiography wrote:
| they were the vox populi. a lot of it was garbage, but having
| a mental filter for it is what set a bar. humor is a more
| reliable signal for truth than official consensus any day. I
| think they captured something essential.
|
| while you are probably sincere, when I hear terms like
| misinformation and disinformation these days I think, "tell
| me you have a received ontology without telling me you have a
| received ontology." that's how divided the discourse is. I'd
| save them because those sites were what people said when they
| felt they could express themselves honestly, and all gems are
| covered in muck, it just takes some digging and refinement.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Well most of YouTube I can easily do without, but there are a lot
| of good demonstrations of crafts and repairs on there that are
| way easier to understand than a text explanation of the same
| thing. If "indefinite" means "it may be that society's ability to
| send you stuff and fix what you have goes away for a while", I
| would want an archive of a lot of that. But it's <1% of the YT
| content, so I'm not sure if there's a good way to filter for just
| that.
| pxc wrote:
| In just one day?? Geez.
|
| Wikipedia in my language.
|
| Music and movies that are important to me that I only access via
| streaming. Maybe a few TV shows in SD.
|
| A giant bundle of ebooks is I can find one (e.g., in a public
| torrent).
|
| Open-source ecology.
|
| -----
|
| The things I'd really want archived but that there probably
| wouldn't be time to archive in such a short period without
| already having mostly-complete offline copies: -
| Wikipedia (in all languages) - Internet Archive - GNU
| projects and docs - Apache projects and docs - Nix,
| Nixpkgs and docs - as many books as possible regardless of
| source (e.g., LibGen) - as much music as possible
| regardless of source - everything public on GitHub, GitLab,
| Bitbucket, SourceHut, Codeberg - all KDE source code and
| docs - maybe video content (in SD only) based on some
| coarse filter like whether a movie is in the Library of Congress
| - maybe archives of some popular forums and forum platforms like
| Reddit, StackOverflow, important Discourse instances -
| various protocols and standards docs?
| shafyy wrote:
| No doubt: Wikipedia
| AlienRobot wrote:
| Fun fact: you can download Wikipedia and sell copies of it :-D
| paulcole wrote:
| None of it. If the Internet is down, society is fucked to the
| point that archiving a few websites isn't going to make a lick of
| difference.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| The documentation for all the programming languages and libraries
| I use, and if possible all forum posts them (and the entirety of
| stackoverflow).
|
| Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley so I can rick roll people
| on the post-internet era.
|
| Newgrounds.
| syngrog66 wrote:
| Gollum J. Trump
|
| literally the only silver lining to this otherwise shitty Trump
| timeline
| mid-kid wrote:
| a full copy of the slackware source code: fits in 10gb, contains
| a semi-curated set of applications and utilities for nearly any
| purpose, including their documentation, without trying to include
| _everything_. I throw this on any system I want to forget about,
| and I rarely need to add any additional software.
| bbarnett wrote:
| I do the same thing, but woth debian. These are good choices.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| The Bitcoin blockchain history.
| zamadatix wrote:
| What's the utility when the internet is down indefinitely?
| Nostalgia?
| runjake wrote:
| I'm already doing this, but:
|
| - All of Wikipedia English
|
| - Download as many LLM models and the latest version of
| Ollama.app and all its dependencies.
|
| - Make a list of my favorite music artists and torrent every
| album I can.
|
| - Open my podcast app and download every starred episode (I have
| a ton of those that I listen to repeatedly).
|
| - Torrent and libgen every tech book I value. Then, grab large
| collections of fiction EPUBs.
|
| - Download every US Army field manual I can get my hands on,
| especially the Special Operations Medic manual, which is gold for
| civilian use in tough times.
|
| - Download every radio frequency list I can for my area of the
| country.
|
| - Download digital copies of The Encyclopedia of Country Living
| by Carla Emory, Where There Is No Doctor, and Where There Us No
| Dentist.
|
| I already have paper versions of almost all of these but it's
| handy to have easily-reproducible and far more portable digital
| copies.
| digdugdirk wrote:
| How much space does this take? Both digitally and physically,
| for the stuff you have in print form?
| runjake wrote:
| <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)
| deivid wrote:
| Is this the libgen fiction mirror or some other large
| collection?
| nickpinkston wrote:
| Thank you for your service - that list is awesome.
| Loughla wrote:
| 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.
| runjake wrote:
| 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.
| Loughla wrote:
| 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.
| dsr_ wrote:
| In the US, "County Extension" is usually the phrase you
| want.
| thorum wrote:
| 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.
| dsr_ wrote:
| (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".
| dingaling wrote:
| > (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".
| kvark wrote:
| That's a great business idea: sell a laptop survival kit for
| tough times.
| infomaniac wrote:
| Can you elaborate on how you're storing this data?
| runjake wrote:
| 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).
| runjake wrote:
| 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.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| SF Medical Manual link:
| https://irp.fas.org/doddir/milmed/sfhandbook.pdf
| runjake wrote:
| 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.
| tarruda wrote:
| > 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
| oceanplexian wrote:
| Probably shelf stable food, firearms, hard currency like gold and
| silver. For information the books I already have (Classic
| literature, engineering references, cook books). Honestly,
| computers would be the last thing I care about even though it's
| both my hobby and my career.
|
| I say this because the Internet is so integral to our current
| society and way of life that it would be like losing access to
| electricity. Most young people have never lived in a world
| without Internet access. Electronic payments, logistics, food
| distribution, etc would all stop functioning. Society is far more
| fragile than anyone wants to admit and people would panic.
| defanor wrote:
| I do store and update backups of public information regularly,
| since losing access to much of the Internet completely is not
| such a remote possibility here; many resources are blocked
| already, both proxying services and protocols are being blocked
| as well. Storing those backups together with personal data
| backups.
|
| The things I store are those that seem valuable and information-
| dense, the kinds that I would be able to use in a relatively
| prolonged isolation. Storage space is limited, and redundancy is
| important for backups, so more copies of important information
| are preferable, to some extent, over added less important
| information. That is, one may consider tiered backups.
|
| Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg, perhaps as OpenZIM archives (for
| Kiwix, making them more readily accessible), look like good
| starting points, along with other Wikimedia projects (e.g.,
| Wikisource, Wiktionary; also available as OpenZIM archives). A
| music collection is a part of my personal backups. Then there are
| textbooks: OpenStax provides good ones under the CC BY license,
| LibreTexts books are of variable quality, but also worthwhile to
| look into, while WikiBooks are mostly disappointing. Then one may
| consider copyright-infringing book libraries, if one is fine with
| those. A few hundred gibibytes seem sufficient for a decent
| stockpile, including a good chunk of human knowledge, and
| providing plenty to do alone (read and study, that is).
|
| Textbooks could be much more lightweight if their sources (e.g.,
| in LaTeX) were provided, rather than PDFs, but unfortunately even
| for those under permissive licenses, usually only PDFs are
| available, which hinders both printing (as another form of
| backups) and regular digital data storage.
|
| I expect the government will block software repositories among
| the last ones, so not backing up those yet, but mirroring, say,
| Debian archive (including sources) may be a good idea for such a
| situation, or when preparing for the Internet to go down.
|
| If one has a lot of extra storage available, other easily
| available large data dumps to consider are Common Crawl, arXiv
| bulk data downloads, complete OSM data, huge copyright-infringing
| libraries, and videos: plenty of nice YouTube channels and TV
| series.
| a2128 wrote:
| A few years ago I was concerned of this being a genuine
| possibility (at least for a few months) due to regional
| conflicts, so I prepared the following on some SD cards and flash
| drives:
|
| * Offline copies of Wikipedia, Stack Overflow and some others
| using Kiwix
|
| * Arch Linux iso and mirror of some packages for installing a new
| system
|
| * Godot Engine along with game assets shamefully stolen from hl2,
| so I can have some creative outlet, or make training sims if
| things got so bad
|
| * Hours of videos and songs I like
|
| Today I would probably include Llama or other LLMs.
|
| It's unfortunate to see big companies pushing for an online-only
| world. Windows 11 requiring Internet access to install, YouTube
| restricting yt-dlp and YouTube Premium downloaded videos only
| being playable if the app was able to ping YouTube servers in the
| past few days. It really feels like technology is regressing, we
| are creating new problems for ourselves for no good reason. But I
| guess it's fine when all of the company offices are in rich
| Western countries with fast and stable internet access.
| eacnamn wrote:
| Does your Wikipedia mirror include media? Text-only wiki seems
| a bit bleak to me, but including all media would devour so much
| storage, I just haven't been able to justify using that much of
| my limited storage space
| rightbyte wrote:
| It would be nice if there was some 'horribly compressed
| media' dump. Like, I can live with '96 pic resolutions for an
| offline copy.
| can16358p wrote:
| I agree with you, and it's not only about rich and Western
| countries: you might be rich and have a stable Internet
| connection, but would like to stay totally offline too, which
| is very hard (if you just want to watch YT videos on something
| when offline etc) nowadays.
| nickpsecurity wrote:
| BibleHub.com, GotQuestions.org, and BiblicalTraining.org for
| spiritual truth.
|
| Educational resources for training people in skills they'll need.
| Everything from K-12 to eHow.
|
| Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica to preserve our knowledge.
| Specialist ones like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and
| Mayo Clinic, too.
|
| Source code for major OSS like Linux, OpenOffice, etc. Hardware
| designs, too. Especially old-school stuff on primitive fabs or
| hand-wired. We'll be covered both ways.
|
| I think we can remake everything else from scratch using the
| prior lessons learned.
| mythrwy wrote:
| YouTube how-to videos.
| fatih-erikli-cg wrote:
| Nothing if my favorite programming language is installed in my
| pc. I make the computer fun for myself. Internet doesnt bring
| anything.
| robin_reala wrote:
| I produce books[1] for Standard Ebooks.[2] I've got a fifty-long
| list of books-to-do-at some point, so grabbing transcriptions
| from Gutenberg and scans from archive.org for each would keep me
| busy for a long time, presumably long enough for the internet to
| heal whatever state it's got itself into.
|
| [1] https://www.robinwhittleton.com/books/
|
| [2] https://standardebooks.org/
| tmtvl wrote:
| A bunch of content currently on YouTube: the Perl conference,
| European Lisp Symposium, Strange Loop, Peter Hadfield's
| (Potholer54) videos,...
|
| Most written content I am interested in I already have backed up
| (for example PDFs of various Wikipedia articles).
|
| Maybe also the latest DVD release of Tumbleweed in case I have
| use for it.
| animuchan wrote:
| First thing that comes to mind is the entirety of 3blue1brown,
| it's brilliant.
|
| I also like the opposite thought experiment, turns out I have so
| much of the Internet that I'd love to never come back online. The
| whole shitcoin scene, poof, gone.
| rsync wrote:
| The diy (home improvement?) stack exchange.
| 23B1 wrote:
| Absolutely none of it. I don't think we are markedly better off
| as a species because of it.
|
| Yes we'd lose probably a good chunk of cultural artifacts but 99%
| of those are transient and will eventually be lost to the sands
| of time anyway (this is true for nearly every era).
|
| Meanwhile the 'culture' downstream of the internet is vapid,
| self-centered, packed with rage and perversion, does little to
| stop human suffering or strife, and is essentially a wealth
| consolidation and mass surveillance tool for the gentry.
|
| That said, I have done this prior to a combat deployment in a
| faraway land, I loaded a ton of books, wikipedia, and movies/TV
| shows up on an external harddrive.
|
| I used it maybe twice and for non-critical stuff. It was eye-
| opening (and refreshing) how little me, my buddies, or the people
| we were working with cared about this nonsense, especially upon
| the realization that it had almost no bearing or impact on who we
| were or what we were doing.
| analog31 wrote:
| My bicycle.
| 7952 wrote:
| Photos of my family. Lots of comforting audio books and movies.
| Recipes of simple food for a wide range of ingredients.
| INTPenis wrote:
| How much would it hurt if you lost all your family photos in one
| day?
|
| And how much would a solution be worth to you?
|
| That's why I have a consumer NAS at home where I backup all my
| most precious media. Simply because I've worked in IT for 20
| years so I believe more in off-site backups than I do in the
| reliability of IT services.
| codr7 wrote:
| Real life?
| sandwichsphinx wrote:
| The entire library of google scholar
| sebbu wrote:
| I don't think I saw OpenStreetMaps in the lists provided by
| various people in this thread. I rely on GPS a lot, and having a
| local one would help greatly (preferably on phone, but still).
|
| Also, OpenLibrary, AniDB / Anilist / Anime-Planet / GoodReads /
| IMDB / jeuxvideo.com / Last.fm / LibraryThing / MangaUpdates /
| MyAnimeList / MyDramaList / NovelUpdates / Shikimori / TheTVDB /
| WLNUpdates (databases of various entertainment stuff).
|
| Then I can look in the GPS where to find them.
| throwaway9567 wrote:
| Friendly reminder that the Internet Archive is accepting
| donations. In light of recent attacks causing operational issues
| for the archive, additional funding will likely be well spent:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41854518
| anticorporate wrote:
| Honestly, very little if anything.
|
| I would double-check my offline backups of everything I care
| about (personal files and professional projects, as well as local
| copies of music and videos), be sure my local maps are up to date
| for directions, and perhaps grab new videos from a YouTube
| channels to have some new entertainment in case I wasn't able to
| get anything new for a while.
|
| Otherwise, there's not much I'd want. Presumably my local library
| would still have books, and the radio would still carry news.
| Most of what I find valuable on the internet are things that
| refresh in near real-time like message boards and news, or aren't
| really _data_ to be backed up so much as services I use like
| ordering food or checking my bank balance.
|
| Having recently gone through over three weeks of power, internet,
| and cell service outage with Hurricane Helene, at no point was I
| tempted to go into town and download me some more internet for
| use offline.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Nothing. Start over from scratch.
| latentsea wrote:
| Soft White Underbelly
| more_corn wrote:
| There should probably be a backup of stack overflow, if only
| because it'd be hard to get it back if it ever goes down.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-11-03 23:01 UTC)