[HN Gopher] Project Nomad - Knowledge That Never Goes Offline
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Project Nomad - Knowledge That Never Goes Offline
Author : jensgk
Score : 332 points
Date : 2026-03-22 12:28 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.projectnomad.us)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.projectnomad.us)
| tsss wrote:
| I was expecting the game from my childhood and was disappointed.
| aquariusDue wrote:
| Yeah, that game was really ahead of its time. I still hold out
| hope some indie studio will attempt a spiritual successor.
| myself248 wrote:
| See also:
|
| https://internet-in-a-box.org/
|
| https://wrolpi.org/
| kgeist wrote:
| 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
| cousinbryce wrote:
| I'm convinced that the multitude of off-line Internet tools is
| a ploy to keep any one of them from gaining traction
| lucasluitjes wrote:
| 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.
| rtibbles wrote:
| 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.
| WillAdams wrote:
| 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.
| pdpi wrote:
| 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.
| moffkalast wrote:
| 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.
| JanisIO wrote:
| Anyone thought about using a Steam Deck with this? Or explored
| the concept of a "Nomad Deck"?
| c0balt wrote:
| 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.
| mhitza wrote:
| It has built in microphones though.
| wds wrote:
| 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.
| JanisIO wrote:
| True, but I always give my devices a protective glass and put
| them in rugged armor. Broken screens never been a problem for
| me..
| moffers wrote:
| Really clever targeting of a niche. I'd be interested to hear if
| they find success!
| shevy-java wrote:
| So how does that work?
| WJW wrote:
| It never goes offline by already being offline.
| bpavuk wrote:
| 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
| Yokohiii wrote:
| I like the idea of an LLM that acts as a public knowledge base.
| But that doomsday framing on the site is pretty annoying.
| adsharma wrote:
| 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.
| waynerisner wrote:
| 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.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| 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.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| 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.
| DoctorOetker wrote:
| What Gulf state do you live in? UAE?
| dogma1138 wrote:
| You'll be hanged from a construction crane if they'll catch
| you with this project in Iran... :)
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Why?
| rendx wrote:
| 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-...
| mohamedkoubaa wrote:
| Great premise for a science fiction story
| iandanforth wrote:
| 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?
| entropie wrote:
| A friend made this years ago. I never used it but the idea is
| awesome.
|
| https://github.com/ligi/SurvivalManual
| adsharma wrote:
| 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/
| jrm4 wrote:
| And for those who are only vaguely familiar, this ZIM file
| format is not the same as the https://zim-wiki.org one.
| hofrogs wrote:
| 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!
| Lapra wrote:
| In a world where this is useful, you aren't going to be spending
| your precious battery on running an LLM...
| desireco42 wrote:
| Solar cells work no matter what, I agree that maybe less
| processing is more useful but LLM is uniqely useful as well
| qingcharles wrote:
| 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.
| layer8 wrote:
| No need for a battery, you just need someone to hit the pedals
| on that dynamo.
| ZeroCool2u wrote:
| 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.
| leowoo91 wrote:
| It could use some own wisdom not to use nodejs..
| itintheory wrote:
| Why does it have to have AI? Ugh.
| layer8 wrote:
| You can use Kiwix, OpenStreetMap and Kolibri as an AI-free
| equivalent. Adding AI to those is exactly the differentiator of
| this project.
| pstuart wrote:
| 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.
| Flere-Imsaho wrote:
| Because if you're stuck in your underground bunker, who else
| can you talk to?
| cstaszak wrote:
| 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!
| codeveil wrote:
| 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.
| amarant wrote:
| >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.
| collabs wrote:
| 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.
| nelsonic wrote:
| For anyone wanting the video explanation from the creator, watch:
| https://youtu.be/P_wt-2P-WBk
| balkanist wrote:
| 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.
| Aargau wrote:
| 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.
| Animats wrote:
| 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/
| BoorishBears wrote:
| 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
| sgbeal wrote:
| > 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.
| nabeards wrote:
| I had thought of building those exact Civil Defense devices a
| few years ago. Maybe it's a viable product?
| Infernal wrote:
| I'm searching for the source material here but must not be
| using the right keywords, any hints?
| Animats wrote:
| I've looked a few times over the years but can't find it.
| National Archives probably has it somewhere, but not
| indexed where Google can find it.
| HelloUsername wrote:
| > 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
| ricksunny wrote:
| joke's on the survivors who have to go find sunlight in nuclear
| winter
| hamstergene wrote:
| 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.
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| 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.
| jmuguy wrote:
| 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.
| coldtea wrote:
| 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.
| kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote:
| But I bet they would've loved the opportunity to do so
| before it all went sideways.
| colechristensen wrote:
| 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.
| brightball wrote:
| 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. :)
| nojvek wrote:
| Is there a serious "rebuild all of civilization" book?
|
| Sounds like a good read.
| coldtea wrote:
| 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...
| kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote:
| 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.
| fer wrote:
| > 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
| brightball wrote:
| Yes.
|
| https://a.co/d/0ieNUmhB (Not a referral link)
| kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote:
| 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
| born-jre wrote:
| what a coincidence, i am just downloading 110gb wikipedia dump on
| kiwix right now
| wooptoo wrote:
| 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.
| cortesoft wrote:
| 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.
| kirubakaran wrote:
| Have you seen this Monty Python skit of Four Yorkshiremen?
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE
| badsectoracula wrote:
| 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.
| canpan wrote:
| 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.
| beeburrt wrote:
| > 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?
| canpan wrote:
| 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.
| coretx wrote:
| Whats not in there ? Why ? Are the LLM's cencored ?
| ForgotMyUUID wrote:
| 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 :)
| highhands89 wrote:
| 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
| beeburrt wrote:
| Anybody know of an alternate version of this with no AI?
| sb057 wrote:
| Just delete the model file?
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(page generated 2026-03-22 23:00 UTC)