Prepper Disk
44 comments
·April 25, 2025exegete
IlikeKitties
> The product offering of an AI chatbot for when the power goes out made me laugh out loud.
To be fair, the current iteration of this is of course bullshit but imagine this in 10 years when raspberry pi sized devices can easily host AIs that outperform or at least match current best models and has been specifically trained to be an emergency assistant.
Kinda reminds me of the public access defibrillators that talk you through an emergency [0]. I can see an AI Assistant be useful during emergencies.
7952
I wonder if such a device could be a good counterpoint to cloud services in a business environment. Just as a reaction to the difficulty and cost of compliance when data is online.
qwertox
Stuff like this makes me think about the benefits which developing countries currently have. They have access to such a vast amount of information, like Wikipedia, any book on AA or torrents, YouTube tutorials, free AI chatbots and what not. Yet the social problems like the ones caused through corruption, localized conflicts and wars are so big, that none of this information is of any value. Who's to blame?
542354234235
It is of value though. Asian farmers were able to use cell phones to check weather and market prices to be able to grow more and sell for a better price [1]. Mobile banking apps have allowed poor Kenyans access to formal financial services, improving financial stability for those most vulnerable [2]. Being able to send money to disparate family members safely and securely protects them from corrupt local informal networks. Access to modern technology developed in first world countries enable poor counties to skip over expensive intermediate steps, like going from no phones to cell towers without building out a land line network. The #saveourgirls social media campaign in response to the Boco Haram kidnappings was started locally, after frustration with lack of action by the inept/corrupt local government, and brought international pressure, support, and aid.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259029112...
[2] https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/policy-topics/p...
xtiansimon
> “…benefits which developing countries currently have.”
The story of mobile phone use in African continent, where there are only the worst roads and no land lines, is an astonishing story of leaping forward through technology.
IlikeKitties
But don't a lot of developing countries have similar access? And especially torrenting is much more common in less developed countries where there's no copyright enforcement.
xnx
> in 10 years when raspberry pi sized devices
Like a phone
j4mie
"Please state the nature of the medical emergency"
api
An AI chatbot trained on massive amounts of knowledge about survival, farming, animal husbandry, small scale community management, home building, clothes making, etc would be immensely valuable.
“I have chickens and one has stopped laying eggs and become lethargic. What could be the cause?”
These things are great lookup tools, much better than web search, and being “jpegs for knowledge” you can pack a lot of knowledge into a small device. You have to check the results but having some old fashioned books on hand would help with that, as would some common sense.
I agree about a separate device. A durable laptop and a solar panel to charge it would be best.
A lot of special purpose devices are sold as a way to sell software since people won’t buy software. Sell a software and data bundle containing curated data and apps and such and nobody will buy it, but pair it with some e-waste and they will.
Same goes for a lot of digital assistants and other gadgets. They could just be apps but people don’t buy apps so they have to come bundled with e-waste.
mwcampbell
> These things are great lookup tools, much better than web search
Here's an article that argues otherwise, convincingly IMO:
https://buttondown.com/maiht3k/archive/information-literacy-...
garbagewoman
An ai chatbot might be a more accessible way to access information. Also, batteries and solar exist
danparsonson
Exactly what you want during a disaster - a chatbot confidently hallucinating nonsense answers to your questions when you can't verify them.
yorwba
Hallucinated nonsense is easily prevented by restricting output to verbatim content from a pre-vetted knowledge base. Think fuzzy search for people who prefer to ask questions instead of listing keywords.
I doubt this is what they've done here, but not all AI chatbots have to be thin wrappers around a large language model.
garbagewoman
I wouldn’t be that hysterical Dan. It could be used to point the user in a direction that is helpful, in the same way as they are used now. Its well known that chatbots hallucinate, yet many people use them, by choice, because they find them helpful.
jl6
I think most people would be better off just putting Kiwix on their phones:
xwat
Here are some Kiwix datasets for preppers https://library.kiwix.org/?lang=eng#lang=eng&tag=preppers (you may have to clear the URL params if you don't see any results)
hobofan
Kiwix also offers a physical product just like this that comes in a few different flavours: https://kiwix.org/en/kiwix-hotspot
dismalpedigree
This prepper disk is almost assuredly just Kiwix server on a raspberry pi.
nkrisc
I think I’d rather have as much of this information as possible in a laminated, ring-bound book with the holes in the pages reinforced. Also the content could be tightly edited and laid out to maximize the amount of information in the book.
Of course that would actually be a lot of work to both write and manufacture, so better to just get something that will be useless the first time it gets wet or power runs out.
rlupi
Do you mean an encyclopedia? I bet there are tons of physical encyclopedias on sale on Ebay.
Cthulhu_
The critics seem to forget how much space a traditional encyclopedia takes up. A device like this is ideal for data sharing during a crisis or in closed regimes, assuming electricity and digital devices are available.
xattt
Doesn’t have to be an encyclopedia. It would be a reference guide or an enchiridion.
garbagewoman
Getting something useless on purpose sounds like an odd thing to do
estsauver
Part of the reason I bought a new macbook with a decent amount of ram was that I wanted to make sure I could have a couple of local LLMs available locally just in case for some reason the frontierlabs/other models eventually became restricted.
imglorp
Is there a public list of shtf type materials like this if someone wanted to collect or edit their own material?
bombcar
There are a number of various things you can find, depending on what you're looking for.
Years ago I found a torrent called "The Ark" which is a collection of various other torrents from different sources, and includes all sorts of random data that could be quite useful in a shtf scenario.
At 238GB it's not that large.
multjoy
404 Media did an interview with the owner:
https://www.404media.co/sales-of-hard-drives-prepper-disk-fo...
mattlondon
I wonder how much useful info you could cram onto a 1.44mb floppy disk in just ascii files?
Perhaps markdown with a basic TUI reader with hyperlinks?
I guess the weakest link then would be finding a computer with a working floppy drive, but it is a fun thought experiment.
xattt
It’s tempting to assume that older technology is more reliable technology. Right now, that argument is being made for good reason to keep AM receivers in cars.
Floppy discs are older, but are still complicated beasts. It’s not like you would be able to repair a broken unit with basic tools.
Hard drives or whatever storage tech you can think of are similar, and you should use what is at hand. I would imagine that a flash drive, or an external SSD, remains more appropriate given the absence of mechanical parts.
At the end of the day, information is information, and you’re better off transcribing it onto paper for true 100% reliability.
panki27
170€ for a "Raspberry Pi 4B with 2GB of RAM and a 512GB premium SD memory card".
Any bets how long that SD card is gonna last?
userbinator
A few years, if recent SSD retention experiments are any indication.
rcarmo
Cute. I have a local instance of kiwix (mostly to avoid distractions) and can see how this would be useful.
bombcar
I used to lose Internet access every spring when the snow would melt - a good time to see what I could still do without it.
Answer is usually: Jellyfin, iTunes (local music), and various PDFs and kiwix.
Surprisingly large amounts of software and even the OS slow to a crawl if they can't contact the Internet (but think they should be able to). Annoying.
alangibson
The "AI Chatbot" model feels a bit like an STC from 40K.
literalAardvark
Pretty much. It would also explain why STC's can't be recreated or extended with blueprints, though it wouldn't do much to explain why they can't be copied.
theodric
I would be concerned about long-term data viability on an SSD that would likely be mothballed until SHTF, especially in light of the recent update released by HTWingNut ( https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/storage/unpowered... + https://youtu.be/rx3Y5x6uzKQ )
userbinator
Interesting how the comments on that article have a few "but I have much older SSDs which I stored unpowered fr over a decade and they're fine"... which is exactly what you'd expect of the MLC or even SLC flash that was common back then.
josefritzishere
It seems unlikely that collapse would ocurr in a sequence conveinient to the use of tech toys for survival. The correct steps and sequence are to read books, practice skills, buy seeds, build off-grid infrastructure. That doesnt mean zero tech, but it's strictly tertiary.
RetroTechie
> It seems unlikely that collapse would ocurr in a sequence conveinient to the use of tech toys for survival.
That's a common misunderstanding:
Our 'installed base' of technology / equipment would not disappear or disintegrate in most types of collapse. Your gadgets would keep working just fine (hardware-wise, that is).
What is susceptible to failure: communications (internet, cell networks, electronic payment systems, etc), power grid, logistics chains (supermarket supply, postal services etc), social structures, law & order (riots, looting), 3rd party-provided services, and probably more.
Also: unless a km+ sized meteor hits, truly large-scale collapse is more likely to happen gradually rather than overnight.
So: think power out, internet cut & riots in the street. With off-grid solar, and software (+data) that works offline, you can enjoy your tech toys just fine.
The tricky thing here is the degree to which daily-used tech requires external services to do anything useful.
It’s an interesting thought but I think there are better ways to do this than having some external disk. You could download all of WikiPedia, medical articles, etc to a laptop to the same effect. A survivalist book is probably even better since it won’t rely on power.
The product offering of an AI chatbot for when the power goes out made me laugh out loud.