Technology

Related reddit thread interesting enough https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/comments/gqvuwm/serious_question_best_way_to_empproof_usb_sticks/

I plan to be the jerking guy at Vesuvius if the nukes fall.

512GB for the bargain price of $189?? Why are we shilling what we can download via torrent for free?

This is just an ad for that device. Title made it sound like there's a run on storage devices.

I love this idea. I couldn't help but think of the innernette though.

Anybody know where to find an archive of this disk?

It's all publicly available info, or was. I've got a Raid 5 I can throw it on, might come in handy during power outs and such.

I've got spare hard drives, and an old Pi and other computers around. No need to spend $189 on this when you can pretty easily DIY. The value is the prepackaged archive.

I see projects like kwix and such, but I don't immediately see this archive or anything comparable. Haven't looked into this before.

BTW, if you're actually worried about the end of the world or whatever, this won't save you. Make friends with your neighbors and communities. If you don't have a physical trade, you need to learn one like fixing shit or growing really good weed.

*Edit suck - such

Fear = Profit!

Would you like to know more?

My problem with preppers is the over estimating on whether they’ll be in a position that these skills will have any effect, and the under valuing on steps we could just take to not have this future in the first place.

Like, you’ll need a farm right off the bat, or your first steps in any guider are how to violently take somebody else’s land. Followed by step two, keeping that land from other humans who don’t want to die.

Instead of prepping, become nomadic scroungers or live in a fricking farming commune in the first place. Basically descend a couple levels of societal development and you’ll already be self sufficient and ready. Like the Amish.

Or, you know, voting for politicians who listen to scientists.

Anything beyond being self sufficient for a month is overkill in my opinion.

If you enjoy this sort of stuff make sure to support the Kiwix Project which like 90% of these commercial offshoots are based off of.

Neat. I get the archived sites and docs as pretty useful and a good way to keep info that might be redacted or manipulated by a fascist government, but I gotta question the use of this technological medium to save information as useful during a “doomsday” situation.

If you’re in an actual doomsday situation, that means odds are utilities like water and power are intermittent or nonexistent, this box will be useless unless you have already spent the time and effort to install and maintain an off-grid power solution to use this device.

So essentially a gimmick. However, I can’t argue with the preservation of knowledge in an effort to reference it when bad actors change what is publicly available.

E: I think people are missing my point. I said you’d need to be prepared to use this device in a doomsday situation, as in, “already spent the time and effort to install and maintain an off-grid power solution…”

But for some reason people are telling me “well if you’ve already got a power setup…” when I stated not having the means to utilize this device it’s pointless. Telling me what I already said? C’mon, people. No need to reiterste my solutions and contradict conditions I stated to make yourself right.

You’d also already have to have all the tools, seeds, plants, material, equipment and supplies to make or farm and a community to implement the knowledge saved on the device. Maintaining the trappings of civilization in a doomsday situation is all but impossible solo, and a shitload of work for a community. You don’t put this box in a closet and when the power goes out permanently and your gas generator kicks on you decide it’s time to learn how to survive. IOW it’s useless unless you’re already prepped.

https://www.prepperdisk.com/pages/how-does-it-work

Would be nice if they'd offer downloads for the disk image. Or at least sell the disk image since I don't need yet another Pi lol.

Good idea for normal people that are not really knowing how and what to put on such a device

What if we could calculate the bending of light around black holes and just hammer away data at space and pick it up again at a set interval.... No storage needed!

Am looking for research funding.

Ooh. As a hobbyist "mostly for funzies" prepper I was mildly interested. But then I clicked around their site a bit and I found preorders for a version of the prepper disk with an LLM chatbot "companion.". Assuming the LLM is using RAG on the library of source documents and isn't just relying on its training, that's really neat. I know people will exclaim "hallucination!", but in a situation where you literally have no idea what to do, no way to get help, and the alternative is lying down and dying, I could see this being really handy. Often the hardest part of having a giant archive of information is how to find what you need out of it and interpret what it's telling you.

I'd rather use an "open" version of this, though. Prepper Disk's website sounds like they're trying to keep their data at least partially locked down, and while I can understand that they want to recoup the cost of the effort they put into setting this up it kind of goes against the grain of prepping to rely on something that you can't repair or modify yourself.

Wouldn't something like this be potentially quite useful if you live in an area that could easily see a natural disaster that results in weeks without a connection to the outside world? Sure you could build a raspberry pi to do it yourself but not everyone is capable of doing that and its also a low power consumption device which is useful to keep your backup power going longer, ideally through a battery as a generator normally doesn't do very low wattage efficiently. Solar is variable and lower power demands means you can go smaller, or helps keep it more reliable.

I find prepper stuff has a fine line between reasonable preparation for something that may well happen and then you get into the crazies that think the world is ending and they are actually going to achieve anything in such a situation beyond dying alone.

As I live in the UK the most likely disaster is a couple cm of snow which will break most infrastructure, shops will run out of things like milk and bread for days. This happened a few years ago, I had to resort to making tortillas instead for my lunch.

Has room for a porn folder too right?

Seems like an amateur apocalyptic preparation oversight that it wasn't included already.