by gooob on 11/3/24, 2:39 AM with 310 comments
by runjake on 11/3/24, 5:54 PM
- 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.
by jpc0 on 11/3/24, 7:40 AM
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.
by LeoPanthera on 11/3/24, 4:23 PM
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.
by pryelluw on 11/3/24, 4:34 PM
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.
by Jupe on 11/3/24, 3:55 AM
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.
by gloosx on 11/4/24, 8:46 AM
If all computers go down and all cables burn to ashes simultaneously then it's maybe a good idea to preserve RISC-V For Dummies and Cable-making For Dummies as well.
by a2128 on 11/3/24, 6:05 PM
* 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.
by elashri on 11/3/24, 5:03 AM
by LinuxBender on 11/3/24, 11:28 AM
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.
by Johnny555 on 11/3/24, 4:18 PM
Are those "Lingerie and Adult Toys" stores on the outskirts of town filled with DVD's and magazines?
by overu589 on 11/3/24, 3:00 AM
If you would like to begin preparing for your tomorrows, this is a good place to start: https://the-eye.eu/public/Books/
by sebbu on 11/3/24, 8:10 PM
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.
by delegate on 11/4/24, 12:38 PM
- bootable linux usb drives which can be inserted into any PC.
- archives of programming languages - the source code for the language as well as all the libraries. Eg. mvn, npm, cargo, pip, etc.
- archive of 'important' projects on Github
Ideally, you should be able to boot from USB and compile any application without internet.
- Maps (including trails)
- Growing food - agriculture, raising animals, etc
- Medicine, chemistry, biology, pharmacology books/videos/etc
- Educational programs (like Khan Academy)
- AI models and all the dependencies required to run them offline (eg. GPU drivers, etc).
This archive would be quite clumsy if it came as just a bunch of zip files, so a search index for all this content would be of great help.
I've been long thinking about working on this Archive.. I believe there would be enough people willing to purchase it just for archival purposes.
It would come in handy if we were to travel to other planets too !
Hit me up if you think this is worth working on, I'd happily join/lead such an effort.
by pxc on 11/3/24, 5:23 PM
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?by gmuslera on 11/3/24, 12:32 PM
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.
by robin_reala on 11/3/24, 6:45 PM
by motohagiography on 11/3/24, 4:51 PM
we could probably rebuild civilization just from 3blue1brown.
by defanor on 11/3/24, 6:00 PM
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.
by bearjaws on 11/3/24, 3:30 AM
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.
by imoverclocked on 11/3/24, 6:23 AM
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.
by mid-kid on 11/3/24, 5:49 PM
by tiznow on 11/3/24, 7:13 AM
by karel-3d on 11/4/24, 11:23 AM
For historians - Wikipedia and YouTube.
For my use? Google Maps (or actually Mapy.cz, local Czech map provider data). I think it might get useful when hunting for zombies.
by fatih-erikli-cg on 11/3/24, 6:41 PM
by animuchan on 11/3/24, 6:49 PM
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.
by fsflover on 11/3/24, 9:29 AM
by Yawrehto on 11/4/24, 1:55 PM
Knowledge/Entertainment: A huge subset of LibGen/Anna's Archive. Wikipedia. Survival guides. Tons of websites, especially smaller ones that might not get preserved. I think the NYTimes will be fine, but random indie websites, not so much. Lots of music. Project Gutenberg and swaths of the Online Books Page listed items. Videos, and of course VLC (if it's not already downloaded). Various coding things (I, I assume unusually for HN, am not a programmer and don't know any programming languages, might as well learn to code.) Minecraft or a knockoff, on the off chance I somehow get bored.
Creating: LibreOffice (if it's not already installed). If it works offline, the Inspiral app, because spirographs make everything better. Gimp, Inkscape, Krita.
Personal: Records of as much of my digital life as I can get. So comments, posts, etc. I want to be able to look back at who I was.
Organization: Calibre (again, assuming it's not installed). Obsidian.
by cableshaft on 11/7/24, 5:09 PM
And since I use git, even my version control stays nice and local.
Main things I would need to make an offline version of, offhand, are my GitHub Issues list, as that’s online only right now and where I track what I’m doing on my games, some documentation for Love2d and Monogame would be nice, and our recipes.
We have a few printouts for some recipes, but most are linked in a Google Sheets excel file.
by tmtvl on 11/3/24, 6:46 PM
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.
by thuruv on 11/5/24, 5:20 PM
by wafflemaker on 11/3/24, 6:13 AM
by orionblastar on 11/3/24, 3:40 AM
My Steam collection won't work because it needs the Internet and DRM to work.
by GTP on 11/4/24, 1:56 PM
[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kiwix.kiwi...
by anonzzzies on 11/10/24, 8:33 AM
Ah, and currently I would also preserve some current LLama to tinker with.
by lesostep on 11/11/24, 1:23 PM
by nickpsecurity on 11/3/24, 6:13 PM
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.
by rossdavidh on 11/3/24, 5:17 PM
by aa-jv on 11/4/24, 11:27 AM
I'd probably write some tools to organize it all, and end up re-creating most of the good content of the sites I like to visit.
After this, I'd get to the 8 Terabyte NAS I've had tucked away, with all the crap I've ever downloaded since 1993. :P
by Quinzel on 11/11/24, 9:17 AM
by notorandit on 11/3/24, 9:49 AM
by Havoc on 11/4/24, 12:21 AM
Imperfect as they are they’re an incredibly dense summary of the internet.
And then duplicate all the repos plus maybe a couple of those old school multi dvd Ubuntu editions intended for offline. Just in case I missed something like a dev essentials package. Copies of the top handful of python packages would also be grand
Chances of missing something crucial is sky high though so this would need a dry run
by signaru on 11/3/24, 5:27 AM
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 on 11/4/24, 7:54 PM
It would also be nice to download the "card catalog" of the local library for offline use at home, if that was possible.
Truth is, "tomorrow" is not enough advance notice for me to save much. Need to be proactive, i.e., "What have I already preserved if the internet went down tomorrow".
by Hammad_khaan on 11/6/24, 7:12 PM
by paulcole on 11/3/24, 5:25 PM
by Titan2189 on 11/4/24, 12:45 AM
We were discussing in my office today how there might be widespread protests about the election result soon.
Who knows how crazy people get, a few dedicated pissed people in a few key places could be quite disastrous.
by wanderingmind on 11/4/24, 10:51 AM
by WantonQuantum on 11/3/24, 4:07 AM
by vitiral on 11/4/24, 12:58 PM
by GianFabien on 11/3/24, 8:02 AM
by INTPenis on 11/3/24, 7:26 PM
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.
by epirogov on 11/3/24, 4:45 PM
by praving5 on 11/4/24, 3:31 AM
by dgellow on 11/4/24, 2:56 AM
Also, a bunch of dev related git repos, such as zig, rust, microsft/stl, python
by whartung on 11/3/24, 4:40 PM
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.
by jareklupinski on 11/3/24, 4:01 PM
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)
by dusted on 11/4/24, 2:24 PM
It's less than 100 TiB, and I think that if the Internet went away right now, I'd be okay information/entertainment wise for the rest of my life.
by openrisk on 11/4/24, 11:01 AM
by elnatro on 11/4/24, 5:33 PM
by AlienRobot on 11/3/24, 5:27 PM
Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley so I can rick roll people on the post-internet era.
Newgrounds.
by asdz on 11/3/24, 11:29 PM
by tjbiddle on 11/4/24, 12:06 PM
It'd eventually sort itself out to the ways pre-internet, sure - but so much now is built on internet-connected tech, not pre-internet tech.
by sickofparadox on 11/7/24, 5:12 PM
by throwaway_4lyfe on 11/5/24, 3:45 PM
by nprateem on 11/4/24, 12:12 PM
by barryrandall on 11/4/24, 3:12 PM
by big-green-man on 11/3/24, 3:48 AM
All OSM data and openaddresses data.
by pvaldes on 11/4/24, 8:21 AM
by kcartlidge on 11/4/24, 6:13 PM
Nothing. I'd be too busy celebrating.
(Even though I'd likely be out of work.)
by jesterson on 11/4/24, 9:59 AM
Downloading music, some great movies, books. For other content I have DevonThink database
by Tepix on 11/3/24, 12:42 PM
by anticorporate on 11/3/24, 8:39 PM
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.
by 7952 on 11/3/24, 7:15 PM
by more_corn on 11/3/24, 10:33 PM
by rsync on 11/3/24, 6:55 PM
by jeff_vader on 11/4/24, 9:47 AM
by henriquegogo on 11/8/24, 12:21 PM
Basically (almost) the whole internet backup.
by theBaba on 11/4/24, 5:25 PM
- You can do anything at zombo com
by the5avage on 11/3/24, 8:54 AM
by kissgyorgy on 11/4/24, 11:37 AM
by 486sx33 on 11/3/24, 12:05 PM
They are important, and slowly being lost to time and produced less and less …
by giantg2 on 11/3/24, 9:00 PM
by RecycledEle on 11/4/24, 9:54 AM
by jonathanMelly on 11/5/24, 5:44 AM
Nothing, let it go down ;-)
by throwaway9567 on 11/3/24, 8:26 PM
by lynguist on 11/4/24, 10:09 AM
by thot_experiment on 11/4/24, 4:39 AM
by edsonmedina on 11/5/24, 10:32 PM
by dicjsnw on 11/4/24, 11:01 AM
by coding123 on 11/9/24, 7:04 PM
by garyfirestorm on 11/3/24, 4:10 PM
by Kalanos on 11/4/24, 4:39 PM
- Wikipedia articles
- YouTube videos
- Google images
by revskill on 11/6/24, 11:08 AM
by mythrwy on 11/3/24, 6:38 PM
by latentsea on 11/3/24, 9:09 PM
by shafyy on 11/3/24, 5:24 PM
by midtake on 11/4/24, 4:29 AM
by nachox999 on 11/4/24, 3:24 PM
by 23B1 on 11/3/24, 7:02 PM
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.
by edanm on 11/3/24, 2:24 PM
by pacificleo12 on 11/5/24, 8:22 AM
by analog31 on 11/3/24, 7:04 PM
by codr7 on 11/3/24, 7:31 PM
by sandwichsphinx on 11/3/24, 7:40 PM
by TacticalCoder on 11/3/24, 5:49 PM
by andrewstuart on 11/3/24, 10:16 AM
Nothing at all.
by hulitu on 11/3/24, 7:48 AM
Surveillance. That's the main purpose, isn't it ? /s
by oceanplexian on 11/3/24, 5:59 PM
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.