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

  today at 8:10 PM

  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

    today at 8:47 PM

    [delayed]

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

  today at 7:01 PM

  And for those who are only vaguely familiar, this ZIM file format is not the same as the https://zim-wiki.org one.

  • hofrogs

    today at 7:10 PM

    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!

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.

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/

• nabeards

  today at 8:29 PM

  I had thought of building those exact Civil Defense devices a few years ago. Maybe it’s a viable product?

• BoorishBears

  today at 7:59 PM

  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

Whats not in there ? Why ? Are the LLM's cencored ?

I like the idea of an LLM that acts as a public knowledge base. But that doomsday framing on the site is pretty annoying.

• rendx

  today at 7:59 PM

  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-...

• waynerisner

  today at 4:46 PM

  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

    today at 6:47 PM

    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.

    • waynerisner

      today at 8:15 PM

      [dead]

• adsharma

  today at 4:15 PM

  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.

• russellbeattie

  today at 5:28 PM

  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.

  • dogma1138

    today at 6:51 PM

    You’ll be hanged from a construction crane if they’ll catch you with this project in Iran… :)

  • DoctorOetker

    today at 6:06 PM

    What Gulf state do you live in? UAE?

In a world where this is useful, you aren't going to be spending your precious battery on running an LLM...

• desireco42

  today at 4:54 PM

  Solar cells work no matter what, I agree that maybe less processing is more useful but LLM is uniqely useful as well

• qingcharles

  today at 5:01 PM

  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

  today at 5:50 PM

  No need for a battery, you just need someone to hit the pedals on that dynamo.

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

  today at 7:16 PM

  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.

For anyone wanting the video explanation from the creator, watch: https://youtu.be/P_wt-2P-WBk

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.

Anyone thought about using a Steam Deck with this? Or explored the concept of a "Nomad Deck"?

• c0balt

  today at 2:30 PM

  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

    today at 4:07 PM

    It has built in microphones though.

• wds

  today at 3:43 PM

  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

    today at 5:58 PM

    True, but I always give my devices a protective glass and put them in rugged armor. Broken screens never been a problem for me..

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

  today at 4:53 PM

  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.

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

  today at 5:00 PM

  A friend made this years ago. I never used it but the idea is awesome.

  https://github.com/ligi/SurvivalManual

>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.

• DonaldPShimoda

  today at 6:29 PM

  Two different uses of "offline", I think. From my own understanding:

  To "go offline" means for something to become inaccessible that was once accessible "online". ("Offline" is an adverb.)

  Meanwhile, an "offline" thing is one which is usable even without ever being "online". ("Offline" is an adjective.)

  So it becomes:

  > "Knowledge That Never [Becomes Inaccessible]"

  > "Node for [Accessible-Without-Connection] Media, Archives, and Data"

  But definitely confusing to put them right next to each other like that. You'd think a copyeditor would flag it or something.

• collabs

  today at 6:27 PM

  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.

Really clever targeting of a niche. I’d be interested to hear if they find success!

See also:

https://internet-in-a-box.org/

https://wrolpi.org/

• kgeist

  today at 3:05 PM

  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

  today at 3:26 PM

  I’m convinced that the multitude of off-line Internet tools is a ploy to keep any one of them from gaining traction

  • lucasluitjes

    today at 3:53 PM

    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

      today at 4:50 PM

      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.

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.

It could use some own wisdom not to use nodejs..

what a coincidence, i am just downloading 110gb wikipedia dump on kiwix right now

Why does it have to have AI? Ugh.

• Flere-Imsaho

  today at 7:31 PM

  Because if you're stuck in your underground bunker, who else can you talk to?

• layer8

  today at 5:42 PM

  You can use Kiwix, OpenStreetMap and Kolibri as an AI-free equivalent. Adding AI to those is exactly the differentiator of this project.

• pstuart

  today at 5:47 PM

  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.

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

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.

Great premise for a science fiction story

So how does that work?

• WJW

  today at 3:15 PM

  It never goes offline by already being offline.

I was expecting the game from my childhood and was disappointed.

• aquariusDue

  today at 2:23 PM

  Yeah, that game was really ahead of its time. I still hold out hope some indie studio will attempt a spiritual successor.

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