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Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline
- tsss 7mo agoI was expecting the game from my childhood and was disappointed.
- aquariusDue 7mo agoYeah, that game was really ahead of its time. I still hold out hope some indie studio will attempt a spiritual successor.
- myself248 7mo agoSee also: https://internet-in-a-box.org/ https://internet-in-a-box.org/ https://wrolpi.org/ https://wrolpi.org/
- kgeist 7mo agoAlso https://kiwix.org/en/about/ 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
- myself248 7mo agoKiwix is one component of all of the above.
- cousinbryce 7mo agoI’m convinced that the multitude of off-line Internet tools is a ploy to keep any one of them from gaining traction
- lucasluitjes 7mo agoThe 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 7mo agoI 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.
- ocdtrekkie 7mo agoOn the contrary, "traction" is an antifeature. I hate technical monocultures. Like there being exactly one home automation software everyone uses now.
- nchmy 7mo agoOne more https://worldpossible.org/ https://worldpossible.org/
- WillAdams 7mo agoMissing 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 7mo agoThey 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 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoAnyone thought about using a Steam Deck with this? Or explored the concept of a "Nomad Deck"?
- c0balt 7mo agoIt 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 7mo agoIt has built in microphones though.
- wds 7mo agoNot 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 7mo agoTrue, but I always give my devices a protective glass and put them in rugged armor. Broken screens never been a problem for me..
- Schlagbohrer 7mo agoAt that point you should just use an old laptop or small formfactor desktop, since finding monitors will not be too hard in the apocalypse.
- moffers 7mo agoReally clever targeting of a niche. I’d be interested to hear if they find success!
- shevy-java 7mo agoSo how does that work?
- WJW 7mo agoIt never goes offline by already being offline.
- wao0uuno 7mo agoYou download it and set it up on your local server to never use it again. It's a project for preppers stuck in their own fantasies. If this project was actually serious about helping people in SHTF scenarios they would be building a neatly organized library of curated resources in a simple, easily parsed format indexed by some lightweight, local search engine. Who the fuck wants to fuck around with a convoluted docker setup just to browse their wikipedia dump? Local LLM? Are they fucking serious? Who would have the hardware and power to run this when the power grid goes down? This thing should be browsable with a file manager and hostable on a raspberry pi. Ideally it would be a zip file with documents and an executable that can be run on your local machine for search. The amount of unnecessary complexity here is ridiculous. Also maps on a server? What's the point? If you're prepping you want those on paper.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- bpavuk 7mo agoturns 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 https://obsidian.md/clipper
- Yokohiii 7mo agoI like the idea of an LLM that acts as a public knowledge base. But that doomsday framing on the site is pretty annoying.
- adsharma 7mo agoThis 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 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoIf 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 7mo ago[dead]
- Yokohiii 7mo agoThey sell pi's with the names PrepperDisk and Doom Box. They probably thought it is funny. The general Idea of having knowledge backups / offline access is reasonable to me, the doomsday framing is seeding the idea that it's about collapse and that takes away from a something that is generally more useful.
- 7mo ago
- mohamedkoubaa 7mo agoGreat premise for a science fiction story
- iandanforth 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoA friend made this years ago. I never used it but the idea is awesome. https://github.com/ligi/SurvivalManual https://github.com/ligi/SurvivalManual
- chocochunks 7mo agoKiwix has an Android app, that'll do Wikipedia and a bunch of other resources. You can get free offline maps from HERE maps or use something like Open Map from Fdroid that uses Open Street Map.
- adsharma 7mo agoSo 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 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/ https://adsharma.github.io/duckdb-wikidata-compression/
- jrm4 7mo agoAnd for those who are only vaguely familiar, this ZIM file format is not the same as the https://zim-wiki.org https://zim-wiki.org one.
- hofrogs 7mo agoI 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!
- jrm4 7mo agoYeah, I'm a long time user/disciple of https://zim-wiki.org https://zim-wiki.org ; it was basically Obsidian but 15-20 years early. To do some of the things that are now trivially easy with Obsidian I learned scripting and such, so I'm familiar with this very weird coincidence/name collision.
- skrtskrt 7mo agoI really curious about what the world of archival formats is like - is there consensus? are the most-used formats actually any good and well-supported,and self documenting?
- synack 7mo agoLibrary of Congress has some well considered recommendations for archival. https://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rfs/TOC.html https://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rfs/TOC.html For web content they recommend gzipped WARC. This is great for retaining the content, but isn’t easy to search or render. I do WARC dumps then convert those to ZIM for easier access.
- Lapra 7mo agoIn a world where this is useful, you aren't going to be spending your precious battery on running an LLM...
- desireco42 7mo agoSolar cells work no matter what, I agree that maybe less processing is more useful but LLM is uniqely useful as well
- dryarzeg 7mo agoWell yeah, but, hypothetically speaking (and just for the sake of pure curiosity) - what about "no sun" scenario, such as nuclear winter or something similar?
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 7mo agoWell, yes, in that edge case it probably wouldn't be worth the energy usage.
- desireco42 7mo agoThere is a point where you have bigger problems then your smartphone or laptop
- qingcharles 7mo agoThis 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 7mo agoNo need for a battery, you just need someone to hit the pedals on that dynamo.
- ZeroCool2u 7mo agoSee 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 7mo agoIt could use some own wisdom not to use nodejs..
- itintheory 7mo agoWhy does it have to have AI? Ugh.
- layer8 7mo agoYou can use Kiwix, OpenStreetMap and Kolibri as an AI-free equivalent. Adding AI to those is exactly the differentiator of this project.
- pstuart 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoBecause if you're stuck in your underground bunker, who else can you talk to?
- ocdtrekkie 7mo agoAI seems expensive from an energy standpoint, but humans consume your food supply. :D
- cstaszak 7mo agoI'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 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 7mo agoZIM 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.
- Schlagbohrer 7mo agoEven with that setup I have unfortunately had a bad experience just using Qwen2.5-27B. I asked it once to take a large PDF of a book and find and quote all instances which mentioned food. After churning for a long time it eventually gave me several interesting excerpts, only one of which was real and the rest were hallucinations/confabulations. I hope we can get to the point where even a small distilled model at the 7B-30B level avoids hallucinating.
- nullsmack 7mo agoQwen2.5 is quite old at this point. The new Qwen3.5 series is good, and it has a 27b dense model too. I have to watch it but I've gotten surprising results out of the 4b model even. They're also vision enabled and pretty good at ocr. These were released in just the last few weeks.
- amarant 7mo ago>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 7mo agoMy 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.
- DonaldPShimoda 7mo agoTwo 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.
- nelsonic 7mo agoFor anyone wanting the video explanation from the creator, watch: https://youtu.be/P_wt-2P-WBk https://youtu.be/P_wt-2P-WBk
- balkanist 7mo ago[flagged]
- Aargau 7mo agoClosing on 40 acres in Panama for an eco-resort. I was planning to build my own offline repository, but will check out this repo.
- dsalzman 7mo agoHow much dod it cost and plan to invest in the resort?
- bamwor 7mo ago[dead]
- codeveil 7mo ago[dead]
- Animats 7mo agoThere'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/ https://www.prepperdisk.com/
- BoorishBears 7mo agoI 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 7mo ago> 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.
- MrDrMcCoy 7mo agoThat's likely with constant power and low writes. If either of those flip for long enough, bye bye flash.
- theshrike79 7mo agoFWIW my pi-hole server ran for 2 years and broke 3 SD-cards, and it didn't even have the courtesy to fail fast, it started kinda-failing and DNS requests started taking forever (the pihole had to time out twice before the fallback DNS was called). Moved to an Actual Computer with a M.2 SSD and zero issues since.
- nabeards 7mo agoI had thought of building those exact Civil Defense devices a few years ago. Maybe it’s a viable product?
- hamstergene 7mo agoNormally 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 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoWell 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.
- wisty 7mo agoDo you know of any preppers who buy guns and rations but don't have a plan for water? OK steelmanning you, certainly a lot of them are way more interested in gun collecting and making beef jerky than other aspects.
- bee_rider 7mo agoI don’t think we have a term for people who quietly keep a well stocked pantry, have a water setup, garden, have hobbies like canning, etc. That’s just being a bit rustic/prudent I guess. So then, the “prepper” derogatory label is only applied to the people who do it in the action movie/silly way. But, the question of how prevalent they are is a good one…
- born-jre 7mo agowhat a coincidence, i am just downloading 110gb wikipedia dump on kiwix right now
- prima-facie 7mo agoI 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 7mo ago20 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 7mo agoHave you seen this Monty Python skit of Four Yorkshiremen? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE
- mememememememo 7mo agoEmail IRC Gopher etc. download. Just connect 10 min a day.
- badsectoracula 7mo agoYeah, 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.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- coretx 7mo agoWhats not in there ? Why ? Are the LLM's cencored ?
- ForgotMyUUID 7mo agoIf 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 7mo agoI 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
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- beeburrt 7mo agoAnybody know of an alternate version of this with no AI?
- test7rocks 7mo agoSo has this project actually curated an extra source of useful info for emergencies/off-gridding/civilisation-restart? or is this just an alternative bundling of existing resources (Wikipedia and so forth)?
- iLoveOncall 7mo agoI've used Kiwix to archive Wikipedia articles on an SSD before, and it made me realize how utterly useless Wikipedia is if you don't have a powerful search engine to get you to the pages in the first place.
- nchmy 7mo agoI quickly came to realize this when I came across similar projects 8 years ago. Moreover, the vast majority of the info is just irrelevant/useless clutter in such contexts. Worse, it's largely in English, so not useful to people elsewhere.
- dspillett 7mo agoFound a click or two in looking for storage and other system requirements: What About Raspberry Pi? Project NOMAD is designed for more capable hardware to support local AI. If you're looking for a Raspberry Pi-based solution, check out Internet in a Box — it's a great lightweight option for basic offline content. Project NOMAD is for when you want the full experience: GPU-accelerated AI, comprehensive content libraries, and a professional management interface. Sounds like I should look at one of the other options mentioned there and in this thread, assuming their libraries and maps are basically the same. I'd like the “comprehensive content libraries” while travelling or when otherwise away from a reliable connection, perhaps with a useful management interface for easy updates and such when on good connectivity, but just in a format I can click or grep through. While I'm assuming I could just turn off, or otherwise ignore, the LLM side, just not having it in the first place would be more efficient.
- arikrahman 7mo agoThe installation seems a bit cumbersome and unfriendly to non-technical people. If it's self-contained, it ought to be simple and platform agnostic, not tied to Ubuntu or a specific OS. I'll fork this and re-frame it into a SPA with a Tauri path.
- hahn-kev 7mo agoYeah that's a very strange choice.
- thestack_ai 7mo ago[dead]
- jeremie_strand 7mo ago[flagged]
- pdyc 7mo agoi am looking for something like this but for a cheap used phones i can give to kids without internet that has all the books, offline maps, wikipedia and some basic llm. They would have complete environment to explore depending on their curiosity.Is there something like this? otherwise i am thinking of creating my own collection and opensourcing it.
- morjom 7mo agoKiwix, maybe Kolibri? If up for tinkering, maybe something like Internet in a Box (can be done through Tmux+Proot-distro) https://kiwix.org/en/ https://kiwix.org/en/ https://learningequality.org/kolibri/ https://learningequality.org/kolibri/ https://internet-in-a-box.org/ https://internet-in-a-box.org/
- lastdong 7mo agoAll in all I think these projects are really great for communities that are unable to get online. There are some nice Linux education distros that would go together well.
- sippeangelo 7mo agoI went on to install this, but it seems very US centric, which isn't apparent in anything else than the domain name. The maps only cover the US, you can only download English dumps of Wikipedia, etc. It's not the biggest deal if you're proficient in English, but I wasn't even able to download the full dump of English Wikipedia as their hardcoded link to it just seems to return 404. The Docker setup leaves much to be desired, as network names are hardcoded, and extension services are expected to be reachable over hardcoded port numbers, making it impossible to run behind a reverse proxy. Going to give this another go in a couple of years when it has had some more time in the oven, but it still looks very promising!
- andrepd 7mo ago> Command center > "Military"-looking font This is larping as a prepper, not anything more.
- unethical_ban 7mo agoI don't see the problem with trying to make knowledge more decentralized, offline-ready and accessible in the case of catastrophe.
- pickleglitch 7mo agoThis is just some guy's hobby project that he is sharing for free. I don't get why everyone is so keen to shit all over it.
- trvz 7mo agoThey're annoyed at people shamelessly publishing low quality crap. Calling it out is a way to raise standards back up.
- TyrunDemeg101 7mo agoThat is the way of the internet unfortunately. Instead of simply appreciating something, it's important to find a criticism and voice it. That way you're 'adding' to the conversation. I mean look back at HN classic posts like the initial Dropbox announcement and the classic: this is nothing more than a wrapper over rsync, etc.
- endymion-light 7mo agoclose enough - welcome galactic encyoclopedia
- prmoustache 7mo agoAre updates done incrementally?
- sillyboi 7mo agoThere's a Doom Box plan but no Boom Box
- didacusc 7mo agoVibe-coded crap, again
- MinimalAction 7mo agoAt my cursory glance, I couldn't figure out what's the typical storage needed for this. I understand it depends on what knowledge databases I install, but some figures of estimations would have been lovely (e.g., Wikipedia is ~ 50 GBs, OpenStreetMaps ~ 20 GBs, etc.).
- anjel 7mo agoAlso the makings of a pretty decent RAG server?
- geenkeuse 7mo ago[dead]
- daisydevel 7mo agoLove the concept. Hopefully I'll never actually need to use it, but if that day comes, this would be incredibly helpful.
- profer602 7mo ago[dead]
- MetroWind 7mo agoNah I'm not installing another JavaScript slop.
- aimemobe 6mo ago[flagged]