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.<p>The product offering of an AI chatbot for when the power goes out made me laugh out loud.
I think most people would be better off just putting Kiwix on their phones:<p><a href="https://kiwix.org/en/applications/" rel="nofollow">https://kiwix.org/en/applications/</a>
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 ( <a href="https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/storage/unpowered-ssd-endurance-investigation-finds-severe-data-loss-and-performance-issues-reminds-us-of-the-importance-of-refreshing-backups" rel="nofollow">https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/storage/unpowered...</a> + <a href="https://youtu.be/rx3Y5x6uzKQ" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/rx3Y5x6uzKQ</a> )
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.<p>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.
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.
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.
404 Media did an interview with the owner:<p><a href="https://www.404media.co/sales-of-hard-drives-prepper-disk-for-the-end-of-the-world-have-boomed-under-trump/" rel="nofollow">https://www.404media.co/sales-of-hard-drives-prepper-disk-fo...</a>
I wonder how much useful info you could cram onto a 1.44mb floppy disk in just ascii files?<p>Perhaps markdown with a basic TUI reader with hyperlinks?<p>I guess the weakest link then would be finding a computer with a working floppy drive, but it is a fun thought experiment.