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.
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.
I was planning to build my own offline repository, but will check out this repo.
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.
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.
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.
AlexNet -> Tansformers -> ChatGPT -> Claude Code -> Small LMs serving KBs
Large LLMs could have a role in efficiently producing such KBs.
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!
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.
>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.
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.
>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.
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
Maybe it's like linux distros: all based on the same software, but optimized for different use-cases or preferences.
whatever I think might be useful later, I capture through the web clipper extension. [0]