Comment by runjake

It's very far from all the humanity's accumulated knowledge. Wikipedia is but a digest of of the deeper end of science, and barely scratches the applied sciences that are required for the modern advanced technology.

To preserve a copy of the humanity's recorded knowledge, you'd have to keep a copy of the library of Congress + archives of all scientific journals + arxiv.org, and equivalents of it for other languages, like Chinese, Japanese, German, French, Russian, Spanish, Hindi,.. Then there is a ton of proprietary and sometimes secret information held by companies and crucial for their functioning.

That’s a great business idea: sell a laptop survival kit for tough times.

(2) assumes technology not in evidence, unless you have a really low threshold of "explain it to you".

Like, "explains it as well as a person who doesn't know anything about it but is reading the wikipedia page".

Like, "explains it but lies, and when you catch them at it, insists that they weren't lying".

Like, "can't actually do math, but has had heard lots of math problems so they guess and hope you don't check on them".

A sleazy marketer's idea of "explains it to you".

> (1) most of humanity’s recorded knowledge

A lot of historical information on the Internet only scrape the top 50% of the knowledge on niche subjects, if even that. So often I see forum requests along the lines of "can someone scan page 242 of book X please".

It would be very interesting to package this as a machine to be deployed into the field without any supporting tech infrastructure. Picture an epoxy cube with a connection for a speaker, a microphone and power. And maybe a serial port. There’s no network connection because it’s designed to be off the grid and last for decades

This reminds me of how the Cuban people get a weekly distillation of the internet from an external hard drive that gets passed around.

https://www.wired.com/2017/07/inside-cubas-diy-internet-revo...

Good to know. I'm trying to dig up direct links to those USDA guides.

I mostly value the Encyclopedia of Country Living for it's old world skills (canning, food preservation, etc), but I'm fortunate also to live in a rural area with a lot of farmers and I have ready access to relatives and friends who are well-versed in those old world skills and they've been happy to teach them to me.

<1 TB. I try to keep the entirety of my important files in under 1tb and so far, I have succeeded. Somehow I've managed to do this even with my photo/video iCloud Photo library. I am not counting large hoards like my ISO and movie collections.

I'm not really sure of exact sizes, but books and PDFs don't take up much space at all. I'd guess a few hundred megabytes? Wikipedia is ~20gb, IIRC.

Physically, I have paper copies of books stashed all over the place. It consumes a decent amount of space all together (~ 4 feet by 9 feet ~18 inches in volume)

My only caveat here is that people should obtain the 2014 or newer Special Operations Medic version, which is the successor to this older 1982 guide.

It’s almost like going for a programming book from 1982 vs now. The state of the medical art has changed substantially for the better since 1982.

The newer post-2004-ish guides include substantial updates to field medical care techniques (especially WRT blood loss, eg gunshot wounds).

There are PDFs of the newer SOC guide on the net. I’ll try to find some good links when I get back near a computer.

M4?

well done, good for you!

yandex (search engine) is pretty good to find stuff. Just search for "band/film + torrent" and it almost always works for me. It's my way to go for lesser known works.

Soulseek?

rutracker

Files and folders on my MacBook and backed up to multiple places (3-2-1). My data store isn't more than 1tb (this doesn't count commercial movies, which sit on a NAS and I could take or leave those).