this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2025
1 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

84512 readers
4841 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
L3s@lemmy.world
enu@lemmy.world
technopagan@lemmy.world
L4s@lemmy.world
L3s@hackingne.ws
1
Sales of Hard Drives for the End of the World Boom Under Trump (www.404media.co)
submitted 1 year ago by j4p@lemm.ee to c/technology@lemmy.world
20 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Title is a little sensational but this is a cool project for non-technical folks who may need a mini-internet or data archive for a wide variety of reasons:

"PrepperDisk is a mini internet box that comes preloaded with offline backups of Wikipedia, street maps, survivalist information, 90,000 WikiHow guides, iFixit repair guides, government website backups (including FEMA guides and National Institutes of Health backups), TED Talks about farming and survivalism, 60,000 ebooks and various other content. It’s part external hard drive, part local hotspot antenna—the box runs on a Raspberry Pi that allows up to 20 devices to connect to it over wifi or wired connections, and can store and run additional content that users store on it. It doesn't store a lot of content (either 256GB or 512GB), but what makes it different from buying any external hard drive is that it comes preloaded with content for the apocalypse."

top 20 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] ModestCrab@lemmy.wtf 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

My problem with preppers is the over estimating on whether they’ll be in a position that these skills will have any effect, and the under valuing on steps we could just take to not have this future in the first place.

Like, you’ll need a farm right off the bat, or your first steps in any guider are how to violently take somebody else’s land. Followed by step two, keeping that land from other humans who don’t want to die.

Instead of prepping, become nomadic scroungers or live in a fricking farming commune in the first place. Basically descend a couple levels of societal development and you’ll already be self sufficient and ready. Like the Amish.

Or, you know, voting for politicians who listen to scientists.

Anything beyond being self sufficient for a month is overkill in my opinion.

[–] TronBronson@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Eh we’re already seeing massive drops in skilled labor. The political environment will create food scarcity in 12 months. It’s already paying to be able to fix your home and car. Can’t imagine what next year will bring. Probably unemployment for many.

[–] tehn00bi@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago

Heading right for Soviet resource scarcity.

[–] meco03211@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I love seeing all the tacticool "operators" with their tricked out ARs, bulletproof vests and helmets, flexicuffs, and other shit but look like they get gassed slowly ascending the stairs from their mother's basement. Rule #1 in the zombie apocalypse is Cardio.

Also society isn't going to collapse overnight. If it does it will be a slow crawl until going full Gravy Seal is warranted. They need to survive until then.

[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Also society isn’t going to collapse overnight.

Not if it goes down like you expect it to.

In my experience, the real problems are the ones you weren't planning for.

Even if we don't end up nuking each other like we thought we would in the 60s-90s, we could still get a massive asteroid / comet strike with less than a week's notice. That innocent looking star 23 light years away could have collapsed 22.99 years ago and zap us with a gamma ray burst next week.

More likely: something we don't even know about comes along and makes life far more challenging than it has been for 100,000 years.

[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Humans are very bad at intuitively grasping very large and very small numbers, and that includes very small probabilities. The odds of a civilization-ending asteroid or comet hitting Earth in the next century is minuscule. Especially with the "not seeing it until it's a week away" condition, we've come a very long way when it comes to mapping near-Earth asteroids and there just aren't any places for them to hide any more. Especially not once Vera C. Rubin goes online.

That innocent looking star 23 light years away could have collapsed 22.99 years ago and zap us with a gamma ray burst next week.

A star that's capable of producing a gamma ray burst is not "innocent-looking", it's actually very obvious. There are none that are that close to us. They'd also need to have a very precisely aimed axis to hit us, gamma ray bursts look so bright in part because their "beam" is so narrow.

[–] MangoCats@feddit.it -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The odds of a civilization-ending asteroid or comet hitting Earth in the next century is minuscule.

Absolutely, based on the information we have today.

That dark swarm of asteroids that was launched out of the Magellanic Cloud 8 billion years ago that's coming on a direct collision course against the Milky Way rotation - yeah, we don't know about that one.

The thing about our probabilities of events that haven't happened yet to leave a scar that we can notice on the surface of the Earth, we haven't been very good at observing the sky except for the last 100 years or so, really 50. So, we're learning more and more about things and newly discovered hazards don't lower the probability of occurrence...

A star that’s capable of producing a gamma ray burst is not “innocent-looking”, it’s actually very obvious. There are none that are that close to us.

That we know of the mechanism that produced the burst. What we don't know about that star is the super Jupiters orbiting it in a quasi stable multi-body arrangement that could collapse a bunch of mass into the star and turn it from Jekyll to Hyde under your bed ASAP.

[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 1 points 1 year ago

Absolutely, based on the information we have today.

Right. You have to dream up counterfactual fantasies in order for it to be a problem.

That dark swarm of asteroids that was launched out of the Magellanic Cloud 8 billion years ago that's coming on a direct collision course against the Milky Way rotation - yeah, we don't know about that one.

And you don't need to worry about it, because as I said, the human mind is very bad at intuitively grasping the implications of very large or very small numbers.

Go ahead and actually calculate what risk there might be from something like this. How much mass do those asteroids have? What's their collective cross-section, and how does that compare to the volume of space they'd be passing through? How big is Earth in comparison?

I'm betting the odds will still be microscopic. I feel safe betting that because we have real world evidence that bodies in our solar system don't frequently get hit by ghost asteroids from the Magellanic Cloud (there's an 80's sci-fi movie title for you). Large impacts are few and far between these days,

That we know of the mechanism that produced the burst.

Once again, sure, you could imagine that ordinary stars sometimes miraculously pop like balloons to spray us with liquid death.

If you want it to actually be a worrying scenario, though, it needs to be backed up with some kind of evidence or theory that makes it plausible. And again, we don't actually see frequent gamma ray bursts in reality, so whatever mechanism you propose needs to be rare for it to fit the data.

[–] sharps9@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

512GB for the bargain price of $189?? Why are we shilling what we can download via torrent for free?

[–] SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you are asking this question, this product is probably not for you.
It's for the non-technical prepper type, the guy who has 10,000 rounds of ammo and dried food for 10 years but still uses AOL.
The idea is just get this thing, plug it into a solar power bank, and then you can get information you might need to survive which wouldn't be available online if there is no more internet. You could absolutely put the same thing together yourself without a problem. If you have the skill and the wherewithal to do that, you don't need this. If you don't have that skill, then you are the target market of this product.

[–] DarkFuture@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I mean, I could make tacos at home. Or I could pay a bit more to go pick them up somewhere. I could change my own oil, or I could have someone else do it.

I could spend time downloading all this data and uploading it to a hard drive I purchase. I know how to do it all. But for the price they're charging for the drive AND Raspberry Pi and the service of gathering and uploading the data, it's not that bad of a deal. Especially if you work a full time job and want to use your free time to not do a chore like this. I mean I'm pretty sure there's torrents for Wikipedia. Not so sure about WikiHow.

If the price was higher I'd be complaining. It's pretty reasonable. It's a peace of mind thing without hassle for anyone with even a little extra cash lying around.

[–] Texas_Hangover@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year ago

You really should change your own oil and filter. Its stupidly easy, and the shit I've seen happen at lube shops makes me wake up in cold sweat.

Nobody touches my vehicle unless I absolutely cannot accomplish the job myself.

[–] AngryRobot@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago

This is just an ad for that device. Title made it sound like there's a run on storage devices.

[–] WalnutLum@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago

If you enjoy this sort of stuff make sure to support the Kiwix Project which like 90% of these commercial offshoots are based off of.

[–] ptz@dubvee.org 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

https://www.prepperdisk.com/pages/how-does-it-work

Would be nice if they'd offer downloads for the disk image. Or at least sell the disk image since I don't need yet another Pi lol.

[–] lIlIlIlIlIlIl@lemmy.world -2 points 1 year ago

Go get it directly from Kiwix

[–] Jimmycakes@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Looks super cool wish there was a version with more storage. 256/512gb is on the low side for end of the world

[–] Obsidieon@sopuli.xyz 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It seems that they are working on a premium version of the PrepperDisk with up to 1TB of storage space. They will also be bundling that with an AI LLM implementation trained with the data present on the PrepperDisk.

[–] Jimmycakes@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago

Now that sounds like a winner to me. I will be on the lookout

[–] RangerJosey@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago

I plan to be the jerking guy at Vesuvius if the nukes fall.