Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

3/22/2026 at 8:00:29 PM

I 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.

by wooptoo

3/22/2026 at 4:12:54 PM

So 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

There is room for a third option leveraging commercial columnar database research.

https://adsharma.github.io/duckdb-wikidata-compression/

by adsharma

3/22/2026 at 7:01:49 PM

And for those who are only vaguely familiar, this ZIM file format is not the same as the https://zim-wiki.org one.

by jrm4

3/22/2026 at 7:10:09 PM

I 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!

by hofrogs

3/22/2026 at 7:18:34 PM

Normally 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.

by hamstergene

3/22/2026 at 7:13:11 PM

There'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/

by Animats

3/22/2026 at 7:59:18 PM

I 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

by BoorishBears

3/22/2026 at 3:48:22 PM

I like the idea of an LLM that acts as a public knowledge base. But that doomsday framing on the site is pretty annoying.

by Yokohiii

3/22/2026 at 7:59:17 PM

There are internet and electricity outages in many places over the world, controlled and uncontrolled. Also natural desasters take out infrastructure at least temporarily.

One "popular" example for those whose horizon doesn't extend over US country borders:

"Hurricane Katrina devastated communications infrastructure across the Gulf Coast, incapacitating telephone service, police and fire dispatch centers, and emergency radio systems. Almost three million customer phone lines were knocked out, telephone switching centers were seriously damaged, and 1,477 cell towers were incapacitated. Most of the radio stations and many television stations in the New Orleans area were knocked off the air. Paul McHale, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense, summarized the damage by stating, “The magnitude of the storm was such that the local communications system wasn’t simply degraded; it was, at least for a period of time, destroyed."

https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/reports/katrina-...

"Our preparedness culture must also emphasize the importance of citizen and community preparedness. […] Thus, citizens and communities can help themselves by becoming more prepared. If every family maintained the resources to live in their homes without electricity and running water for three days, we could allocate more Federal, State, and local response resources to saving lives. Similarly, if every family developed their own emergency preparedness plan, they almost certainly would reduce the demand for outside emergency resources. As the 9/11 Commission Report states, “One clear lesson of September 11 is that individual civilians need to take responsibility for maximizing the probability that they will survive, should disaster strike."

https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/reports/katrina-...

by rendx

3/22/2026 at 4:46:07 PM

I 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.

by waynerisner

3/22/2026 at 6:47:04 PM

If 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.

by dogma1138

3/22/2026 at 4:15:25 PM

This 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.

by adsharma

3/22/2026 at 5:28:36 PM

Doomsday may not be the end of the world, but simply living in a country where you're being unjustifiably bombed by a foreign government lead by a delusional sociopath, and so access to information sources becomes limited.

by russellbeattie

3/22/2026 at 6:51:54 PM

You’ll be hanged from a construction crane if they’ll catch you with this project in Iran… :)

by dogma1138

3/22/2026 at 6:06:36 PM

What Gulf state do you live in? UAE?

by DoctorOetker

3/22/2026 at 4:33:10 PM

In a world where this is useful, you aren't going to be spending your precious battery on running an LLM...

by Lapra

3/22/2026 at 4:54:03 PM

Solar cells work no matter what, I agree that maybe less processing is more useful but LLM is uniqely useful as well

by desireco42

3/22/2026 at 5:01:01 PM

This 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.

by qingcharles

3/22/2026 at 5:50:53 PM

No need for a battery, you just need someone to hit the pedals on that dynamo.

by layer8

3/22/2026 at 7:04:58 PM

Closing on 40 acres in Panama for an eco-resort.

I was planning to build my own offline repository, but will check out this repo.

by Aargau

3/22/2026 at 5:41:23 PM

I'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

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!

by cstaszak

3/22/2026 at 7:16:05 PM

ZIM 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.

by codeveil

3/22/2026 at 6:27:00 PM

For anyone wanting the video explanation from the creator, watch: https://youtu.be/P_wt-2P-WBk

by nelsonic

3/22/2026 at 2:17:12 PM

Anyone thought about using a Steam Deck with this? Or explored the concept of a "Nomad Deck"?

by JanisIO

3/22/2026 at 2:30:02 PM

It 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.

by c0balt

3/22/2026 at 4:07:33 PM

It has built in microphones though.

by mhitza

3/22/2026 at 3:43:48 PM

Not 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.

by wds

3/22/2026 at 5:58:23 PM

True, but I always give my devices a protective glass and put them in rugged armor. Broken screens never been a problem for me..

by JanisIO

3/22/2026 at 1:48:31 PM

Missing 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.

by WillAdams

3/22/2026 at 4:53:45 PM

They 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.

by pdpi

3/22/2026 at 4:00:24 PM

I 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?

by iandanforth

3/22/2026 at 5:00:40 PM

A friend made this years ago. I never used it but the idea is awesome.

https://github.com/ligi/SurvivalManual

by entropie

3/22/2026 at 6:21:06 PM

>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.

by amarant

3/22/2026 at 6:29:16 PM

Two 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.

by DonaldPShimoda

3/22/2026 at 6:27:33 PM

My 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.

by collabs

3/22/2026 at 7:35:35 PM

what a coincidence, i am just downloading 110gb wikipedia dump on kiwix right now

by born-jre

3/22/2026 at 2:26:58 PM

Really clever targeting of a niche. I’d be interested to hear if they find success!

by moffers

3/22/2026 at 1:48:19 PM