Comment by rebolek
12 hours ago
I think that for situations like this we should invent a device that can hold information for an arbitrary amount of time even without electricity. Maybe we could call it "BOOK" or something like that.
12 hours ago
I think that for situations like this we should invent a device that can hold information for an arbitrary amount of time even without electricity. Maybe we could call it "BOOK" or something like that.
This isn't clever or insightful. You can of course condense down critical information into a survival handbook, but in existential crises you don't necessarily know in advance what you'll need to know. Wikipedia (as a benchmark repository of knowledge) is ~5 million pages and would require a decent-size room to store if printed out. By contrast, a laptop + solar panel can fit in a backpack. SD cards/USB sticks with the capacity to store all of Wikipedia are a few $ each.
If things are so bad that you need to factor in the non-operability of any electronic devices, how many indestructible paper libraries are you planning to build and manage in advance, and at what budget?
I don't think Wikipedia is a good benchmark here. Try 30 random articles and see how much of that information you would want to have with you in an emergency survival scenario.
Either way the comparisons here are unfair. An LLM that runs off a backpack-sized solar panel and a laptop might be a substitute for a broad, low quality, surface-level encyclopedia but it's many orders of magnitude worse than a library of books.
I would argue that in a survival situation the accuracy of information becomes even more important. If an LLM to misidentifies a plant (or a medical condition, its treatment, etc.) it could put you in an ER, but in a survival situation that could kill you.
The pedanticty (or is it pedanticness???) on hn is astonishing sometimes.
If there's any place to get an answer it's here.
Bravo my friend. And I mean that in a good way. Love me some diversity.
and then we have a lot of “books” so we collect them in “shelves” then in “libraries” then we want to search them etc etc