FaceDeer

My point is that the “already fully prepared” requirement is extremely small and easy. “Having a car” is enough (or, in the event of one of these disaster scenarios, having someone else’s unattended car somewhere near you). So bringing it up as an objection to the usefulness of this hard drive is not really significant.

You’re overestimating the difficulty and expense necessary to support this device. You could probably power it from a car. A solar panel and inverter cost less than a hundred dollars.

There are an infinite number of things for which there is no evidence. Preparing for those things would be taking effort away from preparing for things that are actually real.

The first lunar astronauts spent 21 days in quarantine because we know that diseases are real and in the past there have been real examples of explorers bringing back new diseases from the places they visited. They didn’t simultaneously get ritually cleansed by a shaman because there is no evidence of actual lycanthropy being a thing.

Of the possibilities, I find

How do you find that? Through some kind of rigorous analysis, or just an intuitive feeling?

As I keep saying, the human mind is not good at intuitively handling very large or very small numbers and probabilities.

You’re analyzing a risk we could imagine, what you can’t do is analyze a risk we haven’t imagined yet.

What you can’t do is analyze a risk without doing an actual analysis. For that you need to collect data and work the numbers, not just imagine them.

Not miraculously, we know some of the causes that make this happen.

Yes, and all the causes that we know don’t apply to any nearby stars that might threaten us. You have to make up imaginary new causes in order to be frightened of a gamma ray burst.

A quick Googling puts them around $50. The PrepperDisk is priced at $270 (Canadian dollars in both cases). So add a second drive and it jumps to $320, plus the cost of whatever additional complexity there is to the motherboard to support it, plus extra development cost for the RAID controller. And the device itself becomes bulkier.

Sure, this satisfies the handful of people who were concerned about that. Everyone else ends up with what’s basically the same product but more expensive and bulkier. I can easily see the developers deciding that’s a net loss for sales.

Money. Raid 1 would make every Prepper Drive cost a lot more, since it would need double the storage space. Fewer people will buy them. Instead, keep them cheap and let the people who are truly concerned about redundancy solve the problem themselves by buying two.

If you’re concerned why not just have two of them? That’s more secure, you can store them in different places.

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.

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.

EMPs are overrated by Hollywood, who like to show sparks and electrical arcs and robots exploding and whatnot. In reality EMPs are mainly a threat to the power grid, because they operate by inducing an electrical current in a conductor and the longer the conductor is the more powerful the induced current is. Power transmission lines are thousands of kilometers long, they’ll build up fearsome currents and fry stuff plugged into them (assuming circuit breakers and fuses don’t manage to protect it). But a device like this has wires a few centimeters long, so they don’t pick up nearly as much as long as they’re not plugged in. They’re more delicate, sure, but I like my odds.

An EMP can also be shielded against by a wrapping of tinfoil, as mentioned below. As long as there aren’t large gaps (no, tinfoil hats don’t work) it acts as a simple farraday cage. So if you really want extra protection keep this in a metal box. Assuming its case isn’t metallic to begin with.

This unit can connect to a cell phone, that’d be a much less energy-expensive way to interface with it.

You’d be charging a battery, not running directly off the bike. Still, solar panels are extremely cheap these days. I picked up a 120 watt panel for 50 bucks recently, it could keep something like this running for hours each day.

Ooh. As a hobbyist “mostly for funzies” prepper I was mildly interested. But then I clicked around their site a bit and I found preorders for a version of the prepper disk with an LLM chatbot “companion.”. Assuming the LLM is using RAG on the library of source documents and isn’t just relying on its training, that’s really neat. I know people will exclaim “hallucination!”, but in a situation where you literally have no idea what to do, no way to get help, and the alternative is lying down and dying, I could see this being really handy. Often the hardest part of having a giant archive of information is how to find what you need out of it and interpret what it’s telling you.

I’d rather use an “open” version of this, though. Prepper Disk’s website sounds like they’re trying to keep their data at least partially locked down, and while I can understand that they want to recoup the cost of the effort they put into setting this up it kind of goes against the grain of prepping to rely on something that you can’t repair or modify yourself.

I think you’re overlooking a more likely (and more reasonable) approach preppers take; become skilled in various survival-oriented skills and then if things go south you can go to one of those farms and offer to help out in exchange for some of the food. The lone rambo raider types aren’t going to last long, humans are social animals that do best in tribes and for the most part want to form tribes.

Preemptively apocalypsing yourself by forcing yourself to live in some sort of self-sufficient compound right now isn’t reasonable for most people, but having some plans and resources in your back pocket in case of disaster is not at all unreasonable.

If nothing else, it makes camping more fun and lets you ride out a power outage or local disaster in style.

Ooh, they’re offering free database hosting? Put me in touch.

If they’re thinking of making “style” something that can be copyrighted, then the effects on AI will be trivial compared to the general creative apocalypse as giant corporations lock everything down and go to war with each other.

Again, that’s not forcing anything. That’s even less so - you have to deliberately go to an AI application in that case.

Nobody’s forcing you to use it. I didn’t even know it was there until this article pointed it out, and when I tried it in Notepad it turned out to need an Office 365 subscription that I don’t have. So by default I can’t use it even if I want to use it.

Ooh, now’s their opportunity to come back as a Fediverse instance!

I don’t know of any “men only” instances, the fact that it’s gender-specific is niche rather than the specific gender.