Lets say you live in a world where the world government has decided people are getting too addicted to the internet and ordered the internet to be shut down for 5 years. The 100 GB of storage is all you have (excluding essential system files for your Operating System). You have 24 hours before the internet is getting shut down. What do you download?
Wikipedia, kernel sources and some LLM models
I’d replace kernel sources with a full Linux distribution (unless this is already part of “essential system files”)
Is it 100 GB in addition to what I already have saved or 100 GB of total storage? Because if it’s 100 GB of total storage then I wouldn’t be thinking about downloading, I’ll be thinking about what I want to keep.
100GB is ridiculously low nowadays. I don’t think I have a single device in regular use (including my phone) with such small storage.
Just my picture archive (that is, pictures I took since I got mit first digital camera) is about 400GB.
But without such a low storage limit, this wouldn’t be a fun question. The point is to really think about what files we cherish and what are we okay with losing access to (for at least 5 years).
Can my current drives be placed into storage and returned 5 years later, or do they have to be destroyed? That makes a big difference.
I disagree there - I think it makes the question pointless as that changes the actual question to “what is the single computing device I decide to keep, after downgrading its storage”. Which in many cases will not even be possible.
Total storage. If you have more, government agents might randonly burst in and confiscate excess storage. 😉
First thing would be to seriously look into data compression, and live with heavily lossy-compressed media (my music collection would be ring-fenced though). Throw out backups of physical media (take the chance on disc-rot); I guess any backups wouldn’t be possible in this universe anyway so it will all be left to chance. And then see what’s left.
I mean… if we’re optimizing for covert physical presence… you can hide these fuckers in tons of interesting places.
Kids these days don’t understand how mind-blowing that card is. 1 TB on a little micro-SD card? For real?
Can I assume that things like movies, TV, and games will still be available in physical form? If so, the Wikipedia backup is the obvious answer
Guides how to create my own little internet with other people, 7zip and 99GB of RAM.
Lol bootleg internet?
I think I head about some place where people actually have a bootleg internet due to government censorship. Forgot where I heard about it.
Nothing, because the rest of the world is trying to do the same thing and the internet is now essentially DDoSed into oblivion 24 hours early.
