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Comment by Firmwarrior | Hacker News Reader

Is it weird if I carry a phone with this and a solar charger around at all times, in case I suddenly get hurled back in time?

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A machine that tells you that the Golden State Warriors won the 2012 Stanley Cup by bowling a perfect 300 would be invaluable in 1602

In that case no need for a LLM, just a wikipedia dump with a full-text index is enough.

I don't think Wikipedia contains facts quite like the one in GP's example...

Wikipedia is going to hallucinate significantly fewer facts than an LLM.

Also put the latest dump of Wikipedia on your phone (Kiwix is great for this). The complete English one with images is about 100 GB.

And for older phones, Wiki2Touch is a jailbreak app that does the same without images in about 14 GB.

I'm writing a Wiki2Touch archive viewer for more modern iOS, because my iPhone SE doesn't have 100 GB free for Kiwix.

Kiwix supports any .zim file, there are plenty of different wikipedia versions available, check https://download.kiwix.org/zim/wikipedia/?C=S;O=D

Thanks, but wikipedia_en_all_nopic_2023-12.zim is still 56 GB, whereas the BZ2-compressed Wiki2Touch archives are only about 14 GB for the latest (and only 8 GB for an archive from 2012 which I'm using).

I was wondering if that's why you are doing this, impressive how much smaller Wiki2Touch is. Very cool project of yours, hope you succeed!

I have offline Wikipedia and maps for similar exigencies.

I think it would be far better to just store a bunch of epubs on your phone in case you get hurled back.

Textbooks on physics, chem, etc.

I think a great caution should be used with modern physics and chemistry - it may be a way to get yourself killed for sorcery.

But if you want to say alive then I'll recommend including few books about creating modern medicine from scratch - like creating aspirin from willow bark and penicillin from molded bread.

I don't think it's remotely feasible, but imagine how rich you could get by synthesizing viagra

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