[HN Gopher] Survival LLM: AI assistant and emergency library tha...
___________________________________________________________________
Survival LLM: AI assistant and emergency library that runs on your
own computer
Author : Luc
Score : 516 points
Date : 2026-10-27 19:55 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.brangus.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.brangus.io)
| zabriel_goss wrote:
| Nice idea! I wonder how the installed IBM Granite 4.2 8B LLM does
| on machines with "modest" RAM
| rnd0 wrote:
| Considering the tendency even now of LLMs to hallucinate, and the
| hardware requirements for any kind of LLM -why not just gather
| those resources into some sort of local archive that can be
| searched without an LLM?
|
| This seems redundant and requiring more overhead while providing
| less reliability than something like Kiwix to me.
| nico wrote:
| Not sure about how the code in this project works. But the way
| I see it, an LLM+chat is a great interface for information. If
| you then connect it to a db with the knowledge/articles you
| need, then you get a great way to navigate it, without needing
| the model to memorize all the info
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| I think that if I were to build this I might skip the LLM and
| just setup a nice interface to the source files using qmd
| style search. [0]
|
| That way the tiny model isn't acting as a potentially
| incorrect interpreter but you still get semantic search to
| help you find the right documents quickly.
|
| I suppose there is something to be said for a good
| summarization, I just worry that these tiny models aren't
| really GOOD summarizers.
|
| [0] https://github.com/tobi/qmd
| nico wrote:
| Awesome, I didn't know qmd style search, thank you!
|
| I'm all up for using the better/simpler task for the job.
| That's been a thing lately also with the Jev/decision
| models hype, most of those things can either already be
| done by a pretrained classifier[0], or you can start with a
| bigger model and then train your smaller/adhoc one when you
| have some data (it doesn't even take much for most
| applications, you can get about 95% accuracy on email
| classification with 50-100 examples)
|
| 0: http://jeffyclassify.com/blog/when-llms-fail-at-
| classificati...
| rafterydj wrote:
| I agree with the OP; this technology does not seem an
| appropriate fit for survival equipment. By definition
| survival scenarios can be life and death. Even one "You're
| absolutely right!" level mistake from an LLM could give a
| user bad information, leading to John Doe eating a mushroom
| he really should not have eaten.
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| I agree with your point, but if John Doe is foraging
| _mushrooms_ without experience of the local flora (which I
| doubt this archive contains), then John Doe is kinda asking
| for it.
|
| The bigger issue in this context would be canning, such as
| incorrectly explaining the mechanisms to avoid botulism
| (acid and/or pressure canning), or perhaps incorrectly
| wiring in repairs. However, again, it's best to practice
| with these prior to emergencies anyway.
|
| It should be noted though, that the model does source its
| claims, so you can fact check it and should review this
| information regularly.
| lukan wrote:
| Slight OT Survival tip, if you are starving don't go for
| mushrooms in the first place (unless you really, really
| know) - even if you get the right one, they don't contain
| much energy for you to burn anyway. The larves you often
| found in them, probably contain more. So mushrooms are a
| nice addition (and in rare cases good medicine), but for
| survival you should focus on something else.
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| It already is a local archive that can be searched
| independently, but the LLM does RAG and is, according to them,
| 95% accurate. It can be useful if you don't remember where to
| find a source/what words to search for, but even a durable
| device with Kiwix would be useless in a a lot of survival
| situations people imagine.
|
| Undoubtedly useful in the right contexts, particularly for
| local repair or homesteading, but "survival" does imply that
| this would be more useful in an SHTF situation.
| x3haloed wrote:
| Decent LLMs can run on anything now: https://github.com/he-
| be/turbo-fieldfare
|
| Kiwix is great, but I'd also like a language model to be able
| to deeply interrogate all of that information much faster than
| I can read.
|
| Just arrange its harness so that its responses are grounded in
| the source material and require source citations for
| everything. Then read the citations to confirm it's not a
| hallucination.
| iAMkenough wrote:
| I like this "both / and" approach. Restructure this project
| to have the LLM source from local Kiwix data you've selected
| to make available offline, rather than a source of data
| you're unfamiliar with. References point directly to your
| Kiwix library.
| xamuel wrote:
| >can run on anything now: (link to turbo fieldfare)
|
| Except the build process there requires a specific recent
| version of swift. Hardly a good definition of "anything"
| rebolek wrote:
| 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.
| dorianmariecom wrote:
| 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
| anigbrowl wrote:
| 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?
| _superposition_ wrote:
| 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.
| dns_snek wrote:
| 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.
| lrvick wrote:
| > and the hardware requirements for any kind of LLM
|
| You can run bonsai2 27b on basically any gaming GPU from the
| last 15 years including on game consoles.
|
| Everyone has access to this stuff now if they bothered to look
| beyond the marketing from big labs trying to collect
| subscription revenue.
|
| I work on compilers, kernels, and operating systems using
| exclusively consumer GPUs.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| Why not both? After the collapse of civilization, as long as
| you can maintain the computer running, you could educate the
| next generation as soon as they could write. Maybe they will
| bypass the local agent as they learn their way into the
| library, to save energy.
|
| Consider they won't have access to the plentiful practice
| opportunities we have now, most resources would have to be
| spent with a practical goal.
| munk-a wrote:
| Nvidia GPUs in the post-apocalyptic radioactive barrens are
| going to be stupid pricey.
| datsci_est_2015 wrote:
| Both. Both is good.
|
| A field guide to foraging for edible mushrooms will probably
| be more practical than naive use of an LLM: "can I eat this
| mushroom?" is an exercise in trust that I will maybe never be
| comfortable with.
|
| But "how do I effectively forage for edible mushrooms" is a
| great stepping stone.
| AdieuToLogic wrote:
| > After the collapse of civilization, as long as you can
| maintain the computer running ...
|
| One of these situations prohibits the other.
| Sky_Knight wrote:
| Survival implies that energy would definitely be a very
| limited resource. Using it to replace knowledge is just... I
| can't describe it even. Why not just learn it on our own and
| keep a small guidebook in your backpack. Our overrelience on
| computers and now LLMs, even for basic life-saving knowledge
| is simply our way of going the way of the dodo... I use
| frontier models at work, I definitely get more done. However
| I will never use it as a replacement of my own knowledge.
| drcode wrote:
| lots of us have solar cells these days, so energy isn't
| going to be such a limiting factor
| asdff wrote:
| A book is a lot more of a sure bet than you maintaining a
| computer. We have ancient books today that have survived
| several civilization collapses.
| IshKebab wrote:
| > the tendency even now of LLMs to hallucinate
|
| That seems to have been mostly solved through scale. I was
| asking Opus 5.5 about some obscure stuff and it kept hedging
| "this is from memory since I don't have internet access" (it's
| sandboxed), "I'm reasonably sure about this but not about the
| numbers" etc.
|
| Even though it was obscure enough that Google couldn't easily
| find the paper that Opus remembered (I couldn't find it at all
| with the traditional search results; the AI summary found it on
| my third try), it actually didn't hallucinate it.
|
| In fact I can't remember Opus 5.5 ever hallucinating. They've
| clearly done some work on that.
|
| Obviously this local LLM is going to hallucinate all over you
| though.
| h05sz487b wrote:
| It does, you can ripgrep all through that archive.
| mtw wrote:
| For one-off questions, a local archive makes sense.
|
| This is more for elaborate projects where you don't know
| precisely what you are looking for. Questions I can think of in
| a survival scenario:
|
| - my solar panel connector is broken. We only have 8 hr battery
| left. Can you tell me how to DIY repair it with the following
| parts
|
| - we want to receive emergency FM broadcasts from the state.
| Give me steps on how to receive it on Flipper Zero with this
| breakout board I found in my spare parts
|
| - with the dewalt drill and these parts, can you tell me how to
| build an outboard motor for the canoe. We need to get outta
| here before the flood goes up further
| classified wrote:
| But this one generates more clicks because "AI" is hot right
| now and has religious following.
| bravoetch wrote:
| I might not know the trouble-shooting steps for a problem I'm
| having. LLMs may give poor answers, but they can help me find
| documents with good answers. That would be enough for most
| people.
| nico wrote:
| Love this. And as a trend, I'd love to see more local/small task-
| specific models/agents. Experts at helping you with that one
| thing, leaving the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink to the
| frontier models/agents
| majorchord wrote:
| I like to use llamafile for cases like this:
| https://github.com/mozilla-ai/llamafile
| anonbeat wrote:
| it would be useful if it would shrink a little bit
| good1andrew wrote:
| pretty cool I like it. could you support more (small) models in
| the future, e.g. from the qwen or gemma family?
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| With all due respect: why does this need an LLM, and this much
| data? Surely a "classic" knowledge base with a more traditional
| search bar, running on top of the same data this LLM was trained
| on would be way smaller, and actually as trustworthy as the
| source material it surfaces for you?
| bityard wrote:
| There are a fair number of people who seem to believe that LLMs
| contain "world knowledge" and are blissfully unaware of how
| inaccurate an ungrounded chatbot can be. They ask it questions,
| it gives them confident and plausible (sometimes even correct!)
| answers, and they leap to the conclusion that these are useful
| tools for end-of-civilization knowledge bases. I fought this
| battle countless times on HN and Reddit, generally
| unsuccessfully.
|
| This project at least attempts to ground its answers with
| (presumably) human-vetted sources. That will make it much, MUCH
| more accurate and truthful than a bare model. But there is
| still a non-zero chance for it to hallucinate answers,
| especially when posed a question that it doesn't have any
| source material in its database.
|
| As for why bother hooking up an LLM instead of a simple search
| engine, search engines don't synthesize data from multiple
| sources into a coherent answer for you, but LLMs are (mostly)
| great at that.
|
| That said, while I like this pattern (LLM + knowledge base) for
| lots of things, this isn't necessarily something I'd trust with
| my own (or my family's) survival.
| SwellJoe wrote:
| Yeah, without the ability to search the web, a very small model
| is going to be too dumb to be useful, and maybe even dangerous
| due to hallucinations. But, there is a point where the
| knowledge of self-hostable models will surprise you. That point
| is probably not runnable on the average laptop, though. It's
| maybe in the ~30B range, but more realistically in the 128B MoE
| range. I guess in their tests Qwen 3.8 27B got as many right as
| the much larger Nemotron Super, but I'd bet Qwen 3.8 Flash
| would be better than either, but it needs 128GB of unified RAM
| or a big GPU and lots of system RAM to run the 4-bit version.
|
| I think if I had to build an emergency LLM today, that had to
| run on modest hardware, I'd bet on Gemma 4 12B. It's got
| excellent reasoning and good vision/audio and speaks 140
| languages.
|
| But, I don't know about the "classic" knowledge base theory,
| though. Is there a high quality curated pile of survival
| information that could be bundled into a web UI and made
| searchable in a knowledge base? The LLMs aren't focused on that
| topic, so there's a lot of wasted space, but they know a little
| about a lot of things, including survival topics. Combined with
| Wikipedia, and maybe a few other sources, you're probably
| better off with one than without.
|
| I guess one could use some huge models plus web search to
| compile/distill a focused survival knowledge base or LLM.
|
| Edit: Project NOMAD seems to mostly be exactly that. It has
| authoritative sources in a searchable knowledge base and the
| tiny LLMs are an afterthought, which is probably what they
| should be. https://www.projectnomad.us/
| johnnudd wrote:
| On the setup process: "You only click for about 5 minutes; the
| rest is downloading." On the energy consumption: "A small
| generator or power station runs it easily"
|
| Five minutes of clicking and a (small) power station is a small
| price to pay when survival could be at stake.
| armcat wrote:
| Back in 2018 I was working on a project for educating schools in
| certain parts of Africa and Middle East, on AI. The issue was it
| had to be air-gapped (no internet guarantees) and small/portable.
| I ended up downloading Wikipedia (not all of it), and then
| created a lightweight inverted index (for search) and TextRank
| (for summaries). The whole thing was on a Raspberry Pi, and
| installed in a small plastic enclosure. We had many of these and
| could easily ship them. There was an "AI Learning Module" as well
| we built, that started with Scratch, and then moved into Python.
| But if I was to do it all over today, I would probably add a tiny
| LLM and maybe a small ASR and a TTS model too, and you basically
| have a completely self-contained AI knowledge assistant in a
| cigarette box. The point being, you basically also have a
| "survival AI" you can take with you. Of course you still need
| electricity...
| taneq wrote:
| That sounds fantastic and you could run it on a small solar
| panel and a big capacitor. Did you get any feedback about how
| it went in the field?
| walrus01 wrote:
| If you're actually offline and need information in a 'survival'
| situation, I'm not so sure the hallucinatory nature of an LLM is
| the based way to distribute a repository of information.
| Additionally, there's no need to fit an LLM entirely in memory.
|
| In a theoretical scenario where the internet is gone and isn't
| coming back: If you can deal with a very low token/second rate
| there's no reason not to store 'offline' a much larger model like
| qwen 3.8-flash-next or deepseek v4 flash 1017 and use an
| inference engine which can stream-read it off disk to extract the
| information you want, albeit slowly. Of course _also_ download
| and use things that 'll fit in RAM, sure, like the qwen 3.8 27B
| in the linked page. But no need to restrict yourself to only
| smaller models.
| saaaaaam wrote:
| > Mac or PC with 16-31 GB | IBM Granite 4.2 8B | 14 of 22 right |
| 6 GB
|
| So on a regular consumer machine this is going to be wrong nearly
| half the time. Great! Let's hope it's only on the simple stuff
| and not the "how do I perform an emergency appendectomy".
|
| Honestly, just buy some books.
| dvt wrote:
| Or just.. _download_ the books, and slap a search engine on top
| of them. It 'll be like 10x smaller than the model. "Survival
| LLM" is absolutely a non-relevant use case.
| saaaaaam wrote:
| When you're living in an igloo trying to stay warm in the
| hollowed out belly of a cow having a few books around the
| place is probably more useful than some files on a laptop
| that ran out of battery just before it got morbidly damp.
| Plus you can burn them if you really need to.
| drusepth wrote:
| On the other hand, the laptop struggling to power a good-
| enough LLM will probably be a great heat source for you in
| that igloo... for about 45 minutes.
| saaaaaam wrote:
| As I said elsewhere, you can always burn the books! And
| eating a laptop is considerably crunchier and more
| fraught than chewing through some good old fashioned
| leather facings, horse glue and nice heavy 120gsm wove.
| recursive wrote:
| On the other hand, if you know enough to build an igloo,
| you're probably going to be ok regardless.
| octoberfranklin wrote:
| "cow in an igloo" sounds like something an LLM would
| hallucinate.
| saaaaaam wrote:
| Yes I slightly mangled that one. But I'm sure there is a
| survival technique that involves crawling into the body
| cavity of a hollowed out cow. You probably wouldn't want
| to do that in an igloo though. I'm not even sure you
| could get a cow into an igloo. If standard issue humans
| are this flawed it's hardly surprising that top flight
| LLMs get things so wrong sometimes.
| natebc wrote:
| I'd have gone with Bantha in an ice cave myself.
| taneq wrote:
| And/or install Kiwix and grab an offline copy of Wikipedia.
| lossyalgo wrote:
| Wikipedia rarely (never?) gives enough information to
| actually build or accomplish anything - it just has a nice
| clean summary of lots of things.
| scotty79 wrote:
| If you have AI model there it can make any search engine for
| you as per your needs.
| anthk wrote:
| Recoll it's far smaller and it runs on a potato. It's a
| desktop search engine which can parse tons of files. Under
| GNU/Linux just install all the recommended dependencies for
| APT/RPM. Or just use Flatpak and to hell with transitive
| dependencies.
| bityard wrote:
| What is your favorite book on emergency appendectomies?
| saaaaaam wrote:
| We had a set called something like "How to do anything in an
| emergency" which had instructions for this and more.
| Alongside lots of creative uses of potassium permanganate.
|
| I'm pretty sure it also told you how to butcher a sheep.
|
| I used to be obsessed with it as a kid. The spectre of
| nuclear war and a three volume handbook on how to survive the
| impending apocalypse with nothing more than a plastic bucket,
| a packet of potassium permanganate, some charcoal and string.
| The late 80s and early 90s were a wild time to be a kid.
| taneq wrote:
| Have you re-read it recently? Some of those books were fun
| to read but not really something to use as a field manual.
| Then again some of them were great! I had a book that
| started with explaining how a battery and a light globe
| worked, went through how to make a DC motor out of copper
| wire and a cork, and ended with a crystal radio and I think
| a radio homing beacon (the latter might have been in
| another book.)
| saaaaaam wrote:
| I have not, sadly. But I'm pretty sure I also had the
| book you mention. My brother and I made our own motor and
| many other things that would now be considered entirely
| unsuitable for 10 year olds to be doing. Copper sulfate
| crystals seem like a great idea until you have to explain
| why the playroom carpet has melted.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I have a bunch of military field manuals and survival
| guides, but they all implicitly presume the existence and
| contactability of civilization sooner or later.
| Realistically, some pocket computer(s) and solar charger(s)
| will store far more information, be far more portable, and
| give you more carrying capacity for things like medical
| supplies, rope, tools, and other hard-to-substitute items.
| dofm wrote:
| Granite is not great at any size. Wonder why they picked that.
| saaaaaam wrote:
| Given the whole thing reeks of vibe I don't think anyone
| picked anything.
| arjie wrote:
| The advantage of a turn-by-turn flow (honestly the chat
| interface was genius) is that with a little human intervention
| you can get much better results out of even silly models. The
| model of choice is strange, though. Not a particularly good
| one.
| taneq wrote:
| Either it depends a lot on the model, or I'm bad at chat, or
| both, because in my experience once a chat starts going off
| the rails it's pretty hard to correct the initial
| misconception. I find it works better to backtrack to just
| before the misconception and edit my previous response to
| head it off at the pass.
| arjie wrote:
| Definitely agreed that it's better to not have some text in
| the context than to have some that needs to be opposed. I
| suppose I meant steering prompts are a non-obvious
| innovation to LLM interaction.
| Alpha3031 wrote:
| People apparently like Granite for RAG specifically. I'm not
| aware of any evaluations with numbers though, so I'm not sure
| if it's a real difference or just vibes.
| yoble wrote:
| The required specs seemed a bit high to me, and I was just
| looking for alternatives.
|
| I found Project Nomad (https://projectnomad.us) which looks more
| polished. Any other suggestions?
| iqbal1980 wrote:
| I just use llama cpp , it's light weight, I think you create
| your own integrations, with a larger model so llama cpp can
| interract with scripts that would browse the web, control your
| computer etc... propably will have to download some pip
| packages
| MrCoffee7 wrote:
| I would suggest Hammunition, https://github.com/Renegade-
| Penguin/Hammunition with install docs at https://renegade-
| penguin.github.io/Hammunition/ . Hammunition offers much more
| info than Nomad for SHTF type emergencies. Hammunition uses
| KIWIX tools instead of an LLM to search the reference sources
| that you downloaded (eg. Wikipedia, etc.). You can install it
| on a Linux distro on a 500 GB external SSD drive that you can
| pick up for $100 at Microcenter. It is geared toward people
| interested in ham radio, but you can listen only on the ham
| radio bands without a ham license.
| TGower wrote:
| It's disappointing that Gemma E4B seems to perform poorly on this
| (42% accuracy according to the GitHub). It would be nice if a $25
| phone could be loaded up with this and stuffed in a EMP proof
| metal box with a small solar charger. Maybe a finetune or Gemma 5
| will get us there.
| x3haloed wrote:
| I made it a while ago now, but similar:
| https://github.com/x3haloed/eowkit
|
| Helps you download a local LLM and offline Wikipedia. Probably
| easier to just ask your favorite agent to glue something together
| yourself these days.
| tpoacher wrote:
| I like how both these projects seem to imply that in the event
| of an EOW scenario linux users can just f##k right off, thank
| you very much. xD
| abujazar wrote:
| No thanks, I'll use a generic model along with trusted sources.
|
| Also: "Apple could not verify "Survival LLM" is free of malware
| that may harm your Mac or compromise your privacy." This is
| obviously some vibe coded trash from an inexperienced dev.
| Trufa wrote:
| You can always not comment.
| copperx wrote:
| Not paying the $100 annual extortion fee doesn't make you
| inexperienced.
| woadwarrior01 wrote:
| The irony is thick. The dev is paying Anthropic $200 a month,
| but $100 a year for code-signing is extortion.
| abujazar wrote:
| The $100 merely serves as a gatekeeper to prevent people and
| non-devs to create unlimited developer accounts. It used to
| be $500 a decade or two ago, and it was worth it even back
| then, until Apple realized they should probably just give it
| away almost for free.
| rpdillon wrote:
| > Also: "Apple could not verify "Survival LLM" is free of
| malware that may harm your Mac or compromise your privacy."
| This is obviously some vibe coded trash from an inexperienced
| dev.
|
| This is a great example of how Apple's "scare warnings"
| completely work to mislead folks about what they are actually
| warning you about.
| woadwarrior01 wrote:
| Code signing and sandboxing exists for a very good reasons
| (security and privacy) and it's easy enough to ship a
| sandboxed app.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| How on earth are you going to operate this if you have no
| electricity?
| anigbrowl wrote:
| What are generators and solar panels? Come on.
| mentalgear wrote:
| This could be made a lot more practical (and safer) if made
| searchable via a simple vector search / embedding that can run on
| any ordinary computer.
|
| The source (data collection) seems the most important feature
| here worth reusing.
| x3haloed wrote:
| This topic is bringing out the hallucination-panic crowd.
|
| It's perfectly safe to use LLMs to surface underlying data and
| knowledge without having to trust that it's giving you correct
| advice.
|
| Use the LLM as search technology: string match -> semantic search
| -> search intelligence.
|
| This is especially helpful when you don't know the right question
| to ask. Semantics only help you find text that is semantically
| near the input query. Semantics won't help you when what you are
| looking for is connected to what you have by something other than
| semantics, like causation, mechanism, or interpretation.
|
| Trying to figure out why your crops aren't growing well will
| likely require you to read several articles across a range of
| sciences, probably scoped to the specific conditions you are
| dealing with. A semantic search is not going to surface those
| first.
|
| Allowing an LLM to chain together several sources for you to read
| first does not require you to ask it for a conclusion.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| A great strength of LLMs is how they provide useful answers
| even if the prompt has glaring spelling or grammatical
| mistakes. If your prompt is not great, as you said, they will
| reply in a way that helps you identify that flaws, and learn
| how to steer the model better.
|
| They're amazingly useful tools, but they're nowhere the level
| believers want them to be, not yet.
| vorticalbox wrote:
| Yes this has been very useful for me this week. I trapped my
| middle finger on my right hand in a door and it really messed
| up my typing.
|
| I tried using dictation but I really disliked speaking to it.
|
| You can write a really messed up sentence and it almost
| always worked out what I meant.
|
| Quite amazing actually
| macNchz wrote:
| The readme on Github does say the system produces hallucinated
| sources https://github.com/anonnerdfrenzy/survival-llm#how-the-
| model..., but really you're correct, for this kind of highly
| targeted use case the LLM's summary could probably be ignored
| entirely and the system could work extremely well even just as
| a search engine: index all of the content up front, chunked by
| paragraph and maybe enriched with a HyDE step, have the LLM
| facilitate running a handful of hybrid keyword/semantic
| searches based on the user's question and reranking the
| results, and show the exact pieces of text in the corpus that
| are most responsive to their question. No summary needed.
| pydry wrote:
| Not sure what the LLM is adding there then other than
| injecting a step into your search that could hallucinate.
| macNchz wrote:
| Query expansion and reranking are both valuable and things
| that even small LLMs are pretty good at. People are broadly
| not great at writing search queries, so a system that takes
| a poorly phrased question, turns it into several different
| actual search queries and then merges and sorts the results
| by relevance can have a big impact. All the better if the
| AI can ask the user some clarifying questions.
| Retric wrote:
| The issue is the opposite of hallucinations where the LLM
| ignores relevant information.
|
| Sure you can combine this with a regular search but
| there's opportunity cost whenever you say LLM + something
| else rather than just the other thing.
| alansaber wrote:
| Can a bad LM implementation surface bad references? Yes. Are
| LMs overwhelmingly useful for research? Yes.
| gfody wrote:
| Is a bad LM implementation still useful for research?
| Shmaybe.
| xiaoyu2006 wrote:
| But at this point why even bring a full model into scope in the
| first place.. just run some cheap embedding retriever
| meristohm wrote:
| Nevermind hallucinations, the donkey-work is important; why
| bypass the hours of research, which trains our in-built LLM and
| can lead to new realizations, and get the carrot without much
| effort? This LLM stuff feels like a candybar; the anticipation
| of the magic feels good, the thing tastes good while you're
| eating it, and everything thereafter is shit, but we easily
| forget, and reach for the next candybar. I appreciated Blindboy
| Boatclub's take in his podcast episode "Artificial intelligence
| is Disgusting and it will never replace Artists" from 2026
| March 17. I also appreciate Electrical Engineer & Computer
| Scientist Timnit Gebru's perspective on these stochastic
| parrots. While intraspecies diversity confers, up to a point, a
| survival benefit, consider the long-term consequences of
| playing this particular game. We don't have to eat every
| candybar the rich mostly-guys ply us with.
| FluffyPancake wrote:
| The premise in this case is to get answers quickly in an
| emergency situation. You don't want to tell the person with a
| burn injury to wait a bit since you always wanted to learn
| how burns are treated.
| grey-area wrote:
| You also don't want to get advice like that cooking advice
| to make a glue pizza.
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| That's is what medical encyclopedias were built for. Fully
| offline.
| 7kago_yomi wrote:
| In a true emergency, there are often many cases where you need
| not just information retrieval, but "thinking and reasoning" to
| deal with unprecedented situations, right? Is it technically
| possible to balance lightweight local performance with thinking
| capability, while avoiding the risk of hallucinations in life-
| or-death instructions?
| duskdozer wrote:
| The summarization is the main issue here. A fuzzy search is far
| less controversial. The LLM companies have done a good job
| synonymizing "AI" with their products however.
| hoherd wrote:
| Multiple times yesterday I caught Claude giving slightly
| incorrect information about things it had read in docs and
| source code. Its info was accurate enough to be plausible, but
| it was still wrong. And when I pointed that out, it agreed that
| it had overstated or made statements without verifying them.
|
| It would be terrible to be doing an emergency medical procedure
| and have an AI backtrack on something it had told you to do.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| The AI should have a tool that it can use to quote an
| underlying document. The AI itself would not be responsible
| for filling the quote; that would be done by the interface
| which deterministically quotes the requested section.
| strangegecko wrote:
| I like using Gemini Notebooks, but this is one of my
| current frustrations. At least with the current UI, I can
| see the document getting quoted, but not the actual quote
| to verify what it's saying or to see the context of the
| quote. So I'm forced to find the content manually or just
| trust the LLM got it right.
| strangegecko wrote:
| There's this article on a woman dying after ChatGPT "helped"
| her taper off medication
| https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/27/well/ai-chatgpt-
| medicatio...
|
| There really needs to be some kind of "double check"
| mechanism built into these things instead of putting 100% of
| that on the consumer. Humans simply don't have the mental
| capacity to double check the amount of data coming out of
| LLMs.
| balarjin wrote:
| The "double check" mechanism for medications is: We tell
| people not to take medical advice from anyone who is not
| trained in medicine.
|
| This is not a new problem. The internet has been full of
| nonsense since the 1990s (at least). Gossip and malicious
| rumors are as old as language.
|
| It is not realistic to stop the generation of nonsense (of
| the malicious or the stupid sort). We should train people
| to detect and ignore nonsense when they hear it.
| strangegecko wrote:
| This advice is inadequate and impractical. Most people
| don't have access to doctors who spend enough time on
| them to really get to the bottom of all issues.
|
| In most countries, there are simply too many patients per
| doctor, meaning it's a conveyor belt of "good enough" 5
| minute appointments.
|
| People will turn to other modes of discussing and
| analyzing their problems if they go to professionals
| repeatedly and the problem still isn't solved. Just
| telling them not to do so or to ignore 100% of it isn't
| going to solve that.
|
| > It is not realistic to stop the generation of nonsense
| (of the malicious or the stupid sort).
|
| Seems like a big statement. Why is it not realistic?
| People are already doing it manually by having one LLM
| fact check output from another.
| asdff wrote:
| The difference is back then we had the adage "don't
| believe everything you read online" that helped adjust
| our priors. Today, however, these companies are
| specifically marketing themselves as the source of ground
| truth. Your boss, or your school that a generation ago
| banned wikipedia, is now demanding you to use these tools
| and make the work dependent on them.
| everforward wrote:
| It's fine and safe, it just feels a bit silly. Yes, I could
| have an LLM read a ton of stuff and generate a list of
| suggestions on the fly.
|
| Or I could have an honest to god farmer make that list now,
| ahead of time. Regular search could absolutely surface that.
|
| But also, as someone who does hydroponics, you're going to end
| up reading the papers anyways unless you've done this a lot.
| It's not easy to pick out something like low iron from too
| little light.
| tobadzistsini wrote:
| No GNU/Linux? Meh.
| elliotec wrote:
| Agreed. Especially for something like this, in which many
| imaginable situations would require the ability to run on Linux
| rather than MacOS or Windows, pretty strange.
| jonathaneunice wrote:
| Alternate idea: Download Unsloth Studio
| https://unsloth.ai/docs/new/studio#quickstart
|
| From the command line: unsloth studio
|
| Browse to the URL it gives you (eg http://127.0.0.1:8888/)
|
| Download a good fast local model e.g. Gemma-4-12B (small machine)
| or Qwen3.6-35B-A3B (larger memory). Or a Nemotron model, if you
| prefer that.
|
| Then you'll have both your backup/emergency assistant that runs
| on your own computer and be gaining skills in a common,
| frequently-updated, well-supported program.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| I'd want an Android version...
| lutusp wrote:
| This will come in handy after AI takes over the world.
|
| But kidding aside, this is an interesting reveal on the ease with
| which a custom LLM can be spun up to fit a particular niche
| application, especially for systems not meant to host an LLM.
| riazrizvi wrote:
| I saw emergency and I immediately thought in case I couldn't
| access online docs or get my coding/platform questions answered
| day-to-day.
|
| Apocalypse emergency I don't need help on. My crisis brain has
| collected more than enough info and capabilities over the
| decades.
| lrvick wrote:
| I give it about 50/50 the internet goes down or becomes
| effectively unusable for weeks, maybe months, at some point in
| the next 5 years given abysmal commitment to cybersecurity from
| almost every company that exists.
|
| Some kid with the right prompt will supply chain attack a
| dependency of a dependency of firmware for border routers just to
| watch the world burn, or runaway AI swarms will saturate all
| bandwidth. Or a Linux kernel zero-click vuln. So many ways this
| can happen.
|
| Better to prepare a bit and never need it.
| jahrichie wrote:
| Can this work with ollama?
| nathanfig wrote:
| I recently evaluated LLMs for use for offline navigation, with
| this very kind of survival scenario in mind:
| https://fig.blue/posts/directions-from-memory/
|
| tl;dr: Local LLMs are really really bad at offline navigation.
|
| That said, pairing the survival guide with a library is totally
| the right move.
| jojobas wrote:
| Why would you want LLM navigation where offline deterministic
| navigation have been there forever?
| nathanfig wrote:
| If you happen to have an app and library of all the maps you
| want then yes, that is better. You could ask the same about
| Survival LLM: Why not just grep a survival guide?
|
| The thesis is that someday an LLM might perform better than
| both. But I agree, not yet.
| jojobas wrote:
| A survival guide won't answer a question, you need to
| search it for some sort of keywords, you might not be using
| the same term or not know what a particular thing is
| called, and might end up having to read all of it to find
| the info you need, or not find it at all.
|
| Navigation is a closed task, A* will always find an optimal
| route as long as your street info is current, you can't do
| better than that.
| jojobas wrote:
| Talos Principle vibes.
| groby_b wrote:
| I can almost guarantee you that by the time you need a survival
| assistant, you won't be willing to spend gasoline on generating
| electricity for your GPUs.
|
| (It's helpful for shorter outages. But "survival assistant", I
| think not, unless you run a compound)
| 0c3ca83 wrote:
| Have you considered just having a library?
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Shoutout to project nomad.
|
| https://www.projectnomad.us/
|
| its got a ton of useful options, preconfigured, integrates pretty
| easily, and can use any local LLM or data.
| KiwiJohnno wrote:
| Interesting. I have a mac mini I run headless dedicated for LLM
| inference. Do you know if I could run project nomad on a linux
| box but use qwen on the mac for the AI stuff? I can't find any
| info on if this configuration is possible.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Sure can. I did similar.
| KiwiJohnno wrote:
| Sweet, I'll give it a go! Thanks dude.
| ciefa wrote:
| This looks cool! My thought in OPs post was "Why now use
| Kiwix?" and Nomad seems to do! Also BYOM is better imho.
| fathermarz wrote:
| Emergencies = No Internet
|
| What about no power? You gonna run your generator for your local
| model? What are we doing here? Have we lost our way completely?
| rpdillon wrote:
| I'm conflicted here -- on the one hand, you make a good point.
| Things we take for granted normally are luxuries in a survival
| sitation. On the flip side, running a generator for a bit to
| get an LLM to generate schedules, guides, step-by-step that can
| be edited/followed on a much lower-powered device seems
| reasonable.
| willguest wrote:
| I'm using for the emergency hot tub and hairdryer first. The
| last thing you want in a state-wide blackout is to be walking
| around super relaxed but with wet hair..
| MithrilTuxedo wrote:
| Generators require the infrastructure that supplies fuel, and
| you need to have a generator you might not need.
|
| Solar panels and batteries are great for emergencies, and
| they're useful besides.
| mindcrime wrote:
| > What about no power?
|
| Solar panels? You can go down to Harbor Freight right now and
| pick up a setup that will run a laptop or tablet for a while,
| for a couple of hundred dollars. One wouldn't have to spend a
| ton more to get a setup that can run a decent PC with a GPU for
| at least a little while.
|
| I mean, you're probably not going to run it all day, especially
| not in the part of year with fewer daylight hours, but
| anything's better than nothing. Plus the same solar setup can
| be used to power other useful things.
| tartoran wrote:
| Yeah, we forgot information on paper it seems. Flawed as it is
| I like the idea though..
| amelius wrote:
| The only way Big AI labs will sell us appliances is when the
| internet was somehow destroyed.
|
| Not sure where this would fit in.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Qwen 3.8 27B runs well on my laptop. And I can fit terabytes of
| human knowledge on it.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Just few days ago I thought digital preppers are soon gonna make
| something like that. It's a generally good idea.
|
| I'd put in this also a ton of software documentation, minimally
| for Rust.
|
| And a bunch of scientific literature.
| CalChris wrote:
| Odd that it doesn't run on phones. It isn't that large, 212MB on
| a Mac. Phones are basically everyone's EDC and most are quite
| powerful.
| jkahrs595 wrote:
| That's just the size of the app. It then downloads the
| appropriate model given the specs of the machine.
| pryelluw wrote:
| I went through a category 5 hurricane that took down everything.
| Prepared by downloading as much as I could ahead of time but it
| wasn't enough. This, or something similar, would have been a
| blessing.
| semireg wrote:
| What this needs is a recipe or script that you can point your
| local agent at and it builds a bespoke implementation that's, by
| definition, highly resilient.
|
| Edit: see project nomad.
| nevster wrote:
| When I quit the app, why is it still running in the background?
| daniel_iversen wrote:
| It's pretty cool. But if it's such a small model and small
| corpus, isn't it almost just as good just to have a static
| wikipedia-style copy of those key sources (WikiMed, MedlinePlus,
| Ready.gov, CDC etc.)? Maybe if they (and that could be static
| too), gave you a "what's going on?" question and then told you
| what you might not know - i.e. "power is out" -> "make sure you
| open your fridge as little as possible", "if you have backup
| battery ensure you turn power hungry devices off" etc.?
| vldszn wrote:
| Really cool idea! Will give it a spin.
|
| I'm currently using https://kiwix.org for the offline access to
| Wikipedia, but your Survival LLM looks even better.
| fultonn wrote:
| Cool project.
|
| I have some property that doesn't really get cell reception in
| the summer, and even in the winter the reception is at-best
| spotty. I use granite and qwen together with a manually curated
| set of books, articles, etc. to get work done while disconnected.
| I tend to update the set of resources before leaving town because
| I'm generally intentionally disconnecting to focus on deep work.
| Building a workflow that makes that possible has helped me build
| out a setup that replaces a ton of my day-to-day anthropic/openai
| use even when I'm near fiber.
|
| It is interesting how, even pre-llms, offline computers change
| the nature of a lot of activities. E.g., about once a year I'll
| walk do a random walk in the woods for a few days without paying
| much attention to maintaining a bearing. With maps and compasses
| it's a whole skill set to find your way back. With a phone and
| downloaded maps you just kinda press the power button and check
| your heading every hour or two.
|
| The "survival" use-case is interesting. I fear a lot of the
| practical applications of that knowledge are either time-
| sensitive (e.g., RAG on a "Stop The Bleed" course won't help
| because by the time you learn the patient is dead) or require
| tools+skills that aren't easily improvised completely from
| scratch in high-stress situations (e.g., building shelter or even
| really simple stuff like building a fire when it's very cold
| out). And for other stuff common sense prevails (e.g., power out
| -> keep fridge closed).
| wanderingbit wrote:
| I set this up on my machine and tested it with the following
| question:
|
| How can I build a bow drill so I can start a fire?
|
| It got it partially right: spindle, bow with string tied the
| correct way, and fire board. But then it flubbed by saying you
| put the spindle between both hands and move your hands back and
| forth to rotate the spindle and create the necessary friction...
| this totally ignores using the bow to rotate the spindle! It also
| mentioned "fanning the sparks" but there is absolutely no way
| your bow drill is going to create sparks.
|
| I asked a frontier model to check the survival LLM's conversation
| trace and it pointed out the errors.
|
| I didn't see obvious errors in the other 3 prompts I used, but
| this one seemed pretty egregious for a survival LLM.
|
| I thank the creator for making this, but take it with a grain of
| salt.
| jmuguy wrote:
| Did it give you the source(s) so you could double check?
| paxy wrote:
| Giving incorrect instructions and saying "go check the
| sources" is worse than just returning the sources. Aka a
| search engine.
| daveguy wrote:
| That's why the question was whether it gave sources, not
| whether they asked it to go check sources. Yeah, LLMs suck
| and you should always assume false information. 80%
| accurate is not production ready.
| drcode wrote:
| I'm actually not sure I agree- I think giving a very
| specific response to your question, even with a 10% chance
| there is a mistake, along with giving you sources, is
| pretty helpful: It gives you a good starting hypothesis
| that you can then validate.
|
| llms tend to make different types of errors than humans, so
| with this process each can guard against the errors of the
| other.
| asdff wrote:
| Its just more work. If you have to verify from the
| sources anyhow, why spend effort reading the prompt to
| begin with? It just wastes your time and maybe even
| pollutes your subconscious with incorrect information.
| stego-tech wrote:
| Please, _please_ do not trust a chatbot in emergencies. There's a
| reason why actual survival and emergency preparedness guides
| include manuals rather than recommend you just use a chatbot:
| practicality.
|
| Just look at those specs needed for accurate-ish results. You
| really think your 128GB Mac Studio or Framework desktop is going
| to be able to work in a real emergency situation? Even if it is,
| how long will it last? What about those precious seconds waiting
| for inference?
|
| The danger here is less hallucinations and more, well,
| _everything else about it_. Instead of setting this up, take the
| time to make sure you have a restocked first aid kit and enough
| water for a week of use by your household. Stock up on meds and
| non-perishable food. Plan exit strategies and contingencies.
| Acquire and store little first aid booklets or manuals of common
| survival tasks in physical form (or hell, throw onto an eReader -
| infinitely more battery life than an LLM host in an emergency).
|
| This is one of those "sounds good in my head" projects that folks
| with emergency experience would bristle at. This is a hindrance,
| not a helper.
| sailfast wrote:
| At what point would it be better to download a few real sources
| and do plain text search? Why risk a hallucination for content
| that would probably be smaller than the size of the model?!
| serf wrote:
| this is more like .. survival harness, no?
|
| >The app is the same everywhere. When it opens, it checks your
| computer's memory and downloads the AI model that fits. More
| memory means a smarter model.
|
| first thing an emergency tool should require, internet access.
|
| at first glance I figured it'd be an ultra small specialty
| trained survival model that'd be small and runnable anywhere,
| sorta like an emergency flavored version of those tiny tts models
| that have been all over recently.
|
| Maybe that's an idea for someone.
| _zendar_ wrote:
| Sorry if this is a dump question but I was wondering why not fine
| tuning each model to get 100% accuracy on those topics?
| WindyTree wrote:
| Wonder why they didn't run Qwen 3.5 9b on 16th Macs. That's a
| super impressive model for size. Is granite better?
| paxy wrote:
| If every single example posted has hallucinations and the
| response is "it's your fault for not checking the sources" then
| it's obvious that an LLM isn't the right tool for the job. A
| search engine works perfectly fine for these kinds of datasets.
| vivzkestrel wrote:
| if your computer doesnt work during an emergency because power
| went out, how will your LLM work?
| vektormemory wrote:
| Great idea, I do a lot of work testing small LLM's in this space
| and agree if you add some guardrails and train a small embedder,
| you won't need these large models, as your info is static, you
| can ship it all as one.
|
| Or try these with your trained embedder:
| https://ollama.com/library/minicpm-v4.6
| https://ollama.com/library/bonsai-2
| KingMachiavelli wrote:
| 212MB for MacOS and 25MB for Windows? Why are MacOS binaries so
| large? Is it typical for them to be 10x Windows binary size?
|
| That said, I'm _really_ looking forward to small and quick
| (latency wise) models are a reality. I can easily see a world
| where every keystroke, terminal command, etc. goes through a
| "autocorrect" type model. You could even blend natural language
| plus terminal program segments and the AI just infers what you
| intend. Either built-in or a second classifier model, determines
| if the autocorrect change needs human review first.
| voxelghost wrote:
| They bundle both python and ollama in that app bundle, and the
| ollama folder is something like 500MB unpacked , bundled python
| I think was 80MB.
|
| Not sure what they do on the windows side.
| cellsstudio wrote:
| I'm not a doomsday prepper but man if you need to run an LLM
| locally during the apocalypse to figure out how long your food is
| going to last, I feel like you are in for a tough time.
|
| This kind of stuff really feels like knowledge that probably
| shouldn't be offload to AI but rather learned and practiced.
| Again, I don't have a bunker in my backyard but seems like a
| weird use case.
| alex_duf wrote:
| Yeah that was my first reaction. In survival mode you want low
| tech not high tech.
|
| Books are pretty damn good and don't need 500W of GPU
| dns_snek wrote:
| I also don't think the showcased response to the food question
| is any good?
|
| Throwing out food that was at 6 degC for 2 hours without
| tasting it is really paranoid, the answer should be "it
| depends". If not following government advice/requirements on
| safe storage conditions (which is tailored to high risk
| populations) meant certain illness then I would be seriously
| ill at least once a week, but I've never been.
|
| I would be _waaaay_ more worried about catching a norovirus
| from someone who didn 't wash their hands than raw meat being
| kept at 4-8C for 12h.
| drcode wrote:
| I actually thought of writing a whole blog post just on this-
| That is such terrible survival advice, OF COURSE in an
| emergency you can eat stuff from the refrigerator even after
| 2 hours.
|
| It is also really dumb to do that if there isn't an emergency
| btbuildem wrote:
| No, those people are going to die.
|
| This is more of a "preserve the knowledge of mankind for the
| survivors" type of archive.
| telesilla wrote:
| I've never maintained an internal combustion engine but always
| figured in an apocalypse I'd figure it out with books if
| needed. I agree that many folk would suffer hard, not knowing
| how to recognize viable food or even cook it.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| I feel like there is a big misunderstanding here. In my house,
| we've been doing a lot of light "prepping" lately. Not for the
| apocalypse, but for simple emergency situations for a few days
| to a week.
|
| The UK government has been pushing hard for the public to stock
| enough food and water for at least 3 days. We have weeks of
| supplies.
|
| My huge worry is that the country will run out of LNG due to
| the ongoing war in Iran, Qatar being offline, and Europe not
| having enough LNG in storage. Plus, a lot of weird weather due
| to El Nino.
|
| Is an emergency LLM really going to make a difference? Probably
| not, but I have one on my desktop computer anyways.
| RetroTechie wrote:
| You'd be surprised how many people don't even have drinking
| water stored to get through a few days. That's 2nd most
| essential after air to breathe.
|
| Same with food. NONE of this type of preparation is
| difficult, very space / time consuming, or expensive.
|
| As for the LNG situation: worst case is do without heating.
| Totally doable in UK climate; extra layers of clothing &
| blankets / sleeping bags do the job (been there, done that in
| the NL).
|
| Remember we're talking getting through a crisis, not comfort.
| Although you can have both with more prep work.
| asdff wrote:
| I mean its obviously just a fun gag tool the OP made to throw
| the tool stack on their resume. This post can land them a six
| figure job.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| Unless you have a general interest in self sufficiency,
| spending time practicing this is going to be a waste of time
| given its risk of actually happening. Thats where the llm come
| in. The most likely scenario isn't some crazy invasion like in
| CoD games, but more likely temporary dissarray, and even that
| is fairly unlikely considering how many things are automated
| now.
| janandonly wrote:
| We need this, but running on smartphones.
|
| Also, I am surprised that the difference between 32GB and 128GB
| in right answers is so small:
|
| * Mac with 128 GB or more memory NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Super 21 of
| 22 right 80 GB
|
| * Windows PC with 32 GB or more NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 19
| of 22 right 25 GB
| vogre wrote:
| From the site:
|
| >Survival LLM >It Can be wrong
|
| thank you!
| hackerbone wrote:
| All this is interesting, but I always had a question: in a state
| of disaster or some mishap even if you have an light LLM running
| - most important is a power source/electricity. Without it
| nothing will work.
| sgt101 wrote:
| There are quite a few options that people lean on.
|
| - Traditional: a generator. Problem is that you need a fuel
| tank, but if you are aiming to get through a couple of weeks
| then that's possible.
|
| - Grid attached battery backup: good because in some places
| (like the UK) electricity at night is much cheaper than
| electricity during the day... so you can charge the battery and
| then save money and get payback on your installation. Bonus
| point is that if there is a grid outage then you have power,
| for a day or so if you are careful.
|
| - Grid attached with solar/wind: as above, but you can charge
| independently from the sun/wind... obviously in some places
| (like the UK) this has limited utility because the sun don't
| shine (like today), and the wind can be annoying and difficult
| as a power source (gearboxes, noise, aesthetics). Can cost in
| though - because of summer power my panels pay back in 11
| years. Small wind turbines seem to be getting more practical
| but I am no expert.
|
| - Non grid battery backup. These also come with solar now, so
| you can recharge if it's sunny. These are cheap (<~PS1000),
| hold maybe 2Kw and so can power some devices while the grid is
| off for a little while. Definitely you can run your phones and
| computers for a few extra cycles, but people are often looking
| to run freezers or fridges with medicine with these.
|
| Another thing that folks like to have is grid independent
| heating / cooking via a woodstove. This is frowned on in urban
| areas and by eco people but I live in the country and have done
| my reading and while other people will pop up and decry
| particulates to be honest I'm keeping my burner so my family
| will be warm and fed for as long as our food lasts or we don't
| get looted by the neighbours.
| hackerbone wrote:
| Makes sense, but still can't imagine a post apocalyptic world
| and how I'll live without power :(
| antman wrote:
| A detail from the benchmarks in that page is that Nemotron
| Lightning has good results for a MoE model close to Qwen 27B
| which is dense. Very interesting considering that Qwen 35B MoE
| stopped being in Alibaba's plans, and curious if Nemotron is
| equally capable in other bemchmarks.
| niobe wrote:
| "Survival LLM, the power is out and there's no food, how do I
| turn your computer on to ask your questions?"
| Schlagbohrer wrote:
| Even in their table it shows the LLM never getting all the
| questions right.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| Seems like a remarkably stupid idea as opposed to just having an
| extensive encyclopedia downloaded with a very thin client you can
| use to read from it.
|
| In an actual survival scenario power isn't guaranteed and errors
| of any kind can be life or death. So you need to minimize the
| resources used to get the thing working.
| brettermeier wrote:
| This is just crap. Why would you want something that can give you
| wrong answers (like 4 out of 20 like in the tables, that is
| much!) - in an emergency?
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| LLMs have become the software equivalent of using a hammer to
| solve all your problems. Like others have said, there are much
| better solutions to provide an enhanced search engine for your
| survival knowledge.
| Forsaken_Parfai wrote:
| How are we powering this computer? Maybe be need a bootstrap llm
| that can answer only that question and runs on a solar device? Or
| some kinda clockwork bad boy, now you're talking :)
| mehdizare wrote:
| Living in Miami, this is the kind of thing I'd actually keep on a
| laptop for hurricane season, when power and cell service can be
| out for days.
| jzemeocala wrote:
| this reminds me of something I built pre-LLMs that i called a
| "doomsday computer"
|
| it was a raspi with a couple 18650s and bms taken from a drill
| battery combined with a pico-projector and a laser keyboard
| stuffed in a waterproof acrylic cube with a stack of sd cards
| filled with stuff like the survivor library and an offline copy
| of wikipedia.
|
| complete with fold out solar panels and circuitry taken from one
| of those amazon solar phone chargers.
|
| worked well for a few hours at a time at night while camping.
| eventually i was planning to add a retropi sd and a best of music
| sd (like classical and the rolling stone magazine top 500)
| busssard wrote:
| you should document this and make an instructable for it! <3
| mrtksn wrote:
| This is much better waste of space than Apple AI. It was
| something I was imagining to build, got pleasantly surprised to
| see it having been done.
| chrissnell wrote:
| From what I can tell: - zero firearms or bowhunting content
|
| - no books on hunting or fishing
|
| - no instructions on field dressing animals
|
| - no FM 7-8 or ATP 3-21.8
|
| - no info on reloading ammunition or flint knapping
|
| This feels more like a tool for city dwellers than a serious
| survival tool.
| rtkwe wrote:
| > - no FM 7-8 or ATP 3-21.8
|
| Those are more militia LARP relevant than actual survival
| relevant in fairness but the other gaps are pretty bad. You can
| definitely have a useful too without that info and for disaster
| situations most people don't have to go into the level of
| hunting their own food so I guess it's more of a question of
| how long and how deep the disaster you're looking at info on is
| expected to go.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| I mean, if you are in a scenario where its everyone for
| themselves, weapon knowledge is going to be absolutely
| essential.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Yeah that's where it comes down to what kind of disaster
| scenario you're actually thinking about preparing for.
| Though there's no amount of post disaster perusing of those
| Army manuals summarized by an LLM that's going to help you
| actually implement anything in them. The skill to use the
| info in those books without being a liability to yourself
| and others requires actual practice.
|
| Also the way groups actually survive scenarios is rarely
| around actual fighting and is vastly more dependent on
| actual survival skills, cooperation, and organizing. The
| lone (or small group) survivalist fantasy is mostly an
| American larp.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Bold of you to assume there will be running computers past the
| nuclear apocalypse. It is much, much more likely that a lot of
| electronics will be permanently fried by the inevitable EMPs.
| Distributing practical skills in how to survive is much more
| useful.
| marceldupr wrote:
| I am not going to accuse anyone of anything, but this looks
| suspiciously like the project I have been working on. The dates,
| the time, the folder structure, the concept. It is a bit
| disheartening, because it missed the whole point, and it
| butchered the implementation. No LLM makes sense. Having an LLM
| in the loop is having the worst of both worlds? Example: My
| initial use case was to provide schools and traders in rural
| Africa with at least some sort of free LLM-like capability. They
| have phones that cost $5. Power cuts, drop of the cellular
| network. Not just 'No-LLM to prove a point'.
|
| It is also only 5% of the wider scope and I was about to release
| it under OSS 2 days ago, but wanted add some final finess. Now
| that this is out, I might as well release it so the concept
| actually ties to its original goal, and release the scientific
| papers that date back to Feb. Please ping me on github. Same
| username as here. Always could do with help.
| spurgu wrote:
| Smallest model download is 6 GB. I'd rather store a collection of
| relevant ebooks.
| einpoklum wrote:
| LLM-authored website convinces you to waste time and energy on
| chatting with an LLM when struggling to survive.
| stsch wrote:
| Why should I download an 80 GB model that I need proper hardware
| for, when a couple MB of PDFs is all that's needed?
|
| Reminds me of the time when Docker was thrown at everything.
| gregwebs wrote:
| This downloads a library of mostly kiwix wikipedia information
| and produces a full text SQLite index that is live searched by
| the model and then the model reads and summarizes the
| information.
|
| Interesting thing is that when I asked a follow up question it
| answered but showed: This answer came from what the AI already
| knows, not the library, so there's no source to check. Ask "look
| that up" to get one.
|
| When I asked "look that up" it was able to. It highlights
| relevant sections.
|
| The information it was working off in my case was WikiHow and
| there aren't any citations in that information.
|
| Running on a 32GB Mac M1 using Qwen 27B. Ollama is showing as
| taking 19GB steady state and 23GB while answering on Activity
| Monitor (sometimes a little more and sometimes a little less).
|
| Its amazing this can be done, but it seems like someone should be
| able to develop a much smaller model that can be used reliably
| for this use case. There are smaller models available to use and
| download but it is stated that they have some reliability issues.
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