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Comments (100)

• wanderingbit
  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.
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  x3haloed
  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.
• fultonn
  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).
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  jvanderbot
  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.
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  rnd0
  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.
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  saaaaaam
  > Mac or PC with 16–31 GB | IBM Granite 4.2 8B | 14 of 22 right | 6 GBSo 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.
• daniel_iversen
  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
  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.
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  fathermarz
  Emergencies = No InternetWhat about no power? You gonna run your generator for your local model? What are we doing here? Have we lost our way completely?
• pryelluw
  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.
• lrvick
  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.
• armcat
  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...
• semireg
  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.
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  yoble
  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?
• nico
  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
  I like to use llamafile for cases like this: https://github.com/mozilla-ai/llamafile
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  CalChris
  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.
• riazrizvi
  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.
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  x3haloed
  I made it a while ago now, but similar: https://github.com/x3haloed/eowkitHelps you download a local LLM and offline Wikipedia. Probably easier to just ask your favorite agent to glue something together yourself these days.
• nevster
  When I quit the app, why is it still running in the background?
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  amelius
  The only way Big AI labs will sell us appliances is when the internet was somehow destroyed.Not sure where this would fit in.
• mentalgear
  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.
• anon
  undefined
• jonathaneunice
  Alternate idea: Download Unsloth Studio https://unsloth.ai/docs/new/studio#quickstartFrom the command line: unsloth studioBrowse 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.
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  TheRealPomax
  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?
• good1andrew
  pretty cool I like it. could you support more (small) models in the future, e.g. from the qwen or gemma family?
• zabriel_goss
  Nice idea! I wonder how the installed IBM Granite 4.2 8B LLM does on machines with "modest" RAM
• 0c3ca83
  Have you considered just having a library?
• johnnudd
  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.
• VikingCoder
  I'd want an Android version...
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  nathanfig
  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.
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  jahrichie
  Can this work with ollama?
• scotty79
  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.
• TGower
  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.
• anonbeat
  it would be useful if it would shrink a little bit
• groby_b
  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)
• jojobas
  Talos Principle vibes.
• lutusp
  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.
• walrus01
  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.
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  tobadzistsini
  No GNU/Linux? Meh.
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  doublerabbit
  How on earth are you going to operate this if you have no electricity?
• 10111001
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• bestlocalairig
  [flagged]
• soren_ai
  [flagged]
• remusrm
  [dead]
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  abujazar
  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.