Survival LLM: AI assistant and emergency library that runs on your own computer(brangus.io)
393 points by Luc 16 hours ago | 148 comments
tl;dr: Survival LLM is a free, open-source offline AI assistant bundled with an emergency reference library (FEMA/CDC guides, medical references, wikiHow, iFixit, and ~930,000 Wikipedia articles) that runs locally on Mac or Windows. It auto-selects a model based on available RAM—ranging from IBM Granite 4.2 8B (16GB) up to NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Super (128GB+)—and cites sources with every answer so users can verify claims. Everything runs without internet after setup, with no tracking, and supports adding your own PDFs and documents to the searchable corpus.
HN Discussion:
  • ↑LLMs are useful as semantic search tools even if answers aren't fully trustworthy
  • ↓Hallucination risk makes LLMs dangerous for emergency scenarios; use books or plain archives instead
  • ↓Testing reveals the tool gives partially wrong answers on practical survival questions
  • ↓Survival knowledge should be learned and practiced, not offloaded to AI during emergencies
  • ↑Offline LLMs with curated resources are genuinely useful for disconnected work scenarios