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Comment by zmgsabst | Hacker News Reader

You can run a small model off a home generator — so in an emergency, you’d turn on both the generator and information service, eg, a mesh for “quick” responses querying that huge collection of information.

That way your machine that, eg, normally plays video games or does AI work can support relief efforts by supporting emergency response IT. You don’t need to mothball the machine, just have an “emergency” boot USB than can run the services from your home generator.

You don’t even need to bring it with you: turn it on and leave it “best effort” at home, while you continue to use it via WAN.

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I feel this is going into increasingly-unlikely mixes of constraints and needs in order to try to keep a "wouldn't it be cool if" hypothetical-tool dream alive. [0]

But OK, let's assume that: The power is out, but you have a generator with so much fuel you can run a desktop just fine; Your neighborhood will somehow make a mesh network; Your neighbors need some already stored information and the best solution for that is texting a chatbot rather than a survival/emergency handbook or Wikipedia; Your mesh-network will also be good enough to match the time-sensitivity of the questions.

Under those assumption, which of these sounds better?

1. Buying an "LLM-in-a-box for emergency supply kits", which you deploy so that your neighbors can ask questions (text over the mesh) of the offline chatbot.

2. Buying a satellite internet transciever for your emergency supply kit, so that your neighbors can ask questions of a much better chatbot and communicate with human experts, their worried relatives, and coordinate with rescue/relief efforts...

[0] https://xkcd.com/2128/

Option 1 sounds better:

I’m only out the cost of the drive, which is like $40 and doesn’t require anybody on the other side cooperate with me.

- - -

More broadly…

You call it unlikely mixes, but we see it all the time:

- people already have a computer for gaming or work

- people (ie, “preppers” like we’re discussing) buy a generator for emergencies

- local emergency response sets up mesh networking during disasters, both official and unofficial

Have you ever tried to use a handbook you’re not intimately familiar with during an emergency? It’s rough.

For personal preparedness, nothing replaces familiarity and practice — eg, weekend survival trips and reading your manual ahead of time.

But for providing information in a random lookup manner to unpracticed people who weren’t prepared? Yes, I think an LLM/chatbot is the practical way to operationalize all that information which you stored (eg, survival guides or machine manuals).

Also, it’s unlikely a general purpose chatbot would be superior at survival advice to one specialized for that purpose — and indeed, is likely to refuse your questions as “unsafe” or “criminal”.

> I’m only out the cost of the drive, which is like $40 and doesn’t require anybody on the other side cooperate with me.

At current prices you are also out about $4k for a Spark to actually run the inference on, if you want a full LLM in a low-power package.

In general, I'm not sure why one would want to pin your survival to an expensive, hallucination-prone data source, when an offline copy of wikipedia with a little vector search attached to a Raspberry Pi can fulfil the same role...

> Have you ever tried to use a handbook you’re not intimately familiar with during an emergency? It’s rough.

Sounds like the absolute worst time to rely on a crappy little model that will inevitably hallucinate.

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