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.