> 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.

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dvt 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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saaaaaam 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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 25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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taneq an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And/or install Kiwix and grab an offline copy of Wikipedia.

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an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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arjie an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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taneq an hour ago | parent [-]

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 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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bityard 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What is your favorite book on emergency appendectomies?

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saaaaaam 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	anigbrowl 34 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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.
	▲	taneq an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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.)

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dofm 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Granite is not great at any size. Wonder why they picked that.

	▲	saaaaaam 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Given the whole thing reeks of vibe I don’t think anyone picked anything.