I got tired of expensive SaaS tools that want my sensitive documents in their cloud. I built ArkhamMirror to do forensic document analysis 100% locally, free and open source.<p>What makes this different:<p>Air-gapped: Zero cloud dependencies. Uses local LLMs via LM Studio (Qwen, etc.)<p>ACH Methodology: Implements the CIA's "Analysis of Competing Hypotheses" technique which forces you to look for evidence that disproves your theories instead of confirming them<p>Corpus Integration: Import evidence directly from your documents with source links<p>Sensitivity Analysis: Shows which evidence is critical, so if it's wrong, would your conclusion change?<p>The ACH feature just dropped with an 8-step guided workflow, AI assistance at every stage, and PDF/Markdown/JSON export with AI disclosure flags. It's better than what any given 3-lettered agency uses.<p>Tech stack: Python/Reflex (React frontend), PostgreSQL, Qdrant (vectors), Redis (job queue), PaddleOCR, Spacy NER, BGE-M3 embeddings.<p>All MIT licensed. Happy to answer questions about the methodology or implementation! Intelligence for anyone.<p>Links:
Repo
<a href="https://github.com/mantisfury/ArkhamMirror" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mantisfury/ArkhamMirror</a><p>ACH guide with screenshots at
<a href="https://github.com/mantisfury/ArkhamMirror/blob/reflex-dev/docs/ACH_GUIDE.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mantisfury/ArkhamMirror/blob/reflex-dev/d...</a>
Ironically, is there a way to try this out in the cloud for people who want this tool who aren’t hyper worried about security?<p>It looks cool.
Thanks, glad to hear it!<p>Short answer - no, not right now.<p>However, instead of going through locally hosted docker and local LLMs, you could reroute it wherever you like, but I don't have a cloud option set up at this time.<p>I'm focused on the developing the local, private applications myself, but nothing is stopping someone from hooking it up to stronger cloud-based stuff if they want.<p>The good news is that my plans for this include making it more modular, so people have better options for what it does and how powerful it is.
What field are you in, sounds interesting that one would need such a tool?
It's not just for people doing interesting things. It just helps people answer questions about stuff. The stuff can be interesting or boring or dangerous or silly. The last question I tested the ACH tool on was "Did William Shakespeare really author all of the works he was credited for?" - You can use this stuff to research whatever you want. That's the point of it - it's no one's business what you are interested in getting to the bottom of.
Description on the repo says it's for journalism, but I build similar rigs that I use for research in companies that have entered bankruptcy proceedings.<p>Commonly there is a lot of information and it might as well be unstructured, and then I need to get answers quickly because my clients aren't going to pay me for going about it slowly.
It's mainly useful for journalism purposes, yes. Audit and compliance uses were also a consideration. It's a unified tool for right now, but I'm working on turning the base of it into the frame and adding individual shards for specialized applications.
It's always interesting to stumble upon a bubble you never heard of.<p>This is super interesting. I will probably (hopefully?) never need to use it, but interesting nonetheless. It also makes sense to have this type of application airgapped. Journalists need to have near-perfect OPSEC depending on what they are working on.
This looks interesting, and honestly makes me want to fire up The Roottrees are Dead and see if I can use this to solve the second act.
That logo is like concentric rings of power around Galadriel's seer-pool, looking at... Hogwarts?
In case it wasn't clear, the ACH update is on the reflex-dev branch -<p><a href="https://github.com/mantisfury/ArkhamMirror/tree/reflex-dev" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mantisfury/ArkhamMirror/tree/reflex-dev</a>
A video demo would be useful. I can't really tell how much the application is doing from the screenshots. Is it a tool with some smart guidance, or is it doing deep magic?
I didn't think a video would be very exciting. It did feel like deep magic when I tested it though. For the scenario in the screenshots, I provided the question, "Did we really land a man on the moon?" and the null hypothesis "We landed on the moon in 1969", and the low value piece of evidence "My dad told me he saw Stanley Kubrick's moon landing set one time and he never lies." Literally everything else the LLM generated on demand for me based on its existing training data, offline. It gave me hypotheses, challenges, evidence, filled out the matrix, did the calculations, everything.
> Literally everything else the LLM generated on demand for me based on its existing training data, offline<p>That's a ton of scope for hallucinations, surely?
And the answer was... ? :)
Well, based on the evidence provided against our competing hypotheses, The least problematic hypothesis is that we landed on the moon in 1969. Second least problematic hypothesis was "The Apollo 11 mission was a hoax staged by NASA and the U.S. government for public relations and Cold War propaganda, but the moon landing itself was real — only the public narrative was fabricated." Third least problematic was "The Apollo 11 mission was a real event, but the moon landing was not achieved by humans — it was an automated robotic mission that was misinterpreted or falsely attributed to astronauts due to technical errors or media misreporting." - The winning hypothesis had a score of 0 (lower is better), second place had a score of 6 (out of possible 10 for our evidence set), and third place had a score of 8. There was also a tie for 4th place "It was just a government coverup to protect the firmament. There is no "outer space."" and "The Apollo 11 mission never occurred; all evidence — including photos, video, and lunar rocks — was fabricated in secret laboratories using early 20th-century special effects and staged experiments, possibly by a small group of scientists and engineers working under government contract." - both of these scored 10 out of 10, making them the most problematic. Sorry guys.
The idea is good. I do think that is going to be the future for high volume data leaks like the Snowden or Epstein files.<p>I do think though that this approach will become annoying quick:<p><a href="https://github.com/mantisfury/ArkhamMirror/blob/main/scripts/prompts/installer_persona.txt" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mantisfury/ArkhamMirror/blob/main/scripts...</a>
The cheesy noir persona is for the AI assisted install and that's it. Inside the app, the prompts are strictly business. (They still have roles, but not "characters" or "personas").
I'm wondering if the ACH Methodology could be used as a general purpose Chain-of-Thought variant.
Unrelated to this post but it is a fascinating thought that at some point in your life, before you die, you will see the stupidest thing that you have ever seen in your entire life, and then you either die immediately or only see less stupid things for an unknown period of time before you die, and none of us can ever know where we are in that continuum.
In the same way it will be true that one day most of us will wake up unaware that all of our tomorrows will have become yesterdays except one and that when we lay down to rest on that day, we will only have part of the next day to wrap up any loose ends in our lives. Perhaps treating every day as if it could be our last is not an unreasonable plan.
Funny and thought provoking, you've now got me reflecting on if i'll ever see anything stupider than my current top 5<p>Personally as an american i'm quite optimistic on peak stupid being ahead of us :)
The Secretary Problem tells us that once you’ve lived 1/e (~37%, 30ish years) of your life[1], the next time you see something that’s stupider than everything you’ve seen before there’s a 1/e chance that’s it’s the stupidest thing you’ll ever see.<p>[1] Strictly speaking it would be 1/e of your stupidity sightings, which may not be 1/e of your life. If you intend to retire early and become a hermit you may want to stop the exploration phase earlier.
Am I going to be killed by the stupidest thing I've ever seen, or will it merely be a distraction from my demise?
Huh that uh. That is something to think about