The Evidence-Based Life — Australian edition

The project

The Evidence-Based Life is an open-source handbook of 765 rules for health, money, legal boundaries and emergencies. Each rule states what it costs in money, time and willpower, what it returns, an evidence grade and its primary sources. It began as HowToLiveBetter by eternity4719, was translated and extended into English by Praveen Bishnoi, and is published under CC BY 4.0.

The English edition still described Chinese statutes, institutions, hotlines and prices. For a reader in Australia, a wrong emergency number or a rule that depends on another country's law is worse than no advice at all.

What we did

We maintain the Australian edition, and safety came first. Emergency numbers and crisis hotlines have been checked and replaced across all 34 chapters, so readers are pointed to 000 and Lifeline (13 11 14) rather than overseas services. Chapter 1 has been fully re-grounded in Australian systems. The remaining chapters are being localised, and a public localisation report records exactly what has changed and what hasn't. The README now says that plainly instead of over-claiming.

We also repaired the edition's build. The statistics check in CI works again, and EPUB validation errors are fixed, so the PDF, EPUB and offline HTML downloads build cleanly again.

Alongside the book, we built AuLiveBetter, a public-beta Q&A assistant over a separately reviewed set of 74 Australian rules. It searches only those rules, can cite nothing else, and sends crisis questions straight to the right help.

Engineering notes

• The assistant is a dependency-free Node.js server. It uses field-weighted BM25 search over the reviewed rules, an allowlist that limits citations to those rules, and crisis routing, all backed by an evaluation suite of more than 200 cases.
• It is deployed to Cloud Run behind Firebase Hosting from GitHub Actions, using keyless workload-identity authentication.
• Localisation follows the project's evidence rules: international clinical evidence keeps its original study populations, and legal and benefit rules point readers to the relevant Australian agency.

Credit where it's due

The web reader, the two-minute self-audit, the AI decision skill and the e-book toolchain are upstream work by the English edition's author. This case study claims only the Australian localisation, the build fixes and the AuLiveBetter assistant.