10 ms·
CrankGPT
- bozdemir 5mo agoSlavery with extra steps? Are we trying to power some douche-bag scientist's car battery?
- bozdemir 5mo agoI guess ppl who down voted didnt get the Rick and Morty reference.
- john_strinlai 5mo agoinstead of complaining about the website, which wouldn't be allowed, i am just going to link this much better reading experience instead: https://squeezlabs.github.io/handcrank/ https://squeezlabs.github.io/handcrank/ (from the "technical documentation" link at the bottom of that... page thing)
- theSuda 5mo agoI gave up on that page halfway through and just came here to read comments. Can't be bothered with this stuff anymore. Thanks for the link!
- SecretDreams 5mo agoI watched the "is this real" video and I'm still* not sure if it's real lol. Regardless of this website presentation, the idea is sound and I'm behind it. We need to stop giving everything away to a hyper concentrated group of wealthy super elites that do not have our best interests at heart. We already have disappointing politicians that are elected. Now we also have disappointing unelected rich decision makers altering our lives based on what bar they had their next back of napkin scheme at.
- yaroslavvb 5mo agoits real, I tried it a couple of weeks ago, asked some questions and got answers - https://x.com/yaroslavvb/status/2062692318415867983 https://x.com/yaroslavvb/status/2062692318415867983
- SecretDreams 5mo agoThey need to tackle two American problems at once and turn it into an exercise bike!
- dole 5mo agoAddressed in the video, but now looks like we've got three problems.
- SecretDreams 5mo agoSorry, I watched it sans audio. I don't have twitter (or insta or fb) so their links default to muted on click. That said, it would still be good if we could address general comprehension, exercise, and private AI usage all with this one hand crankable device!
- Joe_Cool 5mo agoI still prefer my Magic 8 Ball, it's less exhausting. But this is pretty cool.
- hmokiguess 5mo agohttps://github.com/ktomanek/edge_voice_agent https://github.com/ktomanek/edge_voice_agent linked repo behind the concept
- boesboes 5mo ago[flagged]
- nicechianti 5mo ago[dead]
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- kowbell 5mo agoMy partner just got a rowing machine that offered "watts" as a unit of how hard you're going (like "calories" or "mph") and got me wondering if they made rowing machines that could slowly charge a battery, and how much I'd need to row to power one of them fancy newfangled M5 Max MacBooks answering prompts. All that to say, CrankGPT, I am your target demographic and if you don't respond to my request for a demo I'll be cranking my keyboard with bad reviews online. Or cranking a rowing machine that powers an LLM to do it for me. Wait...
- kkkqkqkqkqlqlql 5mo agoSoon enough we will see rowing machines rated in max TFLOPS.
- alex7o 5mo agoWe already get TFLOP per watt so you can compute how much flops you are doing while cycling
- smallpipe 5mo agoA fairly untrained cyclist is usually able to maintain 200W, so yes this is definitely possible
- iamacyborg 5mo agoAnd a good sprinter can make some toast!
- eurekin 5mo agoI'm still sour they had only one toast in, in a two slot toaster
- mech998877 5mo agoI've had the same thought and it's been a topic I've been this close to talking about at parties. If I did I'm sure I'd bore everyone to death. Considering the difficulty of sustaining 700 watts vs 350 watts, we could've had some very well-burnt toast if they uninstalled the heating coils for the 2nd piece of bread!
- movedx01 5mo agonice, cranker
- engineer_22 5mo agoTBH I'd buy that.
- utopiah 5mo agoSeems people do already, for your next small gift exchange or if you birthday look up "USB Hand Crank Phone Charger" it's like $20. Edit: I confess, kind of tempted, 41 EUR for a "big" one https://www.bol.com/be/fr/p/zimoros-handslingergenerator-krachtige-usb-nooddynamo-crank-generator-voor-buitensportactiviteiten-noodsituatie-voor-oorlog-rampen/9300000249720944/ https://www.bol.com/be/fr/p/zimoros-handslingergenerator-kra...
- engineer_22 5mo agoLol did you reverse image search the prototype? Lmao
- utopiah 5mo agoNope, I literally did as I said namely look up "USB Hand Crank Phone Charger".
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- Foobar8568 5mo agoWe are in a state of the world where I don't know of it's a satire or a future actual product.
- willXare 5mo ago[flagged]
- Retr0id 5mo agoHey can you tell your operator to reduce the comment rate? Three top-level comments on a single post in 3 minutes is a bit excessive, don't you think?
- chrisandchris 5mo agoAnd even then, some products think they should be satire, when looking at their pricing.
- tclancy 5mo agoSo what do I make of the "Call us for pricing" ones?
- bigfishrunning 5mo agoThose ones are vaporware, don't call them.
- utopiah 5mo agoThey raised $100M. /s
- flawn 5mo agoThey are part of the latest YC Batch. //s
- josefresco 5mo ago"Is this real?" launches a pretty realistic looking demo video. Hard to say these days though.
- willXare 5mo ago[flagged]
- isuckatcoding 5mo agoCould one apply the same principle to a solar powered machine I wonder
- wett 5mo agonit: “Is this real” dialog took a bit to load on mobile, a placeholder would be nice
- chaidhat 5mo agoIn the future, humans will just all be on hamster wheels generating power for our AI overlords.
- nobrains 5mo agoThe Matrix
- cjs_ac 5mo agoI thought this was going to be about LLM-generated conspiracy theories, but the website was funny anyway. There's a technical documentation link at the bottom of the page that documents an actual working hand-crank-powered Raspberry Pi that runs a local model.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- glaslong 5mo agoOh that's a fun idea... I've been poking at a "ghost phone" that synthesizes a personality and matching voice, which rings at random times on an old candlestick rotodial handset. "Conspiracy call-in" on a CB radio would be a good variation!
- notahacker 5mo agoThey're not raising at $1bn valuation until they pull out a slide deck with hockey stick curves showing the point that human brawn can out-think human brain...
- dfilppi 5mo ago[dead]
- lostmsu 5mo agoI love this idea but for gamers who need an incentive to workout. You can only game on power you generated with your own muscles.
- soylentcola 5mo agoNot sure it's possible to say this without being pithy, but haven't there been stories told, perhaps TV episodes and films made, regarding the concept of using human bodies to generate power in support of machine intelligence? Seems a little on the nose to me, but I guess some days it's hard to tell what's a gag and what's a legit pitch.
- JKolios 5mo agoWell, the Matrix did this. Badly. "Machines who have developed nuclear power are using human bodies as batteries"-level badly.
- claysmithr 5mo agoWell, the original script said they used humans for their brainpower (computation)
- TremendousJudge 5mo agoFrom http://hpmor.com/chapter/64 http://hpmor.com/chapter/64: MORPHEUS: For the longest time, I wouldn't believe it. But then I saw the fields with my own eyes, watched them liquefy the dead so they could be fed intravenously to the living - NEO (politely): Excuse me, please. MORPHEUS: Yes, Neo? NEO: I've kept quiet for as long as I could, but I feel a certain need to speak up at this point. The human body is the most inefficient source of energy you could possibly imagine. The efficiency of a power plant at converting thermal energy into electricity decreases as you run the turbines at lower temperatures. If you had any sort of food humans could eat, it would be more efficient to burn it in a furnace than feed it to humans. And now you're telling me that their food is the bodies of the dead, fed to the living? Haven't you ever heard of the laws of thermodynamics? MORPHEUS: Where did you hear about the laws of thermodynamics, Neo? NEO: Anyone who's made it past one science class in high school ought to know about the laws of thermodynamics! MORPHEUS: Where did you go to high school, Neo? (Pause.) NEO: ...in the Matrix. MORPHEUS: The machines tell elegant lies. (Pause.) NEO (in a small voice): Could I please have a real physics textbook? MORPHEUS: There is no such thing, Neo. The universe doesn't run on math.
- 5mo ago
- piinbinary 5mo agoI bet if you took one of Taalas' cards which consumes 200 watts for 14,000 tokens/second [0] and slowed it down by a factor of 10, it would actually be quite reasonable to power by bicycle. [0]: https://www.sdxcentral.com/news/chip-designer-taalas-bets-on-hard-wired-ai-chips/ https://www.sdxcentral.com/news/chip-designer-taalas-bets-on...
- lukasbm 5mo ago15 Million Merits
- xg15 5mo agoThe promo video is highly unrealistic. No way there are still so many human devs in the office.
- estebarb 5mo agoI can do high level thinking for around 6 hours with just two scrambled eggs and a cup of coffee. What I need is something to prevent me from context drift. /starts googling how many scrambled eggs are equivalent to the energy consumed by a data center. Google how many chickens are in the world.../
- Aachen 5mo agoConsider that you can do this as a working day because someone else is plowing the fields that grow your food, probably burning stored energy in fuels for the process We're sadly not that efficient. The 150kcal/6h=600kcal/day you've mentioned aren't enough, and it takes more than 600kcal to create 600kcal plus transportation into your home Besides, we won't stop existing, so any math about "chatgpt uses X kW and so it's better than hiring another human" doesn't work out. The human doesn't stop burning fuels when not in use: any LLM usage is additional energy that needs to be generated while staying within CO2 budgets
- sharpshift 5mo ago[dead]
- karussell 5mo ago> and it takes more than 600kcal to create 600kcal plus transportation into your home This is not a strong argument or at least a different area of discussion. Because you can say exactly the same for the electricity: you need more than the power. You need the coal+transportation, or power plant, or solar panels ... I'm pretty sure humans are much more energy efficient ... for certain tasks ;)
- Aachen 5mo agoSure, do the math for both, considering also that the human will continue to run anyway and then see who should do the task to minimise worldsuck :P
- includenotfound 5mo ago
- zahlman 5mo agoThe webpage linked is an example of everything I wish people would stop doing in web design. Fortunately, at the bottom there is a link to the "technical documentation" (https://squeezlabs.github.io/handcrank/ https://squeezlabs.github.io/handcrank/) which is vastly improved (aside from being light-mode-only and linked from a dark-mode-only marketing page). It also gives me much more interesting information (specifically: models that can apparently run acceptably on a Pi 5). Please let me read your content with a scrollbar that works the way scroll bars are supposed to, rather than turning everything into a weird slide show where you don't actually know when the next slide is coming. Please let me just click on buttons that look like links to more information, without JavaScript.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- alansaber 5mo agoWhy can't technical people appreciate that us, the silent majority, love having our scroll hijacked? I can't remember the last time I used a scroll bar to navigate a website, but using it to navigate between choppy javascript keyframes fills me with joy.
- lelandfe 5mo agoThis isn’t scroll hijacking You can scroll normally, with all your favorite keys, or go super fast to the bottom It’s just scroll animations. Bad ones, admittedly.
- ProllyInfamous 5mo agoJust use your page_up/page_down keys, and you can skip all the stupid/excessive scrolling requirements.
- janderson215 5mo agoNow that iPhone has switched to USB-C, I can plug in my Apple Extended Keyboard directly without needing a dongle. It’s like magic.
- pj_mukh 5mo ago"Tech companies have quietly abandoned their climate pledges to build gas-burning power plants that feed your favorite AI." What I love is this quote is super-imposed with a background image that has gas-burning smokestacks but also nuclear cooling towers in the same field. This is a bit representational of this particular line of protest against AI - just super confused about it all and thrashing out. Green energy has been (technologically) solved, but instead we want to go back to manual labor as a source of power? Hilarious.
- danbruc 5mo agoNot only nuclear power plants have cooling towers. Here [1] is, for example, a coal-fired one in Poland. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-fired_power_station#/media/File:Be%C5%82chat%C3%B3w_Elektrownia.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-fired_power_station#/medi... EDIT: To elaborate a bit, if you are burning oil or gas in a turbine, you do not need a cooling tower, the waste heat goes into the atmosphere with the exhaust. If you use fossil or nuclear fuels to produce steam for a steam turbine, you either need a river with enough flow to not boil all the fish if you reject the waste heat into it or you need a cooling tower to reject the heat into the atmosphere.
- capricornpl 5mo agoSo many questions... Does it support /effort setting? What about subagents and multi agent setups? What's the max token output on a diesel generator?
- smileybarry 5mo agoWhether it's a parody or satire or a fake product page for a DIY project, emphasizing the climate cost of AI while using AI to generate every video there kind of ruins it.
- singpolyma3 5mo ago... it's just a blank page?
- simonreiff 5mo agoThis is so cool; I wonder what the roadmap includes? I'd love to see if this could evolve from gag product/gift idea, to a solar-powered inference box on slightly more robust hardware, for instance, completely freeing the owner from any need to purchase a subscription or rely upon the grid for inference. That would be freaking cool and I'm sure would sell a ton if the models that could run on the hardware were sufficiently capable and could be piped into a laptop (which seems like the easiest part). What would the power requirements be to run a more capable model than the ones used, maybe a DeepSeek open-source model? Really curious but I'm unfamiliar with the technical details that might go into such calculations.
- sciencejerk 5mo agoI think it's a joke?
- harrouet 5mo agoAlways amazed by the mount of time, effort and skill that goes into this kind of prank :). (although I salute the attention it brings to an important cause)
- palmotea 5mo ago> We chose a cheap off-the-shelf switchable voltage 20W hand-crank generator marketed for emergency USB charging. The Pi normally draws around 1.5A, but when it’s working hard (as it does when doing inference on the CPU), its current requirements can increase substantially, causing the generator voltage to sag below the Pi’s required 4.8V or even, in the case of a momentary 5A spike, to trigger the generator’s internal overcurrent protection and shut off the voltage output entirely, causing the Pi to brown out. > To ensure the Pi sees a steady voltage when the full inference stack kicks in (and to afford crankers a little rest), we built a custom capacitor board [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Zv_Hsinvx_sWtdur4iWYZVM_Zct7wCH1PM6Od_ClN8c/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Zv_Hsinvx_sWtdur4iWY...] to smooth out the generator’s output and act as a short-term (~20 second) power reservoir. Somewhat off-topic, but could this capacitor board work with a small-ish 5V USB solar panel? I'm not great with electronics, but it seems like just the solution for a device I want to run with the panel. My vague impression was it's not kosher per the USB spec to just stick a capacitor across the supply to even out the brown-outs, but this looks like it's doing some other stuff.
- zb3 5mo agoWell, I assume this isn't real, but.. I'd want to know the actual number - how much more (than in the demo) work'd we need to do (energy to produce) to actually power a CPU/GPU which could use real small on-device models.. I really want to know, no matter how big that number unfortunately is.
- PhillyPhuture 5mo agoMissed opportunity to have Laurence Fishburne somewhere in the advertising.
- myworkaccount2 5mo agoI can't tell if this is a joke, or they are serious.
- jihadjihad 5mo agoCan you adjust the weights with a Shake Weight™?
- claysmithr 5mo agoneed the south park episode with the shake weight version of this
- Chrise_N 5mo agobilling is $9.95 for each 60 second period, to accept, say "creme fraiche".
- Waterluvian 5mo agoI prefer the gooblebox over the flooblecrank design. It keeps my hands free for other activities.
- misiek08 5mo agoACTUALLY xD Transferring power from gym bicycles is one of the smartest things. But they probably won’t even be enough for the AC to run - still a lot of power and heat lost.
- stymaar 5mo agoThis is hilarious. And also it mades me realize that we would all be way more healthy if we powered our laptops from bike power.
- jszymborski 5mo agoAs a bit of an aside, I really like the idea of trying to design things with the constraint of it having to be able to run off a hand-crank. I feel like it is not only an interesting engineering challenge but one that might lead to a more efficient and sustainable framing.
- nemo1618 5mo agoI would love a crank-powered router. Would be a good way to curb internet addiction!
- bko 5mo agoOr we could... hear me out... build more power plants. The de-growth stuff is pretty evil when you take it to it's logical conclusion of population control.
- jszymborski 5mo agoThere's a bit of a difference between population control and reaching a sustainable equilibrium. One can also argue the death of all life on earth is a pretty evil logical conclusion of infinite growth on a finite planet.
- bko 5mo agoWhat does "sustainable equilibrium" mean? What are you balancing if not human growth? And how do you plan to do that?
- icantevenhold 5mo agoDoesn't it kind of work itself out? If it’s unsustainable population growth there will eventually be some catastrophic environmental effects and the population will be reduced to a sustainable level. Of course living during that reduction could be a rather unpleasant experience but it probably also won’t last too long. If it’s already sustainable everything is fine.
- 5mo ago
- rpastuszak 5mo agoPlaydate (the came console) is amazing for this! I was really bored once and built a Claude Code remote control for Playdate. Voice recognition was done via parrot + handy.computer Basically: different key combos were tied to different actions, e.g. \ - hold A to speak - move the crank slowly to navigate - crank super fast to send the prompt Eventually this became a universal remote control for the computers in my home (YAML file with bindings from Playdate UI → A11y events). Using the crank to control movies is fun! (I can share the source -- just let me know if this is actually useful) Also, I feel like the author and me have similar hobbies. A few years back I almost won a (re-sellable on Ebay) award for https://meat-gpt.sonnet.io https://meat-gpt.sonnet.io ! (I lost to a gallery of 3d sandwiches)
- Waterluvian 5mo agoI really wanted to like the Playdate but it's such an unbelievably overpriced and underspecced toy. But the crank, which really looked like a gimmick, is oddly quite nice to have and I wish my kids' Retro Arcade had one.
- rpastuszak 5mo agoI mean it's 100-160 mHz CPU, 16 MB RAM, 4 GB storage -- you could run diablo 1 on it!
- Waterluvian 5mo agoYeah in retrospect I really got it wrong with “underspecced.” I really should have said “not colour.” This all comes as a retrospective comparing it to my kids handheld for their MakeCode Arcade projects. The device that was 4x the price ended up on a shelf and I find myself borrowing theirs. I just wish it had that dumb crank. It’s so weird and yet I love it.
- rpastuszak 5mo agoThe lack of colour is actually quite cool (and it’s a fun creative constraint). But the lack of backlight and usb (iirc) is annoying. The first because you can’t use it in bed and I like to play something cosy/silly in low light (https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/obsidian-for-vampires/ https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/obsidian-for-vampires/). The second - because now I need a companion app/script to handle comms over WiFi (bonjour). You can use cable, but if I could pair this with my phone… as a personal assistant - that would be amazing!
- bogometer 5mo agoI will wait for the legion of hamster wheels power upgrade...
- cliffasaurus 5mo agoFinally an eco-friendly AI? Where the only water consumed is the glasses you drink because you got tired of cranking?
- t1234s 5mo agoBy the title I was hoping for an off-the-rails LLM on Crank.
- Sharlin 5mo agoI'm pretty sure I've seen this in Black Mirror.
- ggamecrazy 5mo agoWhen I was at Peloton a long time ago, someone proposed an April Fools’ joke where we could announce a dynamo add-on that would let you power your house from your bike. The math isn’t as bad as you might think: 200Wh (about a 60 min, somewhat intense ride) seems to be about 20 minutes for a H/B100. Still 3x, but not bad at all! I remember the idea being dismissed quickly because people would likely actually want it.
- hdndjsbbs 5mo ago200W is pretty good FTP for an "untrained" cyclist. FTP is the maximum you can sustain for a single hour, but you're not going to do multiple back-to-back. Obviously the peloton crowd is biased towards people who will have better endurance and higher FTP, but basically the upshot is you could run one card for one hour with the effort of a 100km long ride which most recreational cyclists do once a week.
- teeray 5mo agoNow we know why everyone was generating power on bikes in “Fifteen Million Merits”
- MagicMoonlight 5mo ago[dead]
- panarchy 5mo agoLooking forward to cranking one out.
- sergiotapia 5mo agoI ain't reading allat. Fix your website bro!
- darkvertex 5mo agoAnd here I thought this was gonna be a Playdate GPT client app.
- Johnny_Bonk 5mo agoIt's things like this that give me hope for humanity.
- pickleballcourt 5mo agoI always kind of wondered if you were out on an island would this help with survival
- ivannz 5mo agothe versificator machine form Orwell’s 1984.
- adam123456 5mo agohi
- reactordev 5mo agoI feel like Orange Theory has a new business prop...
- rwoerz 5mo agoNow I have that image in mind, where some Morlock finds that thing 100000 years after we have blown up our civilization and can actually make use of it.
- johnnytech 5mo agoFor the real hardware, what do you use as the AI computer? a Pi 5?
- joe_the_user 5mo agoI was hoping for a parody LLM that produced answers of increasing craziness until you stopped using it. Can someone point me to something like this?
- square_usual 5mo agoYou can make one yourself in ~100 lines of code.
- drusepth 5mo agoThis makes me yearn for the golden years of april fools online.
- pona-a 5mo agoI kept thinking this was a play on crank as in charlatan and crank as in hand-crank. Generate any flavor of crankery with the turn of a crank. Turns out it wasn't satire...
- boombapoom 5mo agoI'm a bit disappointed you don't have to insert physical tokens to operate the handle
- mikaeluman 5mo agoI tried visiting the site but the design was incredibly annoying. I take it this was some kind of joke.
- ecommerceguy 5mo agoI wasted many hours this weekend chatting with ai, so I did my business in excel using https://udm14.com/ https://udm14.com/ to find relevant pages "old school". AI slops out fast.
- avodonosov 5mo agoEnterprises will use mostly horses I think, not gyms
- ptx 5mo ago> During voice agent startup, the slowest part are [...] in dlopen-ing large shared libraries (ONNX Runtime in particular) and in hundreds of small random reads off the SD card as Python walks the import graph. Could this maybe be fixed by arranging the files on the filesystem in the order they're read? Or maybe importing the Python modules from a zip file (with no compression) would be faster, if that makes it easier to store them in the required order? I seem to remember Windows having some sort of feature like that, automatically rearraging the data on disk in the order it's read when booting the system.
- asdf420 5mo agoReady for the gooble box version
- not_the_fda 5mo agoWe have a gym at work. We can have half the team generate tokens and half the team use the tokens. Put up a leader board in the gym on tokens generated.
- xyun92 5mo ago[flagged]
- petruil2 5mo agoSomething that we miss from the puzzle of AI effort/energy consumption is what would be the amount of energy to build something or to find something in case that we had not the AI. we would need much more days to build a software, more people more energy. But with AI all these resources are reduced. We have to find the equilibrium among the entities..
- optimizedsphere 5mo agoMan, it'd be fun to hook this up to a sewing machine treadle table. (And, of course, paint the box with black lacquer and gold decals.)
- GoodPepper50 5mo agoI know the forced scrolling is annoying, but this concept is incredible