CrankGPT
crankgpt.com
crankgpt.com
Fortunately, at the bottom there is a link to the "technical documentation" (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.
You can scroll normally, with all your favorite keys, or go super fast to the bottom
It’s just scroll animations. Bad ones, admittedly.
Er… I meant to say cranks with keyboards. Sorry. It was a rough weekend.
Once you were happy with your touch-typed document, you then plugged the "keypad" directly into your Mac's ADB (keyboard/mouse) port... and the thing would sit there and manually re-type your composition into the computer's texteditor.
----
Education needs such "reduced tech" to return to teaching. Think of this one as a "more advanced typewriter" – although I own a few of those, too, and they're fantastic for pure composition.
Or what I actually use for ssh on the road: https://github.com/klausw/hackerskeyboard
Google kicked it from their store because it still supports older Androids but it still works just fine on the latest versions. It's on F-Droid.
I don't use them, but that is surprising! I would program one of my theoretical phone's physical side buttons to handle PgDn/PgUp [†] – similar to my old Kindle's layout. Do phones still have side volume buttons (e.g.)?
[†] Thanks for the better styling, than my former Page_Up &c
Except you can’t.
I scroll down, and the content of the page doesn’t move as expected.
Scroll animations, post-grid floating voids, bouncy house dampening, hyper rounded... everything. These are the 50s Chevy fins of today.
I've enjoyed working with some great designers over the years, Stanford D-School and even wild-raised. All the good ones intuitively steered clear of trends destined to be era-stamp tropes. They'd say, "I can already hear the ghosts of design-future mocking me: 'That's so early-AI' and 'Yo, the mid-20s called and wants their bento grid back.'"
This page was designed for today, for making it to HN, not 'the ghosts of design-future'.
You are the silent majority?
No doubt non technical people have different UX experience than tech nerd, but I have seen plenty of "normal" people curse at artsy fluffy design, that made known navigation skills useless and nobody likes their time wasted.
Thanks, web designers <3
However, it seems pretty clear to me they did this in service of a joke - you have to "crank" your scroll wheel to get to the content, just like you have to crank this device. I think it's funny...
I actually didn't consider that interpretation.
(I also almost deleted the comment, definitely didn't expect it to blow up like this.)
P.S. I agree with you 100%
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...
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!
While watching the video, I was wondering how they modified the >1kW device to produce a toasted toast in that short amount of time (I guess you could substitute instantaneous power for time up to a point, but the video wasn't that long), thinking maybe they removed one of the sides' circuits. Now I'm disappointed as well. Thanks xD
But that was 35 years ago and it was a high school physics experiment meant to be entertaining more than precise.
For an average untrained male cyclist who is 175lb, they should be able to maintain 1.5-2 w/kg over an hour, or 120-160watts. A beginner cyclist who's been cycling recreationally over over a year should be able to attain 2-2.5w/kg which is 160-200 watts. A recreational cyclist who's be training for several years should be able to maintain 200 watts.
Trust me, I'm a cyclist, and I cycle with a power meter.
If you are not chasing watts, it’s much more sustainable to do 70 watts for two hours. You can probably do this every day.
Basically, you can probably charge your macbook at peek power for an hour every other day, or every day for a short while if you're okay with burning out eventually.
Expect to need to eat 400-600 calories and a lot of water each time you do this.
However you can expect around only 3 watts of output at normal speeds and you will need to put in around 5-7 watts of power for the same speed. This is barely enough to trickle charge modern phones.
I will probably end up with no sound system and just expensive dynamo lights, using a USB speaker that doubles up as a power brick.
There is a nice USB battery kit for dynamo that fits in the steerer, so it is soldering iron time for that, so might as well learn how to do USB-C power things.
One day there will be structural solar panel batteries that can be 3D printed into lightweight bicycle frames, so maybe I will stick to throwaway lights until then!
please don't inflict your music on everyone around you.
And there is you on your high horse telling me this?
How patronising!
Thanks a lot. Unfortunately I can’t edit it anymore.
Even without a battery, I could easily imagine designing an efficient single slice toaster that could handily brown a pop tart on a 300W budget.
If you like then "golden," perhaps the entire box.
My own is ~250W @ 3.12W/kg. I can't even hit 700W yet, let alone for over a minute. My 5 second power is ~640W.
Crazy numbers.
Lost the opportunity to say "bread".
I would suspect my equivalency to be about 1/3rd a Robert [unit of measure from vidlink].
But that was great youtubes.
Might this just be selection bias? I mean, if humans can't do a task efficiently, we're not going to do the comparison with a machine.
Some actions we do seem (to me) very inefficient when compared with machines. For example: grating carrots and brushing teeth.
I read efficiency as "Energy inputted to accomplish a task", in which case, biological systems are far more efficient than current-day mechanical ones. It's a tradeoff.
Electrochemical reactions in your muscles combined with the mechanical advantage from the geometry of your joints and ligaments is simply more energy efficient than most mechanical or electromechanical systems. On top of that, our learned and evolved kinematic algorithms result in vastly more efficient control. Humans tend to be pretty good at using only exactly as much energy as required for a given action. Overshoot is quite limited compared to robots.
Your suggested actions seem inefficient, but if you look at the actual energy expenditure, mechanical means are much worse simply because mammalian muscle is so efficient.
Humans are efficient, but not across the board. Trivial counterexample: walking is incredibly energy inefficient vs a bicycle or other wheeled conveyances whose primary dissipater is rolling resistance.
It's not strange at all, I was responding to a specific, incorrect claim. I even quoted the wrong claim in my earlier comment , and I'll repeat it again, with added emphasis
>>> humans are incredibly efficient, from an energy perspective, in anything we do, compared to machines
I simply provided contrary evidence to a well-defined, falsifiable claim. How is that strange?
Then to boldly claim that humans are more efficient at anything compared to a machine, just does not follow.
> in one assignment I remember comparing the energy outputs between the human and robot equivalents of different tasks, whether or not the robot was humanoid in how it was designed
So I think the point in this context is relevant, even if it's apples to oranges.
You could say that a robotic gun is much more efficient than a human in killing, that's another easy easy comparison of different tasks where robots win, but it totally miss the point.
But annoyingly pedantic.
There might be more efficient ways to move but we are pretty well equipped by evolution.
Agreed, but it was gp that brought up the human vs. machine efficiency argument. Machines can have wheels.
Humans cannot fly.
That's a pretty common device for elite fitness testing.
The Concept2 rowing machines can power itself using the power you generate by rowing, so we're partly there.
It's the only unit that makes sense tbh
It’s also interesting that the industry has settled on using watts to mean rate of useful work whereas calories to mean the total work including inefficiencies, despite that calories is just a unit of energy. A rule of thumb for cyclists is that in addition to usual unit conversions, the “calories” figure should be multiplied by four to account for energy expended by the body but not used for rotating the pedals. I don’t use rowing machines but I’m sure they would have a similar conversion factor in order to calculate calories.
Unfortunately even with the bike it seems like you really need to find one machine that can be repurposed, a rowing machine seems a bit of a stretch.
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.../
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
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 ;)
The problem is then that I get more questions, but AI can handle them faster than I can muster them up or type them. So it's a net win
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.
[1] 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.
I feel like it is not only an interesting engineering challenge but one that might lead to a more efficient and sustainable framing.
What are you balancing if not human growth? And how do you plan to do that?
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.
If someone said they pick up trash on the side of the road to help the environment you wouldn't say the logical conclusion of their ideology would be that they become the unabomber
I think what I'm honing in on is the idea that hand cranks produce very limited, often interrupted power and are relative low-tech, both of which are directionally the right way for us to be putting our efforts.
[0] https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/
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.
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.
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
(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 !
(I lost to a gallery of 3d sandwiches)
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.
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!
> 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_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.
[0]: https://www.sdxcentral.com/news/chip-designer-taalas-bets-on...
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.
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.
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.
And also it mades me realize that we would all be way more healthy if we powered our laptops from bike power.
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.
I really want to know, no matter how big that number unfortunately is.
No way there are still so many human devs in the office.
Put up a leader board in the gym on tokens generated.
(although I salute the attention it brings to an important cause)
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.
"Conspiracy call-in" on a CB radio would be a good variation!
Edit: I confess, kind of tempted, 41 EUR for a "big" one https://www.bol.com/be/fr/p/zimoros-handslingergenerator-kra...
I take it this was some kind of joke.