Birbla

Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

Sign in
  • Hacker News
  • Not 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.

    by soylentcola
  • As 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.

    by jszymborski
  • instead 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/ (from the "technical documentation" link at the bottom of that... page thing)
    by john_strinlai
  • We are in a state of the world where I don't know of it's a satire or a future actual product.
    by Foobar8568
  • "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.

    by pj_mukh
  • I 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.../

    by estebarb
  • My 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...

    by kowbell
  • The 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/) 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.

    by zahlman

Explore Birbla archives