Hacker News

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.

This makes me yearn for the golden years of april fools online.

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...

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.../

"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.

We are in a state of the world where I don't know of it's a satire or a future actual product.

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)

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.

When 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.

> 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_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.

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.

Playdate (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

(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)

I 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...

This is hilarious.

And also it mades me realize that we would all be way more healthy if we powered our laptops from bike power.

https://github.com/ktomanek/edge_voice_agent linked repo behind the concept

And here I thought this was gonna be a Playdate GPT client app.

I 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?

ACTUALLY 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.

This 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.

The promo video is highly unrealistic.

No way there are still so many human devs in the office.

I always kind of wondered if you were out on an island would this help with survival

For the real hardware, what do you use as the AI computer? a Pi 5?

So many questions... Does it support /effort setting? What about subagents and multi agent setups? What's the max token output on a diesel generator?

They'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...

Can you adjust the weights with a Shake Weight™?

Always 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)

I feel like Orange Theory has a new business prop...

I prefer the gooblebox over the flooblecrank design. It keeps my hands free for other activities.

15 Million Merits

Finally, proof that AI is just expensive cardio.

It's things like this that give me hope for humanity.

I 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.

I'm pretty sure I've seen this in Black Mirror.

By the title I was hoping for an off-the-rails LLM on Crank.

Missed opportunity to have Laurence Fishburne somewhere in the advertising.

I will wait for the legion of hamster wheels power upgrade...

nit: “Is this real” dialog took a bit to load on mobile, a placeholder would be nice

I can't tell if this is a joke, or they are serious.

Looking forward to cranking one out.

Finally an eco-friendly AI? Where the only water consumed is the glasses you drink because you got tired of cranking?

Could one apply the same principle to a solar powered machine I wonder

Now 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.

Whether 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.

I still prefer my Magic 8 Ball, it's less exhausting. But this is pretty cool.

the versificator machine form Orwell’s 1984.

Well, 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.

nice, cranker

I love this idea but for gamers who need an incentive to workout. You can only game on power you generated with your own muscles.

TBH I'd buy that.

Now we know why everyone was generating power on bikes in “Fifteen Million Merits”

I 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.

Slavery with extra steps? Are we trying to power some douche-bag scientist's car battery?

hi

... it's just a blank page?

In the future, humans will just all be on hamster wheels generating power for our AI overlords.

I ain't reading allat. Fix your website bro!