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.
Why 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.
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.'"
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.
Great prop for a Black Mirror episode about AI use in a post-apocalyptic world. Everywhere you go, all you hear is brrrrr..brrr..brrrr followed by people mumbling.
Totally agree on the atrocious landing page. The technical one is much better, although the power supply circuit by using a resistive balancer and a linear regulator wastes some good power for nothing.
yea i can't stand this. im not so boomer i want every webpage to be like. times new roman white background and just using <p></p> and bulleted lists, but idk i cant even put a finger on what im not enjoying here. think it's possibly using scrolling as a way to try and force me to read through stuff. jokes on them, i can't read. not giving me the agency to click around into info that interests me drives me nuts, chances are im just gonna keep scrolling at 1000mph and eye scan until i see what im looking for virtually zero chance im going to sit through the experience of every carefully designed scroll-slide they've tried to present to me here.
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 took several biomechanics classes as electives back in my undergrad, and 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. The most impressive think that stuck with me is that humans are incredibly efficient, from an energy perspective, in anything we do, compared to machines. Every time we delegate a task to a machine, we are using several orders of magnitude of energy to do the same thing. For most tasks, it feels wrong, but it doesn't make me any more willing to give up my car. Maybe if I lived outside the US.
> The most impressive think that stuck with me is that humans are incredibly efficient, from an energy perspective, in anything we do, compared to machines.
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.
We're still pretty efficient while not having wheel shaped limbs. Running like humans works pretty well. So well even that we can chase a lot of animals longer than they can outrun us.
There might be more efficient ways to move but we are pretty well equipped by evolution.
No, it's evolution. Mammals burn a ridiculous amount of energy just existing, so evolutionary pressures tend toward more efficient muscles and body geometry.
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.
There's a difference between consistency and efficiency.
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.
If you live in most places in the US other than the urban heart of a few very large cities you have to take a huge hit to your ability to get places in a reasonable time frame without a car. I have hope some more cities other than NYC are improving the situation, but as it is the closest I got to using public transit for a commute was when I was going to one of our other offices in a different downtown area I would drive my car to the park n ride to take the train the rest of the way. The train saves time and sanity because traffic downtown is a nightmare, but that drive takes 5 minutes, and it would add 20+ minutes if I had to walk to the closest bus stop so I could take the bus up to the train station.
If you live in most cities in Italy you have to take a huge hit to your ability to get places (in a reasonable timeframe or at all) if you must do it with a car.
If you're comparing raw calories to output, yes. Even gasoline has a caloric value, but humans can't drink gasoline. Growing and preparing food for human consumption uses a lot more energy than pumping and refining gasoline, so at the end of the day, human efficiency gains are not that impressive.
For more reference how insane 700W is, the average FTP of a world tour pro road cyclist (i.e., Tour de France) is ~350-420W/6-7W/kg. FTP (Functional Threshold Power) being the avg you can sustain for an hour without fatiguing.
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.
When I was 11 or 12 I powered an incandescent bulb with an exercise bicycle. I think it was 40 or 60 watts. I can totally understand why that guy was exhausted: 60 watts wasn't hard for me, because I used to ride uphill every day after school, but the other kids could only get a dim glow.
It’s basically well known to cyclists that training with a power meter that tells you “watts” more accurately gauges effort and caloric expenditure. (Heart rate gauges subjective effort however, taking into account stress, caffeine intake, etc.)
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.
At low effort (i.e. active recovery can-do-this-all-day-every-day) levels, it's quite efficient. That assumes that you're fine with whatever let's say ~120w continuous can get you, which is what the m5 max 16'' mbp peaks at (in my case) during inference (ds4-flash)... so I guess it's quite usable, actually :)
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.
Annoying. Blame the Germans and their lighting laws for bicycles. I want human powered USB-C with enough oomph to power a modest sound system or lights, whilst charging my phone. The allure of USB-C is what interests me, but 3W is not much to work with. Also annoying, no rear dynamo for my bike, so I can't even double up to 6W.
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!
Some of the bottle style ones claim to go up to 6W, they would also be easier to double or triple up. They are not nearly as nice and efficient as the hub dynamos though
An untrained cyclist is not able to maintain 200 watts.
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.
As an average male who is ~175lbs and untrained at cycling, this is hugely validating for my terrible idea; 140 watts is the max charging speed for 16" M5 MacBooks. I can finally stop thinking for myself and have my computer do it all for me, powered by my big beefy legs.
140 watts is the FTP. That means you can do it for an hour, and it will be an extremely exhausting hour and you will want at least two days of rest to recover from this workout before doing it again.
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.
This exactly. FTP is functional threshold power, it's the maximum you can physically maintain in zone 4 heart rate for 40-60 minutes and it's physically exhausting. This is hard work, hardest work honestly. If you have gas left in the tank after you could had a higher FTP. I'll get out on the bike and do a zone 4 workout and keep a steady state of 180-200 watts through the first 20-30 minutes, by the end of the hour or hour and a half of my workout, even with breaks to break, reset heart rate, have some water, salt and glucose, I'm down to 120-150 watts at the end of the ride.
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.
I just rode with an untrained cyclist (new to cycling) yesterday. The person averaged 80W over five hours. It’s about right for an actual untrained cyclist.
That's solid. If my memory is correct, and my teachers were correct (both of these are suspect) back in high school, a human should be able to momentarily exert about 1 horsepower at maximum effort. We did an experiment on how much power we could output at maximum effort. We tested it by sprinting up some number of flights of stairs, and timing it. As I recall we did conclude that in round numbers the hypothesis was correct.
But that was 35 years ago and it was a high school physics experiment meant to be entertaining more than precise.
I'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!
I thought toasters took ~1.6 kW, just like any other resistive heating device (space heater, oil-filled radiator, microwave oven, oven oven, hairdryer, kettle, under-sink water heater: it's allways 1500-1850W!) except for the ones on special circuits (shower, stove). Turns out, our toaster draws 850W!
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
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.../
Consider 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
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.
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
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 !
I 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.
Yeah 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.
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)
Or 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.
There'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.
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.
Do not confuse curiosity and caring for extremism.
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
It's not more sustainable though. It takes more energy to grow the food to get the calories to metabolize to turn the crank than it would to run an electric motor or a engine to do the same work.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
200W 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Oh 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sorry, 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!
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.
Why 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.
This 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.
> just scroll animations. Bad ones
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.'"
> You can scroll normally
Except you can’t.
I scroll down, and the content of the page doesn’t move as expected.
Just use your page_up/page_down keys, and you can skip all the stupid/excessive scrolling requirements.
Now that iPhone has switched to USB-C, I can plug in my Apple Extended Keyboard directly without needing a dongle. It’s like magic.
I now have visions of an Apple Extended Extended Keyboard that comes with a crank...
It’s nothing new. In fact, many of the comments on this site were made by keyboards with cranks.
Er… I meant to say cranks with keyboards. Sorry. It was a rough weekend.
how do i press these buttons on my android phone?
Connect Keyboard, Press PgDn.
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.
"love having our scroll hijacked? "
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.
Pretty sure your parent comment was being sarcastic. Why else would they write “choppy javascript keyframes fills me with joy”?
Well, I missed that word, but my irony/sarcasm detector has lately been a bit uncalibrated by the current zeitgeist.
The "choppy" JS keyframes helps give it a cinematic and authentic feel. /s
Great prop for a Black Mirror episode about AI use in a post-apocalyptic world. Everywhere you go, all you hear is brrrrr..brrr..brrrr followed by people mumbling.
Calling this web design is giving it too much credit. This is just a glorified marketing pamphlet, which is fine for its purpose.
Twas probably also prompted… to pile irony over...
Totally agree on the atrocious landing page. The technical one is much better, although the power supply circuit by using a resistive balancer and a linear regulator wastes some good power for nothing.
yea i can't stand this. im not so boomer i want every webpage to be like. times new roman white background and just using <p></p> and bulleted lists, but idk i cant even put a finger on what im not enjoying here. think it's possibly using scrolling as a way to try and force me to read through stuff. jokes on them, i can't read. not giving me the agency to click around into info that interests me drives me nuts, chances are im just gonna keep scrolling at 1000mph and eye scan until i see what im looking for virtually zero chance im going to sit through the experience of every carefully designed scroll-slide they've tried to present to me here.
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...
For reference, this is what 700W cycling looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4O5voOCqAQ
I took several biomechanics classes as electives back in my undergrad, and 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. The most impressive think that stuck with me is that humans are incredibly efficient, from an energy perspective, in anything we do, compared to machines. Every time we delegate a task to a machine, we are using several orders of magnitude of energy to do the same thing. For most tasks, it feels wrong, but it doesn't make me any more willing to give up my car. Maybe if I lived outside the US.
> The most impressive think that stuck with me is that humans are incredibly efficient, from an energy perspective, in anything we do, compared to machines.
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.
We're still pretty efficient while not having wheel shaped limbs. Running like humans works pretty well. So well even that we can chase a lot of animals longer than they can outrun us.
There might be more efficient ways to move but we are pretty well equipped by evolution.
Gp brought up the human vs. machine efficiency argument.
That's a strange comparison. Wheels are incredibly limited in the type of surfaces they can be used on.
> That's a strange comparison
It's not strange at all, I was responding to a specific, incorrect claim. Here's the part I was responding to, with added emphasis
>>> humans are incredibly efficient, from an energy perspective, in anything we do, compared to machines
"Every time we delegate a task to a machine, we are using several orders of magnitude of energy to do the same thing."
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.
No, it's evolution. Mammals burn a ridiculous amount of energy just existing, so evolutionary pressures tend toward more efficient muscles and body geometry.
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.
There's a difference between consistency and efficiency.
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.
If you live in most places in the US other than the urban heart of a few very large cities you have to take a huge hit to your ability to get places in a reasonable time frame without a car. I have hope some more cities other than NYC are improving the situation, but as it is the closest I got to using public transit for a commute was when I was going to one of our other offices in a different downtown area I would drive my car to the park n ride to take the train the rest of the way. The train saves time and sanity because traffic downtown is a nightmare, but that drive takes 5 minutes, and it would add 20+ minutes if I had to walk to the closest bus stop so I could take the bus up to the train station.
If you live in most cities in Italy you have to take a huge hit to your ability to get places (in a reasonable timeframe or at all) if you must do it with a car.
If you're comparing raw calories to output, yes. Even gasoline has a caloric value, but humans can't drink gasoline. Growing and preparing food for human consumption uses a lot more energy than pumping and refining gasoline, so at the end of the day, human efficiency gains are not that impressive.
Unfortunately, humans want houses and cars and vacations and such, which makes them very expensive. ;)
For more reference how insane 700W is, the average FTP of a world tour pro road cyclist (i.e., Tour de France) is ~350-420W/6-7W/kg. FTP (Functional Threshold Power) being the avg you can sustain for an hour without fatiguing.
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.
A trained powerlifter probably exerts a few kW on a heavy lift, but only for a second or two.
~3000 watts for 0.75 seconds (not counting pauses)
Can you still touch your toes? I doubt Robert could... hopefully your own practice leaves you more balanced.
Haha, yes. Track cyclists are a different breed.
> Haha, yes. Track cyclists are a different breed.
Lost the opportunity to say "bread".
When I was 11 or 12 I powered an incandescent bulb with an exercise bicycle. I think it was 40 or 60 watts. I can totally understand why that guy was exhausted: 60 watts wasn't hard for me, because I used to ride uphill every day after school, but the other kids could only get a dim glow.
I am a nerdy blue collar electrician and that was incredibly interesting. Only 0.002kWH from that beast of a cyclist.
I would suspect my equivalency to be about 1/3rd a Robert [unit of measure from vidlink].
I'm sure he could have generated way more total energy if he wasn't trying to get get that max power.
1hp/750W or so sustained is insane power for all but a few and that is still for relatively short time periods.
1HP sustained is not insane for a horse. A human OTOH is a very different matter.
1HP is actually ~5 horses. There was a test trying to measure it.
https://youtu.be/7qxTKtlvaVE
Other way around, a horse does more like 5-15hp
Yes, you’re right. My mind is foggy apparently.
Thanks a lot. Unfortunately I can’t edit it anymore.
One horse power is the rate a horse can sustain while working hard all day long.
They don't make them like they used to
I can do 300W for 30mins - does that mean I can barely heat up a Pop-Tart?
Spend 30 minutes charging a battery and you should have enough energy to turn any flavour of pop-tart into carbon flavour.
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.
You wouldn't need any sort of fancy toaster: anything small, rated >= 300W, would deliver cyclingpower from a rider of any skill.
That actually could toast a few batches of Pop-Tarts.
If you like then "golden," perhaps the entire box.
... at 1:03 he hits steady 700W. At 1:29 shows they kept increasing the incline at least to 40 degrees. Why not keep it at the same incline? . . .
It’s basically well known to cyclists that training with a power meter that tells you “watts” more accurately gauges effort and caloric expenditure. (Heart rate gauges subjective effort however, taking into account stress, caffeine intake, etc.)
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.
"Please row faster, the model is thinking" is the future of human-in-the-loop.
Isn’t that a black mirror episode? Anyways, much like the Matrix, using humans for energy is insanely inefficient.
At low effort (i.e. active recovery can-do-this-all-day-every-day) levels, it's quite efficient. That assumes that you're fine with whatever let's say ~120w continuous can get you, which is what the m5 max 16'' mbp peaks at (in my case) during inference (ds4-flash)... so I guess it's quite usable, actually :)
Imagine the work(out)station of the future.
</s> (or not)
Yes, Fifteen million merits, one of my favorite episodes.
"What are we powering? Why are we powering it? For what?"
To generate pictures of cats driving trains and CRUD apps, apparently.
You can get a dynamo hub front wheel for push bikes: https://bikepacking.com/plan/dynamo-hubs-lighting-charging-g...
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.
Annoying. Blame the Germans and their lighting laws for bicycles. I want human powered USB-C with enough oomph to power a modest sound system or lights, whilst charging my phone. The allure of USB-C is what interests me, but 3W is not much to work with. Also annoying, no rear dynamo for my bike, so I can't even double up to 6W.
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!
Some of the bottle style ones claim to go up to 6W, they would also be easier to double or triple up. They are not nearly as nice and efficient as the hub dynamos though
> power a modest sound system
please don't inflict your music on everyone around you.
> got me wondering if they made rowing machines that could slowly charge a battery
The Concept2 rowing machines can power itself using the power you generate by rowing, so we're partly there.
> offered "watts" as a unit of how hard you're going (like "calories" or "mph")
It's the only unit that makes sense tbh
Soon enough we will see rowing machines rated in max TFLOPS.
We already get TFLOP per watt so you can compute how much flops you are doing while cycling
A fairly untrained cyclist is usually able to maintain 200W, so yes this is definitely possible
An untrained cyclist is not able to maintain 200 watts.
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.
As an average male who is ~175lbs and untrained at cycling, this is hugely validating for my terrible idea; 140 watts is the max charging speed for 16" M5 MacBooks. I can finally stop thinking for myself and have my computer do it all for me, powered by my big beefy legs.
140 watts is the FTP. That means you can do it for an hour, and it will be an extremely exhausting hour and you will want at least two days of rest to recover from this workout before doing it again.
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.
This exactly. FTP is functional threshold power, it's the maximum you can physically maintain in zone 4 heart rate for 40-60 minutes and it's physically exhausting. This is hard work, hardest work honestly. If you have gas left in the tank after you could had a higher FTP. I'll get out on the bike and do a zone 4 workout and keep a steady state of 180-200 watts through the first 20-30 minutes, by the end of the hour or hour and a half of my workout, even with breaks to break, reset heart rate, have some water, salt and glucose, I'm down to 120-150 watts at the end of the ride.
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.
I just rode with an untrained cyclist (new to cycling) yesterday. The person averaged 80W over five hours. It’s about right for an actual untrained cyclist.
My best is 980W - for 1 second
That's solid. If my memory is correct, and my teachers were correct (both of these are suspect) back in high school, a human should be able to momentarily exert about 1 horsepower at maximum effort. We did an experiment on how much power we could output at maximum effort. We tested it by sprinting up some number of flights of stairs, and timing it. As I recall we did conclude that in round numbers the hypothesis was correct.
But that was 35 years ago and it was a high school physics experiment meant to be entertaining more than precise.
And a good sprinter can make some toast!
I'm still sour they had only one toast in, in a two slot toaster
I'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!
I thought toasters took ~1.6 kW, just like any other resistive heating device (space heater, oil-filled radiator, microwave oven, oven oven, hairdryer, kettle, under-sink water heater: it's allways 1500-1850W!) except for the ones on special circuits (shower, stove). Turns out, our toaster draws 850W!
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
Woah there, gotta watch that waistline! :)
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.../
Consider 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
"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.
Not 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#/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.
We are in a state of the world where I don't know of it's a satire or a future actual product.
The best startups are indistinguishable from satire until someone adds a pricing page.
Hey 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?
So what do I make of the "Call us for pricing" ones?
And even then, some products think they should be satire, when looking at their pricing.
"Is this real?" launches a pretty realistic looking demo video. Hard to say these days though.
They raised $100M. /s
They are part of the latest YC Batch. //s
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. \
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 !
(I lost to a gallery of 3d sandwiches)
I 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.
I mean it's 100-160 mHz CPU, 16 MB RAM, 4 GB storage -- you could run diablo 1 on it!
Yeah 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.
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)
I 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!
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.
Or 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.
There'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.
What does "sustainable equilibrium" mean?
What are you balancing if not human growth? And how do you plan to do that?
Doesn'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.
Do not confuse curiosity and caring for extremism.
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
In a similar vein, the solar-powered website. [0]
[0] https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/
It's not more sustainable though. It takes more energy to grow the food to get the calories to metabolize to turn the crank than it would to run an electric motor or a engine to do the same work.
I would love a crank-powered router. Would be a good way to curb internet addiction!
This makes me yearn for the golden years of april fools online.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
And also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People_(Black_Mirror)
Yeeeap. Was thinking about that and the Matrix mostly.
Yeah, it all makes sense now.
Well, the Matrix did this. Badly. "Machines who have developed nuclear power are using human bodies as batteries"-level badly.
Well, the original script said they used humans for their brainpower (computation)
From 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.
> 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.
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.
200W 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.
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.
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.
I think it's a joke?
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
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™?
need the south park episode with the shake weight version of this
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?
You can make one yourself in ~100 lines of code.
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...
For the real hardware, what do you use as the AI computer? a Pi 5?
I prefer the gooblebox over the flooblecrank design. It keeps my hands free for other activities.
15 Million Merits
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.
Oh 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!
It's things like this that give me hope for humanity.
I'm pretty sure I've seen this in Black Mirror.
Missed opportunity to have Laurence Fishburne somewhere in the advertising.
By the title I was hoping for an off-the-rails LLM on Crank.
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.
Could one apply the same principle to a solar powered machine I wonder
Finally an eco-friendly AI? Where the only water consumed is the glasses you drink because you got tired of cranking?
Looking forward to cranking one out.
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.
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.
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.
Seems 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-kra...
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.
its real, I tried it a couple of weeks ago, asked some questions and got answers - https://x.com/yaroslavvb/status/2062692318415867983
They need to tackle two American problems at once and turn it into an exercise bike!
Addressed in the video, but now looks like we've got three problems.
Sorry, 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!
Slavery with extra steps? Are we trying to power some douche-bag scientist's car battery?
I guess ppl who down voted didnt get the Rick and Morty reference.
hi
... it's just a blank page?
In the future, humans will just all be on hamster wheels generating power for our AI overlords.
The Matrix
I ain't reading allat. Fix your website bro!