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.

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...

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.../

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.

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 feel like it is not only an interesting engineering challenge but one that might lead to a more efficient and sustainable framing.

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.

> 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.

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.

[0]: https://www.sdxcentral.com/news/chip-designer-taalas-bets-on...

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

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

(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.

I really want to know, no matter how big that number unfortunately is.

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.