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...
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.
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.
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.
I would suspect my equivalency to be about 1/3rd a Robert [unit of measure from vidlink].
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.
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!
It's the only unit that makes sense tbh
The Concept2 rowing machines can power itself using the power you generate by rowing, so we're partly there.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks, web designers <3
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.
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%
I feel like it is not only an interesting engineering challenge but one that might lead to a more efficient and sustainable framing.
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
[0] https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/
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.
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)
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
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.
Edit: I confess, kind of tempted, 41 EUR for a "big" one https://www.bol.com/be/fr/p/zimoros-handslingergenerator-kra...
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.
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!
> 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...
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.
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)
I take it this was some kind of joke.