Comment by donmb

16 hours ago

I recently reactivated a 10 years old Kindle as an AI-Story-Generator (https://github.com/donmb1/ai-story-generator). Old hardware is valueable and with AI you can do great things with it.

So LLMs are simultaneously making new hardware unaffordable, while also making old hardware usable again.

That too sounds like an actually good development all things considered. For the planet, anyway. And with the big caveat of that cloud tether, though just for scaffolding.

  • Old e-readers were already usable. Generating extruded story-like product on them when they're already perfectly capable of displaying the vast majority of human literature doesn't make them any more usable.

  • > That too sounds like an actually good development all things considered

    It would be good if we would use less resources.

    But we are not.

    It's just that some people don't get the newer resources.

Thanks for sharing, maybe it's time to buy some more old Kindles... I use bunch as smart paintings (with changing pictures generated locally with stable diffusion), and of course Home Assistant dashboard. They are awesome little machines.

  • Look at CrowPanel, you can get nice e-ink devices made for development, at a reasonable price. I have a small 2.13in esp32 board, I spent some time yesterday making it into a pocket flashcard device for my German courses. The energy consumption is minimal, small form factor, easy to flash via esptool or arduino utils

    • Thanks for the tip, I've seen those small e-ink display on sale in Aliexpress, but wasn't sure about their quality. Maybe I'll get one for my next project, I can see many use cases.

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