Re:Decade-old RAM is making a comeback
by donmb on Sunday October 11, 2026 @03:56AM
(#50040643)
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.
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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.
I didn’t notice any quality issue. And the crowpanel docs and demo repos make it simple to quickly get results. Though I had troubles getting macOS to establish a serial connection, no problem under Linux and windows
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.
> 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.
Re:Decade-old RAM is making a comeback
by WindyMiller on Sunday October 11, 2026 @04:36AM
(#50040925)
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.
Rather, the LLMs will make the OS on those old e-readers much more maintainable.
Also making old hardware unaffordable too.
Re:Decade-old RAM is making a comeback
by downrightmike on Sunday October 11, 2026 @05:49PM
(#50048181)
Produce rots in the fields because there was no way to get a profit from it
Re:Decade-old RAM is making a comeback
by simonklitj on Sunday October 11, 2026 @05:40AM
(#50041372)
Please. There are so many human stories out there—read those.
Re:Decade-old RAM is making a comeback
by PunchyHamster on Sunday October 11, 2026 @06:40AM
(#50041703)
unlesss it's for children, just read books.
and if it is for your child, read them books.
Please don't raise your kids on AI slop. They'll grow up without knowing anything else.
Re:Decade-old RAM is making a comeback
by CamperBob2 on Sunday October 11, 2026 @12:52PM
(#50045213)
It's a shame this story isn't better known. I was lucky enough to read it in grade school, just before the first usable 8-bit computers came out.
I use a mix of both. We have tons of books at home. Sometimes I am jusst tired of reading the same books over and over. This is a fun way of letting them participate.