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CrankGPT

"fully offline, human-powered local AI" -- an LLM and a voice model, running on a Raspberry Pi 5, driven off hand-cranked electricity generation! I was very sceptical, but they've put in the work to optimise the platform and choose models very carefully, and it looks like it actually runs off hand-cranked power, amazing

Tags: ai llms electricity hand cranking voice raspberry-pi hacks hardware

Kafka’s quiet observability superpower — Kafka Interceptors

Interesting Kafka trick:

Kafka Interceptors have quietly existed since 2016, yet most teams overlook them as an observability superpower. This article shows how Kafka Interceptors, combined with Apache Flink, can provide lightweight, near-real-time event tracing across a Kafka-based event-driven architecture — without invasive instrumentation or expensive observability platforms.

The project, confluent-kafka-isotope, uses Kafka Interceptors to collect and attach trace signals to records while Apache Flink interprets those signals using SQL and stateful processing for latency analysis, topology discovery, stuck-trace detection, and forensic replay.

Tags: kafka observability flink isotope-tracing tracing event-tracing interceptors ops