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AI On Every Machine: The LLM You Probably Didn’t Want

May 6, 2026 by 58 Comments

It’s been a story of the last week or so if you follow the kind of news channels a Hackaday scribe does, that Google have quietly installed an LLM as part of the Chrome browser. Reports vary as to when they did this because there’s a lot of confusion online with their online Gemini features also present in the browser, but it seems Chrome users are noticing its effect through slower performance and hefty disk access. Given that Chrome is by far the most popular web browser, this means that billions of users will have downloaded the four gigabyte Gemini Nano model, and now have an LLM they didn’t know about. It will be used to provide advanced auto-correct and other text suggestion features that their online version of Gemini would presumably be overburdened with, and since it’s available through a set of in-browser APIs we expect that it will find its way into a lot of websites, online applications, and plugins.

It’s caused a bit of a fuss in some circles, and we think, with some justification. When billions of computers unwittingly install an extremely energy intensive software component the effect on global power consumption will be significant, with a consequent uptick in the carbon footprint of computing. It’s not a phenomenon restricted to Chrome, as an example Siri has used a local LLM on Apple devices for a while now. We’ve seen rumblings of discontent and talk of getting European climate regulators involved, but perhaps instead it’s time to have a conversation about local AI models. The key is not whether or not they are a good thing to have, but when and how they operate.

While many of us are sick to death of AI slop and have not been lured into AI psychosis by an over-reinforcing chatbot, the fact remains that LLMs can do some useful things, they’re here to stay whether we like it or not, and having one under your control on your own computer doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Install Llama.cpp on your machine, and you’ve got an LLM of your very own, upon which your usage data isn’t going to be sold, and your content isn’t going to reinforce the finest plagiarism device the world has ever seen.

Opt-In and Opt-Out

The concerning development with the Chrome LLM is that not only has it been installed without the user’s consent, it runs without their consent too, and they can’t use it for anything except what Google Chrome wants it to be used for. Unlike the Llama.cpp mentioned above, it’s not under their control, instead it’s a compute-hungry monster ultimately controlled by Google. The prospect of a future in which multiple pieces of everyday software install their own similarly out-of-control multi-gigabyte CPU-munchers is a concerning one. Anyone who remembers Microsoft’s Clippy grabbing all the resources in a 1990s desktop as its stuttering animation played its course will know where this is going.

If local LLMs are an inevitability, what’s needed is a way to make them like any other application, one that the user chooses and installs themselves. Such an LLM could make its services available to applications such as a web browser if the user allows it to, but not run unless asked. It’s fairly obvious that installing Llama.cpp or similar is beyond many users, but it shouldn’t lie beyond the bounds of possibility to package something like it as an application they can install.

We know that the previous paragraph is pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking, and that as the person who knows computers in your family your next few Christmases will be spent wrestling with six different LLMs running on some elderly family member’s PC. But perhaps in Clippy lies the answer. If the consumer can learn to associate built-in AI features with their computer grinding to a halt just as they did with an office assistant thirty years ago, then perhaps they’ll demand change. We can hope.

Retrotechtacular: Julius Sumner Miller Breaks Lamps With Magnets

May 6, 2026 by 23 Comments

If you watched the Mickey Mouse Club way back when, you might remember Professor Wonderful, who was, in reality, physics professor [Julius Sumner Miller]. He also had his own show, “Why Is It So?” along with appearances on talk shows. We recently ran across one of the shows from 1962 where [Miller] uses electromagnets to break a lamp.

[Miller] moved to Australia, and this episode is from the Australian version of “Why Is It So?” As you might expect, given the topic, the professor covers Oersted and Faraday.

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How Giant Tanks Of Fluid Could Help Support The Power Grid

May 5, 2026 by 53 Comments

If you’ve been paying any attention to the renewable energy space, you’ll know that generation isn’t really the problem anymore. Solar panels are cheap, and wind turbines are everywhere. The problem is matching generation with demand—sometimes there’s too much wind and sun, and sometimes there’s not enough. Ideally, you could store that energy somewhere, and deploy it when you need it.

The answer everyone keeps reaching for is lithium-ion batteries, and they work just fine. However, there’s a competing technology that’s been quietly scaling up in the background—the vanadium flow battery. It has some unique advantages that could see it rise to prominence in the world of large-scale grid storage.

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Strange Ways To Make Cold

May 4, 2026 by 14 Comments

Making stuff cool and keeping it that way has been a pretty essential part of human civilization for thousands of years, with only in the past few hundred years man-made methods having become available that remove the reliance on the whims of nature and lugging around massive blocks of ice. The most important cooling method is undoubtedly that of vapor-compression refrigeration, but this is hardly the only method to transfer thermal energy from one location to another.

For example, we recently covered an elastocaloric cooling project by a group of scientists that uses strips of NiTi metal. By flexing these they induce a cooling effect which when put in a number of stages serves to transfer a significant amount of thermal energy between both sides, much like a vapor-compression system but without the gases and compressor. Meanwhile the Seebeck effect is relatively well-known from Peltier thermocouple devices, and features heavily in portable refrigerators and kin where these solid-state devices can also transfer thermal energy.

Of course, along with how they function the major question with all of these cooling technologies is how efficient they are, as this determines when you’d want to even consider them for a specific application.

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Why Leaded Fuel Is Still A Thing

May 4, 2026 by 89 Comments

Leaded fuel is considered one of the greatest environmental failures in modern human history. Adding tetraethyl lead to gasoline reduced knock in internal combustion engines, which was widely considered a good thing. It was only later that the deleterious health effects came into view, by which point there was a massive fleet of lead-dependent automobiles and an industry reluctant to change. Still, the tide turned, and over the last 50 years, unleaded fuel has become the norm for automotive use across the world.

And yet, there remains a hold out—a world where engines still burn leaded fuels and spray their noxious fumes across the countryside. In the aviation sector, leaded fuel remains a normal part of everyday operations to this day amidst concerted efforts to eliminate it for good.

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Hackaday Links: May 3, 2026

May 3, 2026 by 3 Comments

Software that collects public data from the Internet and uses it to provide half-assed answers to your questions might seem like a modern craze, but today we bid farewell to a website that helped pioneer pretend conversations all the way back in 1997 — as of May 1st, Ask Jeeves is no more.

Well, technically they dropped the “Jeeves” part back in 2006. Since then it’s just been Ask.com, but as the name implies the idea was more or less the same. Rather than the relatively rigid parameters and keywords required by traditional search engines, you could ask Jeeves questions about the world using natural language. Early advertisements showed the virtual valet answering arbitrary questions like “How many calories in a banana?,” which of course today seems commonplace and utterly unimpressive, but was a pretty wild for the 1990s.

It might seem surprising that a site designed from day one to offer a human-like Q&A experience should fold right as such technology is becoming commonplace. But of course, that commonality is the problem. When Google can answer your questions just as well (or poorly…) as Jeeves or anyone else, what’s the benefit for the average Internet user to seek out another service? But it’s still somewhat ironic, which is probably why the farewell message on Ask.com ends with the line “Jeeves’ spirit endures.”

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How TTY Opened Up The Phones For The Hard Of Hearing

April 30, 2026 by 15 Comments

The telephone was an invention that revolutionized human communication. No more did you have to physically courier a letter from one place to another, or send a telegram, or have a runner carry the message for you. Instead, you could have a direct conversation with another person a great distance away. All well and good if you can speak and hear, of course, but rather useless if you happen to be deaf.

Those hard of hearing were not left entirely out of the communication revolution, however. Well before IP switched networks and the Internet became a thing, there was already a way for the deaf to communicate over the plain old telephone network—thanks to the teletypewriter!

Over The Wires

The teletypewriter (TTY) has been around for a long time. The first device came into being in 1964, developed by James C. Marsters and Robert Weitbrecht, both deaf. Their idea was to create a method for deaf individuals to communicate over the phone network in a textual manner. To this end, the group sourced teleprinters formerly used by the US Department of Defense, and hooked them up with acoustic couplers that would allow them to mate with the then-ubiquitous AT&T Model 500 telephone. Thus, the TTY was born. A user could dial another TTY machine, and key in a message, which would print out at the other end. The receiving user could then respond in turn in the same manner.

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