The raspberry pis have been bad value for money for at least 4 or 5 years now unless you're really sensitive to the power draw. Once you add in a case and fan (required if you don't want it to overheat and screw the SD card), the charger, SD card it generally comes in at roughly the same price as more capable intel 1L PC like the Lenovo M920Q (though of course, they aren't new)
Yeah power consumption (and performance per watt) is the main reason I keep buying Raspberry Pi, I haven't find anything similar on that regard, specially for pi zeros
I'm on mobile so can't easily pull up an example part number, but digital signage controllers can often be PoE powered. They're insanely overpriced new from the actual suppliers, but for hobby projects they can normally be sourced relatively easily on ebay. The trick is that many of the ebay sellers don't bother listing the specs, so you need to first search digital sign cintroller/computer on ebay then look up the spec sheet from the model number.
True for base PoE (802.3af, 15.4W), but if you have PoE+ or greater (802.3at, 30W and up) you can start to power more common PCs - I’m running a couple repurposed Chromeboxes from PoE++ adapters.
I really like the ecosystem around them. All of the nice compact hats, the software, the 3D print files. Very googleable which also means easy to get help from an LLM.
Unless you specifically need a pi (unlikely) then they really are awful value now. Hard to really go out of the way to support them now they've stuck two fingers up at the solo/indie/educational community and gone all enterprise.
Second hand mini pc's are a good option. Half the price of a pi 5 + sd + power and you often get them with 16gb ram, a decent ssd, etc.
If you need GPIO then many of the rockchip boards are still fairly affordable and easily had.
The Pi isn't great value, but honestly, I'm finding it hard to find a better trade-off between price, performance and software support right now than the compute modules for embedded projects where you can afford to spin a custom PCB. Especially for low-ish volume or prototype stuff.
I also love the compute modules for their size. Stick one on a nano base board and they’re half the size of a Pi 5. TBH the standard Pis are a bit frustrating with all of the IO. I do not believe the average purchaser is using one as a PC replacement and wants 4 USB ports and 2 HDMI ports. I’ve never seen one in use like that. They are mostly servers or driving a single display without any user input.
100% with you on the IO. I've never even wanted two display output ports with any raspberry pi.
You know what I do want though? An actual damn HDMI port! HDMI cables are everywhere, wherever I am I have unlimited options to connect an HDMI device to some kind of screen. But micro HDMI? The literal only thing in my life that uses it is the Raspberry Pi 4 and 5. There have been plenty of times where I've reached for a Pi 3b instead of a 4 or 5 just because I didn't have a micro HDMI cable.
I do not understand what has gone through their head. How could anyone look at the use case for a Raspberry Pi and decide that two micro HDMI ports is a better choice than one HDMI port? I don't understand it. Like you, my experience with the Pi is that they mostly just sit there, headless, so the only reason I need display output is that it's useful during setup (because they don't have a proper serial console port).
I can't set up a Pi 4 or 5 without going hunting for that micro HDMI cable I bought specifically for that purpose and never use for anything else. I can set up a Pi 3b anywhere, at any time.
The micro hdmi thing (which I too loath) is for digital signage and industrial machinery - we (home users) aren't the audience and haven't been for a long time.
Being able to run two sides of an advertising board, or two control panel screens on a big hunk of metal doing fabrication things in a factory was more important to Raspberry Pi as a business apparently.
Why he heck they didn't just go with 1x normal hdmi and 1x usb-c +DP for the Pi 5 is a mystery, perhaps the SOC doesn't support it or something.
Completely depends on what you're doing. If you're doing a lot of sustained compute, or doing graphics, then yeah you're gonna want some cooling. But it's a useful little machine for all kinds of tasks which don't cause sustained high power consumption.
Two fried on me. One was just running a printserver without a case. It was in summer so ambient temperature was around 32C but still, you telling me you use rpi 5 without even a cooling case?
I have been using a Pi 4 as a desktop computer for a few years (didn't have anything else) with an microSD card and without any fan, heatsink or case. Haven't had anything problems. Obviously, this depends on your environment, but it worked fine for me.
I've had an rPi4 running a copy of a forum and server (for reference) in one of the fancy aluminum cases which passively cools for a couple of years now, no issues.
The big chunky aluminum ones do seem pretty good on the pi 4. I had one in the flirc case for a long time and it never seemed to have issues. Obviously adds to the cost though. Also not sure if the Pi 5 works as well in them given its higher thermals, and the Pi 4 didn't exactly run cool so imagine the 5 might throttle occasionally without active cooling.
Raspberry Pi hasn't been a cheap SBC for a long time. It's now in the same market segment as a NUC, but without the case and with worse price to performance.
Have fun reading 40 answers about how discarded Lenovos from 2017 are cheaper and stay idle at 5W. It springs to 3x the power usage of a pi if they do anything with it but who cares about performance per Watt?
i'm running qwen3.5:0.8b on my orangepi zero 2w, low token/s but it still runs. I think i paid around £14 for it over a year ago but now the same board is double price. I wouldn't buy a computer right now of any kind. It's a bubble.
Interesting, I have a few Pis laying around, I know they'd be low token use, but debated putting some models on them, whats your setup look like if you don't mind me asking? Is there a specific image or package you're using?
Suchir Balaji, the OpenAI researcher who was found dead in his flat just before testifying against his employer, published an excellent article somehow related to this topic:
And I still run into naysayers claiming that we cannot extract valuable opinions or warnings from fiction because "they're fictional". Fiction comes from ideas. Fiction is not meant to model reality but approximate it to make a point either explicitly or implicitly.
Just because they're not 1:1 model of reality or predictions doesn't mean that the ideas they communicate are worthless.
Exactly. Neither firm would have been (successfully) sued by their shareholders for failing to make significant profits, so let's not blame on capitalism what is instead the individual greed driving these decisions. In fact, OpenAI is now going to trial because it gave up its non-profit status, reneging on the commitments it made to its shareholders (fraud, by another word).
I don’t get it. Even the Soviet Union used money. Simply paying for stuff isn’t necessarily capitalism? Or are you suggesting Anthropic should be state-owned?
Using money as a medium to facilitate exchange of goods and services is not capitalism. Abandoning one of your core principles in the pursuit of money, or more charitably because not doing so means your competitors will make more money and overtake you in the marketplace is an outgrowth of capitalism
In the Soviet Union the reasons might have been "to beat the Capitalists", "for the pride of our country" or "Stalin asked us to and saying no means we get sent to Siberia". Though a variant of the last one may well have happened here, and the justification we read is just the one less damaging to everyone involved
>Though a variant of the last one may well have happened here, and the justification we read is just the one less damaging to everyone involved
Hegseth was planning on getting the model via the Defense Production Act or killing Anthropic via supply chain risk classification preventing any other company working with the Pentagon from working with Anthropic. So while it wasn't Siberia, it was about as close as the US can get without declaring Claude a terrorist. Which I'm sure is on the table regardless
Exactly. He recently said the following in an interview:
"AI safety and anti-capitalism [...] are at least strongly analogous, if not exactly the same thing." [0]
[0] Nick Land (2026). A Conversation with Nick Land (Part 2) by Vincent Lê in Architechtonics Substack. Retrieved from vincentl3.substack.com/p/a-conversation-with-nick-land-part-a4f
> The meeting between Hegseth and Amodei was confirmed by a defense official who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
"Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has threatened Anthropic, saying officials could invoke powers that would allow the government to force the artificial intelligence firm to share its novel technology in the name of national security if it does not agree by Friday to terms favorable to the military"
Agree. Also what upsets me the most is that to a great extent, all of these antics he pulls out are largely ignored by its userbase, meaning that most of the people using OpenAI products are either ignoring or ignorant altogether of what he truly thinks of them.
I'm not advocating for stopping GenAI usage because of this, but considering there are several equivalent competitors out there, it'd be mostly warranted to boycott OpenAI for these exact reason.
Otherwise the message that remains in the eye of these ghouls is that no matter how much you treat the world population as annoying cattle, they'll gobble it up in exchange for restaurant suggestions and rageslop
But those margins are for traditional businesses with human workers, if these claims of 100x productivity increase are real Anthropic should very easily be able to outcompete Accenture no?
Consulting - especially the more strategy type consulting - is often not about “we don’t know how to do something”, it’s more of “there is so much resistance to change organizationally that not even CxOs/directors can push it through”.
Besides selling consulting services involves a lot of relationship building and knowing the business vertical.
Could this be about bypassing government regulation and taxation? Silkroad only needed a tiny server, not 150kW.
The Outer Space Treaty (1967) has a loophole. If you launch from international waters (planned by SpaceX) and the equipment is not owned by a US-company or other legal entity there is significant legal ambiguity. This is Dogecoin with AI. Exploiting this accountability gap and creating a Grok AI plus free-speech platform in space sounds like a typical Elon endeavour.
For the sake of an argument, let’s assume "The Outer Space Treaty (1967) has a loophole. If you launch from international waters (planned by SpaceX) and the equipment is not owned by a US-company or other legal entity there is significant legal ambiguity” is 100% true.
To use that loophole, the rockets launched by SpaceX would have to be “not owned by a US-company”. Do you think the US government would allow that to happen?
New info now online. Elon Musk has now confirmed it is about getting regulatory permission for solar panel deployment. These regulation stop deployment at scale. Its cheaper in the future in space (prediction: in 36 months).
He was asked directly during interview: is this a regulatory play?
You cannot escape national regulations like that, at least until a maritime-like situation develops, where rockets will be registered in Liberia for a few dollars and Liberia will not even pretend to care what they are doing.
It may happen one day, but we are very, very far from that. As of now, big countries watch their space corporations very closely and won't let them do this.
Nevertheless, as an American, you can escape state and regional authorities this way. IIRC The Californian Coastal Commission voted against expansion of SpaceX activities from Vandenberg [1], and even in Texas, which is more SpaceX-friendly, there are still regulations to comply with.
If you launch from international waters, these lower authority tiers do not apply.
Untrue. Responsible for any spacefaring vessel is in all cases the state the entity operating the vessel is registered in. If it's not SpaceX directly but a shell company in Ecuador carrying out the launch, Ecuador will be completely responsible for anything happening with and around the vessel, period. There are no loopholes in this system.
This could simply be done by hosting in the Tor hidden service cloud. Accessing illegal material hosted on a satellite is still exactly as risky for the user (if the user is on earth) as accessing that same illegal material through the Tor network, but hosting it through the Tor network can be done for 1/1000th the cost compared to an orbital solution.
So there's no regulatory or tax benefit to hosting in space.
In addition to all the sibling comments explaining why this wouldn't work, the money's not there.
A grift the size of Dogecoin, or the size of "free speech" enthusiast computing, or even the size of the criminal enterprises that run on the dark web, is tiny in comparison to the footer cost and upkeep of a datacenter in space. It'd also need to be funded by investments (since criminal funds and crypto assets are quite famously not available in up-front volumes for a huge enterprise), which implies a market presence in some country's economy, which implies regulators and risk management, and so on.
And in this context it seems to go against The Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 and the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024:
I very much don't believe for a second anyone would manage to get a judgement against them on this in the UK.
For starters, the language is highly subjective, and they'd be able to show vast amounts of discourse about software engineering where "from scratch" often does not involve starting with nothing, and they'd then go on to argue that the person suing haven't actually had any reason to believe that they would be able to replicate a setup that was described as a complex large-scale experiment without much more information.
The person suing would have an uphill battle showing that whatever assumptions they made were something that was reasonable to infer based on that statement.
And to have a case, a consumer would also then need to have relied on this as a significant factor in choosing to buy their services.
But even if we assume the court would agree it is fraudulent, the remedy is only "directly consequential losses".
In other words, I doubt anyone would lose sleep over this risk.
That's very interesting, thanks! I had no idea that legionella risk was a thing for data centers. This article mentions that to avoid the risk most data centers treat the water with disinfectants which are sometimes toxic:
They're really nasty bacteria and once in a system they are hard to get rid of because then you have to heat everything to temperatures that the system normally might never reach.
That's why central heating systems that run 'low' every now and then stoke up to 60 degrees or more on the secondary circuit for tap water.
And data centers are the perfect location, endless 35 to 45 degree water. Cooling towers are the main problem for this, another is aerosols of water that has been sitting in the sun for a while, for instance in a garden hose exposed to the sun.
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