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.
Store birth date in systemd for age verification
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47436240
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