The underlying classifier, BirdNET, is a traditional neural network and not an LLM: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoinf.2021.101236
Are there any LLMs being widely used for audio classification? I know VLMs are being used a lot in image stuff. It always seems kind of silly to me to throw everything at an LLM. I know they’re huge and can automatically handle a huge number of tasks but something in me finds it wasteful when we could be creating easily trainable, cheap to run bespoke models for a lot of stuff
Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations
131–140 of 266 posts
Re: Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations
#132Finally, we solved the problem of converting bird sounds into their pictures without involving human cognition. The great problem and the need had to wait for the great, ultra expensive, data-center-driven AI technology to appear on the horizon. AI is such a good technology that continue to solve many such great problems that humans desperately needed for their survival and progress. All at the a minimal cost of some…
Hmm. The project uses BirdNET-Go, which does inference locally on a Raspberry Pi. Then it looks up the species against a set of already existing illustrations. So in this case it seems like the "ultra expensive, data-center-driven AI" is not really involved in the core loop of this project.
Re: Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations
#133Finally, we solved the problem of converting bird sounds into their pictures without involving human cognition. The great problem and the need had to wait for the great, ultra expensive, data-center-driven AI technology to appear on the horizon. AI is such a good technology that continue to solve many such great problems that humans desperately needed for their survival and progress. All at the a minimal cost of some…
Do you not like AI?
Well, it's not a fruit or food that I can eat. It's not a shelter, It's not a fellow human or a pet. So, hard to say if I like it.
Re: Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations
#134Finally, we solved the problem of converting bird sounds into their pictures without involving human cognition. The great problem and the need had to wait for the great, ultra expensive, data-center-driven AI technology to appear on the horizon. AI is such a good technology that continue to solve many such great problems that humans desperately needed for their survival and progress. All at the a minimal cost of some…
Hmm. The project uses BirdNET-Go, which does inference locally on a Raspberry Pi. Then it looks up the species against a set of already existing illustrations. So in this case it seems like the "ultra expensive, data-center-driven AI" is not really involved in the core loop of this project.
The local inference is a product that came out of the data-center-driven AI.
Re: Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations
#135Re: Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm. The project uses BirdNET-Go, which does inference locally on a Raspberry Pi. Then it looks up the species against a set of already existing illustrations. So in this case it seems like the "ultra expensive, data-center-driven AI" is not really involved in the core loop of this project.
The local inference is a product that came out of the data-center-driven AI.
What a shame that we get a bird ckassifier by the samle technology we use to recognize cancer and other illnesses.
Re: Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm. The project uses BirdNET-Go, which does inference locally on a Raspberry Pi. Then it looks up the species against a set of already existing illustrations. So in this case it seems like the "ultra expensive, data-center-driven AI" is not really involved in the core loop of this project.
The local inference is a product that came out of the data-center-driven AI.
> came out of the data-center-driven
should we tell them how hacker news gets onto their computer?
Re: Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm. The project uses BirdNET-Go, which does inference locally on a Raspberry Pi. Then it looks up the species against a set of already existing illustrations. So in this case it seems like the "ultra expensive, data-center-driven AI" is not really involved in the core loop of this project.
The local inference is a product that came out of the data-center-driven AI.
This is incorrect; the local model is a small dense neural network called BirdNET that would not have been referred to "AI" when it was published in 2021. The model outputs a bird species probability distribution and the web application displays an existing image file of the most probable bird on the screen. This is a lovely example of simple, offline, and fun project using a straightforward machine learning model.
Re: Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations
#139Very cool, but IMO not mentioning https://theodore.net/projects/AvianVisitors/ as an inspiration is a very ugly move from the author
Thanks! Discussed a few months ago:
Avian Visitors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48343424 - May 2026 (20 comments)
Re: Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations
#140Very cool, but IMO not mentioning https://theodore.net/projects/AvianVisitors/ as an inspiration is a very ugly move from the author
I thought it was the same person. That is how close this project is. Inspiration may be too soft of a word.
Maybe for fairness we'll link to it from the toptext as well.