From Newsgroup: nz.comp
Madman Sets Up Entire Server on Disposable Vape,
Hosts Its Own Website
------------------------------------------------
"Blazingly fast."
"Vibe" coding? Try vape coding.
Either the most sober - or the most nicotine-addled - individual
of all time has done the improbable: hosting an entire website
on a single disposable e-cigarette.
According to programmer Bogdan Ionescu, it's a stunt that's
meant to demonstrate just how ridiculously tricked out even
one-and-done vapes have become, he shared on his blog last week.
<
https://bogdanthegeek.github.io/blog/projects/vapeserver/>
Ionescu said he had been collecting disposable vapes for years,
but it was only last year that he realized that some of these
"fancier pacifiers for adults" came with surprisingly capable
microcontrollers from ARM, the same manufacturer that makes the
processors used in MacBooks.
It's capable - in relative terms, at least. According to Ionescu,
it's a microcontroller "so bad, it's basically disposable." But,a
in 2025, that still means it has a ridiculous amount of computing
power, at least for something that get thrown out after a week.a
He didn't share the specific vape - so as to not do "free
advertising for Big Tobacco," as he phrased it -abut the one he
chose came with 24 kibibtyes of flash storage (a kibibyte is
basically a kilobyte)aandathree kibibytes of static ram, all with
a 24 megahertz processor.
"You may look at those specs and think that it's not much to work
with," Ionescu wrote. "I don't blame you, a 10 year old phone can
barely load Google, and this is about 100x slower."
"I on the other hand," he declared, "see a blazingly fast web
server."
It took some trial and error before it could achieve these blazing
speeds.
At first, "pings took ~1.5s with 50 percent packet loss," Ionescu
said, "and a simple page took over 20 [seconds] to load."a
"That's so bad, it's actually funny," he said, "and I kind of
wanted to leave it there."
But after he fixed an issueawith his code that causedathe program
to only read a single character at a time, he unlocked the vape's
true potential.
"Pings now take 20ms, no packet loss and a full page loads in about
160ms," Ionescu rejoiced. "Now this is what I call blazingly fast!"
The stunt raises a pretty important question: if these are devices
advanced enough to power a whole website, why are they designed to
be thrown away? One study estimated that vapes and other tiny
consumer items add up to a staggering 9 million metric tons of
e-waste every year. Is it reasonable that some of these have touch
screens and can even run Twitter?
"I wouldn't want to be the lawyer who one day will have to argue
how a device with USB C and a rechargeable battery can be
classified as 'disposable,'" Ionescu wrote. "Thankfully, I don't
plan on pursuing law anytime soon."
If you want to access the vape-powered website, you can visit this
link, though it doesn't appear to be working at the moment. Maybe
it's taking a smoke break. Such are the perils of hosting something
on the (vape) cloud.
<
https://futurism.com/neoscope/disposable-vape-hosts-website>
--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2