this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2024
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[–] [email protected] 49 points 7 months ago (5 children)

Now I don't know enough about electronics to know how wrong this is, but I do know enough about electronics to know that this absolutely sounds wrong.

The problem comes when someone takes an answer like this, knowing far less than I do, and they try and hook up their fridge to a car battery.

And this is why I hate LLMs. Being confidently wrong is scary enough when it's just people, nevermind technology.

It does make me chuckle, though, that Skynet could have been totally innocent in their destruction of the human race, they just confidently came to the wrong conclusion and had the tools to carry it out.

Like a toddler whose inner thoughts are telling him to throw a cat out of the window. He doesn't know he's going to kill it, he just knows that's what his brain is telling him to do.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Now I don't know enough about electronics to know how wrong this is

Very, assuming the refrigerator in question typically runs on a typical power grid you'd find in the US or Europe (source: am electrical engineer)

Mainly because most compressors I'm aware of use alternating current (AC) motors, or at a minimum accept AC power. Batteries alone produce direct current (DC). The simplest way to make this work would involve an inverter (converts DC to AC). Cheap ones probably have at least a 10% conversion loss, so you're looking at an hour or two at most.

Edit: should also mention that discharging a typical lead-acid battery until it's all the way flat (realistically below ~11V) does irreparable damage. Might be cheaper to replace the contents of your fridge :)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

From a technical stance, it's right. This top comment does the math pretty well, and I've done it myself recently trying to decide if I should add a battery backup on my fridge. If you can overcome the startup surge (and a car battery definitely can), a modern fridge doesn't draw very much power.

Of course, there's a lot of details missing about how you do this without dying of electrocution. So I think it's also a fair criticism of the LLM.