The command structure checked and double-checked and determined their information was flawed.

According to the story, there were already aircraft en route to board the ship. Do you think this is how the US military actually operates? Launches aircraft to board a Chinese ship, and only while they're en route midair do they bother to double check?

Just to elaborate on the "actual details" flags:

1) What ship? This isn't exactly sensitive information - both the US and China know it - and there were supposedly already aircraft en route to board it. Leaving that out means that nobody can check ship traffic or flight records to see if these claims are actually plausible.

2) What AI? Is this some private military tool like Maven, or is it, like, say, ChatGPT?

3) They're saying that the analyst fed intelligence related to the ship’s cargo manifest and the AI "hallucinated" that it was carrying nuclear weapons. If you're feeding it intelligence, asking for a conclusion, and it reaches a conclusion, but that conclusion is wrong, that's not a "hallucination", that's just a wrong conclusion. And exactly how difficult was this analysis? Are we talking "there's a no-smoking sign on the deck" -> "Oh, that's surely because of nukes!", or are we talking "It's setting off all our geiger counters and there's audio of the captain repeatedly talking about "Héwqì"" -> "Sounds like good evidence for nukes!"

4) Is this actually how the US military operates? They get one report, they launch an airborne boarding operation, but *then* decide to redo the analysis while the birds are en route to their target? Really?

This whole anonymously-sourced story is just throwing off red flags for me left and right. I'm sure something happened, but I really doubt it's fully matching the portrayal.

And of course, what's being described (with a serious paucity of actual details, throwing off all my Hype Story red flags) is not only not WW3, it's not the first time it's happened

Sorry about that!

Light bulbs are very small things; the energy that goes into making them is likewise very small, regardless of type. The electricity an incandescent bulb burns is, by contrast, not at all small. You also have to replace the incandescent bulb far more often.

There's all sorts of exhaustive analyses out there, but the TL/DR is:

One incandescent bulb takes ~1-1,5kWh to manufacture and lasts ~1000 hours
One LED bulb takes 8-20kWh to manufacture and lasts ~25000 hours (commonly modern home construction doesn't even use lightbulb sockets anymore; the fixtures are designed to not need "bulb replacements")

So even on manufacturing, the LED bulb wins because it's up against 25 incandescent bulbs. But that's all trivial, because:

60W × 25000h = 1500 kWh
9W * 25000h = 225kWh

So a few extra or fewer kilowatt hours in manufacturing is irrelevant. It's totally dominated by usage energy.

Incandescent only wins one category: disposal (it's just glass and a little metal, you can just throw it in the trash; LED is e-waste and gets recycled). But in both cases, you're talking tenths of a percent of lifetime energy usage.

Lol, a company dominated by Rationalists/Yudowski fans is "far left activists" now ;) The entire premise of HPOMR is that Lily Potter cast a spell to make her sister Petunia more attractive so she could marry a better husband, and when they adopted Harry, instead of having him attend public school, they homeschooled him, so he became brilliant. Very "woke" premise there ;) I don't know if you've heard, but the Rationalist community is the middle of a scandal right now for putting career-limiting pressure on women in the AI space to attend sex parties, including rape-themed ones. All those dang woke feminists, amiright?

It's more like someone standing on public ground outside movie theatre holding up signs like, "Bruce Willis has been dead the whole time!" ""Verbal" Kint makes up his whole testimony on the spot - he's actually Keyser Soze!" "Dr. Mann is a liar, and the "ghost" pushing books off Murphy’s childhood bookshelf is her father, through a time portal from within the black hole!", etc, and then people skip buying a ticket and head back home. Now the plot-spoiler has decided to make it up to the movie theatre by buying some tickets from them.

It seems you went into a friendly, informative, non-disagreeing reply with a view to win a "Being An Argumentative Asshole Online" competition, and congratulations, you won!

Most of the other frontiers are like 1 ELO apart, so yeah, 20 is a big lead.

Maybe in one of the agent categories? It seems poorer there. But under the category "Best Text Models", it's crushingly in the lead.

Dimming them not only directly saves power, but also dramatically increases their longevity, and also increases their efficiency (saving even more power). :)

So "not that different" translates to "less than half" by the time you finished the paragraph?

Did you miss the phrase "raw bulb efficiencies", or were you under the impression that streetlamps are raw bulbs and nothing more?

You're talking about PEPC uptake of bicarbonate and CO2 in soil moisture. It's only like 1-2%, and it's not "soil carbon", it's CO2 from the atmosphere dissolved in water. Same uptake whether the soil is humus-rich or bare sand.

How do you plan to handle achieving 1000W/m2 of lighting *before* losses?

I think realistically you'd need orbital mirrors for that.

Also, someone keeps stealing my water. I'll leave a glass of water out overnight, and the next time I check it, it's lower. I swear I'm not making it up, it's happened multiple times.

The funny thing is there's not that much difference in the raw bulb efficiencies - LPS is slightly lower, but not dramatically. But LPS have more fixture losses (the bulbs are omnidirectional), ballast losses, inefficient dimming (and only to slight degrees) for morning/evening, and so on. LED's high CRI (vs. LPS's virtually nonexistent CRI) can sometimes mean you can use less light, too. In practice, you can use something like 30-40% the electricity with LED streetlamps as with LPS, despite the raw bulb figures not being very different.

But no question that LED is much worse for astronomy. LPS was almost a pure spectral line, very easy to exclude. White LEDs use phosphors and deliver a broad spectrum white (apart from the source's blue peak). Pretty much the worst spectrum you could have apart from incandescent. : It kind of sucks that we have to use phosphors in the first place, as they're wasteful - but unfortunately, LEDs have a "green gap"; in the green spectrum, existing tech has a dramatic drop in output and efficiency (and corresponding increase in price) - while green is what our eyes see best. There's still ongoing work to fill it, but it's been a slog. If we could skip the phosphor and just have a mix of different coloured LEDs, the fixtures would be even more efficient, and it would be much easier for astronomers to filter (esp. if the frequencies were standardized)