There's also nothing about "AI agent" that says "fully autonomous" but that shouldn't get in the way of wild speculation and some good pedantism.

Yeah, "very". They're going to make it like sudo where when you give permission to a program to write protected files once it has it forever after.

No, wait, that isn't how it works, is it?

It will probably be what finally pushes me to a Linux laptop, though.

Yeah, because Linux totally doesn't have any files or folders that you have to give special permission for programs to alter.

Fun reminder that with an AI agentic framework, pretty much any software can be readily disassembled and this sort of malicious behavior "fixed". Tasks that previously would have taken far too many man-hours to do, well, you can have a bot do it now.

, I'm talking about the massive, entirety of the electronics industry, all of which is required to make an LED bulb:

Yes, that's what life cycle assessment (LCA) figures include. It doesn't take 8-20 kWh merely to assemble a LED bulb, that's the energy for everything included.

And that's actually a lot of energy for such a small item. Even incandescents are relatively energy intensive to make for such a small item (glassmaking is energy intensive), and LEDs are 8-13 times as energy intensive to make. Just (A) not 25x as many, and (B) orders of magnitude off of being relevant compared to usage consumption.

Remember that this "every person driving every car" also applies to the usage electricity, which is by far the vast majority of the impact. Generating an extra 1,23 megawatt hours to power 25000 hours of incandescent instead of LED lighting involves massive numbers of people "driving their cars and mining". 1,23 megawatt hours of generation just is not even remotely comparable to the resources that go into manufacturing a small electronic device. Which should be obvious from the price alone.

And pretending that incandescents are made of rainbows while LEDs are made by Satan is just not fair. Incandescent bulbs rely on tungsten. Tungsten is only 50% more common than silver. Extracting tungsten from wolframite or scheelite requires open-pit and/or underground mining, then pressure digestion in hot sodium hydroxide, liquid-liquid extraction with organic solvents, & acid precipitation. Since you're throwing away 20-25 incandescent bulbs for every LED, you're demanding 25 glass envelopes (glass smelting), 25 brass threaded bases (copper mining), and 25 tungsten filaments. The number of components is less but the volume of them is far more. As is the energy required to make them.

As for "waste": a large portion of the world's electricity comes from fossil fuels. 1,23 megawatt hours of electricity leads to a ton of pollution, including things like lead arsenic and mercury, being emitted directly into the environment. Far more than anything you might be concerned about within a LED bulb if you were to outright incinerate the thing in open air and dump all its waste straight into the water. Which is, of course, not what actually happens. And it should be mentioned that that RoHS marking on the bulbs? That requires strict requirements on the maximum amounts of toxic elements that can even exist in the product. We're talking milligram quantities of gallium, indium, phosphorus, etc. It is simply incomparable to the emissions from power generation.

Re, health claims, I can only guess you're talking about blue light impacts on circadian rhythms, and that early LED bulbs tended to be "cold" / "daylight" color spectra, wherein most incandescents are "warm" spectra? But today you can buy fluorescent to literally any spectrum you want, so it's not particularly relevant. Or maybe you're talking about flicker? Again, it was often bad with old bulbs, but completely irrelevant to modern bulbs. If you mean something else, you're going to have to state what you mean.

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

Teams crashes reliably whenever I start video on my laptop. I haven't noticed this very valuable feature in any other similar program so they're clearly inferior to Teams.

I will point out that celebrities typically buy coastal houses on bluffs overlooking the ocean

Bluffs aren't a great place. They collapse.

Using celebrity behaviour as a gauge is also not a great idea. They do all sorts of stupid shit. When a celebrity buys a multi-million dollar house on a beach or a bluff they're thinking "this is cool, let's party" not "is this a secure asset I'll be able to pass down to my children."

That's how it normally works. The subprime mortgage thing happened because banks discovered they could make those risky loans and then sell them to other people for a good price by disguising how risky they were by packaging them up and selling them as securities.

Which is kind of ironic considering the OP's comment about banks still providing mortgages for coastal properties. Apparently they're selling them more and more to the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation which... packages them up and sells them as mortgage backed securities.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2020%2F0...

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.insurancebusinessm...

What DRAM fab do you think has unsold capacity?

There isn't really any such thing as a DRAM fab. You can make DRAM at pretty much any of them, including the one in that guy's shed. There are some that specialize in DRAM. They all have unsold capacity, DRAM-specialist or not. The typical lead time is apparently about 18 months. The DRAM manufacturers (including in this story) keep saying they're "virtually" booked up for the next year. So you can call them up and schedule a run in a year, or 18 months, or maybe next week depending on what "virtually" means.

The OP is claiming that memory fabrication is "worse than OPEC" because nobody else can make memory. This is obviously not true. Intel is contemplating it. Many memory manufacturers have started up in the past. Most have gone bankrupt or been acquired. The limitation is that nobody wants to go completely nuts building new fabs that are very likely to be under utilized two, three or five years from now. So they're "only" increasing capacity at 20% per year. For context, world oil production capacity increases by a couple of percent a year and refining capacity, which is capital intensive like chip fabrication, by more like 0.5-1%.

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.

DRAM is a commodity in both the actual sense (the stuff from different sources is pretty much interchangeable) and the sense you've described. You, literally you, can ring up someone who runs a contract fab and ask them to make you some DRAM. It's pretty straightfoward stuff. Here's a YouTuber making some in his garage: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F....

There are a bunch of boutique DRAM producers. They're small scale and do specialty stuff (the actual high end DRAM). The commodity stuff you want to buy is dominated by a few companies that are vertically integrated, super efficient and make their money on massive volume. They also switch around a fair bit because during booms like this one making memory seems like a great idea, but then there's a bust and half of them go broke. SK Hynix alone started out as Hyundai, merged with LG's memory unit, got booted out of Hyundai during a bust, got bought by a conglomerate, bought out Intel's memory unit, and is currently a major producer.

But hey, it's boom time so Intel's talking about making memory again, CXMT is firing up and the majors are all building new fabs as quickly as they can borrow the money to pay for them.