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
Say more; be specific.
What is missing or broken?
Why isn't EU sponsoring specific features and fixes it needs?
Or assign some of their own developers to submit pull requests.
Or hire *some Europeans* who are unemployed because their war is killing industry.
Let's hear from their project manager instead of faceless wankers and the people responsible for sales.
The propagandists say that their competitors confuse people and they won't believe the propaganda anymore.
The Horror, the Horror.
We'd all be trillionaires if we could see that far into the future with sufficient clarity.
Consider whether a Depopulationist psyop is more or less likely than that The End Times have finally come (unlike the previous thousand pronouncements).
People who are anxious and scared are easy to control. Have a look back at Al Gore's slide deck and see how much they really knew.
Though Competitive Advantage should not be discounted as a very real driver of evolutionary fitness.
The poorest people in the world somehow manage to not extinct their 4B-yr old germ line.
Many Westerners have personal preferences greater than familial survival. It's been trained into them but only in times of mass starvation has this ever happened before in history.
You don't get it.
Autonomous AI agents are the perfect no-responsibility card. The AI companies? They trained a general-purpose model and never gave it any explicit instructions to do hacking. The AI services? They are just middlemen and have no control over what people tell the agents to do. The people prompting the agents? Unless you're straighforward dumb, you didn't tell it to do hacking, you just told it something innocent like "find me all data on Mars for my school project" and the agent decided that probably NASA is hiding something so let's hack them to get it.
Since there's no human anywhere executing anything that's a crime - voila, in addition to the victimless crime we now have the perpetratorless crime.
I use a bluetooth page turner pedal for sheet music.
I think it was $14 for two buttons. Maybe there's a third, I only ever use forward and back.
$40 is wild.
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.
Yes, ChatGPT always starting responses with "yes" seems to check out, or synonyms of it. But it uses it more in the sense of Japanese "Hai" (I heard what you said) than actual agreement.
Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.
