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Comment Re:Fuck you Larry Ellison (Score 1) 35

It's pure insanity to hate someone so much because they donated money to a person you dislike and one that actually won the popular vote...

... mostly because of the money people like the ellisons and the fat nazi threw at the elections, distorting the democracy from its traditional meaning of one person having one vote to the absurd of modern american plutocracy, where one vote equals one dollar and those who can buy more buy the government. Yes, the very same american plutocracy whose riches is either built on government-guaranteed rent-seeking or on tax exemptions and direct transfers from the government, after the elections.

I'm always amazed how the "traditional values" people are totally ok with the full subversion of their government by the party of corporate socialism, while they whine about "DEI" and whatnot.

Comment Re:kids these days ... (Score 1) 63

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.

Comment Re:LEDs for thee, not for me (Score 1) 110

, 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.

Comment Re:again, don't blame the computer (Score 1) 58

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?

Comment Re:wow another WW3 (Score 2) 58

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.

Comment Science denier, anyone? (Score 0, Troll) 71

The reasonable conclusion is that the Greens are more intelligent than you. ... And I think that's probably the worst insult I've ever used on Slashdot *pats self on back

A couple of things about the issue.

Firstly, it's usually explained using insult and hyperbole. That's not a way to get others on your side. There's an old saying "it's not enough to be correct, you also have to be effective". It's usually used on... wait for it... nerds, who are typically very smart but cannot communicate well, and who fall back on insults when they cannot communicate well.

Secondly, for some reason no one wants to debate the issue. The mantra is "the science is settled", which isn't really how science works, but there are STILL gaping logical holes in the entire edifice that no one wants to clear up. Such as: other than rising global temperatures, the theory hasn't made testable predictions of any consequence that have actually come true. For example, in 2005 after Katrina, someone noted that "due to climate change, hurricanes will become stronger and more frequent", and then we had about a decade of no major hurricanes.

Thirdly, and this is the one that really bothers me: even if the science is settled, even if the conclusions are correct, climate change does not indicate what should be done. I've reviewed probably two or three dozen experiments aiming to mitigate the effects over the years, they ALL had the best of intentions, and they've ALL failed, sometimes spectacularly, and always adding more CO2 to the atmosphere than if we had done nothing.

In the meantime, since 2000 when Al Gore brought the issue into the public eye, I've seen the rise of solar panel farms, windmills are everywhere in the midwest, and we've gone from about 2% renewable (year 2000, mostly hydropower, and discounting wood) to about 30% today (also discounting wood). New technology is taken up at an exponential rate, so expect those numbers to rise faster in the near future.

Several technologies have been developed that we're right on the edge of deploying (carbon capture by electrolysis, fusion energy generation, robotic labor (various companies)) or in the middle of deploying (EVs, various companies) that should help enormously.

And finally, the issue has become political. The premier maker of EVs, the one who made EVs that people want to buy, is vilified by the political side that wants you to believe in climate change. A sect of that side wants to replace capitalism with communism, even though the resource utilization of that model is one third to one half of what we have today, and would slow down the innovation and advancement that might help us solve the issue.

But if you're not on board, you're a science denier.

It took 40 years to convince everyone that smoking was bad for us, now we have to endure the people who think they're right and have to insult us because we don't believe them.

Stop badgering us about it, it's not about science it's about economics, and it won't be a problem in a decade or two.

(Note for the observant: This post is rife with observable trends and verifiable facts, so expect the other side to downvote it into oblivion, because that's the way to convince people.)

Comment Re:If an individual did any of this hacking by han (Score 1) 43

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.

Comment Re:Of course, their AI is working from CCP doctrin (Score 1) 171

That's just your straw man.

Back at you, and you keep sticking to it because you know you have no way out. You're stupid as fuck, but not stupid enough to not realize you're completely out of your depth here, so you're desperately trying to find some reason sounding plausible to you to "win". See, there ain't no such reason precisely because you're ignorant.

But let me help, here is a list of several "much larger" models that I can't run on your or mine modest hardware that happen to be Chinese.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhuggingface.co%2Fzai-org...

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhuggingface.co%2Fmoonsho...

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhuggingface.co%2FQwen%2FQw...

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhuggingface.co%2FXiaomiM...

Which one of them is, to quote the ignorant moron again, "handicapped by training" - or to be more precise - what is your empirical evidence that any of these four specific models are "blind" or trained via a process that physically left out global factual data during pre-training for reasons of political convenience?

Let's hear you on the substance of what you really claim to know, "large models", "expert" :)))

Comment Re:Rhetorical (Score 1) 110

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.

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