Because of the differences in how incandescent bulbs work vs LED and Florescent, and thus how their dimmers have to work.

Incandescent: you just heat up a bit of metal until it’s glowing hot. Literally the same effect as leaving something metal in a campfire or furnace until it glows, just super hot so super bright and white.

Florescent: have a tube of gas, and then put a super high frequency voltage across it (thousands of Hz), and enough energy will be imparted to the gas molecules that they will emit photons.

LEDs: apply a constant DC current to a bit of a custom grown semi conductor, and that will give the semi conductor atoms enough energy that they will release photons.

The main thing about those, is that for Florescent and LEDs, they require very specific types of power.

• Florescent bulbs require a very high frequency voltage, this is what the electronics in the bottom of a CFL do, convert the 60Hz of AC power from your house into super high frequency voltage.

• LEDs on the other hand, can’t use AC, and need constant current applied, not constant voltage, so all the electronics in the bottom of those bulbs work on converting your house’s 60Hz AC power into like ~24V of DC power.

• Incandescents on the other hand, do not care what type of power you put into them since any type of power can make them hot as long as you put enough in. You can feed them AC, you can feed them DC, etc.

Now it comes to dimmers. If you want to reduce the brightness of an incandescent bulb, you need to reduce the power going to it, which means reducing the voltage.

The first dimmers did this by putting a variable resistor in series with the bulb. When it’s resistance is zero the bulb is at full brightness, when it’s resistance is way higher than the bulb’s then the bulb is super dim.

This is good because it’s super cheap and easy and you can precisely lower the voltage while maintaining the exact same waveform, but the problem with this is that you’re feeding the same amount of power to the circuit no matter what, the resistor is just burning up the excess and turning it into heat.

So then we landed on how we built the vast majority of classical dimmers you see today: switched dimmers. Since incandescents are just hot metal, and there’s a lag between when you heat metal and when it cools, you don’t actually need to give it a clean wave form. Modern dimmers just switch on and off really fast to reduce the average amount of power going to the bulb. At 50% brightness, the dimmer might be switching on for 20ms then off for 20ms then on for 20ms then off for 20ms.

It’s a great simple solution for incandescents, but when you try and feed the precise electronics of an LED or Florescent, that messy, choppy signal, they can’t handle it and often just see it as the power coming on and off or it messes with their internal circuitry.

That entirely depends on if there’s an equivalent developed by not an asshole.

Man I just tried to throw out a Chromium fork that didn’t use Manifest v3, I didn’t realize Brave went off the deep end. Personally I use Firefox and Edge when I need to use Chromium and for work just because I find it’s dev tools nicer.

Stop using Chrome, it is adware at this point. Use Firefox or if that’s too different, use Brave or Edge or a different chromium offshoot that isn’t going to support manifest v3.

It’s wild that Amazon wants RTO so bad when they’re famous for a philosophy of not letting teams talk to each other directly, and instead forcing every team to publish APIs for their services that other teams can consume.

I mean, sure you could still be collaborating internally with your team but they seem ideally suited to take advantage of remote work.

My guess is that for a lot of big tech companies, half the RTO push was just because they didn’t want to have to look like they overspent so much on super fancy lavish offices now that everyone was suddenly happier at home.

Microsoft posted a revenue of $211.9 billion for 2023. Keeping in mind that the vast majority of the world’s population uses Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office and loads of online applications run on Microsoft Azure, the economic impact of Microsoft’s products is probably counted in trillions of dollars.

Comparing this to countries with the same ballpark energy consumption, Azerbaijan’s GDP was about $78 billion, Slovakia’s GDP was around $127 billion, and Iceland’s GDP was approximately $30 billion in 2023.

The economic output of Google and Microsoft by far exceeds these countries’ GDPs, highlighting the vast financial scale of these tech giants relative to their substantial electricity consumption.

Oh yeah, it’s crazy to think that! I don’t know where I would have gotten that idea, other than the article that OP linked that we’re all discussing.

Yes, training new AI models uses a bunch of power, so does building out any new infrastructure. Atleast Microsoft and Google use a far high percentage of renewable power than most other industries.

Don’t buy something, and a factory doesn’t need to run to produce it. It’s not privilege, it’s called following a chain of cause and effect.

It was the Stack Overflow developer survey I believe

As of last year ~70% of software developers were using copilot or a similar AI assistant. The legal field has seen a drop off in junior hires because of AI assistants. Snapchat’s AI filters and tools have long been a huge draw for that platform (and then copied by everyone else to avoid bleeding users), and Bing saw massive user growth after integrating OpenAI.

AI has problems and limitations but it’s absurd to think there’s no demand for it just because it’s pushed by annoying people. Everything with hype will get pushed by annoying people.

What the fuck do you guys think factories do? Just run for no reason? Where do you think the stuff you own, use, and consume comes from?

You also use Gmail and force Google to run their servers to power it.

Reducing your carbon footprint as much as possible is important, but it’s absurd to get mad at companies that power 90% of the world’s businesses for using a bunch of power to do so. It takes power to do those things. Get mad at the companies who are over consuming relative to their peers and those that are driving demand towards unattainable activities. Just getting mad at people for moving and using energy is absurd.

They only do that because they project it to be profitable, i.e. they project demand for it.

It’s also ridiculous to claim that people don’t want it just because you don’t.

No, it’s not.

Them making money implies that they are being paid to use power, which is true. Their absolute carbon footprint is irrelevant given that most of what the carbon they use is at the request of someone else. The metric to judge them on is their carbon footprint relevant to peers.

I.e. it’s not fair to judge a cab company for driving someone somewhere (judge the person choosing to hire a cab), but it is fair to judge them if they use gas guzzlers instead of EVs.

It makes more sense than trying to build Master Chiefs. Robot powered body armour sounds awesome, but in reality it’s a lot more efficient to avoid getting hit then to try and take hits and keep moving, especially if you’re a rich country with an advantage in micropocessing resources (assuming Taiwan doesn’t fall).

What they’re talking about isn’t crazy either, build out a platform that can handle robust military comms, connect it to a modern military information network, and then have local machine learning capabilities to handle local on site applications.

I mean, even just a bunch of soldiers in a line with networked helmets would create a line array of microphones that could theoretically be used to figure out where enemy fire is coming from / how many people are shooting at them, what type of gun is firing at them, how much they have left, etc. If humans today can pick out where a sniper might be shooting them from, Im willing to bet a computer connected to an array of different soldiers’ sensors will be able to do it not too long for now.

I’m waiting. A screenshot, video, link to the GitHub file, etc. will do.

If you get enough words out I suppose you really can convince yourself that you’ve made a coherent point when all you’ve done is made up different scenarios and missed the point.

You’ve successfully raised my self awareness in that I’m now aware that if someone else makes up a scenario where they explicitly can’t read, they could draw wild conclusions and get offended.

Given their reaction thinking that it was politics to correct, I find the idea the idea that it was an innocent translation issue a little hard to believe.

It’s not my opinion, it’s an objective flaw with the analogy where the comparison doesn’t entirely work. It’s not a big deal, by their nature analogies tend to be imperfect.

I found both sides rather aggressive to be honest. The implication that the use of “he” implies that the author assumes every user is male comes with an implied accusation of some form of misogyny.

No, it didn’t. Go read the PR, it’s extremely polite. I in fact, would challenge you to try and think of a more polite and less accusatory way of bringing up the same issue. I can’t.

Furthermore, the “generic he” has also been acceptable English for centuries, and has only been starting to be phased out in the past few decades.

Yeah, you know what else has only been around for the past “few” decades? Literally every single computer and piece of software ever made, you know what literally none of them do? Refer to their users as “he”.

You want to make it sound like it’s a simple ESL mistake? That’s fine you’re welcome to believe that, but do you know how I respond to translation mistakes when I’m speaking a foreign language? I laugh and say oops, sorry, my mistake I’ll fix that. I don’t say “don’t bring your politics into this”.

I’m sorry but you are making up a fantasy to try and believe that the author wasn’t being an explicit asshole.

Lmao, bruh. Your inability to read properly is not my problem.

Again, name a time you think you need to use the word “he” in a software instruction or label and I’ll point out how you don’t. Don’t worry, we’ll wait for you to think of one.

And again, I didn’t say they should be fired for making that mistake, I said that’s a junior ass mistake to make. I said they should be fired for being childish, immature, and defensive in the face of valid criticism. You might want to reflect on how childish, immature, and defensive you’re being in response to calling someone else that.