> On a large enought scale, it creates global warming on it's own.
Any amount of energy we can ever generate from nuclear is trivial compared to the insolation. Average daily insolation on Earth is 6 kWh/m^2. Earth area is 5.1e+14 m^2. This means we get 3e+15 kWh daily from sun, or 1.1e+18 kWh annually. On the other hand, we produce 2e+11 kWh electricity annually. This means that solar insolation is 7 orders of magnitude larger than our electricity production.
Which is why I mentioned that it will be a problem in the future, not today. Imagine all of India airconed. And it's also why I mentioned albedo. That will drastically increase the sun insolation effect, today a lot of the suns energy is reflected back into space. This will change, especially with solar panels.
No, it won't ever become a problem. 7 orders of magnitude means we get 10 million times more energy from sun than we generate in electricity. Bringing rest of the world energy use to US/Europe standard will at worst result in 100 times more waste heat generation than now (and almost surely much less than that), which is still far cry from 10 million.
Yes, it's obvious. There's no way a single person will consume as much energy as the whole country does today. These days, the energy use per capita goes down in developed countries, so the current energy consumption growth is mostly due to poorer places catching up.
You seem very sure about how humanity will look like in 500 years and how much energy it would use.
Obviously you consider the concept of Type II and Type III civilizations impossible and ridiculous, since they would use more than 20 orders of magnitude more energy than we do.
I consider talking about Type II and Type III civilizations ridiculous in the context of discussing potential increase in the use of air conditioning in India.
I see. So when you said "No, it won't ever(x) become a problem", it was like one of those ads "Unlimited(x) data", with the fine print "(x) unlimited is meant to be understood as less than 10 GB per month", or in your case "(x) ever means at most 200 years from now"
Note, that when I said "all of India being airconned" I literally meant all of India, as in the whole subcontinent being a single giant city with 100 billion people living in it. And on that scale you need energy not only for airconn, but food/water/waste disposal/... But I guess you exclude that possibility too. It's understandable through why you would just imagine that I was talking about making India into something like present day Europe. In general people find it really hard to imagine anything radically different than the status quo.
Just to add to the other comment, I suggest you look up what the temperatures of the nighttime side of Mercury are (which receives max solar radiation intensity about 10x of Earth at ~14.4 kW/m^2 vs our max of ~1.4 kW/m^2 outside of atmosphere and ~1 kW/m^2 at the surface). Now reflect on the relative importance of absolute energy input vs retention.
> The first complication came in 2008, when a group of scientists, in an effort to more precisely map out the evolutionary relationships among animals on the tree of life, identified comb jellies rather than sponges as the earliest animals.
Interestingly, comb jellies have RGB lights. They were dropped in later animals, probably many viewed them as too tacky, but nature truly was on to something:
> The first complication came in 2008, when a group of scientists, in an effort to more precisely map out the evolutionary relationships among animals on the tree of life, identified comb jellies rather than sponges as the earliest animals
I really hate this wording, because it gives the wrong idea, namely that Comb Jellies as they exist now are the same as they existed 600-700 million years ago.
Not necessarily lasting physical damage, but flickering CRTs, or for that matter flickering fluorescent or LED lights can cause headaches, nausea, ...
I've certainly noticed it myself, using 75 Hz CRTs made me feel tired after a few hours, unlike 85 Hz.
> In 1989, my colleagues and I compared fluorescent lighting that flickered 100 times a second with lights that appeared the same but didn’t flicker. We found that office workers were half as likely on average to experience headaches under the non-flickering lights.
Except in this metaphor, in terms of features, performance, and sheer quality of experience, a Rolls Royce would be something like LimeChat, and Slack is a Ford Pinto
Truly spoken like someone who isn’t aware that most IRC clients, including LimeChat, will happily display images, including gifs, but for some reason feels confident and qualified enough in their uninformed opinion to be belligerent about it on the internet.
Funny how a google images search for limechat fails to find a single screenshot with inline images. But I'll take your word for it.
I guess that settles it. People will dump Slack and Discord on mass and move to the amazing IRC clients like LimeChat which are so much more efficient. it's well known that the number one thing people look at when choosing software is how efficient they are. Nobody cares about looks or features, just about CPU cycles.
If people cared about looks or features, Slack certainly wouldn’t come out on top.
No, what people care about are primarily network effects. They'll use whatever someone in the company decided to use (frequently Slack because it’s always been Slack since someone back in 2013 decided it was the hip choice, before it even had a desktop client), and they’ll put up with whatever dogshit client they’re served, because it’s out of their hands.
In the last two companies I worked in it was us low level employees which were begging IT for Slack, until they reluctantly accepted (because of costs and of fears about hosting confidential chats on 3rd parties). Nobody was begging for LimeChat or IRC.
And what about Discord? It's almost exclusively used by people in their homes, there is no company pushing it down their throats.
There are network effects outside of companies "pushing [software] down [employees'] throats." Consider, for instance, that large groups of gamers already use Discord?
Sure, but there are multiple "OpenGL on Metal/Vulkan" projects. Because it's possible to do so without all that much of a performance loss.
OpenGL effectively should die... but it's not going to be in favor of raw Metal/Vulkan, except in rare cases. Most people already use engines that abstract most of that away, and Metal/Vulkan are in basically every way better for those engines.
bfloat16 sounds like it could be supported with minimal changes to existing floating point units, maybe with just some improved microcode.
FB's approach on the other side requires entirely redesigned and separate execution units. That's harder to justify, that silicon will remain dark for non-DL usage.
It doesn't work that way. Aircons dump unusable waste heat into the environment. On a large enought scale, it creates global warming on it's own.
Same with solar panels, they change the albedo of the earth surface, and this will be a huge problem in the future.