Around 2012, our family got a few LED light bulbs partly because I was intrigued by them. They were still pretty expensive at the time, but we got three to put in the most used fixtures. Fast forward to last year, now that LED bulbs are everywhere, and we finally did a huge overhaul of our lights, replacing all the CFLs that were showing signs of being about to die, with LEDs. The old ones from 2012 still work fine to this day, keep in mind they were in the most commonly used lamps in our home and got more than their fair share of being turned on and off in rapid succession, left on for long periods, and general abuse you'd expect in a house with a lot of people in it, but they still work perfectly. BUT, we've replaced like five or six of the NEW ones over the last year and a half they've been in use! The failure mode is almost always that they would start flickering, and because we prefer not to live in a disco studio, we'd have to get them replaced ASAP. We've even had one of the replacements fail in less than a year! And it's not like we got them from the dollar store, we got the middle shelf ones at the hardware store, and while they were cheaper than the original ones from 2012, but they weren't *that* cheap. What the hell is going on? You'd think over the last ten years, they would have gotten better as the technology matured, but it seems to me that they've gotten much worse. The second biggest selling point of LEDs after efficiency was that they last way longer than any other type of light, but the new ones we've gotten don't even last as long as an incandescent anymore!

also being discussed on [MeFi](https://www.metafilter.com/196651/I-guess-thats-unavoidable-if-your-rotations-count-per-orbit-is-a-prime) and [HN](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32975173)

When you think of systematic racism, you need to be thinking of the subtle stuff *as well as* the more brazen stuff like restaurants banning non-whites from entering or people of colour getting longer prison sentences for the same crime. Actually, the subtle stuff is insidious, because people don't think it's racism. Reminds me of Google classifying black people as gorillas in their photo app. People were saying "oh well it's just a limitation of the technology, it was just an accident" no! That's now how AI works! What happened was they didn't consider black people/indigenous people/etc worthy enough to put enough of them in the training data. That's not better than them intentionally doing it! inb4 "the technology is still immature/in beta, they'll get better at identifying people of colour in the future!" That's not how that works either! You have a responsibility to be inclusive to the best of your ability from day one! If you're not doing that, not exaggerating, you're better off not making the product at all. And it's not like a giant tech company didn't have the resources to make it inclusive. These aren't pretend arguments I'm making up either. People genuinely say those things and think they're valid excuses for this.

Well, they are.

cross-posted from: https://szmer.info/post/138077 > > In the early hours of September 15, Ethereum completed "The Merge – the long-awaited transition from its original proof-of-work consensus mechanism to proof-of-stake. > > > > Later that day, SEC Chairman Gary Gensler pointed to the staking mechanism as a signal that an asset might be a security as determined by the [Howey test](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEC_v._W._J._Howey_Co.). > > 🍿