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Comment by leobg | Hacker News Reader

DIY Perks [1] has a good tutorial on how to make a super bright LED panel from LED strips. Quite easily, actually.

Been using one of those in my office for the last eight years or so. I use a server PSU for power.

I was surprised to see how bright it is when I once went outside while it was on. Not only was my window the brightest in the entire street by far. But it actually illuminated the trees around my window.

If I was to build it again - and especially for a place like living room - , I would build it so as to also simulate sunset. That is to say, that it will automatically lower the brightness and shift to a warmer spectrum in the evening. Otherwise, this thing messes with your biorhythm and gets you out of sync with normal daylight hours very quickly.

[1] https://youtu.be/jLia59KfkSw

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He also created a version that simulates sunlight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bqBsHSwPgw

Came here to mention both DIY Perks videos, as well as to say that the ability to change colour temp is practically vital.

Yep -- I love this video. The detail he went into on this is remarkable; it taught me a few things about the limits of pretend sunlight as a photographer, and why some pretences work and others don't.

You should also take into account the costs associated with running and powering the COB led he used for that sun light.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBV-1VNWscA

Since the OP is quite courageous about claiming someone "inventing" this in 2017, I'd like to highlight your prior art:

> Been using one of those in my office for the last eight years or so. I use a server PSU for power.

And as you mention, articles on it have been circulating for even longer.

It's Yudkowsky from LessWrong, he is actually a quite insightful thinker, but his disciples claim stuff like this all the time. LessWrong is an extreme echo chamber.

For me the breaking point was Roko's Basilisk, a self-proclaimed "most-dangerous idea of our time".

Are you honestly claiming that the author believes that Yudkowsky was literally the first person in history to suggest making lights brighter?

Also, you should read anything Yudkowsky himself has written about Roko’s basilisk. He’s never claimed that it could work, or that it’s dangerous at all.

(“Why did he ban it then?” Because he wanted to prevent it from inspiring an infohazard brainstorming session that could produce a real danger, and he apparently hadn’t heard about the Streisand effect.)

Yudkowsky claimed that the exact basilisk as described by Roko wouldn't work, but he also believes that something like it would.

Sort of. He believes that if people try to come up with infohazards and then immediately spread them, there’s a nonzero chance that they succeed. It’s unlikely, but still not something to encourage.

(This is not the same thing as “being certain that a minor modification of Roko’s basilisk would produce an evil time-travelling AI,” to be clear.)

This kind of utter gibberish is exactly why people don't take LessWrong seriously.

“Ideas can be harmful” is gibberish?

The amount of self-importance on display is what makes it sound like gibberish.

  A: "I have the most ground-breaking idea ever!"
  B: "Okay, let's hear it?"
  A: "No, it's too dangerous, it may well destroy the world, but trust
      me it's brilliant and completely novel."

It's a religion at that point.

How about bitcoin? It's not so much an idea as a piece of software, but being predicted on wasting energy it's going to do a lot of harm. That's an example of this class of game-theory based ideas.

I believe that there are other ideas like that, things that set up spirals that are a lot worse than just "destroy energy to make money". Obviously they're not going to be universally compelling, an idea that's dangerous like that in one context might be perfectly safe in another. It depends on the target audience.

> That's an example of this class of game-theory based ideas.

That's a good point on its own, but it's not a response. At no time did I or anyone here in this thread assert that "info hazards" do not exist. What is being discussed is whether it's worthwhile to be deferential to a person/community who is making claims of being in possession of an exceptionally catastrophic piece of information that by its nature would preclude public scrutiny on ethical grounds.

I don't think Yudkowsky is making that claim anywhere?

>At no time did I or anyone here in this thread assert that "info hazards" do not exist.

>What is being discussed is whether it's worthwhile to be deferential to a person who is making claims

It's honestly really not that clear what you're trying to discuss, certainly you haven't been making a clear statement like that. I don't think anyone is making claims of being in possession of such an infohazard for one thing, and if there were I don't think anyone would be saying you should be deferential towards someone who claimed to have one, sight unseen.

I think you're arguing with a bit of a straw man? Like no one is being all "let's be deferential towards Yudkowsky because he has the idea equivalent of a nuke". He doesn't, to the best of my knowledge, claim to have the idea equivalent of a nuke.

I assumed you were claiming that info-hazards don't exist because otherwise what exactly are you claiming?

Anyway, if that was your point, granted. Let's not be differential towards people who claim to have info-hazards, unless they can go into a room and make someone laugh themselves to death or something.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBWr1KtnRcI

He doesn't, to the best of my knowledge, claim to have the idea equivalent of a nuke.

Well, he isn't willing to reveal how he convinced his opponents to let the AI out of the box.

Yeah, but his win rate is probably not that much above control.

>>It's not so much an idea as a piece of software, but being predicted on wasting energy it's going to do a lot of harm. That's an example of this class of game-theory based ideas.

It's not a waste if the product the PoW generates is valued as equal to or greater than the cost of generating the PoW, and the market ensures that is the case, as miners cannot operating at a loss.

Where it can be socially harmful is when energy consumers don't pay for the cost of the negative externalities that the energy they purchase created in its generation, but that applies to all energy usage, not just that used in generating PoW.

You should know that costly signalling strategies are widely employed in nature because costly signals are reliable:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handicap_principle

Money laundering is useful but that doesn't mean it's good. A Ponzi scheme can generate wealth but it can't generate value. Wealth without value is maybe not wasteful, but it is harmful.

> Where it can be socially harmful is when energy consumers don't pay for the cost of the negative externalities that the energy they purchase created in its generation, but that applies to all energy usage, not just that used in generating PoW.

Bitcoin alone uses as much power as a medium-sized nation. The increased power usage has caused old fossil-fuel power plants to come back online.

1. There is no evidence that cryptocurrency is widely used to launder money

2. Money laundering can improve economic efficiency when the crimes that generate the illicit revenue are socially beneficial, as is the case when people in China escape the Communist government's capital controls, or when people in Venezuela escape their Communist government's steep inflation tax via mandates to use the state's fiat currency.

Even in ostensibly free societies, socially harmful laws that repress the right to voluntarily interact, like price controls on N95 masks that prolonged a shortage in them for months, or heavy taxation to pay the pensions of a bloated and over-paid public sector kleptocracy, can be socially beneficial to undermine.

So your deduction that money laundering or other forms of escape from institutional rules, is socially harmful, is overly simplistic. In some cases it is harmful, and in some cases it's beneficial.

3. Cryptocurrencies are by definition not ponzi schemes. You could argue they're speculative bubbles, but that is itself speculation.

>>Bitcoin alone uses as much power as a medium-sized nation.

Because it generates billions of dollars of currency a year, and its production is costly in energy and affordable in labor. The energy consumption of labor-intensive industries obfuscates the real energy requirements of those industries, by effectively outsourcing the energy consumption to the workers.

It generates zero dollars. Every dollar in all cryptocurrency markets comes directly from someone buying in. Claiming otherwise is basically a blatant lie.

It's not generating dollars. It's generating a digital asset that is worth something. Of course the value of any commodity is based on what people are willing to buy it for, so your observation in no way discredits the point, that Bitcoin mining is generating something that objectively, based on what the market is paying, has value.

Can you link me to when anyone on LessWrong has behaved like your "A"?

Now you've just generalised the statement until it becomes a truism. So you are now essentially claiming the statement is garbage because it is devoid of useful meaning.

From the article:

>Elevator pitch: Bring enough light to simulate daylight into your home and office.

>This idea has been shared in Less Wrong circles for a couple years. Yudkowsky wrote Inadequate Equilibria in 2017 where he and his wife invented the idea

Yes, I read the same article. Do you believe, based on a single word, that the author believes that literally zero people in the entire course of human history have ever suggested “brighter lights” until Yudkowsky came along?

I don't know who any of these people are, but that is exactly what the article says, so why should we not believe that that's what the author believes?

Because it’s far more likely that the author chose slightly wrong words that ended up conflating a specific invention with being the first human “to invent the idea” that “hey, brighter lights would be closer to obviously brighter daylight” only 5 years ago. I’d wager that the author realizes that more than half of adults today had that insight sometime prior to 2017.

Some people read websites the way they would read a math proof. One tiny error and the whole thing comes down. A more charitable reading is often perfectly appropriate.

If you are reading it as a math proof, I am only disputing the claim when the idea was invented.

As I don't bring up the rest of the article's points, I am neither supporting nor refuting them with that particular comment.

Math (or actually, logic) is a bit more resilient than you make it out to be.

The LessWrong community is known for self-citations all over the place and heavy use of jargon created by themselves, and words redefined as terms-of-art. In light of this, if a member claims that one of their prominent figures "invented" something, you better take the claim at face value.

On the flip side, interpreting everything you read through your own lenses of experience and bias instead of assuming that the author meant what they wrote seems fraught with pitfalls.

Use of the word "invention" is usually a red flag. I've certainly done a number of things I never had knowledge of any prior art on, but I never said I "invented" those things.

If I wanted to, I'd probably go and research prior art first before making use of the word.

Also, I'd say that the article author is not referring just to brighter light as the invention, but rather as the use of extremely bright light indoors for different psychological effects.

No one in the parent posts has said anything about "literally zero people".

The OP made a claim ("invented in 2017"), and this very claim is being criticized.

I found perplexing that you interpret the very same words in almost opposite ways.

I cant find it again but I read an article about how brightness goes up with technology and human spend roughly the same proportion of income on light. Kind of disproving the led efficiency is good for the environment argument. Not revolutionary, better to break that pattern.

You contradict yourself.

If humans spend same proportion of income on lumens, and you get more lumens per watt, then you will use less wattage per the same proportion of income. Ergo LEDs are more efficient.

Are you thinking about the cost of the physical lights? Because what is being discussed is the cost of energy.

Watt-hours are energy. If cost of energy is decreasing and you get more lumens per watt with LEDs then the benefits stack, they do not cancel.

If energy price is going down, then even more watts are being bought (since spending is fixed).

Not all those watts are going into lighting. If spending is fixed on lighting but total expenditure is up that means energy is being bought for things other than lighting. Kirchoff's law applied to the grid in toto.

Adds up considering the proliferation of computing devices, particularly cryptomining.

[removed by author as off-topic]

In hindsight, I should not have included the comment about Roko's Basilisk. It was really nothing more than a personal observation that had nothing to do with the topic at hand. As a result, this thread attracted a lot of people who have very strong opinions on an off-topic matter, and for that I'm sorry. It muddled an already tense discussion on whether any sane person should take the claim of inventing brightly lit homes in 2017 literally or not. For what it's worth, I would have deleted the Basilisk portion if people hadn't already responded to it.

Cool, I didn't even know comments could be deleted! I appreciate your reaction.

Yudkowsky says he and his wife did it in 2014, so it sounds as if it was actually pretty much at the same time as said prior art.

(Also, they were specifically doing it as a treatment for SAD; I don't think Yudkowsky claims novelty for anything other than the idea that SAD might be effectively treated by having very bright indoor lighting all the time rather than e.g. a lightbox that you sit next to for half an hour a day.)

The Paris hotel in Las Vegas has had this for at least 20 years. When you're inside at 3am it feels like daytime. I think the idea is to keep you awake and gambling at all times.

Light as a treatment for SAD has been looked at since 1984, all day exposure is hardly a new idea.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abst...

Right, but for some reason the SAD light boxes you could get produced much less light, so they weren't effective for her.

In 1984, to get the amount of light put out by ~250-300 watts of LEDs in 2022 would have required the incandescent light array to come perilously close to the limit of what it is safe to pull from a single outlet continuously in the US, which is 1500 watts. (You can transiently pull 1800 from a standard wall outlet, which is used by hair dryers, but you're not supposed to pull it continuously for hours at a time.) It also would have functioned as a full-on space heater (that was on continuously, not on a thermostat as needed), and very careful attention would need to be paid to cooling this massive array.

So, I'm gonna read between some lines here, but: I imagine earlier efforts would then by necessity have produced less light, because it's actually a lot easier to deal with ~400-500 watts of incandescent light than 1500 watts of incandescent light. 400-500 I think you could just about get away with putting a diffusion screen in front of them and making sure the enclosure has a lot of passive air flow. At 1500, if you're going to enclose this into a reasonably-sized product you're going to need active cooling with fans.

And there is a little noticed and rarely talked about weakness I've seen in several science fields where I've dug into a history of papers, which is that once one investigator picks the parameters of an investigation, it tends to "stick". If the first scientist investigating "Light therapy for SAD" and picked a 500 watt incandescent setup, it is extremely likely that many further papers will try to match their lumens setup, in the interests of trying to keep the papers informing each other. The entire therapy may live and die on the contingent conditions the first couple of researchers happened to pick, even after the entire lighting landscape has changed and it's practical to blast 5 times the light per watt and have time-varying light temperature now, which would have been even more difficult in 1984. (Conceivable, with some sort of rotating filter screen in front of it, but now you're cutting in to your light output even more, unlike modern LEDs which give you more options in dealing with this.)

By the 01980s you could have easily been using fluorescents, which went mainstream a quarter century earlier, so I think your stickiness hypothesis is the more likely problem. This had been puzzling me! Thank you for providing the likely solution!

Maybe fluorescents with the idea that the narrow spectrum of light produced was less likely to be effective?

Well, I mean, SAD lightboxes do use fluorescents.

I spoke to a physiatrist who considered full spectrum light to be essential in the light boxes. Don’t know about the actual research on the topic.

The entire market of SAD lights was fluorescents pre-LEDs, they can be made just as "full spectrum" as LEDs are (by which I mean neither is capable of true full spectrum, just an approximation with appropriate phosphors).

Incandescents can actually produce a continuous spectrum, so I am guess this is and was just misuse of the term.

Yeah, I assumed you were saying that the physiatrist was insisting on the use of incandescents for that reason. I don't know why someone would interpret you as saying that LEDs were superior to fluorescents, since obviously neither one produces full-spectrum light!

One doesn't need to make lights out of led strips, shop lights have transitioned to LED.

$20 each, https://www.harborfreight.com/5000-lumen-4-ft-led-hanging-sh... 5k lumens, 60w

I also came to post the DIY perks video about simulated sunlight, the effect of parallel rays really changes the geometric mood of the room.

It really does help.

Just don't keep working into the night under them, because whoa boy - talk about sleep disruption. Those nice bright lights make it surprisingly easy to work until 6am and not even realize it.

I have mine hooked up to a remote so I can turn them all off at once. Either propped in the corners of the room or bounced off the ceiling. They are much too bright to have them shining directly.

Since you seem to be a heavy user, and if you don’t mind me asking: Has your eye sight deteriorated in those eight years, and how is your sleep quality?

No problems with eyesight. No glasses or anything. I see the light as basically replacing the brightness I would be getting if I wasn’t sitting inside my office instead of outdoors.

And sleep: I don’t have any trouble sleeping, no. But as I mentioned, using a such a bright light in the evening will fuck with your day/night rhythm. If I’m not diligent to turn off those lights at sunset, I’ll easily be working up until two or three in the morning. If that happens, the problem isn’t that I wouldn’t be able to sleep (I will) or that I would sleep badly (I won’t). It’s just that it shifts my rhythm out of sync with everybody else.

Thank you!

Yuji does indeed make the good stuff, just really in a consumer-friendly form factor unless you count the low-power bulbs.

For your sunset approximation, you could add some warmer ones and fade over; they also have some dual-color strips with two different color temperatures evenly spread to allow for seamless mixing.

Exactly. You’d probably need fewer of the warm colored strips, because at the time of day when you will want to use them you’ll also want less light anyway.

While true, the ability to work in a warm white atmosphere is a benefit not to be ignored.

(I'm using a 20W/m 5m strip of BC-series 1900K for my living room, along with a 10W 4000K bulb hanging from the ceiling.)

I was going to suggest diy perks but thought you were going to link his artificial sun video [1]. I’ve been wanting to build one but not sure where I could fit since it requires a bit more space then a bright led build would. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6bqBsHSwPgw

Jesus Christ. I hadn't actually seen this one. Wow!

You could say he's going overboard in this one, with that fish tank sky simulator thing. But then: How much do we spend on airfare and lodging just to wake up to this kind of light? What an amazing improvement in quality of life this can be.

Thanks for sharing this one!

I really think it could boost a persons mood on a dark day his looks so incredible I would love to try it and even just brighten up one room. But I think if a guy were to make these as fake skylights you would really have a business.

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