How much electricity is conserved by turning off the light bulbs for 200ms every few seconds VS how much energy is expanded by running a webcam + CV program constantly? It’s probably less energy efficient overall.
Turning the bulb off for just 200ms might be increasing energy usage by itself. I know in older bulbs you had to leave them off for so many seconds/minutes before you gained any savings by turning them off. The amount of energy it takes to get them going far exceeds the amount needed to keep them running. There is also the problem of the bulb wearing out faster because of the constant switching on and off.
IIRC for incandescent it was about 1/3s to break even. For fluorescents it is likely higher but don't have a source (it may not be an issue if the starter is smart enough to realize that it isn't needed or not needed as much). However there is going to be extra wear and tear on these bulbs which makes the savings offset by extra bulb replacement. For LED the cost of turning off should be very near to zero so this would likely actually save resources.
Of course this idea is awful for other reasons. But it is very funny.
For a modern (led) bulb there is effectively zero wasted energy by turning it off and on, but it depends how you define waste. Does light emitted after the switch is turned off count as waste? (Most bulbs take a few hundred ms to turn off)
Note that this has nothing to do with saving energy and everything to do with reducing wear on the bulb from on/off cycles.
> The operating life of CFLs is more affected by the number of times they are switched on and off. You can generally extend the life of a CFL bulb more by switching it on and off less frequently than if you simply use it less.
> In any case, the relatively higher "inrush" current required lasts for half a cycle, or 1/120th of a second. The amount of electricity consumed to supply the inrush current is equal to a few seconds or less of normal light operation. Turning off fluorescent lights for more than 5 seconds will save more energy than will be consumed in turning them back on again.
For this specific discussion about turning lights off while you blink, yes, you do actually burn more electricity in addition to wearing the bulb out if you're cycling it off for just 200ms.
But for real world use by normal people, turning off for 5 seconds will save energy, and turning it off for 15 minutes will save money.
In the real world people don't care if their CFLs burn out and get replaced with LEDs because CFLs are comparatively terrible and you can get a higher quality LED bulb for about $5.
True, I was just trying to explain this to my partner who didn’t want to throw out still functional CFLs. In this case the value of the estimated remaining life of the CFL + cost of new LED is less than the expected power savings of the LED.
I submit that there are vanishingly small number of individuals who would spend more on bulbs than what those bulbs would save in electric costs over their lifetime.
That's going to depend on the design of the bulb. If it's off for the length of a blink, it probably doesn't need to strike again. Or you could dim it to 10% for the duration instead of turning it off.
But the other factor is dealing with the delayed response of the phosphor. Can you actually turn the light output off and on fast enough?
It’s been my experience that people who call things uninteresting are merely sharing their own unusual disinterest in something otherwise interesting. It’s also been my experience that said people are usually the most uninteresting in the room.
Also, I don’t know what it says about you that you went from effectively “trees falling in the forest” to the Hacker News infrastructure to defend your point about fun, thought-provoking idioms, but I do know it’s remarkably uninteresting.
Fair enough. By calling my comment uninteresting, have you also rendered yourself to likely be the most uninteresting person in the room, by the logic in your first paragraph? If so, who wins the title of the most uninteresting person in the room?
You initially would for having claimed something interesting is not, however you also started a discussion which is pretty interesting, including your own further comment, which also adds interest to the situation. Paradoxically you two now may be the most interesting here.
Tell that to Schrödinger. Even questions that seem utterly pointless and mundane at first glance can lead to captivating insights if explored at depth.
A lot of discoveries of interesting stuff resulted from something uninteresting being considered interesting and deeply contemplated. Others look and say "what an idiot, spending such time on such uninteresting x", I say, "you're only my self-imagined disagreeable other, I'm your god, your consciousness is my consciousness, what say you now?" and they would say nothing since the puppeteer has been revealed and there is nothing left to say. I guess this is why God will never prove he exists.
My point in bringing up the light meter is that in these "tree falls in the forest" thought experiments, it's taken for granted that your own biological senses are an absolute source of truth.
But your eyes are just another set of equipment, similar to a light meter. Just because your eyes are attached to the rest of your body, it doesn't make them inherently more trustworthy than equipment that's not part of your body.
However, our expectation is that a tree falling in the forest could kill us even if we didn’t hear and see it. That’s why we look when we cross the road. The fact that we’re subject to all sorts of things that can cause us harm without sensing them makes the case a lot more compelling that the light meter exists when we blink.
Lamp lights are not dependent on whether you can see them or not, unless they are programmed to.
The state of an individual person’s consciousness has no bearing on whether the sun is shining or not.
Refrigerator lights turn off when the door closes. It’s usually easy to find the mechanism that handles this and manually trigger the light to switch off.
Regarding God, I assume you mean the Abrahamic god. There are many culturally specific deities and superstitions and there doesn’t seem to be any verifiable reason why one would be “realer” than any other.
You're assuming any of this has an existence independent of your mind, that more than the present moment exists, and a whole lot of other things.
You make reasonable assumptions, but proving them is hard, because any attempt you make to prove them still end up being filtered through your potentially unreliable senses.
In practice we decide to just accept that a material world with semireliable senses exists, because the alternative is no certainty at all.
The alternative without falling into skepticism is idealism. But scientific explanations of many things like disease, chemistry and physical forces are very compelling compared to the world just appears the way it does as ideas in our mind.
The 'issue' is that these are essentially 'commonsense' answers. By definition it's impossible to empirically study the unobservable.
Though of course whether these questions are at all interesting - after all the answer has no effect on anything or it would be observable - is another matter.
The problem with this argument is that it's begging the question. You're assuming that the Universe is behaving in a way that is consistent with how it appears.
There is no possible experiment you could in principle do to verify that the universe stays the same when you're not looking. We can say that the universe behaves consistently as though it does, and I'm not saying that doesn't matter, but it's not quite the same thing. Furthermore we can't tell whether the universe is tricking us some of the time, or all of the time, or never.
What if the world is just a dream? Then an individual person's consciousness has a massive influence on the weather. And there would be new arguments for the existence of God.
What would you call the 'God' worshipped by Christians, the many by Hindus, etc., if not deities?
We sentient beings are fortunately capable of discussing abstract thought, things not known to exist, and even things known not to exist; we can give them names without requiring that they 'are', and we can discuss what it means 'to be' anyway, and whether those things 'are' after all merely by virtue of our discussion.
And did you even read the rest of that sentence? Other commenter is basically 'on your side'.
It's atheism like this that makes me describe myself (dissociatively) as agnostic, frankly.
Amazing. It reminds me of the car company that built rain detection in their car and turned on your wipers so you don’t have to.
I don’t remember which manufacturer it was but their ad was hilarious “think of what you can do with that extra time you would have used to turn on your wipers”
This tells the system to *activate the wipers*, as well as adjust wiper speed and frequency based on the intensity of the precipitation combined with the vehicle’s speed.
I have it on my BMW. It works great. There is still a similar looking control as you would have with a conventional system but instead of wiper speed it is basically a "sensitivity" or a "desired dryness". Here in the PNW rain can be a light mist or proper raindrops and may change minute to minute. So I just turn it on, set it to something in the middle and the wipers wipe when necessary. I rarely have to touch it again after turning it on.
Compare this to my old Toyota that just had low-med-high. Low was still moving constantly, the only intermittent was a manual "mist". This meant my wipers were running way too much even on low or I had to hit the mist every 10-20 seconds.
It's great (have it on my Subaru). It is particularly useful at that wet road or drizzle stage when more water comes from other vehicles than the sky. At that level it might wipe only 3 to 6 times a minute. It certainly removes that over-compensating dry wiping you get without it. I used my older Toyota Land cruiser on a road trip and constantly adjusting the intermittent interval in the drizzle was a pain.
Yeah, I almost never touch my wipers. Only exceptions I can think of is if there’s a very very suddenly change in the speed/volume of rain falling, I’m stopped for an extended period (the automatic speed adjustment works better when you’re moving), or if a bug or something has hit the windscreen and I need to squirt to clean it. That sentence was a real effort to go down memory lane though, it’s just not something I really have to think about anymore.
The typical stick for controlling the wiper speeds usually only has a few different speeds, there's no fine-grained control of getting the exact speed to match the rain. You're forced to switch between too slow and too fast. Too fast creates a jarring sound/vibration, too slow means the water starts building up on the window, causing visibility issues.
as an infrequent driver, I have difficulties splitting my attention between driving and dealing with controls like headlights and wipers, so anything that automate that is great
My dad's car was doing this at least as far back as 2003.
He thought it was so cool. When he first got the car, he was like, "Watch this!" and squirted a whole water bottle at the windshield just to make them come on.
Sixteen-year-old me recorded this as peak dorky daddom in my memory.
My 10 year old BMW does this and it works perfectly. It's much nicer than fiddling with my wipers constantly. Tesla isn't blazing any trails here, they are just stubborn and won't buy an off the shelf system that already works.
after driving a car with this (and automatic headlights), it's not as a time saved, but rather attention that can be kept on the driving and not fiddling with the controls;
Be careful with this one. If you see a house/apartment where lights are repeatedly being turned on/off that’s generally considered a signal that they are in distress and you might get first responders dispatched to you curtesy of a neighbor who saw this and called 911.
Also I honestly can’t think of a worst way to try to save money, especially after you factor in the power it might take to do the facial recognition. There would be a good chance that you actually lose money unless you are in a hanger full of Na lights.
Edit: 5 bulbs in a room that each consume 10 watts (fairly generous), people blink up to 20k times a day, an average blink is 100 ms. So that’s 2000 seconds of blink time or just about 33 minutes. 33*5*10 is 28 Watt-hours saved per day or about 0.84 kWh per month. At the rate of $0.20 per kWh you just saved $0.16 a month.
But wait you have latency to detect the blink so let’s cut that figure by 15%. And since we don’t know how long a blink will last (some are shorter) you also need to reduce the off time by one standard deviation of a blink so to be safe let’s make the off period after detection last only 60 ms. So now we are at $0.096 per month. And now we also need to run multiple cameras and facial detection which has to run continuously. Unless you can do that under 28*0.6=16.8 Wh per day you are losing money.
Maybe you could generate power by harnessing the wind generated by moving your eyelashes? Mount tiny little nano-windmills on each of them, with accelerometers, so you don't even need to use computer vision. Every time you blink it would generate just enough power to send a signal to your lightbulb.
Or knock down your roof so that the moonlight alone illuminates your area. In 20-30 generations you will evolve huge eyes perfectly adapted for this and save tons of generational wealth.
Unless I had established the blinking light code with my neighbors in advance, how would blinking lights inform me any more if I knew my neighbors or not? Unless they were blinking out S.O.S. it would not occur to me that it might be a sign of distress.
In what situation would you switch the lights on and off constantly to signal you need help? The only situation I can think of is that you're somehow too injured to make noise or move, but you're able to reach the light switch?
I tried Googling it and can't find anything anywhere, neither as some official police recommendation, or even anyone talking about it as a commonly understood signal.
Only circumstance I can imagine is if someone is kidnapped and they flash lights in an SOS pattern? Seems pretty unlikely they'd be by a street-facing room in the first place though.
Right. But then you’re hoping the kidnapper doesn’t notice you? Which means they’re not there? Which means you could just shout. And how can you use the light switch if you’re (presumably) tied up anyway? Alexa?
I have heard of it in the context of domestic violence when a person locks themselves in a room without a phone and is trying to signal to the outside world that they are in trouble.
Right. In the case they’re locked in a room without their phone and the domestic abuser doesn’t also notice them turning the light on and off, I guess it would be an ok strategy? But again, that seems pretty farfetched. I have heard of cases where they call 911 and “order a pizza” and the operator catches on though.
I think if they're in a locked room being noticed by the domestic abuser isn't a huge concern of theirs since they have a locked door between them and the abuser.
> too injured to make noise or move, but you're able to reach the light switch?
Sounds more likely to me, than someone getting a webcam and writing a computer program that switches off the lights when eyelids closed because he he blinks! :-)
Yeah I get that. But knowing the HN crowd I think it’s worth doing the math and pointing out how playing with this could result in unintended consequences.
I think the simplest fix for that would be to also track the eyes (and view range) of everyone else within a reasonable distance. My cat could do that in Perl in 5 minutes and 3 lines.
>Be careful with this one. If you see a house/apartment where lights are repeatedly being turned on/off that’s generally considered a signal that they are in distress
because of the supernatural events taking place inside!
It's fun and all but is it really practical? If you have more than two people in a room, it should turn off only when both are blinking at the same time, which should basically be never?
It's clearly not practical. I would assume that the "smart" overhead consumes a lot more electricity than you could save by turning them off for a couple of minutes a day. But it is really fun.
Not for LED bulbs, as far as I know. That’s certainly true for incandescent, but I don’t think this experiment would work well with incandescent anyway.
Variable brightness with an LED is achieved using pulse width modulation, turning it on and off REALLY fast. So no, this won't have any effect on the life of the LED :)
This is resume-driven-development, except with IoT rather than K8S, Terraform, and AI. Shard a DB w/ 1000 records, put your 3 page website in a Terraform config transpiling down to an Azure .yaml config defining K8S micro-services running in the Cloud - the machine spins up every time the lights blink out for 200MS!
Also: How much electricity is conserved by turning off the light bulbs for 200ms every few seconds VS how much energy is expanded by running a webcam + CV program constantly? It’s probably less energy efficient overall.
I think most of the latency was actually in acquiring the image from the camera and sending the on/off command over the network. Processing was pretty fast, IIRC.
Yes, there was a very simple OpenCV-based blink detection program on my computer that I repurposed to control my bulbs with. When it detects a blink, it turns the bulb off for 200ms, which is long enough for me to not perceive any darkness.
The part that wears out from cycling often is the ballast of the bulb. I imagine these smart lights are in the bulb's ballast, so sending the "off" command isn't de-energizing the ballast of the lightbulbs.
If you were doing it on a smart light switch that was feeding 120V to the ballasts I do imagine it would impart some additional wear and tear to the bulbs. I'm not sure how much additional wear and tear it would be on an LED, I know the main thing that wears out on a florescent is the starting circuit which needs to bring the energy of the bulb enough to start the arc which wears out over time.
It's very odd to me that bulbs don't come in two parts: Ballast and LED. That way, we wouldn't have to keep buying and throwing away the perfectly good part when the other one broke.
Ballasts are only needed on fluorescent lamps (because they have negative resistance, so if you run one by itself without a current limiter, it'll consume more and more current until it explodes)
You could use two oppositely polarized lights, and wear polarized glasses, so you could switch the lights in the room on and off individually for each eye.
You could also use computer vision to mute the speaker when you covered your ears, and mute the microphone when you covered your mouth! Zoom meetings would be so much easier.
The average person blinks 28,800 times a day. 10% of your time awake is spent with your eyes closed [Source: Google I'm feeling lucky. YMMV]. Imagine saving 10% on your lighting bill. This is revolutionary. You really only need it to work for one person in a household as long as everyone gets on the same blinking schedule.
This is a hysterical application of technology, thanks for sharing. A small part of me worries that some cubicle company will add it as a feature to individual cubicles in offices. We already have aggressive proximity sensors controlling lights and the phone booths, so perhaps this is next!
Incredible idea. Can it be applied to compute heavy visual applications too? Like playing a game at 4k at 120hz, what if the game would stop rendering and the display would turn off for 100ms every time you blink but the game would proceed as normal?
Well that assertion leaves a lot to imagination. So if you're running a 1080ti GPU it uses a max power of 250w, worse case you can cut power to its onboard processors in a way that does not require re-initialization after power is resumed in 100ms. Even a 5% improvement would translate to a reduction of 12w just on the GPU front.
On one hand I wanted to try this but then I was not comfortable with giving some website access to my webcam. Maybe I am just old and paranoid... EDIT: I brought the age factor up because I am under the impression that people born after 2000 are so used to getting filmed and photographed everywhere that they don't have such reservations
> people born after 2000 are so used to getting filmed and photographed everywhere that they don't have such reservations
It's more complicated than not having reservations -- younger people share more online but are also more likely to take steps to protect their privacy:
You can find what you want in the data, but my personal read is everyone does what they have to do. Older people have the option of just opting out without losing access to their community (how much social capital are you losing by not checking out that link?), while younger people have to engage in order to be part of their community, so they get more exposure to what can go wrong and take more risks but also more steps to protect themselves.
If you're engaging with people of a different generation I'd strongly encourage taking this approach -- if I assume you're making smart choices about dealing with the social system you're in, rather than doing something dumb, what does that tell me about the situation you're facing and what kind of support you might need?
That article is from November 2016. The conversations about privacy and personal information have evolved massively since then. Cambridge Analytica, Facebook's $5bn FTC fine, and TikTok's takeover of youth social media were all yet to happen.
This quoted bit below says it all:
"But when I poke through 10 years of Facebook, I see something else altogether. We’re not an oversharing generation. We’re a generation that’s over sharing — done, finished, kaput, through. … All the chatty candor and hyperactive disclosure of our early years on Facebook now look like just another kind of youthful indulgence."
All this means is that this person has 'aged out' of their FB phase. What about the hundreds of millions of younger people still on IG, Snap and TikTok?
I'm not exactly young, but I gave the site temporary access without thinking much about it; I know the tech and I'm confident my browser will revoke access as soon as I close the tab.
I realize now, that I did not consider what the site might do while it has access. Maybe a video or pictures of me blinking are uploaded to some shady server somewhere now.
Security cameras and such record you all the time though out in public. I presume there are many random servers containing video where you are blinking.
Same realisation here. This is the only time I have ever granted camera access to a website. And even though this is a legitimate project, I feel as if they can take advantage of that access.
> EDIT: I brought the age factor up because I am under the impression that people born after 2000 are so used to getting filmed and photographed everywhere that they don't have such reservations
If my daughters are anything to go by you seem to be right. I'm trying to make sure that at least the home network and devices used on it leak as little personal data as possible - router-based content blocking (ads etc.), DNS proxy which blackholes unwanted domains, search through Searx, Youtube proxied through Invidious, Twitter proxied through Nitter, Reddit proxied through libreddit, Nextcloud for "cloudy" things, Exim4 for mail, Pixelfed for photo sharing, Peertube for video, Airsonic for audio/books, etc - but they really don't seem to care one bit whether they're being tracked and profiled by the world and its dog. They don't seem to realise there is no need to allow those companies to leech them for all their data nor do they seem to realise the potential negatives in allowing the leeches to parasitize them. At least they are not on TikTok (which I block at the router), Facebook (the site, one of them uses Instagram and as such still remains within Zuck's clutches) or Twitter.
Same here (born in the 70') - I went as far as allowing temporary access by the page, but then concerning the browser itself (Opera on Android in my case) I had only the options to "Allow" or "Deny" access to the camera => I wanted to try this out, but in the end I just couldn't => had to decline :(
It would be nice if the browser had finer-grained controls, i.e. if you could monitor the amount of data the website attempts to send.. possibly even mock the webcam first and send a fake video to see what happens.
This is why I let so many cool eye tracking ideas left on the shelf. I can't imagine many people will be ok with using it - even though there's so many cool use cases - simply because they'll be paranoid. Not sure how to start to build all the cool futuristic apps for iris tracking now that it's a solved problem.
Cool idea, but it seems to change just after I blink, so it is very easy to spot the changes. I guess my system has too much delay in capturing the images.
And if I keep my eyes closed longer, it seems to run through lots of different changes, and then do another change as soon as I open them. You can test this by only closing one eye - it seems to think you're blinking really rapidly.
I don't know exactly how it works, but it seems to act something like: "for each frame of video, if we can see an eye that is closed, change something on the page". I think it should change to "if we can see an eye that is closed and there wasn't a closed eye in the previous frame".
If you like this, I recommend the game 'Before Your Eyes' where the game progresses each time you blink. Beware, it will take your emotions on a hell of a ride.
Sometimes it is nice to collect postcards. It’s a nice way to collect artworks and to post them to a postcard gallery. It is important to collect postcards with artworks from different sources. If you collect artworks from different sources, then it can be a gallery of artwork.
You can collect postcards with the artwork from online applications. You can collect postcards with different artworks, but you have to choose your artworks from a certain source. This is a different approach. I am trying to collect artwork from different sources, such as different online applications. You can choose artworks from different sources. That’s why you have to take care of your artworks. If you collect artworks from one source, then you have to make the artworks you collect public.
I want to use this or google's module to build an app (ideally node.js) that can track whether im looking at the screen or not and do something about it.
the use case is that I only really consume media (movies) etc when I'm eating so I can multitask. However I hate pausing and unpausing while grabbing my spoonfuls vs chewing and watching.
Cool demo but I worry blink detection is going to get seriously abused by everyone from phishers to marketers to torturers. And no, the solution is not as simple as 'turn off your webcam' or 'wear shades'.
sooo .. is this website made by the same guy who thought it was fine to take snapshots of people staring at apple computers? if this is him then he's a genius.
I'm curious and it seems cool, but no I'm no opening up my camera to some random website. As an option, it'd be nice if it offered a simple button to trigger the change instead of using the camera.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzcdopwq7ok
It actually worked really well, I couldn't perceive the room being dark at all.