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The government would probably be knocking on his door if he developed a guided hat dropping system


Yes, there's truly huge interest in the technical ability to accurately place hats on people of all ages and backgrounds, across the globe.


I can assure you that if you develop a system to accurately place objects (bombs, say) on top of people and post the code on the open internet for everyone to see, the government will indeed have some critical question for you.


Accurately placing heavy, aerodynamic objects onto people when you start out directly above them is not very difficult. The hard parts are either placing the object on top of the person from a few hundred or thousand miles away, or - in this case - placing an object that tends to flutter rather than follow a ballistic trajectory.


> Accurately placing heavy, aerodynamic objects onto people when you start out directly above them is not very difficult.

It's still difficult; to do that, you need to know the wind speed at every point between them and you.

Or you need to be so close that the wind speed doesn't matter, but at that point nobody's going to be impressed that you can hit them.


One way to do it in this case would be to lower it on a rope instead of just dropping it. But maybe guidance fins would work too.



I invite you to try it yourself to see if it is difficult or not.


The trick is knowing which one to place the thing upon.


Well, they might want to expand their markets.


The OP is clearly talking about hats here. Wildly different problem spaces. Styles, whimsy, and so on.


I can assure you that you have no idea what you're talking about, starting with the fact that you obviously didn't watch the video.

It isn't aiming anything. It isn't adjusting for anything. It's doing so from a stationary point.

The ML isn't used for anything other than a simple "is there the thing I was trained to look for within this area?" It's basically a ML version of something one could pretty easily do in OpenCV.

There's NOTHING about this useful for aerial bombing, which involves dozens of problems much harder than "this is the spot you should aim for."

There are probably dozens of smartphone apps for helping marksmen calculate adjustments that are about a hundred times more complicated, and more useful for (potentially) hurting people, than this.

And then there's this Stuff Made Here project where the guy makes a robotic bow that can track objects and hit them no matter where you're aiming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MkrNVic7pw&pp=ygUTYm93IHRoY...

I can't stand people who act like it's reasonable for the government to monitor and harass people for stuff like this. The second our government is harassing him or the SMH guy, I'm moving to Canada.


You've replied to somebody talking about "if somebody developed (something not in this blog post)" with a long angry rant as if they had imagined the blog post claimed it had developed that thing.


Ahh, the constant war between obviously bullshit articles and comments who didn't even look at the article they're commenting on.


It is not that they haven't read the article but they are commenting on a thread which is mussing about how much the government would be interested in if (IF!) someone would develop what the article title implies they developed but hasn't in reality.


Ai-augmented compulsory hat rules are the next hot market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hat_Revolution


The RC plane fandom on youtube has started to manufacture and drop fake bombs onto miniature targets. The bombs even have fins. I kinda wonder how long until they start adding electronics and flaps to start guiding the bomb, and how far they can get before they start to have feds knocking on their doors. I'd be interested in working on it but I'd prefer to keep my TSA precheck clearance.


The technology has great potential to blow some people's minds... up.


C'mon, what could they possibly use a phase-conjugate tracking system for?




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