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Search and rescue (lemmy.today)
submitted 22 hours ago by to c/microblogmemes@lemmy.world
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[–] 43 points 17 hours ago (6 children)

I hate modern tech. When I was naiver I would see this project as incredibly cool and fascinating; I still think is very cool from a technical perspective. But knowing where and how it'll be used, is just sad.

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  • [–] 17 points 15 hours ago (4 children)

    This is why we should be teaching the humanities to engineers from the beginning. We should be questioning what value these things can bring and how said tech can be used to do the opposite. Don't just focus on the technical achievement, a flex of ego driven technique.

    I'm not saying, don't do something because it might have blow back but you have to weigh up the cost-benefit ratio.

    Recently there was a demo of a drone that spins in place so that it looks like a faint smudge rather than, well a drone. Their justification was that it could be used to do wildlife watching without interference with the animals... almost everyone else saw this as a near invisible bomb.

    Every day I see something new that makes me realize that there are too many in that field that do not think about these issues until it is too late. That they do not realize or do not care that their work will be leveraged into the next hell on earth until it is too late.

    Alas this is nothing new, Wernher von Braun by Tom Lehrer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjDEsGZLbio

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  • [–] 6 points 10 hours ago (1 child)

    I was assured that requiring humanities courses in science degrees was pointless...

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  • [–] 4 points 9 hours ago

    Yep, when folks like Jordan Peterson were pushing that agenda, that is how you know it must be important. Live your life as an inverse Peterson.

    He did likes trans people, you like them. He eats nothing but meat, you never eat it. He praises right wing folks, you probably shouldn't. Also don't go on Joe Rogan.

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  • [–] 2 points 14 hours ago (1 child)

    I don't know how they were trying to observe the drone, but there are image processing techniques in the visible spectrum and signal processing techniques in the radar domain to detect rotating objects. Do you just mean a smudge to the naked eye?

    Also it makes no sense how a rotating drone would be good for wildlife watching. Wouldn't your sensor on the drone be rotating the whole time? That's another step of processing to continuously correct for a rotating reference frame.

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  • [–] 2 points 13 hours ago

    You can see it in action and yes the excuse was pretty weak. That said, this is at the stage that quad drones were in about 15-20 years ago. It might not be useful now but you can see the direction that are looking at.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7d42fAhAXs

    Also having a rotational image corrected on a modern SOC is fairly trivial on the GPU, I could see having a specific ASIC on board would be able to do it even easier. The most difficult thing would be having to compensate for a rolling shutter or doing away with that all together.

    I said it in a response further up, the technology of making the drone doesn't have to be perfect it just needs to add enough burden to the opposition that it becomes another vector to correct for. And those that don't do that will potentially end up being hit.

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