You have it reversed, no? Computer vision was just called computer vision and computer graphics until "AI" became the new headline grabber, then computer vision somehow became "AI". Even optical flow from 30 years ago is now being called "AI" by some people even though it has been around for decades and doesn't work off of any training, it just tracks every pixel to get motion vectors.
This concept is great, it’s also a brilliant idea for a webcam on a Bourbon St balcony in New Orleans to throw beads at parties below. I am friends with a guy who owns a multistory bar in the middle of the strip and would be open to this, so if OP or someone else is interested in developing an AI/remote control bead thrower, drop some contact info and I’ll reach out
I will be honest, while the project is actually neat, it showcases some of the issues with technological advancements as related to society ( and happens to also touch on one's exposure in a big city ). One could easily imagine a scenario ( or scenarios ), where this could be misused.
You seem to be making it unnecessarily dramatic for comedic effect and it does not have be government in attempt to dismiss genuine concern. The only reason I am not expanding on it is because I do not want to give people ideas.
Perhaps it can be used to drop water balloons full of Gatorade on parched travellers. Or, to extend the earlier concept, miniaturised atom bombs on beatniks.
As the saying goes, "ideas are cheap, execution is everything".
I guarantee you that you haven't come up with any ideas in the few minutes you've been thinking as a casual and presumably non-criminal observer that haven't been thought of already by countless criminal and terrorist groups. The only thing you're accomplishing by being vague is making it hard for us to understand what you're getting at.
Hmm. On this very forum you will often see me argue actions vs speech and how the two are very different from one another and how only one of those can actually be construed as violence.
<< I guarantee you that you haven't come up with any ideas [...]that haven't been thought of already by countless criminal and terrorist groups.
It is likely. My imagination is somewhat limited, but this is kinda the point. If I can think it, a sizeable portion of the population can as well. The difference is that it just made it now is easier to deploy in non-benign manner. My concern is not with terror orgs. Those can and do their own thing. I am worried about a casual kid, who uses it for 'pranks' that will happen, as they seem to invariably eventually do, to go too far.
The two situations are not alike. People choose not to throw rocks directly as the action is direct, immediate and likely against the law with all the things that it would influence. On the other hand, we have a remote system capable of dropping things on unsuspecting heads in an automated manner.
One is easy an people don't do it, while one is complicated and people don't do it.
You could drop stuff from a drone or have a drone shoot a gun too, but people don't want to hurt other people in general.
What scenario is in your head that you think being able to drop something and hurt or kill someone is going to happen more if people can do it automatically?
Who are these people that aren't hurting anyone but are suddenly going to do it once it becomes a science project?
There is no evidence or explanation here, you seem to just be saying that if people can hurt other people with some sort of automation they will, but you're not explaining why that would be or giving any examples of it happening.
You don’t need to aim that well with a nuclear bomb.
This sort of tech could clearly be applied to the “last mile” problem in hand grenade deliveries as well, so close range jammer based solutions seem pretty hopeless (I think that’s been pretty obvious for a while, but this hobbyist project really emphasizes the fact, right?)
A lot of states are working on legislation that includes requirements for watermarking AI generated content. But it seldom defines AI with any rigor, making me wonder if soon everyone will need to label everything as made with AI to be on the safe side, kinda like prop 65 warnings.
This is not quite like the "AI" that's hyped in recent years, the key component is OpenCV and it has been around for decades. Few years ago, this might have been called Machine Learning (ML) instead of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
You have discovered a secret area of my personalized "pet peeves" level: just a few days ago I saw an article (maybe video) about how "AI" tracks you in a restaurant. Screenshot was from an OpenCV-based app with a bounding box around each person, it counted how many people are in the establishment, who is a waiter and who is a customer, and how long they have been there.
Maybe it is easier to define what isn't AI? Toshiba's handwritten postal code recognizers from the 1970s? Fuzzy logic in washing machines that adjusts the pre-programmed cycle based on laundry weight and dirtyness?
Adding two numbers, each having 100 digits? Reciting the fractional part of Π on and on? I have only seen that done by talented people appearing in TV shows. Seems AI.
Historically, we often call something AI while we don’t really understand how it works. After that it quietly gets subsumed into machine learning or another area and called X algorithm.
There's an old saying: "Yesterday's AI is today's algorithm". Few would consider A* search for route-planning or Alpha-Beta pruning for game playing to be "Capital A Captial I" today, but they absolutely were back at their inception. Heck, the various modern elaborations on A* are mostly still published in a journal of AI (AAAI).
Yes, no more machine code. Everything was to be written in BASIC. ...how we laughed at that outlandish idea. It was so obvious performance would be... well... what we have today pretty much.
IKR? If you can't hand-pick where instructions are located on the drum, you may have to use separate constants, and if that's the case what is even the point?
If you spend a few hours writing a bit of code that has to run for decades, millions or billions of times per day on hundreds of thousands or millions of machines it seems quite significant to use only the instructions needed to make it work. A few hundreds of thousands extra seems a lot. One would imagine other useful things could be done with quintillions or septillions of cycles besides saving a few development hours.
This is a fair point and maybe someone more well versed can correct me but pretty much all state of the art image recognition is trained neural networks nowadays right? A* is still something a human can reasonably code, it seems to me that there is a legitimate distinction between these types of things nowadays.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect We got it named already, it just needs to be properly propagated until there's no value left in calling things 'AI'.
No, in an introduction to data structures and algorithms class. It’s pretty odd behavior to disagree with someone who is simply sharing their lived experience.
Yeah sorry, rereading, that came off as way aggressive for no reason. Rereading the chain, I think I just meant that it’s an algorithm that was frequently taught in AI classes, so at least some profs think it counts, even though it was called an algorithm.
That's my point: legislation seldom defines AI rigorously enough to exclude work like OpenCV. I presume that leaves it to courts or prosecutorial discretion.
So it doesn't actually drop hats onto heads and doesn't use what most people would consider AI... I think I could probably rig up something to gracelessly shove an item out of an open window too which is basically what we're left with. It'd take longer to create the app for booking appointments, and to set up everything for payment processing.
Be it "AI" or not, these mostly fall under "AI" legistlation, at least in the new EU AI Act. Which is IMHO a better way to legislate than tying laws to specific algorithms d'jour.
This comment is known to the State of California to contain text that may cause you to ignore warnings which may lead to cancer, reproductive defects, and some other shit that I can't remember because it's been almost a decade since I lived in California and weirdly I can't easily find the full text of one of these online through a quick search (emphasis: quick)
I fear you’re right — cookie banners will soon also come with endless AI disclaimers that net net desensitize the end user to any consideration as they seek to skip poorly crafted regulation and get on with their lives.
Poorly enforced regulation. Most of the cookie banners are illegal but businesses, especially large ones, have too much power to be effectively regulated.
The nags are kind of malicious semi-compliance, partly in effort to make the regulation look bad.
If Big AI lobbyists get their way, this is exactly the kind of warnings we'll get.
Flood users with warnings on everything and it'll get ignored. Especially if there's no penalty for warning when there isn't a risk.
Big Tobacco must love Prop 65 warnings, because by making it look like everything causes cancer, smokers keep themselves blissfully ignorant at just how large the risk factor is for tobacco compared to most other things.
He seems to be already fully booked until the 13th of August, must have been really successful, or maybe just the result of the exposure on HN? Hopefully people aren't booking spots just to troll.
Although I think the idea of nonconsensual hat drops is so fun and fantastic.
I wish I could register myself as being up for any sort of serendipity like this. While I like the idea of a hat randomly dropping onto my head, some people may not.
As a counter point, the hat is a great way to protect against AC water drips.
My biggest fear about walking around any city (but NYC in particular) is an actual AC machine dropping onto my head. Maybe you could offer the choice to drop down a hard hat on streets with high AC unit density (and then pick it up when I leave the area).
Love this! I play recreational ice hockey in an Adult league and for the past many years I've desired to use AI/Object recognition to recognize who was out on the ice during what times during the game to attribute who impacted goals and which players were taking longer than usual shifts ( every team has those one or two players!).
This may be achievable for me with the current state of AI and GPT to help fill the gaps that my knowledge is lacking in. Thanks for showing what you made and how you did it. It's encouragement to me.
This would be interesting, feel free to email me if you get stuck. If you had a camera at eye level, you could try to train it on recognizing the player jersey numbers.
Facial recognition would be better. Don’t forget that canonically in Mighty Ducks D2 Goldberg and Russ switched jerseys so that Russ could get his infamous “Knuckle Puck” shot off undisputed because everyone thought the puck was passed to Goldberg until the mask came off. So the ML training on jerseys would have missed this critical moment and potentially assigned the score to Goldberg, when really it was Russ (wearing Goldberg’s jersey) who should have gotten the credit.
One might argue that this sort of thing rarely happens so it’s not worth doing more complex facial recognition vis a vis Jersey numbering. But I say that while it may be rare, when it does happen it’s a major event, so no complexity should be spared to ensure we capture it accurately.
I would have multiple camera footage. One gopro would be just be a wide-angle of the bench behind the players, another would be on the game clock, and additional ones would be on-ice footage. Typically my gopro set-up has been behind the goalie (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCavsdzc-OY) and the rinks have Livebarn feeds (here's one on my YT from 2018 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WEE9y4cAHg) but there are challenges in quality abound.
Iirc, LiveBarn offers this as a service if your local rink has it set up. Annoyingly, my local rink uses 30 minute video slots so it only ever captures half a game.
I play in a rec soccer league and had a similar idea, except to also have everyone on the team wear a smartwatch that could intelligently buzz at you to sub out based on your heartrate and how long you've been in.
i work on roboflow. seeing all the creative ways people use computer vision is motivating for us. let me know (email in bio) if there's things you'd like to be better.
My immediate response to this was “ew, there’s already so much gum on the street”. Then I realized you meant you want to chew gum while walking down the street and I became enlightened.
I would hope that we have invented error-free software development by then, though. Otherwise, a small error leading to the wrong coordinates could really ruin your day (or head)... ;)
Or use lasers and tiny gum-shaped smoke bombs to sample and model the local air column currents, pre soften and flatten a portion of the gum paper-thin with some sort of wettimg/rolling assembly, stage, then let it drop and form its own miniature gum parachute or replica of one of those whirling propeller seeds that have a built-in wing to slow their fall.
What about a “we will remember it for you wholesale” version of the gum experience - you pay money and are then implanted with memories that are indistinguishable from chewing the gum.
I kinda think this is the end goal for all capitalism - you pay money for nothing.
Perhaps small guided parachutes that receive an auto-correction location from the RPi and track the mouth? The issue is that the gum will be expensive.
Maybe a receiving chute? Small, portable, and a clearer indication (cannot be confused with a yawn), plus it'll open up the variety of comestibles you can purchase just s mouthful of. No more forks, no more spoons, just a little sloped thing to slow and guide
Apparently the knowledge isn't wide enough, because this is the first I'm hearing of it... Why is gum bad for you? I knew it was in a downward sales trend, but I figured that was just consumer preferences changing over time.
Gum with sugar is bad for your teeth. Gum without sugar has xylitol in it, which is good for your teeth, but may increase your risk of heart attacks and strokes due to it promoting blood clotting[1].
Why does this remind me of something out of a certain old point and click adventure game, it was one that had the verb USE apply to every type of action.
click>(GUM)
click>(SELF)
click>(USE)
"You used the GUM on yourself.
Nothing special happens.
You now have 0 GUM."
There was another game in the same genre that did the same, but with the verb OPERATE. As teenagers my friends and I used to laugh way too much at dialogue responses these games would craft, where you would get things like "OPERATE GUM on SELF"
Slightly unrelated: Did the building owner/landlord complain about that? Is it legal?
I know a friend of mine whom the building asked to remove a camera they had. It was a camera used only to record the hill view in front of the building, so it isn't violating any privacy, and it was attached with magnets, so no damage whatsoever.
I was also curious about this. a bunch of BASE jumping hats dropping off a building is exactly the sort of project I would momentarily think about doing and never seriously entertain due to being certain that sooner or later someone, somewhere is going to sue me for some marginally harm-like side effect.
I don't know how litigous your region is but of all the people you know who have been sued, how many of them got sued for something silly vs a more low effort scheme like the classic throw yourself onto someones car and have 'back pain'? You might be safe to do silly shit on the basis that there are easier and better targets available.
Also curious if they had any grounds for that. I was under the impression that if you have a camera within your apartment (looking through window), nobody should be able to tell you no.
Unless perhaps the camera was attached outside their window (no longer their apartment), in a way that could be deemed unsafe and fall off and hurt someone, whereupon the building owner could be held liable? In that case I would find it reasonable to tell them to remove it.
What if we had like a fridge with glass window and drinks or snacks organized in rows with identifiers for each. You could enter the identifier and make your payment to the fridge and it would drop the corresponding drink/snack to a slot on the bottom of the fridge.
Really, really liked it! Also, would be glad to hear where you got that helicopter heads. I've been looking for one for some time but my head is large sized so I can't find one that fits here where I live.
Can you go a bit more in depth for the part regarding training the Ai to recognize the heads? Like what software(s) did you use ecc... I'm an undergrad who's seeking to do similar computer vision internships for his thesis and I find this kinda fascinating
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[ 0.16 ms ] story [ 238 ms ] threadI guarantee you that you haven't come up with any ideas in the few minutes you've been thinking as a casual and presumably non-criminal observer that haven't been thought of already by countless criminal and terrorist groups. The only thing you're accomplishing by being vague is making it hard for us to understand what you're getting at.
Whether the idea has occurred to a bad actor and if they choose to act on it are very different.
We effectively “promote” bad ideas with detailed public discussion; it’s literally what influencers get paid to do.
<< I guarantee you that you haven't come up with any ideas [...]that haven't been thought of already by countless criminal and terrorist groups.
It is likely. My imagination is somewhat limited, but this is kinda the point. If I can think it, a sizeable portion of the population can as well. The difference is that it just made it now is easier to deploy in non-benign manner. My concern is not with terror orgs. Those can and do their own thing. I am worried about a casual kid, who uses it for 'pranks' that will happen, as they seem to invariably eventually do, to go too far.
Well and because your ideas are either fantasy land or old hat.
Do you really not see the difference?
You could drop stuff from a drone or have a drone shoot a gun too, but people don't want to hurt other people in general.
What scenario is in your head that you think being able to drop something and hurt or kill someone is going to happen more if people can do it automatically?
Who are these people that aren't hurting anyone but are suddenly going to do it once it becomes a science project?
This sort of tech could clearly be applied to the “last mile” problem in hand grenade deliveries as well, so close range jammer based solutions seem pretty hopeless (I think that’s been pretty obvious for a while, but this hobbyist project really emphasizes the fact, right?)
Toupees
Pianos
Air conditioners
Enriched yellow cake uranium
Specially trained mice with machine guns
Robert De Niro in Brazil
Etc etc
We must mobilize to stop this now before it’s too late. Hopefully this will be addressed during next week’s presidential election.
A lot of states are working on legislation that includes requirements for watermarking AI generated content. But it seldom defines AI with any rigor, making me wonder if soon everyone will need to label everything as made with AI to be on the safe side, kinda like prop 65 warnings.
[ all cookies and ai stuff ]
An example of similar computer can do that isn't AI would be arithmetic
I don't disagree that it certainly meets certain AI criteria, just saying that particular phrasing (A* is AI) was never used.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/ai-9
The nags are kind of malicious semi-compliance, partly in effort to make the regulation look bad.
Flood users with warnings on everything and it'll get ignored. Especially if there's no penalty for warning when there isn't a risk.
Big Tobacco must love Prop 65 warnings, because by making it look like everything causes cancer, smokers keep themselves blissfully ignorant at just how large the risk factor is for tobacco compared to most other things.
I see what you did there.
I can’t believe someone would spend the time and effort to do this.
I love it. You’re brilliant.
I have never liked it when the ACs drip on me in midtown let alone a hat dropping on my head!
I wish I could register myself as being up for any sort of serendipity like this. While I like the idea of a hat randomly dropping onto my head, some people may not.
My biggest fear about walking around any city (but NYC in particular) is an actual AC machine dropping onto my head. Maybe you could offer the choice to drop down a hard hat on streets with high AC unit density (and then pick it up when I leave the area).
This may be achievable for me with the current state of AI and GPT to help fill the gaps that my knowledge is lacking in. Thanks for showing what you made and how you did it. It's encouragement to me.
One might argue that this sort of thing rarely happens so it’s not worth doing more complex facial recognition vis a vis Jersey numbering. But I say that while it may be rare, when it does happen it’s a major event, so no complexity should be spared to ensure we capture it accurately.
Trace and hudl use shirt number and person tracking. I bet they could add skin color and gait analysis to do this as well.
Sometimes you can notice a little nob on the back/shoulder of a player.
https://www.google.com/search?q=nhl+player+tracking+jersey
https://old.reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing/comments/u5707w/wha...
To summarize, I used:
1. Low weight but very cool product (like Propeller Hats)
2. Raspberry Pi for controlling everything
3. Adafruit stepper motor for the dropping mechanism
4. Yarn for holding the hat
5. Roboflow for the AI
My immediate response to this was “ew, there’s already so much gum on the street”. Then I realized you meant you want to chew gum while walking down the street and I became enlightened.
You’re working toward this world and I commend you.
Since you haven't seen someone chewing gum in a while, I'm now curious about where you live. North Korea? Singapore?
1: https://newsroom.clevelandclinic.org/2024/06/06/cleveland-cl...
click>(GUM)
click>(SELF)
click>(USE)
"You used the GUM on yourself.
Nothing special happens.
You now have 0 GUM."
There was another game in the same genre that did the same, but with the verb OPERATE. As teenagers my friends and I used to laugh way too much at dialogue responses these games would craft, where you would get things like "OPERATE GUM on SELF"
I know a friend of mine whom the building asked to remove a camera they had. It was a camera used only to record the hill view in front of the building, so it isn't violating any privacy, and it was attached with magnets, so no damage whatsoever.
Unless perhaps the camera was attached outside their window (no longer their apartment), in a way that could be deemed unsafe and fall off and hurt someone, whereupon the building owner could be held liable? In that case I would find it reasonable to tell them to remove it.
I remember it was on the balcony, securely attached. The building simply cited their policy, not any laws nor safety issues.
Of course, that starts to verge on what's spooky about the idea, but either way, this is really fun and cool.
Finally some window shopping that interests me.