This is actually a thing, but specifically for blocking people from printing currency IIRC.

That’s cool as fuck

I can’t believe I forgot Clippy…

My impression is that scout is specifically going to be an agentic ai. Agentic ai platforms are supposedly a little more competent than chatbots, but still subject to the same llm chicanery and enormous energy usage.

It’s hard to compare against copilot because MS has called a ton of distinct things copilot (see the diagram below).

Ah yes, Cortana and Copilot both suck, but surely third time’s the charm. And when Scout is, inevitably, unpopular as well? We’ll see what they call number four.

When light encounters a surface, a certain amount of it is absorbed, some may pass through the material, and the rest reflects. All of those functions are variable with wavelength- a material that is opaque to visible light may be transparent to other forms of radiation, like radio waves. This is actually where our perception of color comes from- it is the wavelengths of light that weren’t absorbed by and didn’t pass through the surface we’re looking at. (Sorry, I’m a nerd about this sort of stuff)

A laser is extremely concentrated light. Most materials can only absorb a certain amount of that energy. As such, a lot more of it reflects back off the opaque surfaces it encounters, even if they aren’t mirrors. For a strong enough laser, even that weakend reflection can do damage.

Per a quick search, 500mW is the threshold where a laser can start doing damage faster than your blink reflex and reflections are also dangerous (IIRC this is the bottom end of class 4 lasers). Most of the projects I’m finding online that are similar to this one are around 1W, so double the threshold.

That’s not necessarily the “instantly blinding” territory I suggested, but even a short exposure will cause damage.

Depending only on a second vision system as a safety interlock seems… foolhardy, to say the least. A laser strong enough to instantly fry a mosquito is likely also strong enough to instantly make you blind.

This isn’t someone’s personal vehicle, waymos are self-driving taxis with nobody in the driver’s seat. You are no more responsible for the behavior of the vehicle than you would be as a passenger in an ordinary taxi.

How is one supposed to reach the pedals from the back seat, where you’re supposed to be sitting in a waymo?

I’m no fan of all this half-baked self-driving bullshit, but there’s no need to mischaracterize the problem, especially when waymo is doing plenty on its own to discredit its abilities.

I only use amazon products when I have no other options. I use google assistant, which was the only voice assistant I ever felt was even vaguely competent.

It used to be able to do some very useful stuff, like setting location-based reminders, but they’ve slowly been pulling functionality out and I’m sure I won’t have an option between it and gemini for much longer.

It’s cool how they’ve broken assistant so badly that commands like “Call Mom” and “Set a timer for 20 minutes” no longer work for me the majority of the time.

deleted by creator