Hey Palmer Luckey, eat shit.
Haley Joel Osment's role on Silicon Valley parodying this dipshit really sums it up.
this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2025
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Iirc IVAS made like 50% of soldiers nauseous to the point of throwing up. So let's shoot some more billions at this, sure
having been in combat, with electronic gear designed for the military, i can say this will be a million percent terrible. it's gonna be too heavy (already they carry too much- i have degenerated discs as do many of my buds) and will break constantly. to say nothing of keeping it charged- who wants range anxiety in a combat situation.
now i will say that going to Iraq radicalized me against war and i filed as a conscientious objector, but back in those days right after 9/11 there wasn't much of an antiwar movement.
My first thought was the reliability. Can you rely on this new tech in a life or death situation. I didn't even think of the batteries.
I might be fearing something unrealistic, but hope this at least doesn't depend on network connectivity at all times.
I was briefly confused how an open source flashlight firmware had anything to do with this..... then I noticed this post wasn't in the Flashlight forum. So apparently Anduril is a war contractor AND a great flashlight firmware but are not related at all.
Why the hell would a flashlight need firmware?
I did a quick search, so I’m basically an expert now. imaginary hair flip
So, some flashlights have multiple brightness modes. I guess that’s controlled via a tiny, low power microprocessor.
And if it’s a computer, it can be hacked!
So the firmware does things, depending on the capabilities of the hardware in the flashlight, but you can set it to override defaults for brightness, change how many levels of brightness you have, add (or remove) a blinky SOS mode, sleep timers in case it’s accidentally left on, and even add a way to check the battery percentage via a button press pattern, that the flashlight responds to with a series of blinks.
No lie, kind of fascinating stuff. I like to hack other stuff, like smart appliances (replacing firmware so it doesn’t share my data, but I still get to use it as a smart device). I don’t think I would be into talking to my flashlight via Morse code, but I can see the appeal as both a hobby, and for folks who need flashlights as safety equipment.
Why the hell make it with a microprocessor when something simple like brightness levels and simple blinking patterns can be made with much simpler digital electronics without the need for any programming whatsoever leaving the whole hacking-issue out of the equation.
Because you could design all of those feature in analog, and make custom boards for every change or have one board you update every few years based on supply, cost, and maybe power performance, but make and adjust features on a minute by minute basis if want to.
The driver, power source, etc can all be more easily separated from the logic too. It could be tiny, or massive. Same software, same controller.
Its a flashlight, not exactly a field in raging development.
Honestly I'm thinking it's because it's cheaper to have programmers doing simple FW programming for things than it is to have engineers design the required circuits. There are so many things with microprocessors in today that just does not actually need it but it was the lazy option. It opens stupid avoidable avenues of vulnerabilities.
My girlfriend asked why I carry a gun around the house?
I looked her dead in the eye and said, "the motherfucking decepticons". She laughed, I laughed, the toaster laughed, I shot the toaster, it was a good time.
…. I don’t know. It’s just what came to mind when I thought of household appliances being hijacked.
I love it,keep up the good work Scotty!
Cheaper components and manufacture to use a dedicated microcontroller to run PWM to dim the LEDs than something like a 555 and transistors to change its logic/capacitor path to vary brightness.
They even may use the same micro for charging lipo batteries, not sure since there are dirt cheap chips for that too.
The fact that people have bothered to modify such basic firmware is pretty funny though.
Or you use one GreenPak device and OTP it based on the model and have it cheaper and more reliable, any supporting circuits like drivers, FETs, bulk capacitance, etc.. Would have to be designed per-model anyway on MCU based design.
Is there are particular GreenPak device hobbiest can use? They look interesting personally
SLG46826V-DIP SLG47115V-DIP SLG47004V-DIP
These are the breakout boards of their respective chips.
These chips are the 3 "multiple time programmable" chips in their line (if I have the right ones, I put them in my mouser list a while ago). Which means that once you program them, they aren't burned in with those settings and can be reused.
There is also a "debug mode" where you don't program them at all but program all the settings after boot so that the settings are cleared again after the chip is repowered. I have never used it, but that is what the renesas rep told us during our technical call at work.
They are super handy at getting rid of all of the logic needed for amplifiers, CC/CV circuits, etc...
Yeah, Anduril the company has been around for a minute (Since 2017). Luckey got in early on selling weapons tech to the government after he sold Oculus.
What's with some really scary companies (Anduril, Palantir) cribbing their names from LOTR?
Peter Thiel is a Lotr fan
maybe a Sauron fan more like
Yeah, totally didn't understand the morality of the book and thinks sauron is a good role model
How in the world would a LOTR fan make such life choices?
Because he is an evil bastard. There is a behind the bastards episode about him.
I just don't like something intended for war being called Anduril. They've missed JRRT's point completely.
There is also a company called palantir which is pretty much a cyberpunk corporate distopia surveillance company.
Well, that would at least somewhat resonate with what a palantir is.
With the wrong part, the kind that Denethor thought he could use and that Sauron and Saruman used, and I really like more the implication of that from Frodo's dream where he stands at one of the towers in the north looking far away.
These have been a huge failure so far. But some guy in a suit thinks it would be cool so keep spending
That's Research and Development (R&D) for you.
I don't know about military, but there was a number of successful applications of hololens in the industrial environment. It never went anywhere where I saw it, because the device was too expensive, too experimental, and it was impossible to purchase, but the ideas were ok.
That fashion started, if anyone remembers, with Google Glass. And those for me appear very nice.
But if most people won't read text on transparent background (even transparent terminal emulator windows), then trying to process information with real world in the background is harder.
Successful applications and OK ideas can sometimes be false positives, because it's, #1, safe to approve of something that won't be implemented anyway, #2, the initiative to try something often comes from superiors who only want to hear disapproval or approval of specific things about the initiative, and about the initiative itself only approval, #3, I like some things for short periods, but I wouldn't ever be able to use something like Hearthstone's UI at work.
There is a wast difference between Google glasses and hololens.
The industrial application that I was using it worked as a concept, and I mean worked in reality, not what you are talking about. I used it, and it did saved me time and labour, even in that preliminary stage. I don't know would it work on a larger scale, but that three devices that the whole factory floor had access to were in use the whole time, and in a conservative industry it's saying something.
Microsoft was doing the headset? Did they have clippy asking who the soldier wanted to kill that day? Maybe mid-combat blue screens to blind the user? Oh wait, a forced update while it was supposed to determine the trajectory of an incoming mortar...
What problem are these even designed to solve?
Wiki makes me think it’s a hammer in search of a nail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Visual_Augmentation_System
The problem it's trying to solve is "How do we make ungodly amounts of money as 'Defense Contractors'?"
To be genuinely fair, this sort of waste is part and parcel to the US Military.
For sure. Head mounted displays are useful for, say, technical repairs. And I see the value as an alternative to the F35 helmet. But besides that … for infantry? Idk. Wishful thinking IMHO
This is pretty much the story of the entire Land Warrior program. Nobody ever expected it to be a Real Thing, it was always a pie-in-the-sky boondoggle to make a shitload of money for the MIC.
It's made by the same kind of techbros who are angry that the "future doesn't look like the future", that got us the Cybertruck and the other recent Tesla abominations.
When artists/writers design future tech for their cyberpunk dystopia, coolness is a greater factor than usability, especially as most creators don't have much experience with product design. I just go with the "rule of cool" and aesthetics, even in cases where stuff would look obsolete by today's standards, because some powerful people in the tech industry decided everything must be touchscreens and voice commands.
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How long until we have Cyberpunk 2077 style quick hacks that can make enemy soldiers just shoot themselves?
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On the one hand, glad to see MS get out of this, I don't think the tech is nearly mature enough to work on the battlefield especially on the software side. I've worn the v1 IVAS and developed on hololens, there are definite use cases but - full battle rattle? no. For critical applications something like this must be combat hard and it's nowhere near ready.
eh that said anduril is fucking evil tho....
Anduril is scary. They seem able to harness the most elegant technologies that idiot government redneck contractors tended to avoid in years past. I've seen them in Haskell and Nix forums offering jobs to morally bankrupt autists FAR too often. Fuck you, Anduril.
FUCK YOU!!!!
A friend of mine was working at a company with contracts for them when they released their first drones back in the early days.
At work, they watched the trailer for the fancy drone. (Later that day he would share the same video with me)
He made the joke: "At least we know what will be coming to gun us down in ten years."
That joke went down like a brick with his coworkers. No one else seemed to understand the severity of what we were buidling up to
Yep, senior Haskell developer here and I have had their recruiters hounding me many times, even though I have told them to fuck off again and again.
I always find it so funny that they chose Haskell. They are desperate to hire, but no one in the Haskell community actually wants to work for them. I'm in a discord server with a bunch of veteran Haskellers and everyone there won't touch them with a 100ft pole.
The Canucks won’t stand a chance
When you have a lot of money, you might try that and even succeed part of the time.
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