I converted my microwave into a laser oven [video]
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youtube.com
What he has can probably cook the steak from a hundred meters away.
Of course, plenty of mirrors arranged just right could give the same effect with limited space, and also allow him to cook the steak from all directions at once. Clearly there are opportunities here.
Sometimes, it doesn't even take money, just knowing someone who knows someone...
YouTube is full of content that tries to give the impression of a random, edgy, not-quite-knowing-what-they're-doing guy just messing around with stuff in their parent's garage, woefully ignoring all safety concerns on camera.
I'm sure many of their viewers don't realize that in reality they are highly skilled, do in fact take care of safety behind the scene and basically run a successful business off videos attacting millions of views.
Seems unethical to me.
He does mention laser safety in the video though
Another one is Photonicinduction, an electrical engineer that plays with insane voltages in his attic basically. I'd never want to replicate anything he does because I would surely kill myself doing it.
That doesn't mean we should censor such channels. They're insanely educational, insightful, and fun. If some idiot thinks they're god and wants to emulate something they're clearly not capable of doing safely, that's not the fault of all of the rational viewers who know better.
It can be difficult to know if you’re capable of doing something safely. Unfortunately you only find out that you’re not capable when it goes wrong.
There’s a reason why labs and engineering firms force people through long detailed safety training courses. There’s a lot of things out there that can kill or serious maim you, which look completely innocuous at first sight. Additionally there are many naive safety protocols that create the appearance of safety, without actually protecting people. Normally people only recognise poor safety setups because they’ve either been shown why it’s bad (plus accompanying horror story), or they’ve suffered the failure personally.
Simply opening up the side of a microwave while it off and disconnected exposes you to a shock risk capable of killing. Unless you take specific steps to make the microwave safe, it’s not hard to imagine someone taking the side of a microwave off after watching this video, without realising the danger within.
Not really. Opening up electronics, fiddling with them, and then plugging them in, is pretty typically considered dangerous. It's such a ridiculous argument to say we should be censoring this stuff because it's dangerous to the untrained.
Should we censor professional cooking videos where they chop food really fast with sharp knives? Someone could cut themselves!
Should we censor videos of people who free climb large mountains? Someone could fall and die!
It's this sort of collective dumbing down of people that results in us having warning labels on hair dryers that say "do not use while sleeping". Censoring instead of educating is directly part of the problem.
With a microwave, just opening it up and fiddling is dangerous. No need to plug it in. The main capacitor inside stores enough charge at a high enough voltage to kill you. Unless you take explicit steps to discharge it, it’ll hold that charge for hours to days.
> It's such a ridiculous argument to say we should be censoring this stuff because it's dangerous to the untrained.
I’m not advocating for censorship. But there are plenty of other YouTubers out there doing similar videos, but they do a substantial better job of explaining the risks and danger, and do so in an entertaining way. I think it’s reasonable to expect YouTubers like this to place appropriate warnings in their videos to make it clear how dangerous their work can be. Those warnings don’t need to be boring or distracting to be effective, it just requires some imagination to integrate them well into a video.
> Should we censor professional cooking videos where they chop food really fast with sharp knives? Someone could cut themselves!
People encounter knives on a day-to-day basis. It’s reasonable to assume that everyone knows that knives can be dangerous when misused. The same can’t be said of lasers and microwaves.
Lasers and microwaves are particularly dangerous due to reflections and refractions, and can pose a significant danger to more than just the experimenter. Lasers bounce around a room, if that room isn’t properly sealed there’s the potential for escaped light to blind someone outside your lab. If you don’t have proper access control on your lab, then you can accidentally blind someone entering it without the correct PPE. If someone grabs a cheap high class 4 IR laser off the internet (which really isn’t hard) and plays with it in a bedroom or garage, there’s an extremely high risk they’ll blind family members. If they’re wearing the wrong type of laser goggles, then they also risk blinding themselves. With an IR laser, you can’t even see the beam. You’ll only know you’ve walked into it when your retina starts burning.
With microwaves, the signal can easily penetrate walls and other non-metallic objects. If you don’t have a faraday cage, or it’s not properly tuned for the frequencies you’re working with, then those microwaves can travel into other rooms and cause significant interference with other electronics (including pacemakers) and cause metallic objects to accumulate significant voltage potential.
All of these risk are non-obvious because the electricity, and RF radiation behave in extremely non-intuitive ways. We have no natural fear or understanding of these phenomena because they’re only dangerous in purely artificial, man made, conditions.
Knives, mountains, fire etc we’ve got thousands of years of evolution telling us those things are dangerous. Laser, electricity and microwaves only became a danger a human is likely to encounter 100 years ago.
> It's this sort of collective dumbing down of people that results in us having warning labels on hair dryers that say "do not use while sleeping".
I don’t think people have ever been very good at evaluating these risks and acting appropriately. If we were, then safety courses would be unnecessary. The only thing that’s changed in the past 100 years, is that we’ve figured out how these technologies will kill and maim us. Now we have the knowledge, it seems stupid to make further blood sacrifices to relearn it.
Trying to avoid a personal attack here. But having worked in environments that deal with high voltage equipment, and high power lasers, been through the safety training, and also been prevented by co-workers from touching/doing something that would have seriously injured me. I’ve developed a healthy fear of electricity, microwaves and lasers.
Once you make enough silly mistakes that injure you, and meet enough people missing fingers, have serious, work induced, chronic illnesses and know people that died. You start understand how little stands between you and the abyss.
I think I can be tricky for people to really comprehend the danger until you’ve seen the photos, met the people, and made your own mistakes.
There is only so much "don't try this at home" disclaimers can do. NurdRage and NileRed probably have the best disclaimers, but even then they are no excuse for actual safety training and experience. There is too much to cram into one safety brief.
Should we censor all woodworking videos of old timers with outdated safety habits?
There comes a point of "we are all adults here" and if you are not, you are probably a dumbshit teenager doing dumbshit stuff without adults knowing. I got my start doing dumbshit dangerous chemistry without any assistance of YouTube, it was all forums for me and there were no warnings, it was just implied that what you are doing has risks and you should look into them. And yeah I had my injuries and near misses, nothing awful thankfully.
If you have any inkling of self preservation, you learn what is required for at least a modicum of safety, and you ask questions of those also in the hobby how to do things safely. The great thing about these channels is that they nucleate and create a nexus for people interested in this stuff, often on Reddit, which is like the one-forum-to-rule-them-all (though I do rather miss the phpbb ones depth)
I think what bugs me about this attitude is it basically implies sharing dangerous knowledge is unethical. Let's say we censor StyroPyro, are people going to suddenly not be tempted? No, they are just going to find other outlets for their curiosity.
I just saying that people can do a better job of sign posting the risks, and pointing people to resources to help them learn about the risks, and how to mitigate them, without having to sacrifice fingers and toes.
> you are probably a dumbshit teenager doing dumbshit stuff without adults knowing.
Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to help them understand the risks. We’ve all been dumb shit teenagers at some point. The lucky one have adult mentors that help do dumb shit without killing themselves, I don’t see why we can’t aspire to make videos that provide that guidance to everyone.
More topically, what if we just put all the laser safety stuff in a laser FAQ?
Yes.
The amount of gatekeeping-cum-concern trolling in the tech community is as abundant as it is timeless. I hope more of the next generation of young scientists get their start from nilered, photonicinduction, styropyro, etc.
Where I get concerned is when people are playing with tech can a easily move from “skin burn that heals in a week” to “partial / complete loss of sight in one eye” with little obvious indication that you’ve crossed that boundary.
Lasers in particular can be very nasty in this space. An simple 1mW green laser will look basically identical to a 1mW IR laser. But the IR laser has a real risk of causing partial sight loss because it not visible, so you don’t blink or look away when it shone in your eyes. Instead the first indication of a problem will either be pain or partial loss of sight, at which point the damage is done and can’t be repaired.
To further complicate things damage to eye can also depend on if the laser is pulsing or running continuously. So laser that seems “safe” when operated continuously can become extremely dangerous when pulsed.
Finally if you’ve got a laser that burn your skin. Then it’ll annihilate your eyes in a instant. The optics in your eyes have a focal magnification of about 100,000x so 1mW/cm2 becomes 100W/cm2 once it hits your retina. Which itself is not the most robust organ in the body.
In short things like lasers create a difficult to control hazard that pretty much targets on of the most sensitive, important and difficult to repair parts of the body, the eyes. People live perfectly normal lives missing fingers and toes, with 3rd degree burns and horrific scars. But permanent sight loss is a totally different ball game, it’s high impact, life long, and we have pretty much no technology that can reverse it.
So please, encourage your children to mess around with technology, take stuff apart. Burn fingers, break bones and slice up hands. But for the love of god, protect them permanent sight or hearing loss. Let them lose that stuff at music festivals or too old age. And doing that mean making sure they really understand how dangerous lasers can be, and how something a simple as taking your goggles of at the wrong moment can have huge life altering ramifications, before they start playing within anything more powerful than a DVD player.
If we were talking about working with extremely strong acids, or radioactive sources, I doubt you would consider being worried about severe chemical burns, or radiation poisoning from accidental ingestion a phobia.
For some reason people think lasers aren’t dangerous, or need be high power CO2 lasers for metal cutting to be dangerous. I suspect it’s because the majority of lasers that people encounter (such as DVD players) have scary warning on them, and yet staring into them is hardly dangerous. But eyes are extremely delicate and easy to damage. Our blink reflex provides all the protection you need for pretty much every normal day-to-day scenario you’re gonna encounter. But lasers are not a normal risk, and the blink reflex frequently isn’t enough to save you.
I guess you also believe that safety glasses when using a saw is a waste of time as well. And there’s no point wearing a mask while welding either.
> Now I gotta say it, poking around in a microwave is not for the inexperienced. When electronics hobbyists get killed by their projects, it's almost always because they're messing around with microwave parts like these.
Simply saying something dangerous isn’t enough. People need to understand _why_ it’s dangerous, or they’re likely to ignore the warnings.
When he was messing around with the capacitors (the really dangerous bit in a microwave). It would have been easy to work in a sentence about how they have a high voltage, and touching them could kill you.
Equally when he was messing with the lasers, he didn’t explain the risk at all, or even demonstrate any safety equipment. Him simply wearing this laser googles on his forehead for the second half of the video would be enough to make it clear that he’s using safety equipment and not just winging it.
Almost every video of his mentions "if these lasers were on for even a second and I'm not wearing glasses, I would immediately go blind".
To be clear I really enjoyed the video, and love videos like this, and want to see more. They’re incredibly educational, and do a fantastic job of lifting the curtain on the modern miracles of science we take for granted everyday, and demonstrating that normal people can understand them. With luck it’ll encourage more people to pick up science and engineering, and build new and interesting things.
But I do worry that sometimes the internet makes it very easy for people to put themselves into very dangerous situations without realising it. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for educational community on YouTube to be constantly trying to find new ways of teaching about the risks, in addition to messing around with the science.
The reality of YouTube is people send links to individual videos, much like this going on HN. People are going to watch a one off (such as myself right now) and not scan a channel for a meta-level warning video.
Often the safety measures take about as much time as setting up the experiment itself. In these videos, it looks nothing like that.
No amount of warnings could be as convincing as seeing a cheap "medical" laser that can ablate metal... even through the safety glasses that were supplied with it.
Civ didn’t prepare me for this.
Can you please let me know:
How many kids do you have? Their ages? What activities they do? Your level of participation?
In general no one can fully monitor what their kids are doing online, and the tooling is woefully behind because it's antithetical to companies measuring engagement as success.
Free Solo is one of my favorite movies of the last decade. In the movie, they are fundamentally and consistently transparent about the sheer danger involved. It probably seems obvious to everyone, but there is danger. If the movie was just artistic shots of Alex Honnold climbing rock without a rope, that were shot in a way that 'simplified' the narrative to the climbing instead of the danger I would have a problem with that.
no one called for keeping information from anyone, they expressed concern that the method of communicating left out critical details that could injure children in a way they do not understand. You can point and laugh at me for doing the 'think about the children' thing but honestly you see children do stuff like this fairly often, because they are children. Your same logic could be used to say we should let children vote, drive cars, own guns, etc. Screw the game operation or doctor with friends, lets give them real scalpels!
Your comment would have been just fine without the first sentence.
Source please. First I've ever heard of this.
You're considering that everyone watching this video knows who styropyro is and have watched all his past videos, including the ones with safety instructions (which may sound like a waste of time to some people with other cooler videos to watch). This looks like the curse of knowledge at play, because there is a demographic that may think it's fine to try this at home. My suggestion would be to simply include more visual disclaimers, because his presentation makes it look like it isn't dangerous, despite him warning sometimes (but always half joking). The current disclaimers are easily missed since there are some people who skip the video to the good parts and don't watch everything.
And just making clear that I want him to keep the jokes (like the moment at 3:20). Those are the best parts. ElectroBOOM does stuff like that too and it's great, but I think it conveys better how painful/dangerous it is. Perhaps if he includes an intro where he warns without jokes, and then adds some visual warnings throughout the video, would be enough. For instance, in this joke, it wasn't shown to a newcomer what he did to ensure it's safe to poke the microwave around like that.
The issue is, while many of us pick up on the shtick, there are many in the general YouTube audience who might not understand this.
I don’t think it should be censored either, I just think these people should take some time to talk about the safety precautions they use. Because some people who watch these style of videos don’t realize there are unspoken safety precautions happening in the background.
If it helps people get off the couch is it really that bad? I want my kid to grow up too, but protecting him from all harmful information is just going to turn him into a potato or worse.
I am aware that he did give some information about the dangers during the video, but they were mostly presented in a "look how dangerous I am!" style, rather than a "this is dangerous but because of precautions [x, y] and understanding [z], this is not actually putting anyone at harm"
Do the experiments in the video safely requires strong knowledge in RF safety, laser safety, and high voltage electronics/power safety. And hopefully good knowledge of the underlying fields of work as well. It’s easy to get wrong with terrifying consequences, and takes time to get right and properly test your safety processes.
Having worked with high voltage systems, and laser systems (separately) it terrifies me seeing someone take such a casual approach. I spot all the safety precautions he's taking because I have the experience needed to look for it, but he’s blends it so well into the chaos that you wouldn’t notice them if you weren’t looking.
And those skydiving wingsuits channels. That is very dangerous. And the skiing ones. And don't even talk about all the crazy drifting/stunting/driving channels. I once saw a kid on a snowboard break his arm attempting a trick on that he had seen one youtube ... or was that the olympics coverage? Either way, such stuff is far far too dangerous to be allowed on the internet.
> Oh yeah, and I should warn you that all the crazy stuff you're about to see was done completely for educational purposes. I mean if you were to try any of this stuff at home you'd probably die, so yeah, please don't try this at home.
This guy is a extremely casual in his attitude, but he never fails to talk about the danger of the devices he builds or of the relevant components.
Yet you choose to focus on the extremely tiny (and of yet no statistically provided citation) number of people that might be harmed by playing with the power of science that is simply beyond them.
So taking the total accounting into consideration; it would be unethical not to promote this content.
Don't understand how something like this can stand while other videos are pulled and the creators banned for life for simply expressing a politically incorrect opinion. Where is that editorial control when its really needed?
He has 9 of them...
Is YouTube really profitable enough to spend $2.5k just in parts, not to mention the other components and a few days to assemble test and film this?
Plus he has utilized them for several videos which helps amortize the cost.
It must me the most heavily advertised in-stream / in-content thing of all time! Advertisement time for VPN's got nothing on Amazon Prime!
And this isn’t even that high! It almost hurts, smh.
and that has 1.4M views so maybe it looks like it? Not to mention the cool brand building etc. I mean youtube is the new tv shows and maybe they want to make videos for a long time so why not.
> YouTube creators are paid a certain rate for every 1,000 views, which varies depending on a variety of factors.
They use better cameras than what some theater releases are shot on.
I definitely can't work out the budget of a youtuber either, but there is money to be made.
Speaking of which, does anyone know if Mr. Beast is actually giving away wads of cash and expensive cars on his channel? The only TV show I can think of that gave away more money was when Oprah gave everyone in the studio a car.
Besides, it's also his hobby. I have no doubt his channel is at the very least financing his hobby.
If you look at even more popular Youtubers, yes, YouTube can be extremely profitable and justify immense production values.
Also worth remembering that consumer microwave ovens are commodities that have been value engineered to within an inch of their life. They operate well under “normal” usage, but there isn’t much slack in the design to accommodate more creative uses.
Then it starts to sink in. This guy knows more than most experts on the topic. Either he’s playing to the gag or he simply is the way he is. That’s when it becomes entertaining.
This guy obviously put a lot of effort into this video, it's a cool project, impressive display of skills and knowledge and he manages to be both funny and educational at the same time. What's not to love?