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Comment by CraigJPerry | Hacker News Reader

Light bar money for on road use is misguided money - there isn’t a light solution that can beat night vision systems.

You get an infrared camera and on the screen a coloured bounding box is drawn over each identified pedestrian or animal etc. Green no threat, red sounds an audible alarm so you don’t need to drive looking at the screen to get benefit of it.

It sees things that just cannot be seen by projecting a light source from near you, no matter how bright.

EDIT: see from 2:25 in https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kQqCDjxYFVc

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Unlike sending engines for cryptographic cyphers across nation state lines, night vision is absolutely one of those things ITAR cares about. And the number of loops holes and exemptions Audi had to apply for made the project financially unprofitable to the point of moving to always on high beam DLP style headlights.

Retrofitting one system in my car which had the option code was a yak shave.

Most automotive systems get by this by limiting night vision to 8fps(!). Similar to how GPS was limited to 100m accuracy in the first civilian models.

What blows my mind is one can get Chinese models off Taobao with 60fps for 1/10th the price of US products like FLIR.

That last part would indicate that the restrictions are utterly moronic if one were to reason. At the very least they need to be relaxed so technology that's readily available to end consumers worldwide isn't restricted.

Yes and no.

A benefit of those same restrictions means TSMC is building foundries in the US for a change.

GaAs sensors are awesome. Combine those chips with ML optimized compute on a silicon interposer and drone warfare gets a hockey stick in adoption.

As civilians we get functional self driving cars via trickle down.

ITAR isn't, or shouldn't be about economic protectionism; it's for restricting the flow of weapons of war.

If the US government wants to encourage domestic chip production, it has other ways to incentivize that.

ITAR blocks export, not import. It has nothing to do with TSMC building fabs here. $50B in incentives might have something to do with that.

And like sister comment says, ITAR is not about industrial or economic policy. It’s about maintaining a qualitative edge in weaponry. How is there a qualitative edge when you can buy the restricted components freely from China?

Just noticed the other comment on GP saying they’re restricted through a different list (EAR). It serves the same purpose so I’m leaving my response as is.

https://youtu.be/UAeJHAFjwPM

There are three types of night vision, and the consumer grade active illumination stuff using infrared light is covered by EAR (Department of Commerce’s Export Administration Regulations) instead of ITAR (which is still significant, but less strict). Which doesn't detract from your point, which is that night vision is hamstrung by regulations. With all the advances in technology, the consumer grade stuff should really be more accessible because it would save lives if drivers could see better in the dark.

Just FYI you can embed a timestamp in youtube url's. For your example, note the end of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=kQqCDjxYFVc&t=2m...

> You get an infrared camera and on the screen a coloured bounding box is drawn over each identified pedestrian or animal etc.

This might be a good use for that new transparent TV technology.. Infared HUD in 4K.

That's amazing, if they could project this on a HUD you'd have solved the problem basically.

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