I am using AI to drop hats outside my window onto New Yorkers | Hacker News Reader

I am using AI to drop hats outside my window onto New Yorkers

dropofahat.zone

1,347 pointsjimhi440 comments

I was once on 25th street in Midtown, when I saw someone drop a tiny object with a little parachute from a window at least 8 or 9 stories up. Once it had finished slowly gliding down to the street, someone picked it up and used it to enter the building. It was the key - I guess the buzzer didn't work! It was a delightful sight.

It must have been dramatic, but from a practical point of view wrapping it inside a few layers of paper towel (so that it doesn't kill anyone) would be faster, and easier to target.

Is it even possible for a a parachute-retarded key to directly hurt someone? I’d be more worried about it surprising someone driving a car or riding a bike and causing an accident

I think the GP meant dropping the key wrapped in paper without the parachute. That's what makes it faster and easier to target. Which also answers your question about surprising someone driving a car, since the key won't drift with the wind anymore.

I wouldn't say it's impossible, but when you're driving/biking in dense, busy cities, you encounter all sorts of unexpected dangerous fast-moving obstacles all the time. I can't imagine this would be a bigger problem than any of the other random shit flying around Manhattan at any given moment.

I biked as my only method of transportation in Boston and New York for years, and never did I have to dodge a projectile coming from above, parachute or otherwise.

I didn't say cyclists constantly dodge projectiles-- I said fast=moving obstacles, like cars and car doors. Having dodged quite a few car doors in Boston myself, I have a hard time picturing someone who could do that being dangerously thrown off by a little key floating down on a little parachute.

never rain nor sleet or snow (or hail)?

Boston must have changed since I last visited.

A friend of mine used to throw us his keys inside a pack of socks

I've seen people use an electric whisk to unreel a string to which the key was attached. Seems less risky than the parachute thing.

>> when I saw someone drop a tiny object with a little parachute from a window at least 8 or 9 stories up.

I was 90% sure the next sentence was going to mention drugs.

Chute to drop a key?? That's too much, something that light should be dropped by streamer. Less vulnerable to wind and more reliable.

Long, long ago I did model rocketry. Using too much chute was not a good thing because it could go so far off course. The high power rocket guys do it with two chutes--a drogue that deploys high and then the landing chute that deploys low. But that requires electronics and certifications and the like. In the lightweight stuff there's nothing fancy, just a delay built into the engine after which it burns through the top, momentarily exhausting into the interior.

I can’t believe I watched a story of using AI to drop hats on people and calling it drop shipping turn into a debate about parties, buzzkills and the risk of addictive substances vs “annoying” people against hat drop shipping and similar ideas, a discussion on the legal bounds of unwanted hat drop shipping, the effect of stray hats on babies and a quantitative analysis on the environmental impact of objects dropped from apartment windows in NYC. Followed by another debate on the mental effect of objects dropping from apartments in cities with skyscrapers. This is amazing.

Hacker news was traditionally an audience that's very hacker orientated. Over the years it's gained a significant portion of audience that are just 'in tech'. Some threads really show the clash between the two IMO.

I feel like we've entered a new era of HN.

First there was the excessively dismissive era that spawned the infamous Dropbox comment (Which was widely misunderstood).

Then came the functional programming era, where people worshipped Haskell and frequently got posted to /r/ProgrammingCirclejerk. Eventually we got past that one as people discovered that Haskell isn't really useful for anything besides showing off how you can implement Quicksort in a single line or starting arguments over what the hell a Monad is.

Then there was the needlessly pedantic era, which basically spawned the "ACKCHYUALLY" meme. The pedantry was often a huge distraction, never added anything to the conversation, and often was actually incorrect. If you've ever said "Actually, that's not ray tracing, that's ray casting!", then congrats, you're part of this era.

We're now in the era of being dismissive, not for technical merits like the previous dismissive era, but for being unproductive. Any time a project is done purely for fun or personal reasons (ie, nostalgia), there's someone in the comments talking about how useless it is, and that the time could be better spent Making The World A Better Place(tm)[0].

[0] https://youtu.be/B8C5sjjhsso

I agree (though I don’t know if you agree with me)!

I think this post captures what I’d expect from hacker news quite well. A cool single person project messing around, creating something a community can enjoy.

What I don’t like are these weird doom mentality discussions over AGI (as an example), they just make me cringe really badly.

Then again I really can’t complain, all in all I love Hacker News, great topics, great comments!

There’s always been a sharp divide in ethos when it comes to involving others without their express consent and when you leave remnants behind.

But we don’t know that and call me naive, but I see this as something that is done on a very small scale, by people who booked a “dropship” on his website. I don’t think you’ll find even a single of those hats in streets around his apartment. The humor is my flavor, and most of the imagine this as a viable product I take as such humor.

> This is amazing.

Just another day on your average know it all message board.

I wonder if there's a way to get data on this, even if it's only 'sentiment.' A bit hard to validate actual experience on what's effectively anonymous without intentional disclosure or a whole lot of rep. I've been told repeatedly about the caustic nature of the HN crew, and it makes me wonder what steps could be taken to shift the culture in a healthier direction while not losing... well, HN haha.

That's what a message board does, you post a thing and people say things about it. Not necessarily nice things, if only nice things were said that would be kind of pointless.

This seems to only support windows :(

I can't believe this comment didn't get the attention it deserves.

This isn't reddit and it's generally frowned upon to quip or make puns without any additional substance.

Everyone loves a joy vacuum.

if i am curious about something and want to learn, i don't want to need to sift through jokes and sarcastic comments. i find joy in learning and people can still be informative and use humor.

The humorlessness is really strong with this one. I caution you not to read the other comments further down lest you catch a hissy fit.

I'm frustrated this is getting so much pushback - puns are noise. HN is more enjoyable than reddit precisely because of the higher signal-to-noise ratio. But a significant part of the comments of this post are arguing about how much fun to have in the comments, a complete waste of my time.

We are debating, with hushed academic rigour (well some of us are) an article where the author is talking about how they designed and implemented a system to drop hats out of a window at passers by.

Hats.

Out of a Window.

For a joke.

Not a cure for cancer.

Not a peace proposal

Not a way to get people out of poverty

Hats. Out. Of. A. Window.

This hushed "no we mustn't pun or mock" type attitude is one of the main drivers of stupid tech fads

It leads to people in positions of power to write down phrases like "This product isn't seen by our customers as a bridge to the metaverse". The product being a fucking chat app with bulletin board built in. At no point did anyone in the room mercilessly rip the piss out of them. And it shows.

This doesn't respond to my previous comment, making it more noise...

I _am_ very sorry. I just couldn't help myself :). loved to read this blog though haha. Took it much too serious for the most part :')

A minority opinion. Codified and occasionally enforced by moderation, but still a minority opinion.

Is there also a rule specifically against making "this isn't reddit" comparisons too though?

I was contemplating whether to write this for quite a while and in general I wouldn't, because it contributes to a bad signal/noise ratio. And I'm not immune to making some semi-snarky remarks that might not contribute too much, myself. But there's a certain... shall we say _behavior_ I recognise from reddit that made me feel it was warranted.

Why? Is that your job? Why do you feel it's your responsibility to inform people when they have strayed from your idea of what someone else's vision of HN is supposed to be? Do you think it's a useful thing to do or that it brings you some benefit?

It's to my benefit because I'd prefer HN not to turn into what reddit ended up as, as then it'd lose its usefulness for me. I don't think it's my job, no, and hence why this is the first time I've done this. But knowing that the moderators aren't heavy handed around here it falls to the existing community to govern itself to a degree. People are free to flag my message if they feel it's inappropriate.

That's just for emulation, dropping hats using ARM and RI (regular intelligence) should be natively supported on your wetware.

Looks like Red hat might be soon coming.

The next drop shipping?

I can’t wrap my head around how that hat drops in a straight line. Between the propeller and any wind, how is that hat not all over the place?

That’s because you aren’t supposed to wrap your head around a hat, you’re supposed to wrap the hat around your head.

If you watch the video, it actually falls several sidewalk tiles away and he has to go pick it up. From the text of the blog, I had assumed he was using AI to actually land it directly on a person’s head, which would’ve been crazy impressive.

Not your mistake, he does his best to imply that the hats are dropping on heads.

He's got a future in marketing.

> He's got a future in marketing.

... of AI

The whole blog post is genius from a marketing perspective.

Also the use of the words "dropshipping" and "windowshopping"

And "AI" for OpenCV

OpenCV was not the "AI" here, the "AI" was a computer vision model trained at the roboflow website that he mentioned multiple times and that he used in the line commented with "# Directly pass the frames to the Roboflow model".

Ah right, a product with AI that doesn't work.

Sounds a bit like this is the new Web3 LOL

You can scratch out the "with AI" part and it still is what marketing is about selling.

I mean, the site is pretty blatant viral marketing for both his drop-shipped-hats-from-china side hustle and (I'm going to go out on a wild limb here and guess) his employer's ML-dataset-management-related startup.

I wish cool stuff like this wasn't always sullied by the slimy feeling from it only being done to draw attention to some startup sitting smack in the middle of the trendiest buzzwords of the month.

Flag the scam spam submission

You’ll have to flag a lot more submissions then. HN is submarine article central

OP is well involved in marketing, it seems. See:

https://mrsteinberg.com/

The government would probably be knocking on his door if he developed a guided hat dropping system

Yes, there's truly huge interest in the technical ability to accurately place hats on people of all ages and backgrounds, across the globe.

I can assure you that if you develop a system to accurately place objects (bombs, say) on top of people and post the code on the open internet for everyone to see, the government will indeed have some critical question for you.

Accurately placing heavy, aerodynamic objects onto people when you start out directly above them is not very difficult. The hard parts are either placing the object on top of the person from a few hundred or thousand miles away, or - in this case - placing an object that tends to flutter rather than follow a ballistic trajectory.

One way to do it in this case would be to lower it on a rope instead of just dropping it. But maybe guidance fins would work too.

They are way ahead of you: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire-guided_missile

The trick is knowing which one to place the thing upon.

Well, they might want to expand their markets.

> Accurately placing heavy, aerodynamic objects onto people when you start out directly above them is not very difficult.

It's still difficult; to do that, you need to know the wind speed at every point between them and you.

Or you need to be so close that the wind speed doesn't matter, but at that point nobody's going to be impressed that you can hit them.

I invite you to try it yourself to see if it is difficult or not.

The OP is clearly talking about hats here. Wildly different problem spaces. Styles, whimsy, and so on.

I can assure you that you have no idea what you're talking about, starting with the fact that you obviously didn't watch the video.

It isn't aiming anything. It isn't adjusting for anything. It's doing so from a stationary point.

The ML isn't used for anything other than a simple "is there the thing I was trained to look for within this area?" It's basically a ML version of something one could pretty easily do in OpenCV.

There's NOTHING about this useful for aerial bombing, which involves dozens of problems much harder than "this is the spot you should aim for."

There are probably dozens of smartphone apps for helping marksmen calculate adjustments that are about a hundred times more complicated, and more useful for (potentially) hurting people, than this.

And then there's this Stuff Made Here project where the guy makes a robotic bow that can track objects and hit them no matter where you're aiming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MkrNVic7pw&pp=ygUTYm93IHRoY...

I can't stand people who act like it's reasonable for the government to monitor and harass people for stuff like this. The second our government is harassing him or the SMH guy, I'm moving to Canada.

Ahh, the constant war between obviously bullshit articles and comments who didn't even look at the article they're commenting on.

It is not that they haven't read the article but they are commenting on a thread which is mussing about how much the government would be interested in if (IF!) someone would develop what the article title implies they developed but hasn't in reality.

You've replied to somebody talking about "if somebody developed (something not in this blog post)" with a long angry rant as if they had imagined the blog post claimed it had developed that thing.

Ai-augmented compulsory hat rules are the next hot market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hat_Revolution

The technology has great potential to blow some people's minds... up.

The RC plane fandom on youtube has started to manufacture and drop fake bombs onto miniature targets. The bombs even have fins. I kinda wonder how long until they start adding electronics and flaps to start guiding the bomb, and how far they can get before they start to have feds knocking on their doors. I'd be interested in working on it but I'd prefer to keep my TSA precheck clearance.

C'mon, what could they possibly use a phase-conjugate tracking system for?

I was disappointed by that, too.

Now if you had terminal guidance... Put flaps on the hat, and use shape-memory alloy wire and a coin cell to actuate them. The hats follow a laser beam projected by the drop unit. Minimal electronics required in the hat. This is how some "smart bombs" work.

Or using the propeller to chase you until it is satisfied that it’s on your head.

The Ukrainians are going to corner the market for prank propellor hat drones once they win this war.

He needs to put the AI in the hat. Hat-drones.

Once he's done that, the military sector beckons.

Gotta raise a from a defencetech fund first

It looks like it has more to do with the aerodynamics of the hat than the wind. It also hits a ledge on its way down in the video.

It seems like both of these are tractable issues.

A round hat that is spun with a significant initial angular momentum would probably fair better in landing more predictably.

Or could just add a brick to the hat to give it some heft.

Sir, that would be terrorism.

That's the interesting part of the hack, and not attempted at all.

I know AI can do a lot but predict wind patterns? LOL

Imagine using AI to drop an object and it falls perfectly where you want it.

It can pre-drop a pre-hat, and adjust for where the pre-hat lands.

The pre-hat would be a free hat?

Yes the first one is always free.

But will it free Hat?

> Imagine using AI to drop an object and it falls perfectly where you want it.

There is a fantasy series that depicts this as a game that two young gods would play together when they were growing up. (Or rather, since one of them had vastly superior foresight to the other one, he'd bully his brother into playing with him.)

Lunar Lander 2024

> he was using AI to actually land it directly on a person’s head

DARPA would definitely come knocking

This is exactly what I was expecting and I Was disappointed. Still mildly interesting but I don't really get it.

that's what I thought. What if there's a gust of wind?

Just use a weight on the string with a configured go fast length and go slow length for your motor to observe

Do it in a more dense city like Manila (4-6X NYC's density) and you're guaranteed to land the hat on someone.

This is the best thing I've seen on HN or indeed on the internet in general for quite a long time. Excellent work and thank you for brightening my day.

I love this kind of project.

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.

I'm guessing we'll just end with every website has a button where you have to accept:

[ all cookies and ai stuff ]

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.

Image recognition is AI.

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?

Those both sound like AI to me

An example of similar computer can do that isn't AI would be arithmetic

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).

Apparently there was a big scare that AI would take programmers' jobs away... decades ago, when the first compilers came out.

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.

We will likely develop more accurate names for the different shades of AI after the fact. Or the AI will.

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'.

A* is definitely AI... Why would someone say it isn't?

As a data point in my early 2010s computer science bachelor program it was taught to me as the A* algorithm.

Right, in an AI class. For example, lecture 5 in 6.034: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-034-artificial-intelligence-fa...

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.

Same class name with the same algorithm for me.

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.

same as parent, it was taught to me in an introduction to algorithms class, and no one during my academic stay ever referred to it as an AI.

I don't disagree that it certainly meets certain AI criteria, just saying that particular phrasing (A* is AI) was never used.

Thank you! I was wondering how they managed to wedge an AI model into a RasPi. And I couldn't figure out what the AI was needed for.

This has been going on for a while:

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/ai-9

Looks like the key component is roboflow (a computer vision/ai platform) and the user trained and deployed a yolo deep-learning model.

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.

It’s going to be like those “made in a facility that processes nuts” warnings that are on most foods these days

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.

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 live in Louisiana, have done object recognition projects before, feel free to reach out. Email in bio.

I live in New Orleans. Happy to help as well. contact in bio.

AI to recognize a pair of titties and then trigger the beads. Genius.

Just think of the adversarial attacks

I am seeking neighboring stores! Sometimes I crave gum on the street, Gum drop anyone?

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

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.

This is legitimately awesome. Nice job sir.

> Sometimes I crave gum on the street

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.

What do you think happens after they have enough of the gum? :)

After gum on the street, there's gum on the street

There is always this option: https://youtu.be/vYrXLaU8guU

I dream of a world where I merely open my mouth and wish it and the gum just flies down into it, already unwrapped.

You’re working toward this world and I commend you.

I'll hold out for the teleportation-based version so I don't have to go through the effort of opening my mouth.

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.

Startup opportunity: AI inside a small in-mouth implant to provide nerve stimulus to open mouth for you when it detects floaty inbound gum.

That does sound convenient. Can it be hooked up to my eyes to detect flies and close my mouth to make sure I don't inhale bugs while biking?

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.

At the speed of gravitational fall, it might choke you!

This is part of the challenge, as I want a pleasant experience. Not a terminal one.

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

Pre-chewed, perhaps.

For a slight additional fee.

CaaS (Chewed as a Service).

SaaCS (Service as a Chewing Substitute).

People still use gum in 2024? I thought it's a wide knowledge that it's bad for you in every single way

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1026426/global-chewing-g...

Since you haven't seen someone chewing gum in a while, I'm now curious about where you live. North Korea? Singapore?

I do, specifically Mastic gum.

Alright, I didn't mean the natural/medicinal gums

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.

Ingredients are poor for mouth and gut microbiome, but then again so is mostly everything else that's processed

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].

1: https://newsroom.clevelandclinic.org/2024/06/06/cleveland-cl...

Wait... gum with sugar? That exists?

Yes? Bazooka, double bubble, and big league chew off the top of my head. As well as every gum ball I've ever seen.

Not seen those brands in Sweden, but I checked the one we have that's for kids, a bubble gum named Hubba Bubba. Indeed, it has sugar! TIL.

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"

Well according to the gum brands it's good for your teeth. I've never heard of any evidence to the contrary, not even from my dentist.

it's good for building up your jaw strength which can be pretty helpful.

Yes, one thing I wanted to mention was to develop/keep the jaw muscles, though eating dense enough food like nuts or dry froots does this too

I am pretty certain sugar-free gum is excellent for preventing cavities by increasing saliva production. That is one way it is not bad for you.

Then a seagull flies overhead ;)

the biggest thing he's overcoming is the rent?! how's he doing that while goofing off with projects like this?

Can you explain the intention behind your post?

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.

> Unless perhaps the camera was attached outside their window

I remember it was on the balcony, securely attached. The building simply cited their policy, not any laws nor safety issues.

There’s plenty of gum already on the street. Simply scrape it up and you can have all the gum you desire.

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.

I was hoping to get in on the ground floor of this investment opportunity but it looks like I'm too late.

Your check height may just be too low?

Throwing your money into a fire pit would be equally as effective.

What an unexpectedly cool post, I clicked the link thinking it would be "typical dumb", but it ended up being atypically dumb in the greatest way! Fascinating. The author overcame many challenges and wrote about them in a style as if he solved the hardest parts with only a little fiddling. Maybe he's already seasoned in the ML and robotics domains? So much fun to read.

Regarding the Video Object Detection:

Why does inference need to be done via Roboflow SaaS?

    ...(api_url="https://detect.roboflow.com", api_key="API_KEY")

Is it because the Pi is too underpowered to run a fully on-device solution such as Frigate [0] or DOODS [1]? And presumably a Coral TPU wasn't considered because the author mostly used stuff he happened to have laying around.

Can anyone comment contrasting experience with Roboflow? Does it perform better than Frigate and DOODS?

Asking for a friend. I totally don't have announcement speakers throughout my house that I want to say "Mom approaching the property", "Package delivered", "Dog spotted on a walk", "Dog owner spotted not picking up after their beast", and so on. That last one will be tricky to pull off. Ah well :)

[0] https://github.com/blakeblackshear/frigate/pkgs/container/fr...

[1] https://github.com/snowzach/doods2

FWIW you can use roboflow models on-device as well. detect.roboflow.com is just a hosted version of our inference server (if you run the docker somewhere you can swap out that URL for localhost or wherever your self-hosted one is running). Behind the scenes it’s an http interface for our inference[1] Python package which you can run natively if your app is in Python as well.

Pi inference is pretty slow (probably ~1 fps without an accelerator). Usually folks are using CUDA acceleration with a Jetson for these types of projects if they want to run faster locally.

Some benefits are that there are over 100k pre-trained models others have already published to Roboflow Universe[2] you can start from, supports many of the latest SOTA models (with an extensive library[3] of custom training notebooks), tight integration with the dataset/annotation tools that are at the core of Roboflow for creating custom models, and good support for common downstream tasks via supervision[4].

[1] https://github.com/roboflow/inference

[2] https://universe.roboflow.com

[3] https://github.com/roboflow/notebooks

[4] https://github.com/roboflow/supervision

You are hereby put on notice that the undersigned intends to and henceforth will appropriate for his own further use without attribution to you the phrase “atypically dumb in the greatest way,” and furthermore that the undersigned may modify said phrase by replacing “greatest” with “best.” Any objection by you to said appropriation and/or modification by said undersigned will be and thereby is deemed waived by you, provided you do not respond to this notice within 48 hours. Please redirect your reply, if any, to /dev/null. Thank you.

Hilarious, your terms are acceptable. I'd actually edited "best" to "greatest", it was a tough call. Glad I could brighten your day, haha.

> ... "Dog spotted on a walk", "Dog owner spotted not picking up after their beast", and so on.

How about hanging a London Tube-style yellow dot-matrix display showing estimated times of neighbours walking past your home? Something like:

"1. Mrs Green towards Post Office 5min"

"2. Mr Smith towards Bus Stop 7min"

"3. Mr Snow towards Mrs Smith 9min"

If the goal is to make a window-based store, then why do you need AI at all? Just release the hat once payment goes through.

This reminds me of thousands of blockchain projects that used the technology to flip on light switch.

I believe the whole project, and the talk of stores in particular, is humour. At least that's how I read it. I appreciate not everyone has the same sense of humour so that may have passed you by.

Ok folks, how does this impact our AGI (Aerial Gear Installation) timelines?

I think it has already propelled us ahead by 2 years.

Propelled us a head, eh?

I see what you did there.

literally everyone did

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.

If only LiveBarn feeds weren’t such a pile of crap I’d have some hope.

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.

Typically beer league players wear full face cages so facial recognition is harder to do

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.

should give this to the coach too - Texas players get heat exhaustion

Trace and hudl use shirt number and person tracking. I bet they could add skin color and gait analysis to do this as well.

The NHL just sticks an airtag equivalent into the jerseys.

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...

This has already been possible for a decade.

> Picture a world where you can walk around New York City and everything you need is falling out of windows onto you. At a moments notice, at the drop of a hat. That's a world I want to live in. That's why I'm teaching you how to do yourself. Remember this as the first place you heard of "Window Shopping."

I truly love the concept of pun-driven development (PDD). As a motivating economic principle, a world where every human being has the resources, time, and personal safety to dedicate absurd amounts of their time to inane levels of pun-driven development is perhaps my favorite definition of utopia.

That's the best justification of Universal Income I have seen so far

It can't be the best. It's only one of many positive consequences. Not even a main justification, but only a point of defense for those so irrationally against the concept.

It's a bad idea, so it might well be the best.

Pyramid Scheme comes to mind. It’s a scheme (as in, a lisp for purists) which compiles to Solidity, the language backing Ethereum.

http://www.michaelburge.us/2017/11/28/write-your-next-ethere...

"I Taught My Shrimp to Fry Rice" also comes to mind:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/upgdrBO02Gs

“Hot today, I could go for a cold drink. OH NO!”

Sometimes I feel we live in a simulation in a real world a few levels down with universal income or something like that. They got bored so had to forget their existence by creating a simulation (or nested simulations).

This is probably a bottom of the barrel idea if you took it in that world where everyone can experiment and execute their ideas. Like, this would probably get you put in jail in that world, it's that lame.

I'm looking into starting a piano or anvil store. This is just the thing I need to make my dream come true.

I feel like such a killjoy, but the first thing I thought of is the ongoing lice “epidemic” among people with school aged children in NYC.

I have never liked it when the ACs drip on me in midtown let alone a hat dropping on my head!

My hats are completely new and unworn! Lice free since June 23

This is a consensual hat, not a villainous hat that attacks virgin tops.

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.

you have to request the hat lol, you dont just walk buy and get shit dropped on you, you book a drop

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).

This is beautiful. Have you ever dropped a hat on someone's head a a surprise?

Fun demo, but it would work just as well for the customer to tap something on their phone (or even send/reply to an SMS) to trigger the hat-drop, and be much, much simpler, and likely more reliable. It looks like it isn't capable of actually placing the hat on the customer's head (it lands on the ground nearby), so the camera and AI stuff is only acting as a trigger, not a guide.

And presumably if another random person happens to stop inside the right sidewalk tile for at least 3 seconds during the 5-minute window, before the actual customer gets there, they'll get the hat instead!

This is so cool and just brings me a lot of joy :)

Also, I've been working on a project (non-commercial) that looks down on people and have found existing models don't work super well from that angle so thank you for publishing your work on Roboflow.

> I've been working on a project (non-commercial) that looks down on people

TIL my dad’s entire life has been a non-commercial project

It would be cool to make something similar for a pet feeder. Imagine having two cats (like we do). A skinny one and a fat one. AI would recognize them and dispense more food for the skinny one throughout the day. Hmm... :-)

I made my pet feeder do this! No ai necessary, though--they just stand on a scale to activate it.

Clever!

Our bowls uses the chip to recognize the cats (and open only for the correct cat, so we can give each cat the correct amount of food, called SureFeed)

Have the cats figured out that the skinny one gets more food?

Fantastic, I love this kind of silly stuff. The clear next iteration is a 4-prop hat, which can be guided to the target head.

Of course, that starts to verge on what's spooky about the idea, but either way, this is really fun and cool.

That's a great idea! Did I tell you about my cousin and his flower pot/anvil/piano business idea btw?

If this is used for the wrong reasons, so using something other than a hat… This could be lethal.

Won't be a problem if we scale up the mosquito zapping laser system...

What, like a toupee?

Only if the toupee created was from the head of another living person.

Most underrated comment!

Also, this would be contrary to GP's comment - it would be the right reason. Imagine if a bald person is walking by and a toupee happens to fall on their head and they can see themselves in a window reflection of a toupee shop that just so happens to be there.

Use some ML/AI to choose the right fit, style, hair color etc., the drop orientation, and angle. Throw in some ChatGTP integration to suggest using scalp glue. Combined with OP's marking skills they will be in business in no time!

I love the way you think. Let’s apply to YC.

So could just dropping things out your window?

wat.

Some powers are not to be trusted to AI

Yes but here you have an unattended and scalable setup

That adds nothing to the danger. It's not scalable.

You need only one person per 100 drop zones, instead of 50 persons manually monitoring 2 zones

What are you on about? People dropping things from buildings is way more scalable than this.

Having a shitty robot that needs to be reloaded every time is not scalable.

people are already doing that manually

I'm confused. The article describes a really cool project as if it were already implemented, but there is no video of it actually working? Am I missing something?

it's a conceptual art project / hoax.

This is so much nicer than the typical type of things that might fall onto your head in Midtown. Love it!

Love the creativity and humor which is often the spark for true innovation.This guy is a real life Kramer from Seinfeld. Reminds me of the episode where Kramer drops a ball of oil from his nyc apartment while testing a business idea.

Is there video of any successful drops?

will this create an organic HN meetup next under this dudes window?

This is fake and an ad, right?

Why 800+ votes for a thing that obviously doesn't do what it claims to be doing, and shows pictures and videos of it not doing the thing?

Because it’s so wAcKy? I don’t get it either.

This is cool. It reminded me of a dream project in my backlog: I want to build a fan that tracks my head when I workout and always blows at my face.

Do y’all think a similar stack/setup (raspberry pi and python3 and this model thing he linked to) would be a good starting point? I prefer to use a more “algorithm” solution than a full blown model (I mean cameras have had face detection since what, the early 2000s?).

Anyway, curious to hear any suggestions.

I have build something similar as an entry for the Hackaday prize in 2016:

https://hackaday.io/project/12384-autofan-automated-control-...

I used Viola-Jones for face detection on a Raspberry Pi 2 and built a fan with servo-actuated lamellae from plywood using my CNC-Router. It almost landed me a job at a local engineering company but chose to stay in academia back then. I still have the hardware somewhere in a drawer in my workshop. It definitely was a fun project.

This is great thanks!

This is a clever use of AI marketing. I'd still be interested in "I'm using computers to drop hats outside my window onto New Yorkers."

I really want to use llama3 8B Q4_0 llama.cpp for some fun automation tasks so I tried following this guide: https://voorloopnul.com/blog/quantize-and-run-the-original-l... but all I get out of it is rambling nonsense. Glad ollama exists I guess, running that works fine for me.

> Picture a world where you can walk around New York City and everything you need is falling out of windows onto you.

A funny way of criticizing something. Great commentary.

Amazing. Any chance of Top Hats as a premium upgrade?

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

That would most likely be the OpenCV bit

No the opencv was just to capture video frames and they were iediately passed to the roboflow model through the ssh client.

Which is what many would also call 'Image Processing'

Oh I could use this to deliver my home made lunch boxes to customers from my 15th floor apartment!

I'm no AI expert, but I think you could do that with some twine.

Twine would bias delivery to the right recipient whereas pure AI can send it anywhere with a high degree of inaccuracy.

This makes me really miss the Stupid Shit hackathon, this seems like a perfect project for it.

https://stupidhackathon.com/

I don't know what is more impressive: that someone thought of such a whacky idea or that they actually implemented it. It's very creative and I can see someone who thinks like this seeing opportunities others wouldn't.

damn, I really hoped it'd autorotate.

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.

> My dream is for all the city windows to be constantly dropping things on us all the time. You will need a Raspberry Pi...

A Raspberry Pi would hurt quite a bit, depending on the floor!

Reminds me a bit of jafflechutes: http://jafflechutes.com/whatis.html

Once superintelligence takes over all jobs, as it is claimed will happen (, and there is an AIBI : AI Basic Income), I hope we are free to do more such projects :)

That project could become a really nice military startup. You could use it in order to drop bombs on the heads of Russian fascist soldiers in Ukraine.

The vision of a world where you need a sandwich on your way to work and it just drops on your head is both hilarious and something I really need in my life.

Fake.. only one video clip where the hat disappears when it falls and then reappears on the guys head just as he re-emerges from view.

He picks up the hat...

A coin on a string would be funnier. Just when someone wants to yoink it, up up up it flies.

Oh, I just realized that will never work. Nobody pays in cash anymore.

Is roboflow in the picture because the Pi doesn't have the power to do object recognition?

I wonder if anvils will be the breakout product for this technology. It seems like it should be.

I know a guy at Acme Corp. who would pay top dollar to get this tech out to his customers.

Grand pianos.

Finally something useful from “AI.”

Thanks, I am happy to notify you that I archived your post in my hall of fame (and in the internet archive). Kudos! https://archive.tunnelsenpai.win/archive/1719179282.959772/i...

From a fellow midwesterner - was this great? “You betcha!”

Finally some window shopping that interests me.

Amazing. Hats on to you!

Pretty cool! Any info about the maximum height of AI head detections?

This tech will definitely find some good use here in Ukraine.

The opportunity for vertical integration here is incredible.

That hat seems familiar.

Tried to buy a hat and this person is... sold out. For a while!

And there I was, hoping for a Flanders and Swann reference.

Like The Gnu Song from At the Drop of a Hat?

Pretty much writes itself really.

This is one of the most beautiful things made with AI

Title is very misleading. I initially thought this is a high-tech prank.

TLDR: Not just any "New Yorkers", but specifically "customers who want to buy a propeller hat". And hats are dropped not "onto", but "somewhere on the sidewalk next to" these New Yorkers. And sure, this might be "using AI", but AI seems like an overkill to recognize that a person is standing longer than three seconds under the window.

So a guy sells hats by dropping them out of the window. Not sure why there are so many comments praising this. Is it because of the pun? Am I missing something?

It’s a fun little project that’s well written prose. In some of the best hacker traditions it does almost nothing.

Thanks OP, a great intro to drop shipping.

Is this legal? Imagine everyone doing this.

Why would this be illegal?

Like there would be a law against lowering hats on a string? I think it may be more funny to have a government create such a law.

Everyone doing this seems wonderful.

You're asking why dropping things out of a window in midtown Manhattan might be illegal?

It's a boring question anyway; this is HN.

Yes, that’s what I’m asking.

Dropping things shouldn’t be illegal. Negligence that causes harm should be.

Someone lowering a hat down on a string seems perfectly fine. Throwing a chair out a window seems bad. I think the details would affect whether someone is illegal, not just a blanket “thou shall not throw things out the window.”

There’s already laws about littering and assault, so I don’t think that would matter how many floors up we are.

Why ask boring questions?

Well, it's not carefully lowered down on a string, it's dropped from the height of the window, which you can see in the video.

Oh man people will argue about anything. You had to change "dropping things out of a window in midtown Manhattan" (fairly high up as we see) to "dropping things" even to argue :)

> the details would affect whether someone [sic] is illegal

Yep, that's how we apply laws.

Who cares? I assume most people here are grey/blackhats (rainbow in this case).

The prop on the hat acts as a para-shoot slowing down the hat via auto rotation.

It's the same behavior that a helicopter would have if it was doing an emergency landing as well.

This is almost certainly illegal. If the hats actually hit anyone, it's possible to be sued for reckless endangerment and/or assault. If they don't, it's littering.

If you're asking dumb things like "how could a propeller hat dropped 50+ feet hurt someone?" then I encourage you to imagine getting hit in the eye by the spinning propeller if you happen to look up.

Site is down. What did it show?

Very cool idea and project :)

Next step: add EEG electrodes

well, lads, may i ask a favor? never try this on fpv drone with shell.

Mad hatter

AI is the new random()

what a lots of free time to spare, creatw and joy...

See you in August!

This is visionary.

Hats off to you!

Is this legal?!

"Regulatory Entrepreneurship"

https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...

anyone know the cross streets?

“Fan” tastic

Go roboflow!

Our team already uses cap.ly. How does this compare to that, or, say haberdash.er? Congrats on the launch.

This is ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS.

I can’t believe someone would spend the time and effort to do this.

I love it. You’re brilliant.

Maybe I’ll try this

As another inhabitant of the same x,y plot -- please don't pivot to pianos.

Cool. Now replace hats with explosives and sell it to the military.

Now take this code and replace hats with bombs.

Just wait until some bozo walking down the street starts litigation about harassment and spinal injury.

I have a few qualms with this AI-assisted hat delivery service[1]:

1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting a kaggle account, learning by doing computer vision projects, and then using opencv to build the vision parts of the system. From Windows or Mac, you could build using a cloud system such as Amazon Bedrock.

2. It doesn't actually replace having a hat for the period from your own front door to OP's apartment. Most people I know own hats themselves or borrow from friends to be able to attend specific events, but they still carry a hat in case there are weather problems. This does not solve the availability issue.

3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?

[1] Actually I don't. It's really awesome.

For any of today's lucky 10k:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Thanks! I was one of the 10k and I’ve been a daily HN user for a long time!

Typical mid-western humor, spends almost as much time describing how to open a window as how to build an AI agent. Very fun project.

All experiences are equal. They all come and go. Its the ego which gives higher importance to building an AI agent over opening a window.

Well now I feel bad for laughing and having a good time.

Typical mid-western Buddhist humor.

This seems wonderful. I’m in New York next weekend and wanted to buy a hat, but sadly you’re all booked up. Too bad.

Although since it only takes a few seconds, I’d expect you to be able to sell thousands of these a day. If you don’t mind me asking, how many slots do you release each day?

I will pay $10 to have a hat drop on my head while standing in one spot for 3 seconds. Please contact me if you are interested in doing business.

WHAT CORNER IS THIS ON I WILL GO THERE RIGHT NOW AND WAIT TO BE HATTED BY AN AI

Judging by the first picture in the article, it appears to be at Park Ave & E 33rd St.

Finally someone accomplishes something meaningful with AI! /s

It seems I'm in a minority thinking this is not that great... wind can blow the hat (or the thing from the generalized idea) into traffic, or onto a baby, or any other place to upset people. Also, if the recipient can't/doesn't pick the thing up, then it's littering. From the technical perspective finding heads in a video is not that impressive nowadays... So, I don't get all the excitement...

[flagged]

And yet again it’s an existing technology (image recognition) with a lick of AI paint

Image recognition is AI. LLMs are the latest flavor of AI, but that doesn't invalidate the term for everything that has been around before.

No it is a _component_ of AI. The ability to react to optical stimuli does not make a plant intelligent, but it is a component of intelligence.

He should've have said "Blazingly fast AI hat dropper, in Rust"

"running on a M4 macbook and controlled by a raspberry pi"

you must be great at parties

Sometimes someone has to tell the party when they've come up with a potentially deadly idea no matter how much of a killjoy that may be.

Case in point - my friends wanted to imbibe a certain white powder with alcohol and I had to let them know that it is magnitudes more toxic to take them together. Did they have a less fun time? Probably. But I won't have their premature deaths on my conscience.

So, now we're comparing a hat dropping one or two stories to overdosing on a combination of drugs and alcohol?

It'd be nice if we could all just chill the hell out and let someone's fun, stupid, kinda pointless project just be someone's fun, stupid, kinda pointless project.

Edit: I don't mind the downvotes, but do feel free to tell me if I'm off base for thinking comparing this project to overdosing is a hell of a stretch.

Imagine walking (or in this case, standing around) on a sidewalk just going about your business. Then, imagine something drops on your head, literally out of the blue. In a city littered with scaffolding designed to prevent pedestrians being injured by stuff dropping from buildings. Further, imagine you are easily scared and/or have a weak heart. So, I think it's not a huge stretch to say that, with enough unlucky coincidences, this also might kill someone.

I think it'd almost certainly eventually kill someone with a pacemaker and a weak heart.

(Or maybe cause someone to take a sudden step away from the sidewalk)

(I wonder if the title is a bit clickbait and the hat dropper in fact tries out this new tech only on friends who are prepared already, not random strangers?)

if it kills someone you can always just say "it's just a prank bro"

It is opt-in. You have to “order” a hat.

Aha, now, on a 2nd look, I see this:

> Here a busy New Yorker can book a 5 minute time slot, pay for a hat, stand in a spot under my window for 3 seconds, have a hat put on their head, and get on with their extremely important, extemely busy day

Ok. And after all, such nice hats are a bit expensive I guess (since they also function as helicopters).

Skimmed the article the first time.

I don't think he was making that comparison. I think this he was more referring to the mentality of "you must be fun at parties" whenever someone speaks up with some concerns about an idea.

Thanks for getting where I was coming from, haha.

I was responding with an anecdote to the comment that sometimes it's important to communicate concerns, even if it means being a killjoy. Didn't mean for it to sound like I was trying to equate the AI hat-dropper to potentially overdosing, just a recent occurrence that I was reminded of when I saw the parent comment.

Deadly? More like the music's too loud.

Most parties serve alcoholic drinks. Alcohol is a common reason for sudden and early deaths. Do you go around saying that in every party you attend?

Yes, you don’t?

I think it’s more akin to telling someone at the party that it’d be stupid to chug that whole bottle of liquor on a dare.

Is dropping a hat really comparable to chugging a whole bottle of liquor?

It is a hat. Chugging a bottle of liquor has way more harm potential.

Only if you’re focused on the individual instead of risk to unrelated 3rd parties.

Yes, think of how dangerous it is to have a hat land nearby…

You mean how dangerous is tossing something vision blocking where people drive…

Yes, how dangerous is it? Please enlighten me.

> Yes, how dangerous is it?

Lethality dangerous

No, define how dangerous it is please. I’d like to know the odds of dying from a hat falling from the sky.

If we’re going to call something dangerous, we should probably have actual logic and data to support that claim, right?

> actual logic and data to support that claim, right?

As you seem to be massively misinformed:

> Distracted driving is dangerous, claiming 3,308 lives in 2022

> What Is Distracted Driving?

> anything that takes your attention away from the task of safe driving.

https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/distracted-driving

Now obviously having a hat land on a windshield and actually block visibility would be worse, but catching something falling out of the edge of your vision especially something odd like a falling hat would easily qualify.

It’s also distracting pedestrians and so likely to result in other injuries.

> As you seem to be massively misinformed:

I am not "massively misinformed". I'm asking a person making a ridiculous claim (a hat falling from the sky will kill you) to support their claim.

I'm seeing no mention of hats in your linked information. Please share hat related injuries, as that's what we're discussing.

The claim is distracting drivers can result in deaths, it has little specific to hats. Rather it’s about the dropping.

“Several properties of visual stimuli have been shown to capture attention, one of which is the onset of motion.“

https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13414-018-1548-1

> I am not "massively misinformed"

Your ignorant response proves otherwise.

So, you're an expert in hat related deaths? I fail to see how rattling off irrelevant statistics makes you "informed". Still not a single reference to hat related deaths, the topic of our debate!

> I fail to see

Clearly you don’t want to see, but you lost the argument anyway.

Some basic advice, if you don’t want to come off as a fool try actually responding to an agreement as presented. You may still lose, but at least it doesn’t look like you’re hiding.

I’m not hiding from anything! You presented an argument (a hat falling from the sky will kill you) and then have been spouting irrelevant nonsense!

I suspect that, if the notion of a hat falling 20 feet out of a window terrifies you this much, you’ve probably not engaged much with real people or the world around you, such that I wouldn’t really have expected anything different. Glad I was not wrong!

> a hat falling from the sky will kill you

Yet, again demonstrating you didn’t understand even the title of the article. As you clearly failed to read there in an ‘s’ at the end of “hats” at the top of the article. In this context that s means repeated hat drops.

Summing up for a simple mind. Research shows falling hats distract people. Article showing intersection means drivers would get distracted. Research showed distracting drivers risks killing someone else.

So with multiple events each risking killing someone taking place risk gasp increases.

PS: It’s also illegal, but that’s a secondary concern.

> Yet, again demonstrating you didn’t understand even the title of the article. As you clearly failed to read there in an ‘s’ at the end of “hats” at the top of the article. In this context that s means repeated hat drops.

_Some_ hats? gasp. The horror!

Go outside.

At least you acknowledged your loss in the end.

It's been mentioned here earlier but considering you don't seem to really go outside you're the poster child for the stereotypical person anyone wouldn't ask for advice about the actual danger of falling hats in this context.

You're so lost in the forced fake universe and viciously defending it digging even a deeper hole for yourself I wonder if you even remember how to walk.

Let's say 0.001% of distracted driving accidents are caused by falling hats. That's way less than one death a year. Now, DUI deaths don't just dwarf that but make it seem nonexistent which it basically is. If you stretch this to the extreme you could consider heavy snowfall to falling hats, but hundreds of hats falling around you all the time to the point they reduce your vision greatly. But even at that point alcohol is more dangerous. And at this point you linking some paper will just make you seem more deranged considering the kind of leaps you're making to try to stretch some academic reference to this theoretical question.

Please go outside.

Drinking alcohol is almost certainly more dangerous than dropping hats.

This is not even close.

Heck, pick any one negative impact of drinking alcohol at parties (impaired driving, or long term health effects, or impaired judgment, etc) and that individual impact would probably be orders of magnitude worse than the total negative impact of dropping hats.

If someone spikes the punch with alcohol that's bad. If everyone is consenting: drop away. If they don't consent please leave them alone.

Do you go around qualifying every point with a hyperbolic example to show that it doesn’t generalize at every party that you attend?

Please don't cross into personal attack and please don't do drive-by internet tropes.

This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Eh, it's cute and I seriously doubt he is using this when not at home since it is a single use device.

But also I am shocked that there is a New Yorker that would pick up a hat from the street and put it on their head. My first thought would be, "how much lice is in this thing?"

As opposed to the hat in the store that has been tried on by a dozen tourists?

Babies with hats?! Won't somebody think of the children!

Also no permitting, especially in NYC! Eeek!

This perspective is being on the right side in the bell curve meme graph. Also why did they copy Noogler hat design?

Google didn't invent the propeller hat.

They just popularized it for humiliating new employees.

Strange perspective, it's not like they make employees wear them around the office, it's more so a message that you're new and it's ok, relax and take your time to onboard ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm thinking it's assault.

Imagine being on the sidewalk and someone just hucks a hat at your head, how would that feel? More than a little alarming for many, I should think.

How is it not clear that it's inappropriate to be violating others' personal space without their consent and without warning, to force clothing upon them no less?

If a hat falls on me when I'm outside I promise you my first thought will not be about how the wind assaulted me without consent...

If you actually read the article all will be much clearer.

Read the article. It is opt-in.

"Here a busy New Yorker *can book a 5 minute time slot*, pay for a hat, stand in a spot under my window for 3 seconds, have a hat put on their head, and get on with their extremely important, extemely busy day all within a single New York minute."

Exactly my thoughts. I dont want anything being dropped on me when I am riding my bike or walking with an infant in a stroller. But I am hoping the guy did this just to solve problems and not actually dropping hats on others.

Possibly the most important tech project of 2024.

looks like AGI has been achieved externally

If this isn't domestic terrorism, I don't know what is.

Hats or Bombs? You decide. The AI doesn't have the ability to do so.

That's nice, except it is very likely illegal

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.

Right? I can already imagine the government doing this to drop nuclear bombs on dissidents.

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.

People are influenced by what they read.

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.

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 only reason I am not expanding on it is because I do not want to give people ideas.

Well and because your ideas are either fantasy land or old hat.

You realize anyone can throw a rock off an overpass and sometimes people actually do it right? People just choose not to.

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.

Do you really not see the difference?

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?

I had a longer post and deleted it. We disagree. Lets leave it at that.

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?)

Like a gun?

Surely, if this got into the wrong hands evildoers could lower all sorts of things people order:

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.

I'm old enough to remember fishing poles hanging out of windows in Alphabet so you could buy drugs.

Yes, imagine if someone dropped a certain red cap with writing on it totally unbeknownst to you. People might form Opinions about you!

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