"If you see light or feel heat from an unknown source"
the whole thing reads a little like a paranoia trigger.
"If you see the flash, it's already too late"
What about LIDAR on self-driving cars?
I have heard that these damage cameras and I am curious as to whether they are equally damaging to eyeballs.
Do I need my tin hat or is there nothing to worry about?
Aside, I hate oncoming Teslas at night, feels like high beams permanently on. Effect seems more with Tesla. Flashing high beams at them does no good maybe it's all AI controlled or the drivers don't care.
The cables snapped at some point. These things were tough, able to last decades. This whole thread made me think aliens cut it.
Whew.
The solution must never involve lasers.
Each of these observations stands properly on it's own. If we're making them compete, we've lost the thread somewhere.
https://petapixel.com/2025/05/20/lidar-lasers-on-volvo-suv-f...
Its not uncommon to have them hovering for 1-2 hours straight 3-7 times a week, every week, at times with no active calls on the community police dashboard almost entirely between 11pm and 4am, often less than 1000 feet in altitude (high dBs enough to shake windows).
That aside, using a helicopter as a broadcast mechanism over a loudspeaker to a neighborhood is entirely unacceptable during hours people normally sleep.
Everyone is complaining and they've been doing that at least 3 years now.
How many times can you hear, "Missing person, or Felony Suspect", black shirt, denim pants, black suspect, call 911", or "suspicious person, black hoodie, call 911", before they lose all credibility. Around 10?
It seems really racist too, always hispanic or black, where the descriptions provided apply to most if not all people of those demographics.
Makes the average person feel like we live in a police state without due process or a rule of law when the only means to resolve is front-of-line blocked through local government which ignores complaints.
I shouldn't be hearing this at 2am regularly, some people work.
An example of the solution being far worse than the problem.
They fly 1-3 at a time in a several mile loop. The parade begins late afternoon and ends at 10pm. I'm grateful we don't get the giant all-night FU, that the GP gets from their local LEO.
Where?
A larger but somewhat different issue is that pilots have some obligation to report laser sightings. Most reports are beams waving elsewhere and not striking their aircraft.
But even those sightings are an issue because officials commonly (and misleadingly) present the stats as if they were all aircraft strikes. News orgs repeat the claims without vetting.
Generally, I treat handhelds of >1W with weapon-ish caution. I won't point them in a direction where people are likely to be.
I have an LEP light and I'm more flexible with that but I still keep it off of moving objects.
For nightly walks, I carry a 21k lumen LED torch that helps with oncoming highbeams. The highest setting is a reasonable response to lightbars.
Like the top-end of that is "after considerable discussion they abort whatever expensive activity they are engaged in and return to base". Literally everything else ranges from "inflicting grevious bodily harm" to "mass casualty event".
It’s just a guess but the death toll from driving too fast is likely much higher than that from laser pointers.
Though people may know the risk and speed anyway.
"They try to build a prison for you and me, oh baby you and me" ;)
https://www.apollooptical.com/material-transmission-data-gra...
Note the sharp drop-off in transmission for wavelengths shorter than 400 nm.
Fortunately that fad is somewhat over and manufacturers mostly learnt not to put in the brightest led they could source.
Now that I think about it, that was probably actually one motherboard ago and it might be different now... but the tape's working just fine so who needs to check?
A little more expensive, but they look a little nicer too.
Has one of the brightest LEDs I've seen lately right on front of the charger whenever a device is on it. Why would they put a bright light on a night-stand accessory, and put it in the front where its shining right into your eyes as you try to sleep?
Or better yet, why have an LED on it at all in the first place? Any device I'm putting on it has its own charging indicator, I don't need the charger itself to have one.
Don’t get me started on kids toys that are too loud!
V-tech have a lot to answer for. As do all well-meaning relatives who buy them as presents. Straight under the stairs they go.
(Just scrape it down a bit)
Not a fan of LEDs, but I at least understand why this as it is.
When you move into a new place, always check they are real and work.
Router has a button which disable all lights until it's pressed again, monitors have the setting in their menus.
The only device thats shining brightly in my home is a storage controller I've got in my home server, with no way of turning it off - or at least dimming it down
If you're on Linux the dot on the cover is /sys/class/leds/tpacpi::lid_logo_dot. See the other files in that directory for other LEDs.
I don't know about Windows off-hand because I don't use it, but the BIOS exposes the functionality so there should be a program to do it. In a quick search: https://github.com/valinet/ThinkPadLEDControl
FreeBSD doesn't support it, but quite easy to write a patch for it if you want it (I actually wrote a patch for this, but didn't really put the finishing touches on it and submit it as my previous one got no feedback at all, so *shrug* – I ended up just installing Linux again). Same for the other BSDs.
[1]: You need to compile your own kernel for the charging/power LED which wasn't needed on older models, because that's registered as "unknown LED" and protected behind a compile option. It's a tad annoying, but it's possible.
Did you try talking to them about it first?
Idk, I’d consider it highly provocative if a neighbour installed anything on or tampered with my property without not only my permission but even the decency of notification. At that point, they not only lose the benefit of doubt but the benefit of civility since I’m not sure what other social conventions and laws they may be comfortable casually violating.
Assuming the worst at first is a bad habit but assuming bad intent after a bad track record is established is healthy and helpful.
Not advocating any course of action, just gaming out the options a little.
If the neighbor had antisocial personality traits (narcissism is most common), trying to talk to them would only trigger a conflict which cannot be resolved.
Expects vandalism or more serious crime.
...put a small green sticker
Ok, good engineer!
Maybe a light bar for the rear of the car and some reflective material for the sunvisor?
I once came up behind a semi on a rural stretch of I-80 with my brights on. He hit me with a set of rear-mounted flood lights.
Probably illegal, but who's going to stop him? Plus, I got the message.
Just took a few people flashing brights at me to make me realize and do the (very easy) adjustment to proper specs.
Doesn’t solve people behind you, but it’s not like they’re going to pull over and adjust anyway. Flash brights and consider it a favor to the person in front of the offender.
But yeah, it's kind of shocking how often people are like "I hate this thing that person is doing" and I'm like "Have you asked them to stop?" and they haven't. Just... ask? Worse case scenario they say no and you're in the same spot you were.
Avoiding such negative consequences of rejection may require a confrontation and possibly very expensive dental treatment (or sponsoring one for the victim of your assault, which it may be interpreted as if you win even if you do not hit first) when it is between two men, and other concerns for personal safety if it is a woman against a man.
(Anecdotally, unfamiliar women seem to have less of an issue asking each other to change their behaviour this way, as do men asking women.)
So, it is more preferable to not complain and instead raise your social status such that you do not come in contact with those people (either real status or at least imagined one, through bottled-up contempt towards those rubes or whatever offending term the context calls for).
I’m not saying it is ideal, just describing why it seems pretty to me obvious how person A would often rather not “simply” ask person B to stop doing something or change something to accommodate person A.
Similar to the effect when an oncoming car is cresting a small hill and the headlight angle of incidence changes to impact your eyes
If you are building a product and it has any indicator lights please dim/diffuse/lightpipe them.
It seems to be a trend these days of ultra bright LEDs for indicators, I have so many devices I've either disconnected, dimmed or taped over the LEDs because it is so bloody bright.
For people doing software, press for the love of god just make that shit adjustable. Only fucking noobs hard code variables. Practicing good habits will help everyone, including you. Unless you got a serious reason not to, expose that to the users. Even if you don't think anyone will want it, I promise you, someone does. There's a lot of people and everyone thinks differently. So only lock down what needs to be locked down.
Unless you're trying to create e-waste or piss people off. Which in that case I only have two words for you and they aren't nice
Also don't forget about response time. You may not be able to do it that fast. Depends on the led
Cheapest light pipe on digikey: 16 cents Cheapest photodiode on digikey: 11 cents Cheapest LED (obviously that annoying blue): 625 milli cents!
Part costs matter! Its not just the BOM, its the NRE from the increased complexity. Im not saying saying its OK, just that its inevitable considering the economic conditions.
I do board level designs and drop down LEDs. If you are not specialising in indicators, its hard to visualise how bright 10mA through your diode is going to be. Add to this that sometimes you never even see the thing you designed!
> 16 cents Cheapest photodiode on digikey
> I do board level designs and drop down LEDs. If you are not specialising in indicators, its hard to visualise how bright 10mA through your diode is going to be.
But if you want to get creative you could use the diodes in the circuit or even your led if you'll blink it. But that last one doesn't tell you the led brightness, only ambient.
[0] https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/harvatek-corporat...
[1] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/1-4V-20-30-45-60_6253...
[2] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/JST3-3MM-receiver-pho...
I think annoying at 10m is sufficient power to require a 'power' LED, so that shouldnt be hard to avoid in a design I would agree. Annoying in your kitchen however is much harder to eyeball a value for (excuse the pun).
> I quoted qty=1 prices though
A big part of the assumption that I was making in my original comment is that you're mass producing devices, not treating it as a hobby project. I agree, the constraints are very different in these two settings. A major difference is the cost/ratio of parts to other costs/time. In mass production the price per part is going to approach <$0.01 for standard COTS parts. Same reason Alibaba has them for so cheap (which doesn't include shipping)
> Annoying in your kitchen however is much harder to eyeball a value for (excuse the pun).
*BUT* it is something the bureaucrats will be able to look at and say that they need to remove it because at scale it will save "a lot of money." But does it? I'm unconvinced. To me it seems to just make the consumers more upset and annoyed. Sure, you might have saved the company $100k because you are producing 10M units, but I'm pretty confident most consumers would rather pay $0.10 to have that part. The bigger problem might be a Lemon Market type of problem where consumers don't actually know/realize they want such a feature at time of purchase but randomly and intermittently realize it over the next week or couple years. It never gets priority thought because there's usually other things to complain about and well then we need to have a larger conversation about if we're doing our jobs as engineers. Are we actually providing value to people with the products we make? Can we take pride in our work? You may be making something dumb, but can you honestly tell yourself "I made the best thing I could"?
The business people need pushback because they don't care about the product, they only care about the profits. That's part of your job as an engineer. Because your job as an engineer isn't to be concerned with the profits, it is to be concerned with the product. Your engineering managers are the bridge, not you the engineer. And a good engineering manager doesn't fully align with the business people either. Because when push comes to shove you have to decide between either: 1) sacrificing the product in favor or profit or 2) sacrificing profits in favor of the product. As an engineer, your job is to have the latter.
Two additional ways to calm an indicator LED are with the modern self-laminating labelmaker tape:
* White tape -- Put 1 or more layers over the LED, to dim and diffuse.
* Black tape -- Use a pin to poke a hole through the tape, from behind, before putting it over the LED. (If there's 3+ LEDs, like on a network switch or server front panel, it will look neater if you measure the pitch of the centers of the LEDs, then use a ruler over the back of the labelmaker tape to match that with the holes. If the back of the tape has two strips you peel off to expose the adhesive, you can use that as a guide for keeping each hole level.)
You could also put black tape over white, but I haven't had to do that so far.
I suspect that Google would punish the screen rewrites that go on in this dance, there most definitely is layout shift and Google don't like that.
LGB : Lyrically gifted brother
JDAM : Japanese digital art museum
It's also worth mentioning that the power rating in many commercial laser pointers should not be considered reliable. It's also possible to overdrive them. I'll put out this way, in my undergrad I spent a lot of time in the optics lab and the post doc had a fun story about where she was working with IR lasers. Basically it was "There's light! Yay! It's working! ... oh fuck! There's VISIBLE light! I'm burning my eyeballs!" It's easy to do some serious damage even with cheap electronics and expertise. The big problem is that laser damage happens without you feeling a thing. If you do feel it, you're probably getting seriously fucked up.
You lose sensitivity to this bandwidth as you get older. But if it's bright enough you'll see it. It's not like there's a hard cutoff in your eyes detection, it decays and you're very insensitive to big bandwidth, but not necessarily blind to them
> There was a slight loss of -0.6 dB per decade in the cumulative threshold, but regression analysis showed the lack of a significant correlation between age and sensitivity. The intergroup analysis confirmed that infrared vision did not significantly differ between the four decades of life. The sensitivity level did not significantly correlate with visual acuity, spherical equivalent, retinal thickness or straylight parameter. The comparison of values measured at the seven locations showed a significant difference between the central (19.7 ±2.2dB) and the peripheral retina (22.5 ±2.4dB).
Source: https://iovs.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2745068
Median age 27 Male: 98% Female: 2% Youngest: 19 Oldest: 64 Median prison time: 12 months Median probation time: 24 months
All of the above were Copilot inferred. Don't know why I need to know the above, though. :-)
Otherwise you're just as likely to be getting hallucinated answers based on the AI model's existing biases and training (if it's an American model, it might start telling you the sentenced convicts are young male and non-white even without looking at the data on the page).
Not sure if it's just OpenAI or if Anthropic has tried this too.
Eg. If we've already worked out premises that A is larger than B, and 2C is smaller than B, than you can easily compute the next token in the sentence "Therefore C is..."
versus computing 123,287,211 times 971,222, where computing the first token is non-trivial, but computing what comes after "11973" in the result is even less obvious. (it would be tremendously easier if you were predicting the result backwards, starting with the last digit).
There is some evidence that models actually "plan ahead" somewhat (something like guessing more than one token at a time, eg. when writing a line in a poem, the model has an "idea" of what the ending word will be) but there are limits to the reliability of that, vs. using a calculator tool.
The "Stop Gangstalking Awareness Group", and especially this page about "Understanding Neuro Weapons." LaserPointerSafety has not evaluated the accuracy or usefulness of this group or their information. (Thanks to M.D. in July 2024 for bringing this to our attention.)
These are kind of kooky links: https://web.archive.org/web/20240509210655/https://stopgangs...
That's the problem with pages such as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_stalking where the author(s) try to make it sound like a mass-delusion, a mental health issue.
These are actual events, happening to actual American citizens everyday. And then, to top it off, we treat them like they're insane. It's wrong.
The problem is that some of the information about these events is dis-information which makes the entire thing seem made-up. It's not.
I am a gang-stalking victim. I am not delusional or insane.
I am a victim of such harassment, for me it lasted for about 2 years. I have done something bad and kind of deserve the treatment/tortures. There is no issue there.
But what got me suicidal is not the gang stalking itself but absolute lack of support from the so called "normal" people. Everyone thinks you are insane, even when I pointed out the obvious signs, showed proof or pointed to ongoing situations around me. People would still find it easier to outright dismiss those, usually coming up with "normal" explanations of things.
The scariest part is when your closest people start to gradually loose trust in you and start thinking you might be crazy too.
During that time I experienced absolutely no real support from the police or doctors, no one wants to listen to what you have to say, every one is busy with their own life. YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN. That's where the problem is.
BTW, the stuff I have experienced with the tech these creeps use is quite amazing if evaluated without bringing the emotions.
https://www.meetoptics.com/mirrors/retroreflectors/corner-cu...
https://www.firstsurfacemirror.com/acrylic-first-surface-mir...
Say the laser-toting miscreant is 100m away and you want to direct the beam back onto the hand holding the laser. For that you'll need the right angles to be correct to within around 0.05°. You're not going to do that by gluing mirrors together by hand. (That isn't to say that you couldn't make a useful one by hand, depending what you're trying to achieve. Just illustrating the precision calculation.)
The expensive prism reflectors gp linked are even more precise than that. They say 3 arcseconds, which is less than 0.001°.
There are corner reflectors placed on the moon for precisely measuring the distance to it. I bet those are really precise ones.
https://tmurphy.physics.ucsd.edu/apollo/lrrr.html#:~:text=Co...
That photo has some serious fisheye distortion going on though, so the line could very well be straight. Also, flying insects aren’t a common sight in freezing temperatures, and the photo clearly shows lots of snow.
Not suggesting that it is a laser beam, just not convinced that it would be an insect.
* https://forum.dangerousthings.com/t/so-you-think-youve-been-...
Also a forum thread which continues to get constant activity. I feel incredibly bad for the people dealing with this. It is unfortunate that there is often absolutely nothing you can say to convince them that what they believe is occurring is not possible.
* https://forum.dangerousthings.com/t/microchiped-or-frequenci...
...or you know your average Hacker News user.
mrguyorama•4mo ago
People who have delusions or people deep into their conspiracy theories have an insane level of insistence. They will refuse to accept "That's just not how that works" as an answer. It's scary.
jandrese•4mo ago
ryandrake•4mo ago
lawlessone•4mo ago
JumpCrisscross•4mo ago
culi•4mo ago
https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-psychiatric-narrative-hinders...
XorNot•4mo ago
I think the big surprise of the internet and subsequently the SCP wiki's focus on cognitohazards and "killer memes" is that the phenomenon in it's own way is an extreme version of a real danger - as a species we are really not well equipped for the information environment we've built, and it's prudent to tread very cautiously.
vintermann•4mo ago
As Philip K. Dick said, of his own "laser pointer" incident: "If you were me, and had this happen to you, I'm sure you wouldn't be able to leave it alone."
Remember, that even for us healthy people, there's ultimately no objective answer to what's important or not. There may be more or less objective conditional answers (e.g. if it's important that I don't starve to death tomorrow, it's important that I eat), but those already assumes something is important. It has to bottom out in something that's important for its own sake, something whose importance can't be justified from something else's importance.
I think the "gangstalking" people have had experiences that their mind does not allow them to dismiss. They may be capable of accepting different explanations for why the experience mattered - but they can't accept that it isn't important, because it's somehow a root important thing for them.
In that very same Philip K. Dick essay, he more or less apologized for this, and listed up various different explanations that he'd tried. But he was lucky enough that his "ultimate importance" experience was basically pleasant. The genuinely paranoid people are not so lucky.
fullStackOasis•4mo ago
peddling-brink•4mo ago
I had a friend experience a psychotic episode and suffer from delusions. It was more than just, "this is really happening to me". Any suggestions that we offered that they weren't able to refute became part of the delusion. "You're right, it's not the police breaking into my house, it must be the FBI!"
armada651•4mo ago
kragen•4mo ago
munificent•4mo ago
For many people with mental illness, it's not a "refusal". That implies agency and deliberate choice from a properly functioning mind. When it's the mind itself that is malfunctioning, those kinds of verbs don't really work. The very definition of "delusion" is a thing you are compelled to believe even in the absence of evidence. If you are able to stop believing it, if you are able to not refuse to change your belief, then it's not a delusion in the first place.
Further, some people suffering in this way have anosognosia, which means not only are they delusion, but their mind is also incapable of perceiving its own malfunction.
goopypoop•4mo ago
Who's convinced by "lol no ur stupid"?
OkayPhysicist•4mo ago
kragen•4mo ago
tencentshill•4mo ago
culi•4mo ago
https://old.reddit.com/r/Gangstalking/
Here's a fascinating Aeon piece on the phenomenon
https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-psychiatric-narrative-hinders...
jlarocco•4mo ago
If you can't explain why it doesn't work that way, there's no reason anybody should believe you.
ascorbic•4mo ago
dotancohen•4mo ago
Both the lasers and the meteors have in common the fact that there are far more false negatives than true positives.