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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.)
