What are the chances some non-trivial proportion of the millions of cars on the road will not have their LIDAR designed, built, installed or calibrated correctly? I suspect this is going to be a recognized public health issue in a decade or two. (It will likely be an issue well before that, but unrecognized...)
There is an incentive to use higher power. Push the edge of safety limits to achieve higher performance from lower cost devices, for example.
It occurs to me there is an opportunity here. Passive lidar detectors sampling fleets of vehicles in the real world, measuring compliance and detecting outliers, would be interesting. A well placed, stationary device could sample thousands of vehicles every day. Patterns will emerge among manufacturers. Failure modes will be seen.
Cursory queries on this reveal nothing. Apparently, no one is doing this. We're all relying on front end certification and compliance. No thought given to the real world of design flaws, damage, faulty repairs, unanticipated failure modes, etc.
Apparently there are lidar jammers. I bet those are rigorously compliant with Class 1 safety regs... No one manufacturing those is ever going to think; "hey, why not a 50W pulse train?"
For everyone of those safety measures to be intentionally bypassed or ignored, the numbers are assuredly non-zero.
But is it going to raise to a level of concern? I don't think we're going to see a ton of cars with blinding lasers installed, unless they are installed to intentionally blind people.
If you have used face I'd, or someone has used a face detection on modern smart phone on you, or if you've pulled up to a modern intersection, you've been blasted with lasers. It may come one day where that's the largest concern but today it's not my primary problem and investing in FUD isn't going to bring any benefits.
That's a lot of qualifiers. And replace "humans" with "cameras" and I'm reminded that despite their well-intentioned efforts Volvo has failed there already.
It really isn't though. It's how you do something correctly. Drill into the details of just about any system and you'll see there's a lot of assumptions based on the layers above and below.
A good safety system requires multiple of these failures to occur together to become unacceptable in risk.
I get pretty ticked when people shine laser lights in my direction regardless of their intensity, so I'm not too thrilled about the idea of invisible lasers hitting me square in the pupil without my knowledge.
I’ve never heard this mentioned but it seems like an environmentalist could support increasing total life on a piece of land vs preserving specific sparse species.
I’d rather see a region of land be a thriving rainforest with millions of species vs protecting some specific tree.
I’m really starting to think the only solution is a household mass spectrometer we can run all our foods through. Literally see every constitute of each food.
Maybe we need an X prize for the under $300 molecular food scanning system.
Welcome to the world of broken institutional trust.
Even that wouldn't be sufficient. Look at the heterogeneity in dairy - the same amount of SFA in yoghurt has a markedly different impact on LDL-c compared to butter, likely because of both the calcium content of the yoghurt _and_ the actual molecular structure (non-churned dairy has intact milk fat globule membranes).
I actually think we need to go the other way and look at foods as foods where we have the data, rather than individual components. Most recent dietary guidelines are more "x% of your plate should be vegetables" than "you should consume x% of your energy as cereal fibre", at least in their headline advice.
This is what regulation already does (quite effectively too, at least over here in the UK). We already know that harmful substances aren’t likely to be present in our foods thanks to regulatory checks.
Then we’d be left with checks for substances at levels lower than regulations are concerned with, but I’m not sure why we’d care about that.
Fish has mercury present in it, but increased consumption seems to be associated with positive health outcomes. If the device said “danger, mercury”, what are we replacing it with? Red meat? Sausage? The current evidence would suggest that would be a retrograde step.
Well that would depend on what you mean by “not working”. It seems like the US regulations are generally doing a good job of keeping toxic products out of the food supply.
I’m not sure if your claim is specifically around food colouring. If it is, I’ve not seen any compelling evidence that the food colouring allowed under US regulation is actually problematic for health.
dupes and disallowing new comments are at odds for discussion unless the goal is to have someone re-review the topic then write a new article for submission.
If there is something new and interesting to say about the topic, someone should absolutely publish it and submit it to HN, and we would welcome it and expect it to inspire a great discussion.
This is one of the least controversial or difficult moderation principles on HN.
Dumb question but I’ve always wondered if we could make a giant reusable “hand warmer” type chemistry around the battery and use that to get it going in cold environments.
Looking into it more. Maybe something like supersaturated solution of sodium acetate (plus water) in a sealed pouch with a metal disc. Bending the disc triggers crystallization, releasing stored heat (around 130–140°F for 20–60 minutes). Boil them to reset.
So you could boil and reset them during charging and click them off if needed in cold weather.
One way I've seen of doing this is to include a PTC heater. It's a heating element that you feed DC. It has a positive coefficient of resistivity vs. temperature, so it'll asymptotically approach a temperature defined by the structure of the material. No PID controller required, it's just a sheet of material you include in the battery structure.
Granted, you have a minor bootstrapping issue wherein you need the battery to be warm before you use battery power, but at very low % of the battery's power capacity I suspect it's less of an issue.
I don't think it's a dumb question at all. Storing thermal energy separately from electrical energy would make plenty of sense if we could store the thermal energy better (cheaper, lighter) than the electrical energy.
A quick search suggests that sodium acetate used like this stores 230kj/kg (i.e. 64 Wh/kg in the units used for batteries) [1] which is significantly worse than the sodium ion batteries being discussed. Same order of magnitude though, so maybe there's a better material that would make it work.
I thought the pill form was actually pretty high tech to get the peptides through the digestive system. I don’t see how a compounding pharmacy would be able to produce it. Anyone know?
But beyond that, the most compelling content was probably the best all time videos which I’ve exhausted. Plus half the videos now seem to cut off before they answer whatever question they posed. Very frustrating.
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