[HN Gopher] Birds aren't real - how to create your own "bird"
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Birds aren't real - how to create your own "bird"
Author : lampysecurity
Score : 106 points
Date : 2024-08-24 21:41 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.lampysecurity.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.lampysecurity.com)
| genpfault wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birds_Aren%27t_Real
| sva_ wrote:
| https://pr0gramm.com/top/birds%20aren't%20real%20/6025041
| amelius wrote:
| How many people actually believed it?
| IshKebab wrote:
| This is pretty much how flat Earthers started.
| amelius wrote:
| I don't see any evidence that something got started in this
| case. It looks like a joke that did catch on, but only
| among people who got the joke.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah I haven't seen anyone actually believe this either,
| but it did take a good few years between the flat Earth
| joke being popular on Reddit, and the resulting community
| of true believers arising.
|
| On the other hand it's even less plausible than flat
| Earth so you'd have to be _particularly_ stupid to
| believe it; not just very very stupid.
| amiga386 wrote:
| How a bird works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrUWSfd0Heg
| bitwize wrote:
| I smile when I see this meme because it makes me think of its
| possible origin in _The Incredibles_ ; specifically, a scene
| where a parrot turns out to be a surveillance drone on Syndrome's
| island: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=g4zKWXdDt2Q
| cassianoleal wrote:
| Check out the book Island, by Aldous Huxley. Came out in 1962
| and the whole island is covered in surveillance devices made to
| look like birds.
| gmiller123456 wrote:
| The idea goes back further than that. It goes all the way
| back to when the CIA invented birds. The references in
| popular culture are documentaries.
| Loughla wrote:
| The problem with this is when the idea gets taken over by people
| who aren't in on the joke. . . Remember how flat earth used to be
| a gag?
| BrianGragg wrote:
| Wait! You're saying the earth isn't flat?! /s ;)
| pvaldes wrote:
| Is ant's fault, they keep making all those little bumps
| around.
|
| The real problem is that we are spending a bazillion of hours
| on dubious philosophical amusements, while the planet is
| being slowly cooked with us on board.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| mad people don't need reasons to be mad; but rather excuses. If
| not flat earthism then something else like aliens or smth.
| left-struck wrote:
| Maybe we should sow the seeds for conspiracy theories that
| would benefit humanity if the mad-anyway people were to
| believe them.
| smolder wrote:
| What will this religion be called?
| whstl wrote:
| I remember UFO sightings being super common before
| smartphones. Celebrities always talking about every once in a
| while, a maid when I was a kid swearing she could see lights
| in the sky, etc.
|
| I even remember some people in my small town getting together
| to talk about it.
|
| (It seems aliens have wised up to the ubiquity of cameras,
| though!)
| freeduck wrote:
| People need to stop looking at their screen all the time
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Try filming an airplane at night and be amazed at how
| shitty the footage of that is from your modern smartphone.
| Even during the day its a tall order without actual optical
| zoom and stabilization.
| whstl wrote:
| That's not really the point: point is those claims pretty
| much disappeared compared to the 90s and early 2000s.
|
| Maybe there's other factors at play, such as X-Files
| ending, or people getting more interested in flat earth.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| There are claims all the time made, you just don't rove
| over the parts of the internet where they would be
| posted.
| omoikane wrote:
| > sightings being super common before smartphones
|
| https://xkcd.com/1235/
|
| > It seems aliens have wised up to the ubiquity of cameras,
| though
|
| https://xkcd.com/2572/
| perching_aix wrote:
| I don't think these are a problem in the sense that they'd be
| something necessary or possible to solve.
| moi2388 wrote:
| The earth is flat. If you travel fast enough, that is.
| SenHeng wrote:
| If you travel fast enough, you'll discover the earth isn't
| flat.
| pvaldes wrote:
| If you can travel really, really fast, the earth is not a
| plane, is a point. A pale blue dot.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| This discovery was made by people who weren't traveling at
| all.
| ungamedplayer wrote:
| Everything is moving relative to something.
| plasticchris wrote:
| Depends on the direction you are going ;)
| dev1ycan wrote:
| I refuse to accept that we must tone down irony/sarcasm because
| of dumb people, we as humanity have had this problem for a long
| time, see: Lucian and his trip to the moon. Yet we've never had
| to do this. People will actively choose to believe any sort of
| nonesense (will avoid naming stuff but we all know what written
| nonesense people believe in) regardless if it is written or
| done in irony/sarcasm or not.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| It's worth keeping in mind that very smart people in the past
| believed things that we now know are nonsense. And most
| likely, smart people today believe things that will be
| considered nonsense in the future.
| operator-name wrote:
| That, or they were skeptical in dangerous ways. I'm
| thinking of the example of Richard Feynman questioning if
| you should brush your teeth, which although is valid to
| scientifically challenge. There's other examples of "smart
| people", especially in their own domains openly applying
| their technique to other fields for the detriment of
| observers.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| When was flat earth _only_ a gag?
|
| People were adamantly trying to prove a flat earth at least 150
| years ago, and even got the co-discoverer of evolution via
| natural selection(Wallace) roped into the controversy:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedford_Level_experiment
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| I remember there being this satire forum where people were
| trying to prove that earth is flat as an intellectual
| exercise. I think it was 15 or more years ago or something
| like that. At that point there was no serious, popular and
| well known flat earth movement. This came later.
|
| It may have been theflatearthsociety dot org.
|
| But maybe I remember wrong. It was that they were pretending
| to believe and trolling, but now as it is more serious they
| stopped trolling in such a way.
| binary132 wrote:
| Not a flat earther myself, but I will say they are right
| about one thing: fisheye lenses are really popular in
| photography of the Earth from space or near-space. It's one
| of those things you don't notice until someone points it
| out to you, and then you see it everywhere.
| samatman wrote:
| I'm sure they're right about a lot of things! Water is
| wet, for instance. The moon waxes and wanes. That sort of
| thing.
|
| If you want to photograph a wide field of view, you use a
| fisheye lens. Humanity hasn't spent a lot of time far
| enough from Earth that it doesn't fill a wide field of
| view, although we do have some rather nice photographs
| from both humans and machines which have made it out that
| far.
| binary132 wrote:
| It has the added benefit of making something round which
| sometimes looks surprisingly not all that curvy look
| curvier.
| empath75 wrote:
| One fun thing about the whole flat earth thing is that
| people who argue online (correctly, of course), that the
| earth is round often will smugly do it using completely
| incorrect arguments or using photographic evidence that
| doesn't show what they think it does. And that's often
| generally true for people who "trust the science" about
| most topics. It's basically impossible to know the actual
| reasons for why scientists believe _everything_ that
| science has established, most people just "take their word
| for it" and don't actually make any effort to understand
| the justifications for almost any of their beliefs.
|
| It's sort of useful to have people around who just believe
| stuff and argue for stuff completely outside the usual
| scientific method just to keep people on their toes.
| krapp wrote:
| QAnon started as a gag on 4chan and then ate the Republican
| Party because it was too on the nose. 4chan itself is a great
| example - it used to be "ironically" racist, now it's just
| racist racist, and that's the joke.
|
| And I was listening to a Behind the Bastards podcast about the
| history of the Illuminati and how a lot of the modern
| conspiracy beliefs about the Illuminati come from the
| Discordian movement parodying conspiracy beliefs.
|
| On the one hand you have to appreciate when people game so hard
| they manifest a zeitgeist entirely out of their own irony-
| poisoned fart clouds, but on the other hand we no longer have
| the level of education or degree of critical thinking to offset
| the nonsense, nor any kind of consensus reality to tether
| ourselves to, and the people who believe in the flat earth and
| Jewish space lasers are everywhere now, and that just kind of
| sucks.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| Having also watched all of this happen, I still can't believe
| it's real. Freeway overpasses now have angry mobs waving
| signs about joke conspiracy theories made up by teenage
| edgelords shitposting from their parents basement.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| To be fair 4chan skews millennial/gen x
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| There is no problem. People believing in a flat earth or birds
| not being real has no impact on you and how you live your life,
| unless you allow these people to live in your head.
| PyWoody wrote:
| All Birds Are Cats (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eIl1VuGTk3g)
| bigiain wrote:
| As per my usual habit, I'm now thinking up overcomplications of
| this.
|
| I happen to have two unused ESP Cams boards/cameras here.
| <instead of random steering movements, feeding the camera output
| over the ESP's Wi-Fi to something handy running OpenCV to do
| person or perhaps even face detection, and having it follow
| people as they walk past would make it _way_ more creepy. And
| perhaps replace the LED with an RGB LED, and do face recognition
| so it lights up green when I am being tracked, and red when it's
| tracking unknown faces...
| spiritplumber wrote:
| https://www.robots-everywhere.com/store/index.php?route=prod...
| you can make one of these if you like (I've been looking for an
| excuse to put the source somewhere)
| dvh wrote:
| I think the camera in esp32-cam already had face or motion
| detection
| tzs wrote:
| > having it follow people as they walk past
|
| That reminds me of this amusing project [1] from 13 years ago.
| An artist had a sidewalk right next to his window. He put a
| curtain on the window that was only wide enough to cover about
| 20% of the window, with a motorized system to move the curtain
| side to side. A camera and software would recognize when
| someone was passing by and rapidly move the curtain to block
| their view in and then move it with them as the passed by.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKhbUjVyKIc
| Neywiny wrote:
| While I love the esp32, it feels underutilized. I wonder if
| instead of the hardcoded "randomness" it could traverse a 1-D
| perlin noise field with a large scale but maybe varying
| sharpness. That way you can get long stretches of nothing, maybe
| a slow move, maybe a fast move.
| lampysecurity wrote:
| Oh I'm well aware it's underutilized, it's simply what I had on
| hand. I love the idea of adding variations to the speed as
| well, maybe a future revision. I programmed and wired this
| together initially in a hotel room. I didn't put much thought
| into the esthetic, that needs work.
| Neywiny wrote:
| Understood. Thanks for considering it and the cool project
| ranguna wrote:
| I'm not gen z, but this is giving me skibidi vibes.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| I was always very bad at electronics, but I'm sure someone else
| here knows: how hard would it be to replace the esp32 with
| something without a CPU, RAM, USB and Wi-Fi while still being
| small enough?
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Sorry, what do you aim to be left with?
| dumbo-octopus wrote:
| Busses
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