Palmer Luckey says he wants to 'turn warfighters into technomancers' as Anduril takes over production of the US Army's IVAS AR headset from Microsoft
Palmer Luckey says he wants to 'turn warfighters into technomancers' as Anduril takes over production of the US Army's IVAS AR headset from Microsoft
Microsoft will continue to support IVAS functionality with "advanced cloud infrastructure and AI capabilities," but it's out of the hardware game.
Hey Palmer Luckey, eat shit.
Haley Joel Osment's role on Silicon Valley parodying this dipshit really sums it up.
I was briefly confused how an open source flashlight firmware had anything to do with this..... then I noticed this post wasn't in the Flashlight forum. So apparently Anduril is a war contractor AND a great flashlight firmware but are not related at all.
Why the hell would a flashlight need firmware?
I did a quick search, so I’m basically an expert now. imaginary hair flip
So, some flashlights have multiple brightness modes. I guess that’s controlled via a tiny, low power microprocessor.
And if it’s a computer, it can be hacked!So the firmware does things, depending on the capabilities of the hardware in the flashlight, but you can set it to override defaults for brightness, change how many levels of brightness you have, add (or remove) a blinky SOS mode, sleep timers in case it’s accidentally left on, and even add a way to check the battery percentage via a button press pattern, that the flashlight responds to with a series of blinks.
No lie, kind of fascinating stuff. I like to hack other stuff, like smart appliances (replacing firmware so it doesn’t share my data, but I still get to use it as a smart device). I don’t think I would be into talking to my flashlight via Morse code, but I can see the appeal as both a hobby, and for folks who need flashlights as safety equipment.
And Aragorn's sword :c
Anduril is scary. They seem able to harness the most elegant technologies that idiot government redneck contractors tended to avoid in years past. I've seen them in Haskell and Nix forums offering jobs to morally bankrupt autists FAR too often. Fuck you, Anduril.
FUCK YOU!!!!
A friend of mine was working at a company with contracts for them when they released their first drones back in the early days.
At work, they watched the trailer for the fancy drone. (Later that day he would share the same video with me)
He made the joke: "At least we know what will be coming to gun us down in ten years."
That joke went down like a brick with his coworkers. No one else seemed to understand the severity of what we were buidling up to
Yep, senior Haskell developer here and I have had their recruiters hounding me many times, even though I have told them to fuck off again and again.
I always find it so funny that they chose Haskell. They are desperate to hire, but no one in the Haskell community actually wants to work for them. I'm in a discord server with a bunch of veteran Haskellers and everyone there won't touch them with a 100ft pole.
Microsoft was doing the headset? Did they have clippy asking who the soldier wanted to kill that day? Maybe mid-combat blue screens to blind the user? Oh wait, a forced update while it was supposed to determine the trajectory of an incoming mortar...
What problem are these even designed to solve?
Wiki makes me think it’s a hammer in search of a nail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Visual_Augmentation_System
The problem it's trying to solve is "How do we make ungodly amounts of money as 'Defense Contractors'?"
To be genuinely fair, this sort of waste is part and parcel to the US Military.
For sure. Head mounted displays are useful for, say, technical repairs. And I see the value as an alternative to the F35 helmet. But besides that … for infantry? Idk. Wishful thinking IMHO
This is pretty much the story of the entire Land Warrior program. Nobody ever expected it to be a Real Thing, it was always a pie-in-the-sky boondoggle to make a shitload of money for the MIC.
It's made by the same kind of techbros who are angry that the "future doesn't look like the future", that got us the Cybertruck and the other recent Tesla abominations.
When artists/writers design future tech for their cyberpunk dystopia, coolness is a greater factor than usability, especially as most creators don't have much experience with product design. I just go with the "rule of cool" and aesthetics, even in cases where stuff would look obsolete by today's standards, because some powerful people in the tech industry decided everything must be touchscreens and voice commands.
How long until we have Cyberpunk 2077 style quick hacks that can make enemy soldiers just shoot themselves?
pmjv@lemmy.sdf.org 's world coming to reality
On the one hand, glad to see MS get out of this, I don't think the tech is nearly mature enough to work on the battlefield especially on the software side. I've worn the v1 IVAS and developed on hololens, there are definite use cases but - full battle rattle? no. For critical applications something like this must be combat hard and it's nowhere near ready.
eh that said anduril is fucking evil tho....
The Canucks won’t stand a chance