There was a time in the electronics world when bright, house illuminating leds first came about and manufacturers used them in place of the dull red/green indicators. Black tape everywhere. Macbooks were one of the worst offenders. They had an extremely bright and worst of all pulsating led that was on when the device was in standby. Used to shine right through laptop bags and keep everyone nearby awake.

Fortunately that fad is somewhat over and manufacturers mostly learnt not to put in the brightest led they could source.

What do you suggest I do about Ford pickup trucks with annoyingly high, bright high beams?

Maybe a light bar for the rear of the car and some reflective material for the sunvisor?

So the LED on these generators is intended to signal issues with the machine to the property owner. The green sticker might be fine at first glance (i.e., when the machine is healthy), but when it switches to yellow (routine maintenance alert) or red (will not autostart due to fault), the owner might not notice.

> small green sticker

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.

> One night I just went a back there and put a small green sticker on the plastic case

Did you try talking to them about it first?

Not to hijack your post with a PSA but I think you'll endorse it...

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.

I can highly recommend aluminum tape or copper tape. Doesn't let any light through and super easy to apply.

One night I just went a back there and...

Expects vandalism or more serious crime.

...put a small green sticker

Ok, good engineer!

If you want more "human drama" read up on Hong Kong protesters' extensive use of lasers against police and security cameras. A powerful enough laser can pretty quickly render a security camera unusable. Ofc it can also blind someone (even indirectly looking at the beam) quite easily

When you have a helicopter circling your house for hours, you do start to lose rational thought.

>A South Australia Police helicopter checking on COVID compliance during a three-day lockdown [...]

Whew.

A lot of helicopters today are being used to harass entire neighborhoods where complaints to local government go completely unresolved, so I can emphasize with that situation, not that I'd ever do something that stupid.

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.

Fighting noise pollution with light pollution

That hole page explains why aliens won’t come visit.

Yeah, a beam of anything is asking for a beam-rider to find it. (Doesn't have to be a missile--wake-follower torpedoes are a form of beam-rider. They don't look for a ship, they try to follow a wake until they run under/into a ship. Passive so the enemy doesn't hear your sonar pinging, nor do sonar masking systems have any effect on it. The weakness is such torpedoes are very predictable and can be tricked into going for a towed decoy.)

True, but I think this post is for a more general audience. Where continuous (and visible) lasers are still found on many things, including weapons.

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.

There are still a few laser designators and munitions that use them. Mostly LGBs, as far as I'm aware - JDAMs didn't eat everything yet.

Um, they used laser dazzlers pretty commonly in Iraq back in the 2000's? Soldiers fucking around with them would sometimes make the news: https://www.wired.com/2009/03/dont-lase-me-br/

Mirror

I read it as sympathetic to the paranoid people who believe these things, and gently steering them towards medical help instead.

The section above seems to explain why this article is written the way it is. Many people do experience sensations or see things that we otherwise cannot. They may have heightened sensitivity or could have a mental or neurological condition that produces these experiences. Some people may feel like they are going crazy seeing or hearing things that aren't actually there. Others feed into the experiences and believe they exist, like targeted individuals do. Someone that may be unsure if they are really seeing lasers or feeling indeterminate heating may and hasn't totally fallen down the DEW or TI rabbit hole could benefit from seeing something that basically says "I believe you're hearing/seeing/feeling these things, there may be medical explanation so you may want to see a doctor."

It's ok. When someone finally weaponizes this for terror purposes, you probably won't have time to react before you're permanently blind. No sense worrying about it.

Only the paranoid survive... I am going there.

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?

>"If you see light or feel heat from an unknown source"

"If you see the flash, it's already too late"

It's in the title itself! lol

I see no such effect in Firefox on Android.

I was extremely impressed by that too. However, if you click on anything else in the sidebar then you get the animation again. I would prefer the visual treat to work once on initial entry into the site.

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.

Is there an effective anti-IR coating for eyeglasses like there is for UV? Seems like a good thing to have but a web search doesn't turn up much. It might interfere with facial recognition, but maybe that's a feature.

What about visible lasers that lack an IR filter and have more IR energy in the beam?

Or UV

For things like this (extracting precise computed data from unstructured blobs) I find that it's often more effective to ask your AI tool to provide a program (I usually ask for a HTML page with a JS form, or a bookmarklet) that can do the actual math.

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).

There are diagnoseable mental illnesses that cause people to believe they are being targeted by sinister forces. They can't believe because their brain is malfunctioning.

Sounds like the writings of a "targeted individual". Or "gangstalking". It's a more common phenomenon than people realize. There's even a subreddit community of individuals experiencing this

https://old.reddit.com/r/Gangstalking/

Here's a fascinating Aeon piece on the phenomenon

https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-psychiatric-narrative-hinders...

> They will refuse to accept "That's just not how that works" as an answer.

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.

Every biohacking community ends up with a page like this talking about implants. "Yes, we implant ourselves with little devices that interact with electromagnetic radiation. No, you probably didn't have such a device implanted in you without your knowledge. If you did, it wouldn't be much use to your adversaries. Please seek psychiatric help".

It very much reminds me of discussions of people finding or seeing meteors falling. The consensus is, if you see the rock falling, then it is not a meteor.

Both the lasers and the meteors have in common the fact that there are far more false negatives than true positives.

"That's just not how that works" isn't an answer; it's a dismissal.

Who's convinced by "lol no ur stupid"?

It's a very carefully-worded page from somebody who has clearly had to deal with a large number of people suffering from paranoid delusions.

The run-on sentence style paranoid people type is getting a lot more common online.

The problem with such delusions is that people desperately need a physical explanation. Because the alternative is that they are seeing things that are not real, which is an even scarier thought than some organized group pointing lasers at you.

Honestly, "That's just not how that works" isn't a very convincing argument.

If you can't explain why it doesn't work that way, there's no reason anybody should believe you.

I read and read and it totally reminded me of Valis

Apparantly their user name is ‘1970-01-01’

that’s the submitters‘ user name, not the submission date