The Compleat Billy Chronicles (thanks to Zenpatista)

[Doktor Howl]

Today:

Norton:  "I'm gonna go home today and my girlfriends are going to ask me what I did at work."

Me:  "Sounds healthy."

Norton:  "And I have to tell them that I was installing heating elements up the ass of a stuffed bison."

Kyle *walks in*:  Why didn't you just cut a hole in the side of the bison, shove the heater in, and then close it up?"

Norton:  "Because Hamish told me...Hamish, why did you tell me to wiggle it up it's ass instead?"

Me:  *stares horribly*

[Juana]

[chaotic neutral observer]

Kyle *walks in*:  Why didn't you just cut a hole in the side of the bison, shove the heater in, and then close it up?"

Yes, that's exactly what I would ask.  It's definitely more important than why we are trying to heat the bison from the inside to begin with.

...so, are we trying to teach the heat-seeking drone swarm to kill large ruminants, or not to kill them?

[Doktor Howl]

Kyle *walks in*:  Why didn't you just cut a hole in the side of the bison, shove the heater in, and then close it up?"

Yes, that's exactly what I would ask.  It's definitely more important than why we are trying to heat the bison from the inside to begin with.

...so, are we trying to teach the heat-seeking drone swarm to kill large ruminants, or not to kill them?

Neither, at the moment.  We are attempting to get them to sort large ruminants.  By visual light, heat, shape, etc.

This is why I have now 4 truckloads of taxidermied critters, ranging from elk heads to entire bison and musk ox.

The fun bit starts shortly, but right now it's just sorting.

[minuspace]

I'm kinda worried about their fluids, assuming you were training a net to identify things by heat signature. Hydration and specific heat capacity, how it relates to thermal radiation vs. whatever else they stuffed with. It's been a frustrating day, or I wouldn't even.

[Doktor Howl]

Today epitomized the very idea of epic failure.   

More later.

[Doktor Howl]

Scene:  3 guys with laptops mashed into a F150 pickup cab, before dawn.

Me:  "Okay, they're not heading toward *any* of the animals."

Norton:  "Um."

Me:  "What is 'um'?  CONFESSION TIME."

Norton:  "I think I put 101.7 centigrade instead of farenheit.  Because Baby Engineer was mixing his units of measure again."

Kyle:  "So, aside from our engine block, what out here is 215 farenheit?  Because the bison sure as fuck isn't."

Me:  "Also confession time:  Three of those are armed."

Norton:  "WHY?"

Me:  "I was bored."

Kyle:  "ALSO confession time.  I forgot to set the 'electronic fence'."

WHACK WHACK WHACK *steam from radiator*

Norton:  "Fuck.  We're still alive."

Me:  "That's a bit of a disappointment, even with the itty bitty payload."

Kyle:  "I feel as if I've wasted my time, if that's all that happened."

Norton:  "What the hell is WRONG with you guys?"

Me:  "The unexploded bison is what's wrong with me, Norton."

Norton:  "I want to go home now."

Me:  "Not until you load up that bison.  BUT WAIT.  The truck doesn't work anymore."

Kyle:  "It's only 5 miles."

Me:  "With Norton dragging a bison."

Norton:  "Or I could just call Laura to come get us in her truck."

*Kyle and Hamish staring*

Norton:  "What?"

Kyle:  "Space truckin' ain't what it used to be."

Me:  "This is all normal, Kyle."

[Bruno]

I thought about building something like that once. I've played with SimpleCV for Python controlling stepper motors, and I don't think it would be too difficult to put together a "shoot anything that moves" or even a "shoot anything orange that moves" program, and train it to shoot clay targets.

But then I decided that anything involving having any non-human actuator pulling a trigger would be at least one felony, so I decided to stop thinking about it.

[Doktor Howl]

I thought about building something like that once. I've played with SimpleCV for Python controlling stepper motors, and I don't think it would be too difficult to put together a "shoot anything that moves" or even a "shoot anything orange that moves" program, and train it to shoot clay targets.

But then I decided that anything involving having any non-human actuator pulling a trigger would be at least one felony, so I decided to stop thinking about it.

Anything that moves is easy.

That one thing moving that looks like those other things moving, that's hard.

[Bruno]

I thought about building something like that once. I've played with SimpleCV for Python controlling stepper motors, and I don't think it would be too difficult to put together a "shoot anything that moves" or even a "shoot anything orange that moves" program, and train it to shoot clay targets.

But then I decided that anything involving having any non-human actuator pulling a trigger would be at least one felony, so I decided to stop thinking about it.

Anything that moves is easy.

That one thing moving that looks like those other things moving, that's hard.

Yeah, that thing you're working on is orders of magnitude more sophisticated than the thing I gave up on after thinking about it for 30 minutes.

The SimpleCV project I was working on was a smartphone testing robot made from salvaged parts from an old scanner and a printer. Mechanically it worked well enough, but the CV part was unstable. I would give it a sample image to find in the webcam image, and it either couldn't find it, or would find it, but it also found several more instances of that image that were not in any way there. After some tweaking, I could get it to just find the one that was there, I'd move on to the next step, and by the time I had that code ready to test, the last thing had stopped working again for some reason. Only thing I could think of that could be causing that was the webcam driver trying too hard to make the image visually pleasing to human eyes, adjusting color balance, focus, contrast... all that jazz.

It could dial the fuck outa that phone, tho. DOOT! DOOT! DOOT! DOOT! DOOT!

[Faust]

I thought about building something like that once. I've played with SimpleCV for Python controlling stepper motors, and I don't think it would be too difficult to put together a "shoot anything that moves" or even a "shoot anything orange that moves" program, and train it to shoot clay targets.

But then I decided that anything involving having any non-human actuator pulling a trigger would be at least one felony, so I decided to stop thinking about it.

Anything that moves is easy.

That one thing moving that looks like those other things moving, that's hard.

Yeah, that thing you're working on is orders of magnitude more sophisticated than the thing I gave up on after thinking about it for 30 minutes.

The SimpleCV project I was working on was a smartphone testing robot made from salvaged parts from an old scanner and a printer. Mechanically it worked well enough, but the CV part was unstable. I would give it a sample image to find in the webcam image, and it either couldn't find it, or would find it, but it also found several more instances of that image that were not in any way there. After some tweaking, I could get it to just find the one that was there, I'd move on to the next step, and by the time I had that code ready to test, the last thing had stopped working again for some reason. Only thing I could think of that could be causing that was the webcam driver trying too hard to make the image visually pleasing to human eyes, adjusting color balance, focus, contrast... all that jazz.

It could dial the fuck outa that phone, tho. DOOT! DOOT! DOOT! DOOT! DOOT!

With open CV for that we used K-Means Clustering to track the object in the shot and would need a few reads to come back positive and a learning system for person detection. We had an advantage though, we were tracking firefighters through burning buildings so they were all dressed in very similar gear making the learning easier. There are some standard libs now for person detection using things like proportions of the body as criteria and face detection but I haven't tried those. That was a fun project.

[Frontside Back]

Wouldn't the pragmatic approach be giving your soldiers beacons saying "don't kill me", and shooting everything else that moves.

[The Wizard Joseph]

Wouldn't the pragmatic approach be giving your soldiers beacons saying "don't kill me", and shooting everything else that moves.

until an enemy manages to emulate, hijack, or suppress the beacon.

[Frontside Back]

At least it couldn't be tricked with a dino suit.

[Frontside Back]

Wouldn't the pragmatic approach be giving your soldiers beacons saying "don't kill me", and shooting everything else that moves.

until an enemy manages to emulate, hijack, or suppress the beacon.

Then you do a switcheroo and shoot everything with the beacon.