Live data from Hacker News

WALDO: Whereabouts Ascertainment for Low-Lying Detectable Objects

github.com

31–40 of 44 posts

Re: WALDO: Whereabouts Ascertainment for Low-Lying Detectable Objects

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that class never really worked and has been removed from the new version of WALDO FYI, it’s not a military thing and shouldn’t be used as such

Don’t worry this is a suburban defense system. Purely civilian targets. I created it after joining my neighborhood NextDoor.

Reminds me of an ancient SNL skit with Dan Aykroyd and perhaps Gilda Radner or another gal on the team where the skit is about Aykroyd wandering his backyard talking about all the annoying things about his neighbors and how he has a solution for it now. He has a neighborhood nuclear device that he can use any time of them crosses a line. The skit ends with a mushroom cloud appearing over his fence as he grins that Aykroyd grin if I remember it right.

Anyway, I have never found this skit mentioned in any of the documentation of the show but I know I saw it live, on Saturday night back before Belushi snorted his last snort.

Re: WALDO: Whereabouts Ascertainment for Low-Lying Detectable Objects

#32

I worked for a place where we needed to know with precision where in space a large object was relative to a large area we had full control over. I wonder if this could be used in reverse by say dropping QR codes on the ground, using the algorithm to track relative positions and doing the reverse operation from there

you don’t need AI for that, classic computer vision will work fine ;)

Of course but it was a pain to figure out how to set that up. Much easier, I would guess to run a single pass of yolo and get parameters out, no?

Re: WALDO: Whereabouts Ascertainment for Low-Lying Detectable Objects

#33
post #24
post #7

I wonder if these achievements are related to war in Ukraine. Do scientists suddenly receive more funding or something? Or it just happens? Is there a non public version with very reliable arm/mil? Is there a version which can reliably distinguish T-80 with and without Z?

Iv seen Ukrainians experimenting with YOLO and it was terrible. Every second bush/tree was flipping between person/tree/rock/nothing. Looks like the model was trained on clean urban environment videos.

> Looks like the model was trained on clean urban environment videos.

But they should now have tons of video data with their landscape and their threats to fine-tune on. It's going to need plenty of labor but they also happen to have tons of maimed soldiers who can't fight anymore.

Re: WALDO: Whereabouts Ascertainment for Low-Lying Detectable Objects

#34
post #7

I wonder if these achievements are related to war in Ukraine. Do scientists suddenly receive more funding or something? Or it just happens? Is there a non public version with very reliable arm/mil? Is there a version which can reliably distinguish T-80 with and without Z?

A big part is that training image detection is incredibly easy today. YOLO is a great network with reasonably intuitive tooling. Anyone with a set of images can start labeling them, copy-paste a couple lines into a jupyter notebook and make a decent YOLO finetune. The difficulty is in the training data, both acquiring it and labeling it. Hence why the readme of WALDO alludes so much to their semi-synthetic data. That…

It's easy but note that the author spent 60k in training costs.

> I'm planning to set up a way for people to get the .pt files and the ONNX models with unlimited outputs for people who support further development of the project on Ko-Fi (https://ko-fi.com/stephansturges), the goal being to offset some of the cost of training these networks (over 60K USD spent on AWS to date! )

Not everyone has that kind of spare cash around

Re: WALDO: Whereabouts Ascertainment for Low-Lying Detectable Objects

#35
post #13

What would be legitimate civilian uses for this technology apart from [0]? After the 10k drone swarm the other day and the pager attacks all I can think of is slaughterbots, which is genuinely freaking me out. [0] - https://xkcd.com/2128/

Depending from how high it can reliably work from, collaborate with UK CCTV surveillance so that you can better track individuals with fewer cameras as long as you can collate them with cameras that confirm their position at various points in time. Fly a handful of drones over the area of a fleeing suspect and be able to track their whereabouts and look for suspicious behaviors (eg. someone running and making constan…

No such thing as a coordinated UK cctv network. Absolute nonsense.

Re: WALDO: Whereabouts Ascertainment for Low-Lying Detectable Objects

#36

> 'arm/mil' --> this class detects certain types of armored vehicles (very unreliable for now, don't use it yet) Living near a bunch of the military bases, this is what I really need. My suburban defense system keeps mistaking USPS trucks for APCs. I haven’t received any mail for months. Sidenote: what are the export restriction?

> My suburban defense system keeps mistaking USPS trucks for APCs.

Is... This an american thing? What the heck is a suburban defense system?

Re: WALDO: Whereabouts Ascertainment for Low-Lying Detectable Objects

#37
post #7

I wonder if these achievements are related to war in Ukraine. Do scientists suddenly receive more funding or something? Or it just happens? Is there a non public version with very reliable arm/mil? Is there a version which can reliably distinguish T-80 with and without Z?

A big part is that training image detection is incredibly easy today. YOLO is a great network with reasonably intuitive tooling. Anyone with a set of images can start labeling them, copy-paste a couple lines into a jupyter notebook and make a decent YOLO finetune. The difficulty is in the training data, both acquiring it and labeling it. Hence why the readme of WALDO alludes so much to their semi-synthetic data. That…

That’s not really going to work. You likely won’t be able to identify markings on a tank. Your biggest challenge will be false positives for things that are not tanks.

Re: WALDO: Whereabouts Ascertainment for Low-Lying Detectable Objects

#38

What would be legitimate civilian uses for this technology apart from [0]? After the 10k drone swarm the other day and the pager attacks all I can think of is slaughterbots, which is genuinely freaking me out. [0] - https://xkcd.com/2128/

Managing the development of farms and construction, monitoring activity levels and the state of things is pretty huge

Re: WALDO: Whereabouts Ascertainment for Low-Lying Detectable Objects

#39

> 'arm/mil' --> this class detects certain types of armored vehicles (very unreliable for now, don't use it yet) Living near a bunch of the military bases, this is what I really need. My suburban defense system keeps mistaking USPS trucks for APCs. I haven’t received any mail for months. Sidenote: what are the export restriction?

> My suburban defense system keeps mistaking USPS trucks for APCs. Is... This an american thing? What the heck is a suburban defense system?

It's a joke.
Post reply on HN