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> If some idiot thinks they're god and wants to emulate something they're clearly not capable of doing safely It can be difficult to know if you’re capable of

> If some idiot thinks they're god and wants to emulate something they're clearly not capable of doing safely It can be difficult to know if you’re capable of doing something safely. Unfortunately you only find out that you’re not capable when it goes wrong. There’s a reason why labs and engineering firms force people through long detailed safety training courses. There’s a lot of things out there that can kill or serious maim you, which look completely innocuous at first sight. Additionally there are many naive safety protocols that create the appearance of safety, without actually protecting people. Normally people only recognise poor safety setups because they’ve either been shown why it’s bad (plus accompanying horror story), or they’ve suffered the failure personally. Simply opening up the side of a microwave while it off and disconnected exposes you to a shock risk capable of killing. Unless you take specific steps to make the microwave safe, it’s not hard to imagine someone taking the side of a microwave off after watching this video, without realising the danger within.

junon 5y ago
> It can be difficult to know if you’re capable of doing something safely Not really. Opening up electronics, fiddling with them, and then plugging them in, is pretty typically considered dangerous. It's such a ridiculous argument to say we should be censoring this stuff because it's dangerous to the untrained. Should we censor professional cooking videos where they chop food really fast with sharp knives? Someone could cut themselves! Should we censor videos of people who free climb large mountains? Someone could fall and die! It's this sort of collective dumbing down of people that results in us having warning labels on hair dryers that say "do not use while sleeping". Censoring instead of educating is directly part of the problem.
- avianlyric 5y ago
  > Not really. Opening up electronics, fiddling with them, and then plugging them in, is pretty typically considered dangerous. With a microwave, just opening it up and fiddling is dangerous. No need to plug it in. The main capacitor inside stores enough charge at a high enough voltage to kill you. Unless you take explicit steps to discharge it, it’ll hold that charge for hours to days. > It's such a ridiculous argument to say we should be censoring this stuff because it's dangerous to the untrained. I’m not advocating for censorship. But there are plenty of other YouTubers out there doing similar videos, but they do a substantial better job of explaining the risks and danger, and do so in an entertaining way. I think it’s reasonable to expect YouTubers like this to place appropriate warnings in their videos to make it clear how dangerous their work can be. Those warnings don’t need to be boring or distracting to be effective, it just requires some imagination to integrate them well into a video. > Should we censor professional cooking videos where they chop food really fast with sharp knives? Someone could cut themselves! People encounter knives on a day-to-day basis. It’s reasonable to assume that everyone knows that knives can be dangerous when misused. The same can’t be said of lasers and microwaves. Lasers and microwaves are particularly dangerous due to reflections and refractions, and can pose a significant danger to more than just the experimenter. Lasers bounce around a room, if that room isn’t properly sealed there’s the potential for escaped light to blind someone outside your lab. If you don’t have proper access control on your lab, then you can accidentally blind someone entering it without the correct PPE. If someone grabs a cheap high class 4 IR laser off the internet (which really isn’t hard) and plays with it in a bedroom or garage, there’s an extremely high risk they’ll blind family members. If they’re wearing the wrong type of laser goggles, then they also risk blinding themselves. With an IR laser, you can’t even see the beam. You’ll only know you’ve walked into it when your retina starts burning. With microwaves, the signal can easily penetrate walls and other non-metallic objects. If you don’t have a faraday cage, or it’s not properly tuned for the frequencies you’re working with, then those microwaves can travel into other rooms and cause significant interference with other electronics (including pacemakers) and cause metallic objects to accumulate significant voltage potential. All of these risk are non-obvious because the electricity, and RF radiation behave in extremely non-intuitive ways. We have no natural fear or understanding of these phenomena because they’re only dangerous in purely artificial, man made, conditions. Knives, mountains, fire etc we’ve got thousands of years of evolution telling us those things are dangerous. Laser, electricity and microwaves only became a danger a human is likely to encounter 100 years ago. > It's this sort of collective dumbing down of people that results in us having warning labels on hair dryers that say "do not use while sleeping". I don’t think people have ever been very good at evaluating these risks and acting appropriately. If we were, then safety courses would be unnecessary. The only thing that’s changed in the past 100 years, is that we’ve figured out how these technologies will kill and maim us. Now we have the knowledge, it seems stupid to make further blood sacrifices to relearn it.
  - junon 5y ago
    Sorry, I simply don't agree with your point of view.
    - avianlyric 5y ago
      Out of interest, have you ever worked with equipment like this? Or in an environment that contains this type of equipment? Trying to avoid a personal attack here. But having worked in environments that deal with high voltage equipment, and high power lasers, been through the safety training, and also been prevented by co-workers from touching/doing something that would have seriously injured me. I’ve developed a healthy fear of electricity, microwaves and lasers. Once you make enough silly mistakes that injure you, and meet enough people missing fingers, have serious, work induced, chronic illnesses and know people that died. You start understand how little stands between you and the abyss. I think I can be tricky for people to really comprehend the danger until you’ve seen the photos, met the people, and made your own mistakes.
      - kortex 5y ago
        Not junon, but I agree with them. I have a chemistry degree, years of chemical safety training, years of practice as a fire artist and performer, and a huge fan of all these high energy science channels. My hobby is basically doing this same kind of "don't try at home" content, sans uploading it, and in fact the thought has crossed my mind to start a channel. There is only so much "don't try this at home" disclaimers can do. NurdRage and NileRed probably have the best disclaimers, but even then they are no excuse for actual safety training and experience. There is too much to cram into one safety brief. Should we censor all woodworking videos of old timers with outdated safety habits? There comes a point of "we are all adults here" and if you are not, you are probably a dumbshit teenager doing dumbshit stuff without adults knowing. I got my start doing dumbshit dangerous chemistry without any assistance of YouTube, it was all forums for me and there were no warnings, it was just implied that what you are doing has risks and you should look into them. And yeah I had my injuries and near misses, nothing awful thankfully. If you have any inkling of self preservation, you learn what is required for at least a modicum of safety, and you ask questions of those also in the hobby how to do things safely. The great thing about these channels is that they nucleate and create a nexus for people interested in this stuff, often on Reddit, which is like the one-forum-to-rule-them-all (though I do rather miss the phpbb ones depth) I think what bugs me about this attitude is it basically implies sharing dangerous knowledge is unethical. Let's say we censor StyroPyro, are people going to suddenly not be tempted? No, they are just going to find other outlets for their curiosity.
- crmd 5y ago
  I would rather see my kid risk a burn taking lasers and motors apart, versus her risking depression and body dysmorphic disorder from passively following toxic video game streamers and Instagram influencers. The amount of gatekeeping-cum-concern trolling in the tech community is as abundant as it is timeless. I hope more of the next generation of young scientists get their start from nilered, photonicinduction, styropyro, etc.
  - avianlyric 5y ago
    I’m all for kids doing dumb shit, getting hurt, and learning valuable skills and life lessons. It can be very educational and fun for all parties involved. Where I get concerned is when people are playing with tech can a easily move from “skin burn that heals in a week” to “partial / complete loss of sight in one eye” with little obvious indication that you’ve crossed that boundary. Lasers in particular can be very nasty in this space. An simple 1mW green laser will look basically identical to a 1mW IR laser. But the IR laser has a real risk of causing partial sight loss because it not visible, so you don’t blink or look away when it shone in your eyes. Instead the first indication of a problem will either be pain or partial loss of sight, at which point the damage is done and can’t be repaired. To further complicate things damage to eye can also depend on if the laser is pulsing or running continuously. So laser that seems “safe” when operated continuously can become extremely dangerous when pulsed. Finally if you’ve got a laser that burn your skin. Then it’ll annihilate your eyes in a instant. The optics in your eyes have a focal magnification of about 100,000x so 1mW/cm2 becomes 100W/cm2 once it hits your retina. Which itself is not the most robust organ in the body. In short things like lasers create a difficult to control hazard that pretty much targets on of the most sensitive, important and difficult to repair parts of the body, the eyes. People live perfectly normal lives missing fingers and toes, with 3rd degree burns and horrific scars. But permanent sight loss is a totally different ball game, it’s high impact, life long, and we have pretty much no technology that can reverse it. So please, encourage your children to mess around with technology, take stuff apart. Burn fingers, break bones and slice up hands. But for the love of god, protect them permanent sight or hearing loss. Let them lose that stuff at music festivals or too old age. And doing that mean making sure they really understand how dangerous lasers can be, and how something a simple as taking your goggles of at the wrong moment can have huge life altering ramifications, before they start playing within anything more powerful than a DVD player.
joe-collins 5y ago
03:11 > Now I gotta say it, poking around in a microwave is not for the inexperienced. When electronics hobbyists get killed by their projects, it's almost always because they're messing around with microwave parts like these.
- avianlyric 5y ago
  I think he could have done better and worked more warnings into his delivery as he went. Simply saying something dangerous isn’t enough. People need to understand _why_ it’s dangerous, or they’re likely to ignore the warnings. When he was messing around with the capacitors (the really dangerous bit in a microwave). It would have been easy to work in a sentence about how they have a high voltage, and touching them could kill you. Equally when he was messing with the lasers, he didn’t explain the risk at all, or even demonstrate any safety equipment. Him simply wearing this laser googles on his forehead for the second half of the video would be enough to make it clear that he’s using safety equipment and not just winging it.
  - junon 5y ago
    I think you're making a lot of assumptions about someone based off of one video. If you've been a styropyro fan for a while, you'd know how serious he takes safety. He has whole videos about proper safety glasses and whatnot, and even destroys some to demonstrate that not all glasses are safe or even made correctly. Almost every video of his mentions "if these lasers were on for even a second and I'm not wearing glasses, I would immediately go blind".
    - avianlyric 5y ago
      I’ll go watch more of his videos then. To be clear I really enjoyed the video, and love videos like this, and want to see more. They’re incredibly educational, and do a fantastic job of lifting the curtain on the modern miracles of science we take for granted everyday, and demonstrating that normal people can understand them. With luck it’ll encourage more people to pick up science and engineering, and build new and interesting things. But I do worry that sometimes the internet makes it very easy for people to put themselves into very dangerous situations without realising it. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for educational community on YouTube to be constantly trying to find new ways of teaching about the risks, in addition to messing around with the science.
LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
No risk, no fun. Why so serious?

junon 5y ago

> It can be difficult to know if you’re capable of doing something safely Not really. Opening up electronics, fiddling with them, and then plugging them in, is pretty typically considered dangerous. It's such a ridiculous argument to say we should be censoring this stuff because it's dangerous to the untrained. Should we censor professional cooking videos where they chop food really fast with sharp knives? Someone could cut themselves! Should we censor videos of people who free climb large mountains? Someone could fall and die! It's this sort of collective dumbing down of people that results in us having warning labels on hair dryers that say "do not use while sleeping". Censoring instead of educating is directly part of the problem.

avianlyric 5y ago
> Not really. Opening up electronics, fiddling with them, and then plugging them in, is pretty typically considered dangerous. With a microwave, just opening it up and fiddling is dangerous. No need to plug it in. The main capacitor inside stores enough charge at a high enough voltage to kill you. Unless you take explicit steps to discharge it, it’ll hold that charge for hours to days. > It's such a ridiculous argument to say we should be censoring this stuff because it's dangerous to the untrained. I’m not advocating for censorship. But there are plenty of other YouTubers out there doing similar videos, but they do a substantial better job of explaining the risks and danger, and do so in an entertaining way. I think it’s reasonable to expect YouTubers like this to place appropriate warnings in their videos to make it clear how dangerous their work can be. Those warnings don’t need to be boring or distracting to be effective, it just requires some imagination to integrate them well into a video. > Should we censor professional cooking videos where they chop food really fast with sharp knives? Someone could cut themselves! People encounter knives on a day-to-day basis. It’s reasonable to assume that everyone knows that knives can be dangerous when misused. The same can’t be said of lasers and microwaves. Lasers and microwaves are particularly dangerous due to reflections and refractions, and can pose a significant danger to more than just the experimenter. Lasers bounce around a room, if that room isn’t properly sealed there’s the potential for escaped light to blind someone outside your lab. If you don’t have proper access control on your lab, then you can accidentally blind someone entering it without the correct PPE. If someone grabs a cheap high class 4 IR laser off the internet (which really isn’t hard) and plays with it in a bedroom or garage, there’s an extremely high risk they’ll blind family members. If they’re wearing the wrong type of laser goggles, then they also risk blinding themselves. With an IR laser, you can’t even see the beam. You’ll only know you’ve walked into it when your retina starts burning. With microwaves, the signal can easily penetrate walls and other non-metallic objects. If you don’t have a faraday cage, or it’s not properly tuned for the frequencies you’re working with, then those microwaves can travel into other rooms and cause significant interference with other electronics (including pacemakers) and cause metallic objects to accumulate significant voltage potential. All of these risk are non-obvious because the electricity, and RF radiation behave in extremely non-intuitive ways. We have no natural fear or understanding of these phenomena because they’re only dangerous in purely artificial, man made, conditions. Knives, mountains, fire etc we’ve got thousands of years of evolution telling us those things are dangerous. Laser, electricity and microwaves only became a danger a human is likely to encounter 100 years ago. > It's this sort of collective dumbing down of people that results in us having warning labels on hair dryers that say "do not use while sleeping". I don’t think people have ever been very good at evaluating these risks and acting appropriately. If we were, then safety courses would be unnecessary. The only thing that’s changed in the past 100 years, is that we’ve figured out how these technologies will kill and maim us. Now we have the knowledge, it seems stupid to make further blood sacrifices to relearn it.
- junon 5y ago
  Sorry, I simply don't agree with your point of view.
  - avianlyric 5y ago
    Out of interest, have you ever worked with equipment like this? Or in an environment that contains this type of equipment? Trying to avoid a personal attack here. But having worked in environments that deal with high voltage equipment, and high power lasers, been through the safety training, and also been prevented by co-workers from touching/doing something that would have seriously injured me. I’ve developed a healthy fear of electricity, microwaves and lasers. Once you make enough silly mistakes that injure you, and meet enough people missing fingers, have serious, work induced, chronic illnesses and know people that died. You start understand how little stands between you and the abyss. I think I can be tricky for people to really comprehend the danger until you’ve seen the photos, met the people, and made your own mistakes.
    - kortex 5y ago
      Not junon, but I agree with them. I have a chemistry degree, years of chemical safety training, years of practice as a fire artist and performer, and a huge fan of all these high energy science channels. My hobby is basically doing this same kind of "don't try at home" content, sans uploading it, and in fact the thought has crossed my mind to start a channel. There is only so much "don't try this at home" disclaimers can do. NurdRage and NileRed probably have the best disclaimers, but even then they are no excuse for actual safety training and experience. There is too much to cram into one safety brief. Should we censor all woodworking videos of old timers with outdated safety habits? There comes a point of "we are all adults here" and if you are not, you are probably a dumbshit teenager doing dumbshit stuff without adults knowing. I got my start doing dumbshit dangerous chemistry without any assistance of YouTube, it was all forums for me and there were no warnings, it was just implied that what you are doing has risks and you should look into them. And yeah I had my injuries and near misses, nothing awful thankfully. If you have any inkling of self preservation, you learn what is required for at least a modicum of safety, and you ask questions of those also in the hobby how to do things safely. The great thing about these channels is that they nucleate and create a nexus for people interested in this stuff, often on Reddit, which is like the one-forum-to-rule-them-all (though I do rather miss the phpbb ones depth) I think what bugs me about this attitude is it basically implies sharing dangerous knowledge is unethical. Let's say we censor StyroPyro, are people going to suddenly not be tempted? No, they are just going to find other outlets for their curiosity.
crmd 5y ago
I would rather see my kid risk a burn taking lasers and motors apart, versus her risking depression and body dysmorphic disorder from passively following toxic video game streamers and Instagram influencers. The amount of gatekeeping-cum-concern trolling in the tech community is as abundant as it is timeless. I hope more of the next generation of young scientists get their start from nilered, photonicinduction, styropyro, etc.
- avianlyric 5y ago
  I’m all for kids doing dumb shit, getting hurt, and learning valuable skills and life lessons. It can be very educational and fun for all parties involved. Where I get concerned is when people are playing with tech can a easily move from “skin burn that heals in a week” to “partial / complete loss of sight in one eye” with little obvious indication that you’ve crossed that boundary. Lasers in particular can be very nasty in this space. An simple 1mW green laser will look basically identical to a 1mW IR laser. But the IR laser has a real risk of causing partial sight loss because it not visible, so you don’t blink or look away when it shone in your eyes. Instead the first indication of a problem will either be pain or partial loss of sight, at which point the damage is done and can’t be repaired. To further complicate things damage to eye can also depend on if the laser is pulsing or running continuously. So laser that seems “safe” when operated continuously can become extremely dangerous when pulsed. Finally if you’ve got a laser that burn your skin. Then it’ll annihilate your eyes in a instant. The optics in your eyes have a focal magnification of about 100,000x so 1mW/cm2 becomes 100W/cm2 once it hits your retina. Which itself is not the most robust organ in the body. In short things like lasers create a difficult to control hazard that pretty much targets on of the most sensitive, important and difficult to repair parts of the body, the eyes. People live perfectly normal lives missing fingers and toes, with 3rd degree burns and horrific scars. But permanent sight loss is a totally different ball game, it’s high impact, life long, and we have pretty much no technology that can reverse it. So please, encourage your children to mess around with technology, take stuff apart. Burn fingers, break bones and slice up hands. But for the love of god, protect them permanent sight or hearing loss. Let them lose that stuff at music festivals or too old age. And doing that mean making sure they really understand how dangerous lasers can be, and how something a simple as taking your goggles of at the wrong moment can have huge life altering ramifications, before they start playing within anything more powerful than a DVD player.

joe-collins 5y ago

03:11 > Now I gotta say it, poking around in a microwave is not for the inexperienced. When electronics hobbyists get killed by their projects, it's almost always because they're messing around with microwave parts like these.

avianlyric 5y ago
I think he could have done better and worked more warnings into his delivery as he went. Simply saying something dangerous isn’t enough. People need to understand _why_ it’s dangerous, or they’re likely to ignore the warnings. When he was messing around with the capacitors (the really dangerous bit in a microwave). It would have been easy to work in a sentence about how they have a high voltage, and touching them could kill you. Equally when he was messing with the lasers, he didn’t explain the risk at all, or even demonstrate any safety equipment. Him simply wearing this laser googles on his forehead for the second half of the video would be enough to make it clear that he’s using safety equipment and not just winging it.
- junon 5y ago
  I think you're making a lot of assumptions about someone based off of one video. If you've been a styropyro fan for a while, you'd know how serious he takes safety. He has whole videos about proper safety glasses and whatnot, and even destroys some to demonstrate that not all glasses are safe or even made correctly. Almost every video of his mentions "if these lasers were on for even a second and I'm not wearing glasses, I would immediately go blind".
  - avianlyric 5y ago
    I’ll go watch more of his videos then. To be clear I really enjoyed the video, and love videos like this, and want to see more. They’re incredibly educational, and do a fantastic job of lifting the curtain on the modern miracles of science we take for granted everyday, and demonstrating that normal people can understand them. With luck it’ll encourage more people to pick up science and engineering, and build new and interesting things. But I do worry that sometimes the internet makes it very easy for people to put themselves into very dangerous situations without realising it. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for educational community on YouTube to be constantly trying to find new ways of teaching about the risks, in addition to messing around with the science.

LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago

No risk, no fun. Why so serious?