9 ms·

When you take this info and combine it with the ability of Wifi7 routers to "see" where people are in their house, you realize that the recent demo of Anduril's

When you take this info and combine it with the ability of Wifi7 routers to "see" where people are in their house, you realize that the recent demo of Anduril's helmet that gives an information display that the soldier/cop wearing it can use to "see who is in the house" or "see around corners" etc. is not sci-fi but instead, something they can do today.

CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
I hate that all our favorite sci-fi books were used as manuals for what to build next, instead of trying to avoid creating those futures in our real lives.
- dv_dt 1y ago
  Read more Solarpunk? From a writers standpoint though, I suspect its easier to weave a dramatic plot through a dystopic background than a more optimistic one
  - red-iron-pine 1y ago
    all happy futures are the same, all terrible ones are terrible in their own, unique way
    - rollcat 1y ago
      Hard disagree. Yes, it's easier to captivate attention by evoking primal instincts - avoid predator, find food, reproduce, etc. These stories stick around in your head, the memetic survivors. They are easier to feed off. But "Happy" doesn't mean a perfect utopia. The entire "classic" Star Trek is set in a utopian future, yet with plenty of space for intrigue. Usually a commentary on a contemporary problem, with a "happy ending" that's supposed to show us the road to a better solution, rather than a bland "forever after". Even "First Contact" (a zombie/survival horror) is spun around the theme of "this is the history/future that we're saving". Bonus: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cq4QY0LGOiI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cq4QY0LGOiI>
  - IAmBroom 1y ago
    "It's about a family with a robot helper, that doesn't go beserk, and eventually recreates their late grandmother's casserole recipe using AI. It's a guaranteed bestseller!"
    - james_marks 1y ago
      You're joking, but you're not far off from Murderbot by Martha Wells, which has done phenomenally well. Swapping grandma's casserole recipe for fighting mega-corps might be the big difference.
- cyanydeez 1y ago
  Whats important to understand about the indeterminacy of peoples minds is that if we could read each others thoughts, we would be vulnerable. Now with the written word and how seemingly determinant people are in large numbers we are again super vulnerable.
- andrepd 1y ago
  Many people (including in this website) are hard at work creating the torment nexus.
  - CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
    No doubt. The question is, is that the explicit goal, and if so, why? And if not, don't they consider the effects of their actions, if they aren't, why?
    - moffkalast 1y ago
      The torment nexus is very interesting from a research standpoint and very profitable for investors. There's many military and industrial applications.
      - red-iron-pine 1y ago
        the torment nexus can't torment you specifically, you're overreacting. i am totally a real person and use the nexus every day to improve my productivity -- it is a simple and intuitive tool.
    - Mtinie 1y ago
      At this point, the path from what these teams of people are building to dystopian outcomes is well-mapped. Whether it’s an explicit goal is irrelevant because if you can reasonably foresee the harm and proceed anyway, you’re making a conscious choice to enable it.
    - nxor 1y ago
      Gotta bring home that stable paycheck (not justifying it)
      - Mtinie 1y ago
        You actually don’t. Technologists have more leverage than most workers. There’s no shortage of jobs that don’t require building surveillance states or engagement addiction engines.
- bentcorner 1y ago
  A lot of aspirational tech was consumed by builders. I dare you to find a nerd who has watched Star Trek and hasn't once thought "wouldn't it be cool if I could interact with the computer with my voice", or "using touchscreens for everything looks so futuristic"? And yet here we are complaining that our phones are over-listening to us and our cars no longer have knobs.
- rkomorn 1y ago
  Personally, I think it's the other way around. Sci-fi writers understood both what technology could create in the future (and what would be desirable), and also understood how people abuse power and the tools available to them to stay in power (or gain more). In other words: they predicted the future, more than they inspired it. IMO, that also makes their writing that much more interesting.
  - CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
    Surprisingly, I never considered that, and agree that it makes the writing more interesting, I'm gonna keep this in mind for future stories. Thanks a lot for sharing that :)
    - rkomorn 1y ago
      Relatedly, somewhat, I've been reading a lot of 19th century French literature (because I'm French and because my sister is a literature teacher who's been "assigning" me stuff to read). It has been somewhat shocking to see how relevant the writing is seen through a 21st century lenses. Whether it's how media works, how cliques of people function, etc. It truly feels timeless in a way that I've found very surprising. It also very much supports notions that people don't change even if means and methods do.
nerdponx 1y ago
Pros: potentially greater safety for police and EMS when dealing with touchy people, obvious benefits for fire rescue (assuming it works in a fire). Cons: use your imagination.
- throwway120385 1y ago
  The police have a very safe job, generally. They've done studies and construction workers have a much higher rate of injury and death than the police in the US. People have this idea that being a police officer is really unsafe and that they're throwing themselves in the line of danger just by doing their jobs, but most people are law-abiding and civil. There are people who are not, but that's not a good reason for the police to pretend like nobody is.
  - mlinhares 1y ago
    Its great for the narrative though, if you don't think they're special human beings risking their lives every day to save you how else can you convince the general population they should venerate them?
    - reaperducer 1y ago
      if you don't think they're special human beings risking their lives every day to save you how else can you convince the general population they should venerate them? Along those lines, I think it's weird that in some cities, a cop who dies choking on a chicken bone on his day off in his own kitchen gets the same benefits and massive traffic-clogging live-streamed publicly-funded funeral with politicians and media spectacle as a cop who gets killed by a bad guy while on duty.
  - Aurornis 1y ago
    > They've done studies and construction workers have a much higher rate of injury and death than the police in the US. Sure, but both construction worker and police officer are significantly more dangerous jobs than most of us here have sitting behind a desk. Obviously it’s not a job where people are dying routinely, but suggesting death or serious injury are the only two risks of interacting with the public and responding to threatening or unstable situations is ignoring the reality. It’s a tough job. Much tougher than my time spent sitting at a desk.
endymion-light 1y ago
In reality - I think this will be far worse than that. Why send in an expensive soldiers or a cop when you could just filter in a drone
- InsideOutSanta 1y ago
  "Just trust us, the people on that boat were definitely smuggling drugs."
  - moffkalast 1y ago
    Back in the good old days police had some dedication to their work and some professional integrity. They would at least go through the effort of planting the drugs afterwards...
  - hopelite 1y ago
    "Just trust us" ... said the people who constantly instigate conflicts and wars and orchestrate and perpetrate false-flag operations to then claim they had to attack and murder people. What the public does not understand though is that THEIR complicity and facilitation is not only integral, it is even necessary in a "democracy" where a psychological "consent" must be manufactured, not dissimilar to basic grooming tactics. And no, it's no coincidence that all the western leadership and institutions are effectively all various types of groomers, i.e., psychological manipulators and abusers.
  - throwway120385 1y ago
    "The guys we blew up with a drone were definitely jihadists."
    - red-iron-pine 1y ago
      some of them were definitely jihadists. but the other half of the wedding party they hit were not...
      - brandonmenc 1y ago
aesh2Xa1 1y ago
Cellular radios also have this capability. There's work done to track individuals in this way (matching your walking pattern/gait). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44416761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44416761 Signal processing is probably a general problem. This month we had news about transcribing speech from sound waves jiggling a regular computer mouse. https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/07/mouse_microphone_security/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/07/mouse_microphone_secu...
Aurornis 1y ago
> When you take this info and combine it with the ability of Wifi7 routers to "see" where people are in their house, WiFi routers can’t tell you where people are in the house. The routers don’t even know their own location within the house. All of those papers you see on the topic have extensive additional information being put into their models. The routers don’t magically know the layout of your house. At most, a WiFi device could infer movement in a house if the RSSI of devices is fluctuating where it is normally stable.
- Almondsetat 1y ago
  The police has access to the planimetry of your home. Secondly, if they get close enough they can measure the distance between the agent and the router, and then deduce all the relative distances from the router to the people inside.
  - Aurornis 1y ago
    This is sci-fi fantasy mixed with paranoia. The floor plan of every home is not on file, especially older homes. Police aren’t accessing your floor plan and then accessing your router and combining these into a perfect model that maps people’s locations. Where in this supposed plan are the police deducing the location of your WiFi router in the house and constructing a model of all materials and objects in the house that impact the model? This just isn’t how those research papers work. It’s not something the police are going to combine with a file from the planning office and magically have a map of you in your house like in a movie.
    - mothballed 1y ago
      They could easily find it for most people. It is generally public record, in my county it's available online, unless the individual built the home themselves (mine isn't on file because I opted out of building codes and planning, but commercial home builders can't do that here). But let's be real, police constantly barge in to the wrong address, looking for people that have been gone for years, accomplishing not much more than shooting a beloved dog on a hair-brained last second witch hunt. It's not that they can't do it, it's that they have the attention span and executive planning facilities of a burnt out coke addict 3 hours post their latest scratch off ticket winnings.
bongodongobob 1y ago
A flashbang or tear gas will also do the trick, they don't need fancy wifi tricks.
fhdkweig 1y ago
Today? No, 30 years ago. https://www.militaryaerospace.com/communications/article/16707574/radar-flashlight-project-promises-cots-based-human-vital-signs-sensor https://www.militaryaerospace.com/communications/article/167...
zitterbewegung 1y ago
I question where it's a good idea to give police / solider a big reflective helmet that can cause headaches, eye strain, and nausea (the previous system from Microsoft before Anduril took over). There were constant complaints by the users that it wasn't useful. I see Anduril using less lenses but the reflective ness of this helmet makes it a huge threat to the user of the product. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Visual_Augmentation_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Visual_Augmentation... https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/11/anduril-to-take-over-microsofts-22-billion-us-army-headset-program.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/11/anduril-to-take-over-microso...

CaptainOfCoit 1y ago

I hate that all our favorite sci-fi books were used as manuals for what to build next, instead of trying to avoid creating those futures in our real lives.

dv_dt 1y ago
Read more Solarpunk? From a writers standpoint though, I suspect its easier to weave a dramatic plot through a dystopic background than a more optimistic one
- red-iron-pine 1y ago
  all happy futures are the same, all terrible ones are terrible in their own, unique way
  - rollcat 1y ago
    Hard disagree. Yes, it's easier to captivate attention by evoking primal instincts - avoid predator, find food, reproduce, etc. These stories stick around in your head, the memetic survivors. They are easier to feed off. But "Happy" doesn't mean a perfect utopia. The entire "classic" Star Trek is set in a utopian future, yet with plenty of space for intrigue. Usually a commentary on a contemporary problem, with a "happy ending" that's supposed to show us the road to a better solution, rather than a bland "forever after". Even "First Contact" (a zombie/survival horror) is spun around the theme of "this is the history/future that we're saving". Bonus: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cq4QY0LGOiI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cq4QY0LGOiI>
- IAmBroom 1y ago
  "It's about a family with a robot helper, that doesn't go beserk, and eventually recreates their late grandmother's casserole recipe using AI. It's a guaranteed bestseller!"
  - james_marks 1y ago
    You're joking, but you're not far off from Murderbot by Martha Wells, which has done phenomenally well. Swapping grandma's casserole recipe for fighting mega-corps might be the big difference.
cyanydeez 1y ago
Whats important to understand about the indeterminacy of peoples minds is that if we could read each others thoughts, we would be vulnerable. Now with the written word and how seemingly determinant people are in large numbers we are again super vulnerable.
andrepd 1y ago
Many people (including in this website) are hard at work creating the torment nexus.
- CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
  No doubt. The question is, is that the explicit goal, and if so, why? And if not, don't they consider the effects of their actions, if they aren't, why?
  - moffkalast 1y ago
    The torment nexus is very interesting from a research standpoint and very profitable for investors. There's many military and industrial applications.
    - red-iron-pine 1y ago
      the torment nexus can't torment you specifically, you're overreacting. i am totally a real person and use the nexus every day to improve my productivity -- it is a simple and intuitive tool.
  - Mtinie 1y ago
    At this point, the path from what these teams of people are building to dystopian outcomes is well-mapped. Whether it’s an explicit goal is irrelevant because if you can reasonably foresee the harm and proceed anyway, you’re making a conscious choice to enable it.
  - nxor 1y ago
    Gotta bring home that stable paycheck (not justifying it)
    - Mtinie 1y ago
      You actually don’t. Technologists have more leverage than most workers. There’s no shortage of jobs that don’t require building surveillance states or engagement addiction engines.
bentcorner 1y ago
A lot of aspirational tech was consumed by builders. I dare you to find a nerd who has watched Star Trek and hasn't once thought "wouldn't it be cool if I could interact with the computer with my voice", or "using touchscreens for everything looks so futuristic"? And yet here we are complaining that our phones are over-listening to us and our cars no longer have knobs.
rkomorn 1y ago
Personally, I think it's the other way around. Sci-fi writers understood both what technology could create in the future (and what would be desirable), and also understood how people abuse power and the tools available to them to stay in power (or gain more). In other words: they predicted the future, more than they inspired it. IMO, that also makes their writing that much more interesting.
- CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
  Surprisingly, I never considered that, and agree that it makes the writing more interesting, I'm gonna keep this in mind for future stories. Thanks a lot for sharing that :)
  - rkomorn 1y ago
    Relatedly, somewhat, I've been reading a lot of 19th century French literature (because I'm French and because my sister is a literature teacher who's been "assigning" me stuff to read). It has been somewhat shocking to see how relevant the writing is seen through a 21st century lenses. Whether it's how media works, how cliques of people function, etc. It truly feels timeless in a way that I've found very surprising. It also very much supports notions that people don't change even if means and methods do.

nerdponx 1y ago

Pros: potentially greater safety for police and EMS when dealing with touchy people, obvious benefits for fire rescue (assuming it works in a fire). Cons: use your imagination.

throwway120385 1y ago
The police have a very safe job, generally. They've done studies and construction workers have a much higher rate of injury and death than the police in the US. People have this idea that being a police officer is really unsafe and that they're throwing themselves in the line of danger just by doing their jobs, but most people are law-abiding and civil. There are people who are not, but that's not a good reason for the police to pretend like nobody is.
- mlinhares 1y ago
  Its great for the narrative though, if you don't think they're special human beings risking their lives every day to save you how else can you convince the general population they should venerate them?
  - reaperducer 1y ago
    if you don't think they're special human beings risking their lives every day to save you how else can you convince the general population they should venerate them? Along those lines, I think it's weird that in some cities, a cop who dies choking on a chicken bone on his day off in his own kitchen gets the same benefits and massive traffic-clogging live-streamed publicly-funded funeral with politicians and media spectacle as a cop who gets killed by a bad guy while on duty.
- Aurornis 1y ago
  > They've done studies and construction workers have a much higher rate of injury and death than the police in the US. Sure, but both construction worker and police officer are significantly more dangerous jobs than most of us here have sitting behind a desk. Obviously it’s not a job where people are dying routinely, but suggesting death or serious injury are the only two risks of interacting with the public and responding to threatening or unstable situations is ignoring the reality. It’s a tough job. Much tougher than my time spent sitting at a desk.

endymion-light 1y ago

In reality - I think this will be far worse than that. Why send in an expensive soldiers or a cop when you could just filter in a drone

InsideOutSanta 1y ago
"Just trust us, the people on that boat were definitely smuggling drugs."
- moffkalast 1y ago
  Back in the good old days police had some dedication to their work and some professional integrity. They would at least go through the effort of planting the drugs afterwards...
- hopelite 1y ago
  "Just trust us" ... said the people who constantly instigate conflicts and wars and orchestrate and perpetrate false-flag operations to then claim they had to attack and murder people. What the public does not understand though is that THEIR complicity and facilitation is not only integral, it is even necessary in a "democracy" where a psychological "consent" must be manufactured, not dissimilar to basic grooming tactics. And no, it's no coincidence that all the western leadership and institutions are effectively all various types of groomers, i.e., psychological manipulators and abusers.
- throwway120385 1y ago
  "The guys we blew up with a drone were definitely jihadists."
  - red-iron-pine 1y ago
    some of them were definitely jihadists. but the other half of the wedding party they hit were not...
    - brandonmenc 1y ago

aesh2Xa1 1y ago

Cellular radios also have this capability. There's work done to track individuals in this way (matching your walking pattern/gait). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44416761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44416761 Signal processing is probably a general problem. This month we had news about transcribing speech from sound waves jiggling a regular computer mouse. https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/07/mouse_microphone_security/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/07/mouse_microphone_secu...

Aurornis 1y ago

> When you take this info and combine it with the ability of Wifi7 routers to "see" where people are in their house, WiFi routers can’t tell you where people are in the house. The routers don’t even know their own location within the house. All of those papers you see on the topic have extensive additional information being put into their models. The routers don’t magically know the layout of your house. At most, a WiFi device could infer movement in a house if the RSSI of devices is fluctuating where it is normally stable.

Almondsetat 1y ago
The police has access to the planimetry of your home. Secondly, if they get close enough they can measure the distance between the agent and the router, and then deduce all the relative distances from the router to the people inside.
- Aurornis 1y ago
  This is sci-fi fantasy mixed with paranoia. The floor plan of every home is not on file, especially older homes. Police aren’t accessing your floor plan and then accessing your router and combining these into a perfect model that maps people’s locations. Where in this supposed plan are the police deducing the location of your WiFi router in the house and constructing a model of all materials and objects in the house that impact the model? This just isn’t how those research papers work. It’s not something the police are going to combine with a file from the planning office and magically have a map of you in your house like in a movie.
  - mothballed 1y ago
    They could easily find it for most people. It is generally public record, in my county it's available online, unless the individual built the home themselves (mine isn't on file because I opted out of building codes and planning, but commercial home builders can't do that here). But let's be real, police constantly barge in to the wrong address, looking for people that have been gone for years, accomplishing not much more than shooting a beloved dog on a hair-brained last second witch hunt. It's not that they can't do it, it's that they have the attention span and executive planning facilities of a burnt out coke addict 3 hours post their latest scratch off ticket winnings.

bongodongobob 1y ago

A flashbang or tear gas will also do the trick, they don't need fancy wifi tricks.

fhdkweig 1y ago

Today? No, 30 years ago. https://www.militaryaerospace.com/communications/article/16707574/radar-flashlight-project-promises-cots-based-human-vital-signs-sensor https://www.militaryaerospace.com/communications/article/167...

zitterbewegung 1y ago

I question where it's a good idea to give police / solider a big reflective helmet that can cause headaches, eye strain, and nausea (the previous system from Microsoft before Anduril took over). There were constant complaints by the users that it wasn't useful. I see Anduril using less lenses but the reflective ness of this helmet makes it a huge threat to the user of the product. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Visual_Augmentation_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Visual_Augmentation... https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/11/anduril-to-take-over-microsofts-22-billion-us-army-headset-program.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/11/anduril-to-take-over-microso...