As per my usual habit, I'm now thinking up overcomplications of this.
I happen to have two unused ESP Cams boards/cameras here. <instead of random steering movements, feeding the camera output over the ESP's Wi-Fi to something handy running OpenCV to do person or perhaps even face detection, and having it follow people as they walk past would make it _way_ more creepy. And perhaps replace the LED with an RGB LED, and do face recognition so it lights up green when I am being tracked, and red when it's tracking unknown faces...
That reminds me of this amusing project [1] from 13 years ago. An artist had a sidewalk right next to his window. He put a curtain on the window that was only wide enough to cover about 20% of the window, with a motorized system to move the curtain side to side. A camera and software would recognize when someone was passing by and rapidly move the curtain to block their view in and then move it with them as the passed by.
People were adamantly trying to prove a flat earth at least 150 years ago, and even got the co-discoverer of evolution via natural selection(Wallace) roped into the controversy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedford_Level_experiment
I remember there being this satire forum where people were trying to prove that earth is flat as an intellectual exercise. I think it was 15 or more years ago or something like that. At that point there was no serious, popular and well known flat earth movement. This came later.
It may have been theflatearthsociety dot org.
But maybe I remember wrong. It was that they were pretending to believe and trolling, but now as it is more serious they stopped trolling in such a way.
Not a flat earther myself, but I will say they are right about one thing: fisheye lenses are really popular in photography of the Earth from space or near-space. It’s one of those things you don’t notice until someone points it out to you, and then you see it everywhere.
A bit like realizing FOV is a big thing in FPS games. Makes a lot of sense why it would be useful once you know it but if you just go play an FPS for the first time you might not think about it until you look over and see your friend can see you and you can't see him.
I'm sure they're right about a lot of things! Water is wet, for instance. The moon waxes and wanes. That sort of thing.
If you want to photograph a wide field of view, you use a fisheye lens. Humanity hasn't spent a lot of time far enough from Earth that it doesn't fill a wide field of view, although we do have some rather nice photographs from both humans and machines which have made it out that far.
One fun thing about the whole flat earth thing is that people who argue online (correctly, of course), that the earth is round often will smugly do it using completely incorrect arguments or using photographic evidence that doesn't show what they think it does. And that's often generally true for people who "trust the science" about most topics. It's basically impossible to know the actual reasons for why scientists believe _everything_ that science has established, most people just "take their word for it" and don't actually make any effort to understand the justifications for almost any of their beliefs.
It's sort of useful to have people around who just believe stuff and argue for stuff completely outside the usual scientific method just to keep people on their toes.
I refuse to accept that we must tone down irony/sarcasm because of dumb people, we as humanity have had this problem for a long time, see: Lucian and his trip to the moon. Yet we've never had to do this. People will actively choose to believe any sort of nonesense (will avoid naming stuff but we all know what written nonesense people believe in) regardless if it is written or done in irony/sarcasm or not.
It's worth keeping in mind that very smart people in the past believed things that we now know are nonsense. And most likely, smart people today believe things that will be considered nonsense in the future.
That, or they were skeptical in dangerous ways. I'm thinking of the example of Richard Feynman questioning if you should brush your teeth, which although is valid to scientifically challenge. There's other examples of "smart people", especially in their own domains openly applying their technique to other fields for the detriment of observers.
“Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they’re in good company.”
I remember UFO sightings being super common before smartphones. Celebrities always talking about every once in a while, a maid when I was a kid swearing she could see lights in the sky, etc.
I even remember some people in my small town getting together to talk about it.
(It seems aliens have wised up to the ubiquity of cameras, though!)
Try filming an airplane at night and be amazed at how shitty the footage of that is from your modern smartphone. Even during the day its a tall order without actual optical zoom and stabilization.
QAnon started as a gag on 4chan and then ate the Republican Party because it was too on the nose. 4chan itself is a great example - it used to be "ironically" racist, now it's just racist racist, and that's the joke.
And I was listening to a Behind the Bastards podcast about the history of the Illuminati and how a lot of the modern conspiracy beliefs about the Illuminati come from the Discordian movement parodying conspiracy beliefs.
On the one hand you have to appreciate when people game so hard they manifest a zeitgeist entirely out of their own irony-poisoned fart clouds, but on the other hand we no longer have the level of education or degree of critical thinking to offset the nonsense, nor any kind of consensus reality to tether ourselves to, and the people who believe in the flat earth and Jewish space lasers are everywhere now, and that just kind of sucks.
Having also watched all of this happen, I still can’t believe it’s real. Freeway overpasses now have angry mobs waving signs about joke conspiracy theories made up by teenage edgelords shitposting from their parents basement.
There is no problem. People believing in a flat earth or birds not being real has no impact on you and how you live your life, unless you allow these people to live in your head.
Is ant's fault, they keep making all those little bumps around.
The real problem is that we are spending a bazillion of hours on dubious philosophical amusements, while the planet is being slowly cooked with us on board.
I smile when I see this meme because it makes me think of its possible origin in The Incredibles; specifically, a scene where a parrot turns out to be a surveillance drone on Syndrome's island: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=g4zKWXdDt2Q
Yeah I haven't seen anyone actually believe this either, but it did take a good few years between the flat Earth joke being popular on Reddit, and the resulting community of true believers arising.
On the other hand it's even less plausible than flat Earth so you'd have to be particularly stupid to believe it; not just very very stupid.
While I love the esp32, it feels underutilized. I wonder if instead of the hardcoded "randomness" it could traverse a 1-D perlin noise field with a large scale but maybe varying sharpness. That way you can get long stretches of nothing, maybe a slow move, maybe a fast move.
Oh I'm well aware it's underutilized, it's simply what I had on hand. I love the idea of adding variations to the speed as well, maybe a future revision. I programmed and wired this together initially in a hotel room. I didn't put much thought into the esthetic, that needs work.
I was always very bad at electronics, but I'm sure someone else here knows: how hard would it be to replace the esp32 with something without a CPU, RAM, USB and Wi-Fi while still being small enough?
If I read the project correctly, all the esp32 is doing is sending a signal to the camera to move left and right plus blinking the led. If that's the case then all you need is a circuit sending "left" and "right" signals[1] on alternate, semi-random intervals. I'm positive you could already do that with the technology available in 1970.
So rather than "waste" a fully-working computer I'd be interested in knowing what a 1970s circuit would look like in the 2020s.
[1] If it's a stepper motor then you need slightly more complex signals that just on and off, but the point is still the same.
O, got you, definitely, could be something like an astable multi vibrator which is a fun discrete circuit to build, or a simple 555 timer in such a mode.
Introducing randomness is a good exercise tho, replacing a capacitor with a capacitive microphone would do it I suppose
I happen to have two unused ESP Cams boards/cameras here. <instead of random steering movements, feeding the camera output over the ESP's Wi-Fi to something handy running OpenCV to do person or perhaps even face detection, and having it follow people as they walk past would make it _way_ more creepy. And perhaps replace the LED with an RGB LED, and do face recognition so it lights up green when I am being tracked, and red when it's tracking unknown faces...