Palmer Luckey says he wants to 'turn warfighters into technomancers' as Anduril takes over production of the US Army's IVAS AR headset from Microsoft

Hey Palmer Luckey, eat shit.
Haley Joel Osment's role on Silicon Valley parodying this dipshit really sums it up.

Iirc IVAS made like 50% of soldiers nauseous to the point of throwing up. So let's shoot some more billions at this, sure
- having been in combat, with electronic gear designed for the military, i can say this will be a million percent terrible. it's gonna be too heavy (already they carry too much- i have degenerated discs as do many of my buds) and will break constantly. to say nothing of keeping it charged- who wants range anxiety in a combat situation.
  now i will say that going to Iraq radicalized me against war and i filed as a conscientious objector, but back in those days right after 9/11 there wasn't much of an antiwar movement.
  
  My first thought was the reliability. Can you rely on this new tech in a life or death situation. I didn't even think of the batteries.

I was briefly confused how an open source flashlight firmware had anything to do with this..... then I noticed this post wasn't in the Flashlight forum. So apparently Anduril is a war contractor AND a great flashlight firmware but are not related at all.
- Why the hell would a flashlight need firmware?
  
  I did a quick search, so I’m basically an expert now. imaginary hair flip
  So, some flashlights have multiple brightness modes. I guess that’s controlled via a tiny, low power microprocessor.
  And if it’s a computer, it can be hacked!
  So the firmware does things, depending on the capabilities of the hardware in the flashlight, but you can set it to override defaults for brightness, change how many levels of brightness you have, add (or remove) a blinky SOS mode, sleep timers in case it’s accidentally left on, and even add a way to check the battery percentage via a button press pattern, that the flashlight responds to with a series of blinks.
  No lie, kind of fascinating stuff. I like to hack other stuff, like smart appliances (replacing firmware so it doesn’t share my data, but I still get to use it as a smart device). I don’t think I would be into talking to my flashlight via Morse code, but I can see the appeal as both a hobby, and for folks who need flashlights as safety equipment.
- And Aragorn's sword :c
  
  That broken thing nobody remembered, until it was reforged.
  I can name a few other such things, but at this point in my existence I'm just afraid to do so. Murphy's laws and such.
- Yeah, Anduril the company has been around for a minute (Since 2017). Luckey got in early on selling weapons tech to the government after he sold Oculus.
  
  What's with some really scary companies (Anduril, Palantir) cribbing their names from LOTR?
- I just don't like something intended for war being called Anduril. They've missed JRRT's point completely.
  
  There is also a company called palantir which is pretty much a cyberpunk corporate distopia surveillance company.

These have been a huge failure so far. But some guy in a suit thinks it would be cool so keep spending
- That's Research and Development (R&D) for you.
- I don't know about military, but there was a number of successful applications of hololens in the industrial environment. It never went anywhere where I saw it, because the device was too expensive, too experimental, and it was impossible to purchase, but the ideas were ok.
  
  That fashion started, if anyone remembers, with Google Glass. And those for me appear very nice.
  But if most people won't read text on transparent background (even transparent terminal emulator windows), then trying to process information with real world in the background is harder.
  Successful applications and OK ideas can sometimes be false positives, because it's, #1, safe to approve of something that won't be implemented anyway, #2, the initiative to try something often comes from superiors who only want to hear disapproval or approval of specific things about the initiative, and about the initiative itself only approval, #3, I like some things for short periods, but I wouldn't ever be able to use something like Hearthstone's UI at work.

Microsoft was doing the headset? Did they have clippy asking who the soldier wanted to kill that day? Maybe mid-combat blue screens to blind the user? Oh wait, a forced update while it was supposed to determine the trajectory of an incoming mortar...
- Obligatory John Malkovich

What problem are these even designed to solve?
Wiki makes me think it’s a hammer in search of a nail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Visual_Augmentation_System
- The problem it's trying to solve is "How do we make ungodly amounts of money as 'Defense Contractors'?"
  To be genuinely fair, this sort of waste is part and parcel to the US Military.
  
  For sure. Head mounted displays are useful for, say, technical repairs. And I see the value as an alternative to the F35 helmet. But besides that … for infantry? Idk. Wishful thinking IMHO
  
  This is pretty much the story of the entire Land Warrior program. Nobody ever expected it to be a Real Thing, it was always a pie-in-the-sky boondoggle to make a shitload of money for the MIC.
- It's made by the same kind of techbros who are angry that the "future doesn't look like the future", that got us the Cybertruck and the other recent Tesla abominations.
  When artists/writers design future tech for their cyberpunk dystopia, coolness is a greater factor than usability, especially as most creators don't have much experience with product design. I just go with the "rule of cool" and aesthetics, even in cases where stuff would look obsolete by today's standards, because some powerful people in the tech industry decided everything must be touchscreens and voice commands.
- Friend/foe identification
  Visualising objectives
  Highlighting dangers
  Etc.
  
  Maybe… I want to read the proposal honestly
  Are these things you thought of or based on something else?

How long until we have Cyberpunk 2077 style quick hacks that can make enemy soldiers just shoot themselves?
- never

On the one hand, glad to see MS get out of this, I don't think the tech is nearly mature enough to work on the battlefield especially on the software side. I've worn the v1 IVAS and developed on hololens, there are definite use cases but - full battle rattle? no. For critical applications something like this must be combat hard and it's nowhere near ready.
eh that said anduril is fucking evil tho....

Anduril is scary. They seem able to harness the most elegant technologies that idiot government redneck contractors tended to avoid in years past. I've seen them in Haskell and Nix forums offering jobs to morally bankrupt autists FAR too often. Fuck you, Anduril.
FUCK YOU!!!!
- A friend of mine was working at a company with contracts for them when they released their first drones back in the early days.
  At work, they watched the trailer for the fancy drone. (Later that day he would share the same video with me)
  He made the joke: "At least we know what will be coming to gun us down in ten years."
  That joke went down like a brick with his coworkers. No one else seemed to understand the severity of what we were buidling up to
- Yep, senior Haskell developer here and I have had their recruiters hounding me many times, even though I have told them to fuck off again and again.
  I always find it so funny that they chose Haskell. They are desperate to hire, but no one in the Haskell community actually wants to work for them. I'm in a discord server with a bunch of veteran Haskellers and everyone there won't touch them with a 100ft pole.