Hackaday Links: October 2, 2022

“Necessity is the mother of invention,” the saying goes. We've never stuck to that, finding laziness to be a much more powerful creative lubricant. And this story of someone automating their work with a script is one of the best examples of lazy invention since the introduction of the TV remote. If we take history at face value - and this is the internet, then why wouldn't we? - that's a little scary, because the anonymous employee was in charge of maintaining digital evidence submissions for a law firm. The job was to monitor new files in a local folder, manually copy them to a cloud server, and verify the file with a hash to prove it hasn't been tampered with and support the chain of custody. The OP says that was literally the only thing to do, so we can't really blame them for automating it with a script once the COVID shutdowns and working from home provided the needed coverage. But still - when all your work can be done by a Windows batch file and some PowerShell commands while you play video games, we're going to take a chance and say you're probably underemployed.

People have been making fun of the US Space Force since its inception in 2019, which we think is a little sad. It must be difficult to be the most recent military service, especially since it is derived from the most recent military service, and no matter how important its mission, there will always be the double stigma of to be both the new kid on the block and the one with a reputation for digging sci-fi. And now they've given naysayers even more to dip into, with the unveiling of the US Space Force's official service song. Every branch of service has a song—yes, even the military, and no, not that one—and they all sound martial appropriate. Same goes for the Space Force song, but apparently people have a problem with it, which we really don't understand at all - sounds good to us.

When you're a pedestrian trying to cross a street in traffic, one of the best tips is to make eye contact with drivers. Making sure an approaching driver sees you and processes information is only possible with a serious look in their eyes, and that might be the only thing stopping you from becoming a hood ornament. But what happens to this rule when the cars no longer have drivers? Easy - stick huge motorized googly eyes on their front grills. Researchers from the University of Tokyo and Kyoto University have done just that, using a self-driving golf cart with comical robotic eyes to test whether it helps reduce pedestrian accidents. The eyes swivel towards a pedestrian to show that the car is about to yield, or look away if the car plans to cross the crosswalk. It seems to work, with pedestrians less likely to try to cross if they don't have eye contact with the car. Interesting results, but we seriously doubt anyone will be laying wide eyes on self-driving vehicles anytime soon.

And finally, we've become very fond of all those AI-generated videos that base their images on song lyrics. There were a few Led Zeppelin songs done by AI Midjourney recently that were interesting, but we really like this comparison of three different AI takes on Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky." The images were produced by DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, and the difference in results is remarkable, especially given the absurd nature of the poem. DALL-E 2 seemed to struggle the most with the poem and tended to use more photorealistic imagery than the other two. Personally, we'd give Midjourney the edge here for creativity and overall freshness of the imagery, but the three were the most frabjous and quite mimicry - not the least bit sneaky.