How Laser Headlights Died In The US

Automotive headlights started out burning acetylene, before regular electric lightbulbs made them obsolete. In due time, halogen bulbs took over, before the industry began to explore even newer technologies like HID lamps for greater brightness. Laser headlights stood as the next leap forward, promising greater visibility and better light distribution.

Only, the fairytale didn’t last. Just over a decade after laser headlights hit the market, they’re already being abandoned by the manufacturers that brought them to fruition. Laser headlights would end up fighting with one hand behind their back, and ultimately became irrelevant before they ever became the norm.

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The Terminal Demise Of Consumer Electronics Through Subscription Services

Open any consumer electronics catalog from around the 1980s to the early 2000s and you are overwhelmed by a smörgåsbord of devices, covering any audio-visual and similar entertainment and hobby needs one might have. Depending on the era you can find the camcorders, point-and-shoot film and digital cameras right next to portable music players, cellphones, HiFi sets and tower components, televisions and devices like DVD players and VCRs, all of them in a dizzying amount of brands, shapes and colors that are sure to fit anyone’s needs, desires and budget.

When by the late 2000s cellphones began to absorb more and more of the features of these devices alongside much improved cellular Internet access, these newly minted ‘smartphones’ were hailed as a technological revolution that combined so many consumer electronics into a single device. Unlike the relatively niche feature phones, smartphones absolutely took off.

Fast-forward more than a decade and the same catalogs now feature black rectangles identified respectively as smart phones, smart TVs and tablets, alongside evenly colored geometric shapes that identify as smart speakers and other devices. While previously the onus for this change was laid by this author primarily on the death of industrial design, the elephant in the room would seem to be that consumer electronics are suffering from a terminal disease: subscription services.

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Hackaday Links: August 17, 2025

We’ve studiously avoided any mention of our latest interstellar visitor, 3I/Atlas, on these pages, mainly because of all the hoopla in the popular press about how Avi Loeb thinks it’s aliens, because of course he does. And we’re not saying it’s aliens either, mainly because we’d never be lucky enough to be alive during an actual alien invasion — life just hasn’t historically been that kind to us. So chances are overwhelming that 3I/Atlas is just a comet, but man, it’s doing its level best to look like it’s not, which means it’s time to brave the slings and arrows and wade into this subject.

The number of oddities surrounding 3I/Atlas just keeps growing, from its weird Sun-directed particle stream to its extreme speed, not to mention a trajectory through the solar system that puts it just a fraction of an astronomical unit from two of the three planets within the “Goldilocks Zone” of our star — ignore the fact that at an estimated seven billion years old, 3I/Atlas likely would have started its interstellar journey well before our solar system had even started forming. Still, it’s the trajectory that intrigues us, especially the fact that it’s coming in at a very shallow along to the ecliptic, and seems like it will cross that imaginary plane almost exactly when it makes its closest approach to the Sun on October 29, which just coincidentally happens to be at the very moment Earth is exactly on the opposite side of our star. We’ll be as far as possible from the action on that date, with the comet conveniently lost in the glare of the Sun. Yes, there’s talk of re-tasking some of our spacecraft around Mars or in the Jovian system to take a peek when 3I/Atlas passes through their neighborhoods, but those are complicated affairs that show no sign of bearing fruit in the short time left before the comet heads back out into the Deep Dark. Too bad; we’d really love an up-close and personal look at this thing.

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Metric, Imperial, And Flexibility

Al Williams wrote up a seemingly innocent piece on a couple of rules-of-thumb to go between metric and US traditional units, and the comment section went wild! Nothing seems to rile up the Hackaday comment section like the choice of what base to use for your unit system. I mean, an idealized version of probably an ancient Egyptian’s foot versus a fraction of the not-quite-right distance from the North Pole to the equator as it passes through Paris? Six of one, half a dozen the other, as far as I’m concerned. Both are arbitrary.

What’s fun, though, is how many of us need to know both systems and how schizophrenic it all can be. My favorite example is PCB layout, where tenths and thousandths of an inch are unavoidable in through-hole and surface-mount parts, yet we call out board sizes and drill bits in millimeters – on the same object, and without batting an eye. American 3D printer enthusiasts will know their M3 hardware, and probably even how much a kilogram weighs, because that’s what you buy spools of filament in. Oddly enough, though I live in Europe, I have 3/4” thread on my garden hose and a 29” monitor on my desk. Americans buy two liter bottles of soda without thinking twice.

The absolute kings of this are in the UK, where the distance between cities is measured in miles, but the dimensions of an apartment in meters. They’ll buy gas in liters and beer in pints. Humans are measured both in feet-and-inches and centimeters, and weighed in pounds, kilograms, or even stone.

And I think that’s just fine. Once you give up on the rightness of either system, they both have their pros and cons. Millimeters are superb for doing carpentry in – that’s just about how tight my tolerances are with hand tools anyway, and if it’s made of wood, you can fudge 0.5 mm either way pretty easily. Sure, you could measure in 32nds of an inch, but have you ever bought a plywood sheet that’s 1536 x 3072 thirty-seconds? (That’s 4’ x 8’, or 1200 mm x 2400 mm.) No, you haven’t.

But maybe stick to one system when lives or critical systems are on the line. Or at least be very careful to call out your units. While it’s annoying to spec the wrong SMT part size because KiCAD calls some of them out in millimeters and inches – 0402 in inches is tiny, but 0402 in metric is microscopic – it’s another thing entirely to load up half as much fuel as you need for a commercial airline flight because of metric vs imperial tons. There’s a limit to how units-flexible you want to be.

Hackaday Podcast Episode 333: Nightmare Whiffletrees, 18650 Safety, And A Telephone Twofer

This week, Hackaday’s Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up over the tubes to bring you the latest news, mystery sound, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous week.

In Hackaday news, get your Supercon 2025 tickets while they’re hot! Also, the One Hertz Challenge ticks on, but time is running out. You have until Tuesday, August 19th to show us what you’ve got, so head over to Hackaday.IO and get started now. Finally, its the end of eternal September as AOL discontinues dial-up service after all these years.

On What’s That Sound, Kristina got sort of close, but this is neither horseshoes nor hand grenades. Can you get it? If so, you could win a limited edition Hackaday Podcast t-shirt!

After that, it’s on to the hacks and such, beginning with a talking robot that uses typewriter tech to move its mouth. We take a look at hacking printed circuit boards to create casing and instrument panels for a PDP-1 replica. Then we explore a fluid simulation business card, witness a caliper shootout, and marvel at one file in six formats. Finally, it’s a telephone twofer as we discuss the non-hack-ability of the average smart phone, and learn about what was arguably the first podcast.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Download in DRM-free MP3 and savor at your leisure.

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This Week In Security: The AI Hacker, FortMajeure, And Project Zero

One of the hot topics currently is using LLMs for security research. Poor quality reports written by LLMs have become the bane of vulnerability disclosure programs. But there is an equally interesting effort going on to put LLMs to work doing actually useful research. One such story is [Romy Haik] at ULTRARED, trying to build an AI Hacker. This isn’t an over-eager newbie naively asking an AI to find vulnerabilities, [Romy] knows what he’s doing. We know this because he tells us plainly that the LLM-driven hacker failed spectacularly.

The plan was to build a multi-LLM orchestra, with a single AI sitting at the top that maintains state through the entire process. Multiple LLMs sit below that one, deciding what to do next, exactly how to approach the problem, and actually generating commands for those tools. Then yet another AI takes the output and figures out if the attack was successful. The tooling was assembled, and [Romy] set it loose on a few intentionally vulnerable VMs.

As we hinted at up above, the results were fascinating but dismal. This LLM successfully found one Remote Code Execution (RCE), one SQL injection, and three Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) flaws. This whole post is sort of sneakily an advertisement for ULTRARED’s actual automated scanner, that uses more conventional methods for scanning for vulnerabilities. But it’s a useful comparison, and it found nearly 100 vulnerabilities among the collection of targets.

The AI did what you’d expect, finding plenty of false positives. Ask an AI to describe a vulnerability, and it will glad do so — no real vulnerability required. But the real problem was the multitude of times that the AI stack did demonstrate a problem, and failed to realize it. [Romy] has thoughts on why this attempt failed, and two points stand out. The first is that while the LLM can be creative in making attacks, it’s really terrible at accurately analyzing the results. The second observation is one of the most important observations to keep in mind regarding today’s AIs. It doesn’t actually want to find a vulnerability. One of the marks of security researchers is the near obsession they have with finding a great score. Continue reading “This Week In Security: The AI Hacker, FortMajeure, And Project Zero”

For Americans Only: Estimating Celsius And Other Mental Metrics

I know many computer languages, but I’ve struggled all my life to learn a second human language. One of my problems is that I can’t stop trying to translate in my head. Just like Morse code, you need to understand things directly, not translate. But you have to start somewhere. One of the reasons metric never caught on in the United States is that it is hard to do exact translations while you are developing intuition about just how hot is 35 °C or how long 8 cm is.

If you travel, temperature is especially annoying. When the local news tells you the temperature is going to be 28, it is hard to do the math in your head to decide if you need a coat or shorts.

Ok, you are a math whiz. And you have a phone with a calculator and, probably, a voice assistant. So you can do the right math, which is (9/5) x °C + 32. But for those of us who can’t do that in our heads, there is an easier way.

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