I'm highly skeptical of this thing's ability to detect and locate a mosquito in 3d space over any kind of range using pictures of mosquitos on his arm as a training set.
this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2026
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Comes out of the first live test run with a shit ton of laser burns on his arm.
"I think I've pinpointed the problem."
This is neat but also stupid. If a laser has enough power to fry a mosquito, it can also fry your retina.
Yes, I’m aware he added a safety system. That’s one layer of Swiss cheese in the safety system. It’ll work flawlessly until it doesn’t. How are potential reflections handled?
Meanwhile, God who deliberately gave us a spare eye for this exact reason
Do not look at laser with remaining eye...
Or set fire to delicate fabrics, wallpaper, or other potentially flammable surfaces a mosquito might be near or on.
Having lived in Florida, it's worth the risk.
I don't think a reflection would be coherent enough to carry enough energy to cause damage.
Personally, I'd just wear laser goggles while the system was operating.
It doesn't need to be coherent, just needs enough joule. The prior commenter is right, if it can fry a mosquito even a reflection will damage eyes
Could run it similar to those disinfecting light bulbs (only when the room is not occupied)
How do you ensure that the room is empty, 100% of the time? Those disinfecting light bulbs don't have the same level of risk as this laser system.
Perhaps a second laser defense system can be installed to ensure people stay out of the original room?
I like the way you think. I think more of life's second-order problems should be solved with blinding lasers.
But if the laser is blind, how will it hit the mosquitoes?
Have it spray tear gas first. But wait, then the laser won't be able to penetrate the cloud. Maybe we could add a quadcopter drone to clear a path to the mosquito for the laser to fire. But then we'll need a system so the drone doesn't run into a human choking on tear gas, and the drone can't see because of the limited visibility, could we use infrared sensors I wonder? /s
This is a stupid system. I love engineers, but they tend to uh... overengineer things like this.
I think we're overthinking this a bit. I have one simple question. Hear me out. Can a mosquito survive a nuclear blast? I'll let you sit with that a minute.
Depending only on a second vision system as a safety interlock seems... foolhardy, to say the least. A laser strong enough to instantly fry a mosquito is likely also strong enough to instantly make you blind.
I will 100% kickstarter this.
I'd just stick screens on one's windows and maybe use DEET if you're really at the height of mosquito season in a bad area.
Like, this has a DSLR camera, a GPU constantly churning away, a laser...
I was actually thinking about it for population control because it could be running almost constantly. And energy wise, I'm not really concerned. I'm on solar+batteries, and anything I can do to prevent juice going to HECO is worth it to me.
If you want population control, just get some buckets and put some water and a mosquito dunk in them. The mosquitos will be attracted to the stagnant water but all the eggs will get eaten by bacteria.
hahaha... I like that 😃
This is not novel. This has been done 100x in the past. It doesn't work.
It worked insofar as it killed all the mosquitoes. Whether it'll end up burning his house down in the long run is still up for debate.
But this time there's AI involved... so we can also boil the oceans!
There's AI and then there's AI. Unless you think the system is talking the mozzies to death, get a grip.
You think he DIDN'T use a multimodal ML model to feed it images plus text prompts?