Simone Giertz makes a living creating shitty robots (2016) [video] | Hacker News Reader

Simone Giertz makes a living creating shitty robots (2016) [video]

qz.com

125 pointsogig89 comments

She's part of Adam Savage's "Tested" crew too, and her YouTube channel is hilarious.

YT Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3KEoMzNz8eYnwBC34RaKCQ

She studied engineering, programming, and robotics, she makes a living making robots full time, and yet the article title calls her a "robotics hobbyist" and the article says she's a "robot enthusiast".

Well, are those titles not true?

Look up "damning with faint praises".

Fair enough, but does that make someone an asshole for describing them fairly aptly, and generally in a positive light, based on what they appear to do?

> She studied engineering, programming, and robotics

To be honest, I can't actually find any evidence that she graduated with even a bachelors for any of the topics you listed. It appears that she makes a living by being primarily an entertainer, not an engineer. In this context, I think the titles "robotics hobbyist" and "robot enthusiast" are appropriate and accurate.

It takes skill for her to do what she does. And this "graduated with X degree" is just classism.

Credentialism is sometimes a useful metric, but at a certain point experience is more important.

I guess I've just never considered a college degree a prerequisite for professional respect.

Even if you do think that way, and you consider her as completely an entertainer with robotics as her medium, is she a robotics hobbyist?

Are all professional rock musicians just guitar enthusiasts?

My suspicion is that she is called so simply because of her gender, and that a male "entertainer", college drop out or not, would be called an engineer.

"Dr Brian May, professional astrophysicist, is also a guitar hobbyist who builds his own instruments"

(joke explanation for HN: this description is technically accurate but nobody would call the guitarist from Queen a "hobbyist")

Respect comes with competence. I respect her as an entertainer, because that is where her competence seems to be. I think her content is great and I enjoy her work.

> Are all professional rock musicians just guitar enthusiasts? My suspicion is that she is called so simply because of her gender, and that a male "entertainer", college drop out or not, would be called an engineer.

Would you trust that college drop out "engineer" to work on the bridge used by hundreds of thousands of people or fly in an airplane designed and built by that "engineer"? There are some disciplines that I think should very strictly and rigorously test for competence, because the alternative is people dying. Engineering is one of those disciplines, and so is medicine. I don't want a college drop out "surgeon" with no formal training in the discipline operating on my body. Maybe I am just not as trusting as you are. But I doubt most people follow the same line of reasoning that you do.

Can you provide some examples of a male entertainer who does the same type of work that Simon does but is labeled as an engineer?

Every time this argument comes up, the first reaction is to talk about fields where lives are on the line: Would you trust a doctor without a degree? Etc.

These situations are comparatively rare. If you have to reach for them, it may as well be conceding the point: A dropout's work is just as good, yes, in all but a few corner cases.

In fact, they usually dropped out because some business was willing to pay them for their work now, rather than wait till they graduated.

> These situations are comparatively rare. If you have to reach for them, it may as well be conceding the point: A dropout's work is just as good, yes, in all but a few corner cases.

I think you unilaterally decided that these situations are rare. I wholeheartedly disagree with that sentiment. This is why we are having this debate.

> A dropout's work is just as good, yes, in all but a few corner cases.

You'd have to be seriously screwed up in the head to actually believe that as a fact. What possible line of reasoning can you be using to say that someone who is formally trained and educated in a discipline is worst or equal to someone who is not? Are you saying that formal education is a total waste of time?

Yes there are exceptions and there have been prodigious people who were ahead of their time but that is why we have a word to describe these extremely rare occurrences.

> In fact, they usually dropped out because some business was willing to pay them for their work now, rather than wait till they graduated.

Do you have a source for this information?

You'd have to be seriously screwed up in the head to actually believe that as a fact.

You're not allowed to get personal here. Once you cool off, maybe we can resume this.

> What possible line of reasoning can you be using to say that someone who is formally trained and educated in a discipline is worst or equal to someone who is not? Are you saying that formal education is a total waste of time?

I my experience from software development, self-thought developers tend to be more competent because they have learnt design principles through actual experience, and therefore have a deeper understanding of the rationale. School educated developers more often have learned design principles as dogma, and don't understand the context and limitations of the principles.

Does this mean that people without engineering degrees should not apply to "frontend engineer" positions?

She frames herself as hobbyist, so I don't want go into war about this.

However given that pretty much everyone able to write a short script calls himself engineer, I find it ridiculous to defend sanctimony of the word in this context and not in equally inappropriate much more common use.

Using google, the first name for "+comedian +technology + enthusiasts" was Stephen Fry. Searching on "+comedian +technology +engineer" don't seem to give much of anything, except for engineer turned comedian which is not what we are talking about.

I did the same by replacing technology with robot, but the only hit with a comedian in it was a article about Simone Giertz.

It seems like the difference between robot enthusiasts and robot engineer is dependent on how they are being used. A robot theater show is engineered. A comedian uses a robot prop and thus get called enthusiasts. If that pattern is true then a magician using robots would also not be called engineer, regardless of gender.

"Maker/robotics enthusiast/non-engineer. Have become somewhat of an expert in shitty robots. Swedish but sound American just to confuse you."

https://sites.google.com/view/botslikeyou/useless-bots/shitt...

No, you used the correct description first "professional (rock) musicians". Obviously being a profession user or a certain tool isn't simply equivalent to being the engineer of that tool: accountants are not software developers merely by virtue of using excel, drummers don't know how to build drums just from banging on them, and Simone isn't a professional robot engineer just because she has a Kuka arm in her house.

"Engineer" is or can be a protected title though, just like "doctor" and "professor"; I'll admit engineer is a pretty broad word nowadays and could mean that anyone doing engineering is an engineer, but still. Not everyone is allowed to do doctoring without a doctor's degree. Straw man argument because we're not talking about doctors though.

Professional rock musicians are often called entertainers. In this case, her medium appears to be creating hobbyist robots for entertainment.

She did not graduate with those degrees (know her personally). She makes no bones about making her living as an entertainer, but she is a very competent designer, builder, and hacker. Is she an engineer, probably not, because she wouldn't build things to a formal spec and report tolerances and fail rates, etc, but that's not the end all and be all of creation.

Here's the business insider interview [0] where she talks about dropping out.

Being self taught is part of the importance I think as it makes the robots more understandable. They typically look like Mechano creations and don't hide any of the concepts used to build them.

[0]: http://uk.businessinsider.com/simone-giertzs-shitty-robots-y...

> She makes no bones about making her living as an entertainer, but she is a very competent designer, builder, and hacker.

No arguments there.

> Is she an engineer, probably not,

Not probably not, but definitely not.

> because she wouldn't build things to a formal spec and report tolerances and fail rates, etc, but that's not the end all and be all of creation.

Agreed.

Thats just gatekeeping. According to the dictionary, an engineer is someone who designs and builds machines or structures. That definitely applies, even if her machines are deliberately shitty.

fine. She's not an engineer. She even calls herself a not-engineer.

There's a legal term engineer, which has definitions and qualifications associated with it, a technical term engineer that has some specific connotations built against it, and an informal term engineer that is dominant in the software "engineer"ing community.

She's not 1) nor 2) but "probably not but maybe" 3).

I don't think that she would refer to herself as an engineer, but more as an enthusiast. Nothing to do with sexism but more that she's not that interested in working with engineery stuff like reliability, fault tolerances etc.

She didn't graduate from KTH since "Teknisk Fysik" wasn't her thing and to be honest I don't think that it would've made any difference. I would say that she's doing quite ok. :)

Source: I'm her brother.

Then make sure to tell her that she's making a difference. My kids LOVE her robots, and it makes the idea of making and playing with robots a whole lot of fun.

I wish to echo this too -- doesn't matter what she has done and where she has come from. She is making a difference to a large number of lives out there, and getting more people into engineering, robotics and science - at all levels and ages!

Hope that these messages to eventually get back to her, because she deserves to know how much of a difference she is making.

the "studied" doesn't mean she holds a degree. Watch out for those loose terms.

I guess by your standards I'm an IT entertainer. I will update my CV accordingly, thank you for the correction.

The whole shtick is about lowering expectations.

Go find somewhere else to derail conversations with implied accusations of sexism. It's ruined what could have been a nice thread about her awesome work with discussions about what we should refer to her as like we are classifying an object.

Her own YouTube page says this:

"Maker/robotics enthusiast/non-engineer. Have become somewhat of an expert in shitty robots. Swedish but sound American just to confuse you."

Please post flamebait somewhere else.

People are always going to have different perspectives and be curious about different things. Most people, especially those who create content, understands this. If there anything that make places like HN tedious to read it comments like your own that is negative, dismissive and argumentative. Who, with anything better to do, wants to be part of that?

This is not a matter of perspectives. This is ignoring the very titles she chose for herself and claiming that the article using those titles did so because of sexism (explicitly stated in another of cantrip's comments below).

There is nothing curious or creative here, just insidious behavior designed to start a fight without a modicum of evidence backing it.

and the article says she's a "robot enthusiast

She calls HERSELF an “enthusiast”. Who are you to deny her self-identity?

There is clearly a big difference between the robots ABB or KUKA make, and the contraptions Simone makes: to imply she builds the former by using the same name as the well established name of the actual makers of industrial robots is just misleading.

The robots Simone makes can fairly be described as "hobbyist robots", although her preferred term so far is "shitty robots".

I think the best term for her would be robotics educator.

This is inspiring as hell.

Simone is making the world a better place in a big way.

She gets money from selling novelty vids to television programmes. How does this make the world a better place?

She is providing entertainment. Some people believe that the arts are worthless, and the only thing worth doing is science. Others don't believe that, and enjoy entertainment, and appreciate people who create the entertainment.

Entertaining people with science.

Making machines less scary so people are less fearful.

Making machines less scary so people are less fearful.

So when Skynet finally decides it's Judgement Day, it's easier for Skynet to eliminate the most dangerous scourge on Earth: Humanity.

You are downvoted, of course, because we all know what side our bread is buttered on. When the revolution comes, many of us here will probably not be friends with John Connor.

OTOH, if she inspires people to make more shitty robots, Skynet will only have shitty toothbrushing robots to work with.

Also if Skynet starts eliminating people, it itself will become the most dangerous scourge; if it's self-learning it'll shut itself down.

I agree. The machines she makes are genuinely funny. Making something funny is hard and takes skill. Beyond that she manages to give personality to her robots.

I guess what I'm trying to say is she's providing actual comedy rather than just entertainment. I view comedy as a higher level somehow.

Making people less fearful of machines by derping around and normalizing Google Home and et al, how is that something to write home about, proudly?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab47XHidvwQ&t=1m55s

You might as well call "social experiment" videos "entertaining people with science" because there goes theory and engineering into the pixel displays people consume them on.

Oh, but call to action for victims of some thing or other, so how could anyone possibly "hate", right? Isn't she self-deprecating enough, already? This is the equivalent of cat videos for nerds -- same shit, different target audience. A dime a dozen, and it's all crap in the same patterns. The sad part is, most people aren't shills, this is simply what they come up with anyway, even when they're not backed by marketing teams, they do their best to produce similar output.

I think it's insulting my intelligence, as part of a pebble on a beach of shit. And instead of allowing each pebble to hide behind the beach, I hold the beach against each pebble.

Inspiring girls to work in science and tech. Showing that it’s a fun and not a scary area. Not world changing but very important.

Not just girls. I've shown her stuff to kids of all sexes and they universally love it and ask about how they can do something like that themselves.

And what are you doing to make the world a better place? I'm guessing you are setting the bar pretty low, so she in fact is looking pretty good :)

By showing us something strange and beautiful. Technical yet artistic. It is convention breaching and paradigm cracking. Inspiring, educating and illuminating too. The world can use as much of that as it can get.

I wish article would have different title, so that people would be less primed to go into gender war over this or that.

The video is really funny. I think I will look her up, because of how it makes robots making look.

Amazingly, she learned English from television. https://youtu.be/z8NIw1HeBBk

If you like Simone Giertz' work and you haven't seen it yet please go see the movie 'Modern Times' by Charles Chaplin.

There is nothing new under the sun.

And a better take on Simone's work from Daily Beast:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/ces-was-full-of-useless-robots...

That article is about CES. It mentions her name once in the first paragraph and then never again.

Pretty much the same amount of text as the gz article then. I find her video's rather inspiring showing what is possible with robots and also how they are incomprehensibly useless in most ways for tasks that are not laid out perfectly for them.

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