I built four eight-foot-long handwriting robots

twitter.com

37 points·slyall··9 comments

Surprised to see overwhelmingly positive comments on this.

It’s a cool project, yes. But getting even poorly faked versions of this with a “handwriting” font is super annoying.

The purpose of this is to deceive the recipient, plain and simple.

Why is this deception?

Because the only reason to do it is to fool the recipient into thinking a human wrote the letter. It's certainly not more readable or efficient than laser-printing Helvetica.

Yeah, the robot/engineering part is cool, but the end application is just yet another junk mail gimmick, and a pretty dull one at that, which is hard to get excited about.

Decades ago I talked briefly with a startup that was doing something similar but using calligraphers in China. The founders were nice but I passed for the same reason.

Previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28587458

I hope nobody legitimately sends me mail with a carefully handwritten address, because as soon as I see nice handwriting in the address, it goes in the junk mail bin.

These machines were built solely to send junk mail, and this is what they were used for. So you would be correct in your judgment.

Given that OP link is https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis/status/1438888219471491074 and the previously submitted link from yesterday(396 points, 156 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28587458) is https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis/status/1438888219471491074, how did this end up being reposted so soon?

I actually submitted it a couple of days ago (and only got a couple of upvotes). This was before the other one that made the frontpage.

But looks like this one got pulled off the backlog and re-animated which reset it's timestamp.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com