The coolest robot I've ever built [video]

For a monochrome display of that size, probably around 20kV

> Is this safe?

Just don't stick your fingers in there while it's on.

Given that this guy built the entire thing, he clearly has enough knowledge on electronics to understand the dangers of the flyback transformer.

So I'd hazard that he just likes making beautiful and entertaining videos in addition to making beautiful and entertaining devices.

However, I do find it enjoyable when you allow yourself to get lost in, for instance, a great opera song accompanied with cool images.

There is beauty in letting go of this guilt for not being 100% productive all the time.

I felt the same way but didn't want to comment as it felt a bit rude, I even want to see his profile because the amount of production 'fluff' seemed excessive for a relatively low 84k subscriber count.

A low amount of videos (14 right now) and ~80% of the video views on this one, it feels weird.

All in all, interesting video and at least he pointed out the elephant in the room about merging to some GPT model.

The trouble with such 'side notes' is they end up eating the thread and are effectively completely unrelated to the thing being presented.

Skipping around without a bunch of buffering lag and ability to increase volume up to 300% in poorly recorded/mixed videos alone are game changers.

The signal:noise ratio of the content there is awful, it requires better tools than what they provide for obvious reasons.

I dislike that you're being criticized. In a technical forum we should be demanding more efficient uses of our time and less manipulation and more facts-based presentation. I feel a little sorry for people who grew up in the youtube influencer age. These techniques are totally normalized for them and I don't think they realize how deeply manipulative your average popular youtuber is.

A lot of us just want a fact-sheet kind of thing that is neurodiverse and "busy technical person" friendly. The marketing-style media is really meant for executives and potential customers. I always shy away from those kind of presentations, find them hard to focus on, get impatient, and just google for a fact sheet, credible review, or technical reddit posting or other text-based info. And if there is video, it should be justified. Like a short clip illustrating something that is hard to explain or appreciate otherwise.

The other big bonus is how easily I can copy and paste these text items, make a bulleted list, etc to share with other busy people. "Hey Boss, check out this robot project, I think we can try that here," is going to be an easier sell with a page of text and some photos than "Hey Boss, here's a 40 minute video of a robot project."

I can't stress how badly the move from a text based internet to a video-based one has badly hurt people like me. I'm autistic with adhd and the constant demands to "hey just watch this video if you want to learn this technology," is just too much. I seek out text tutorials with screenshots or code snippets or whatever. I think we're becoming what happened to the boomers. That is to say the rise of TV, TV news, etc moved them way from books and newspapers that were far less centralized and had more potential for merit, variety, and lower barriers to entry. For someone like me, I could never be a slick youtube video producer, but I could write a good hack-a-day article. Why should the former have more merit? Why should we be applauding slick production techniques outside the ability of nearly all technical people?

I'm sorry if this rant is going odd places, but honestly, the mass videofication of all things has incredible downsides, but is incredibly profitable hence we're stuck with it, but we should be able to call it out if we are displeased with it.

i use this to see if the rest of the fluff is worth it :)

Superfast Matt reference?

It's actually funny, ever since Wheel of Time released and we got Prime to watch it, it's not just that we started buying from Amazon instead of individual stores, but we've actually bought a bunch more stuff over the internet than we would have before anyway. Stuff like air blowers for cleaning out electronics, verifiably safe toys for the cats, spring-loaded arms to hold phones up, a Kindle to read ebooks. The Kindle is the other thing I'll give credit to Amazon for being just very good and very good value like their streaming service, the Kindle is a very good device. Annoying DRM on my books, sure, but I've got them backed up for when it gets cracked.

Fast forward a decade or so and it's exactly as you say, finding anything reputable on their website is an exercise in frustration and unpronounceable randomly generated "brands" which have paid to be pushed up the search results. Alexa works maybe 50% of the time when I try to use it now (mostly I've switched to HomePods and Siri), the devices with screens are a constant flurry of pointless distractions ("There's nothing on your shopping list"... cool, maybe just don't tell me about that then). FireTV is a barely functional shit show which often takes multiple seconds to validate I've entered the parental control PIN correctly, and can take anything up to half a minute to fully populate the home screen with adverts.

The thing that really took the biscuit for me was when I cancelled my Prime subscription recently. Now whenever I try to buy something from Amazon I get interstitials trying to dupe me into reupping, often cryptically worded such that it looks like I'll be paying £10 for delivery if I don't. This is probably a good thing as it just encourages me to go elsewhere.

I live in Seattle. A lot of random things I can get shipped the next day (sometimes even the same day!) for free (I pay for Prime, but there is no additional cost), like if I need a USB drive, compost bags, or dish soap.

I'd prefer to buy things from Amazon vs other sites simply because I'm used to Amazon. I have an account; they have my address and payment information. I just need to click a few buttons and have what I need the next day.

If something goes wrong, customer support is still pretty good in most cases, although sometimes Amazon has dropped the ball. Amazon is great with returns -- most of the time, I don't even need to box up and label my return. I just need to show up at an Amazon Fresh store or some other dropoff point (there are many in Seattle) and hand them my item/scan a QR code, and that's it.

People have complained about fake products on Amazon. I've bought hundreds of things from Amazon, from CPUs to consumer electronics to batteries. I'm sure I received some knockoff at some point, but I've never noticed.

I would gladly switch away from Amazon if something better popped up, but I don't see how any alternative could be better without eventually becoming Amazon again.

I see a lot of hate for Amazon on HN, maybe it depends on the location. I never had a problem with them and neither did any of my friends.

The Alexa stuff is a little weirder for me. It’s gone in waves of being amazing and being terrible. I just noticed that for the last six months they’ve stopped with the “by the way” bs after I ask for the time, so that’s nice. A month from now they might turn the dials and make it annoying again.

Their e-Ink Kindle hardware is very nice and they have more ebook titles than anybody, but the DRM is such a downer. I’m cheering for the DeDRM people to crack it, but so far KFX seems to be holding…

My biggest Amazon complaint is their review system. It’s so gamed it’s almost useless. I pretty much only look at 3 star reviews because 1 and 5 are rarely fair or accurate.

I've bought I think three things from amazon just to try it out. My lesson is that the entire site has a toxic interface and my credit card got falsely charged sometime afterward, which I cannot prove but I'm pretty sure was related to my use on their site. It looks like a cheap scam bazaar.

I don't understand its apparent US ubiquity...but then I don't understand the desire for something like Alexa either.

I think there are fewer region restrictions here, maybe because they were a US-first company. Their account management and customer service is certainly lacking.

On the generative AI front, OpenAI/Microsoft doesn't control me either. I use it as a coding assistant instead of searching StackOverflow, or when I want to brainstorm lists of other ways of writing the same thing when I don't like what I've written and am not sure the best way to improve it.

Could just be you're approaching the tools wrong? But I can't imagine what you're doing where they're controlling you.

I think (and hope) it'll track a similar trajectory to 3d printing:

1. Expensive systems only approachable to large corporations

2. Lower-cost but affordable as a business expense to cottage industry

3. Affordable to hobbyists, but requiring domain expertise to operate

4. COTS plug and play solutions for the wide audience

Right now we are at (1) with the huge scale LLMs, but scaled models are runnable by hobbyists (2-3) and we are at (4) when it comes to things like image generation and music splitting.

For example, an AI slave (lit. robot) is useless to you because then you have the master-slave mentality so half of you is still a slave. Once we're actually OK inside we won't even think we need technology.

I think initially things like Alexa, Siri and Google Home were so much verbose and personality based and now just barely speak and don't do any fun personality stuff, outside of kid-centric features like "guess the animal game", bedtime stories, etc. I think people are just too busy or in a hurry to deal with personality from technology. In fact, Cortana has entirely been cancelled and replaced with a faceless and nameless Bing Enterprise Chat.

Another case is how stoic and boring and lifeless ChatGPT is compared to some of these more personality based AIs out there. People just want the facts and not to be bothered. They actually don't want a virtual friend. Things like MS Bob, Cortana, and various avatars and personality-based agents keep failing compared to simple and fast interfaces. I think that'll probably stick with robotics too. I think the Star Trek "computer" will win out every time. People just want to feel empowered and have a minimal of their time and effort spent.

I was reading some chatGPT programming workflow Twitter thread the other day and the guy was unusually polite with the thing. Like, does saying "please" or "thank you" actually improve its performance or is it just tech roleplay?

*Of course not including the new LLM-based Skyrim NPC mods