4 ms·

A 15-year old makes model trucks. Neither shocking nor surprising... unless white audiences have a low opinion of the intellect of Africans/Blacks. Go to Nige

A 15-year old makes model trucks. Neither shocking nor surprising... unless white audiences have a low opinion of the intellect of Africans/Blacks. Go to Nigeria. The place is full of construction, engineers, inventors, mechanics, etc. This video -- to a Nigerian -- would receive this response: "Big fucking deal... if the kid was really smart he'd be using motors and gears by now." The response of a white liberal, on the other hand: "Oh how precious... I didn't know that those people even knew how to write! Someone should give him a scholarship!"

c0vfefe 7y ago
I'd upvote the video even if it was an American kid, it's cool. The fact that it's from an impoverished country makes it cooler.
jklinger410 7y ago
It's called soft bigotry by low expectations.
hi5eyes 7y ago
i love when whitey tells me about my own culture/community and then I (a poc) somehow get excluded from the conversation because the worst thing you can tell a white person is their opinion doesn't matter
marmada 7y ago
The kid uses "wood and condemned laptop batteries to construct a moving excavator and a dump truck." That's pretty impressive to me, and something worth talking about. I am not sure why you assumed this is a post by a "white liberal" that automatically assumes a low opinion of Nigerians. To me, this is a post about something interesting that someone has done, and is made more interesting by the fact that they live in an impoverished part of the world (I watched a video on them, it's pretty clear they aren't rich).
_ph_ 7y ago
I wouldn't have predjudices about the intellect of an African kid, but I would assume that a random kid might not have as much access to resources as e.g. an American kid might have. Looking at the video, it looks quite as if fancy technology is replaced with a lot of practical creativity, like building a hydrolics system based on syringes.
apo 7y ago
The boy himself says: "When people see me on the street operating my excavator and tipper, they are usually surprised." I don't imagine he's flying to Beverly Hills to demo his projects and then flying back to Nigeria, but I guess that's a possibility. The environment the boy was filmed in suggests that he doesn't have a lot to work with. Maybe that's BBC going for the sensationalist angle, but I doubt it given that the article was originally produced for BBC News Pidgin: https://www.bbc.com/pidgin/tori-48130271 https://www.bbc.com/pidgin/tori-48130271 The initiative to actually implement his designs with limited resources is the hallmark of a hacker, and he belongs on the front page of this site. His young age makes it that much more interesting. I have worked with 15 year-olds before and let me tell you that there's a wide spectrum of abilities. In particular, the ability to reduce plans into an implementable format quantitatively (i.e., measuring and cutting accurately) is extremely rare even in the US. Very few wealthy US students could do what this boy has done.
- lurquer 7y ago
  Using syringes for hydraulics has been around forever. I remember instructions for making a 'hydraulic' backhoe in a Cub Scout booklet nearly 40 years ago. Go to youtube and search for 'syringe hydraulic.' I'm not knocking the kid, but the adulation over his accomplishment -- copying a DIY project off YouTube most likely -- is absurd.
  - apo 7y ago
    And I have patiently explained to multiple teens in great detail how to turn a simple design into a drawing and that into a 3D artifact. 95% of them can't do it. If this kid figured it all out from YouTube, he's still way ahead of the rest of his peers around the world. The point for me isn't the syringes. It's the initiative and determination it takes to start with the idea and actually finish it, particularly among this age group.
steve19 7y ago
Someone posted an article on HN recently partly about a woman in Germany who makes fabric pillows shaped like cuts of meat and whose shop looks like a butchery. It's not hard to make pillows shaped like meat, but it's a fun quirky business and I enjoyed reading it. I would have just as enjoyed reading about a white kid in the UK who made the same sort of scale bulldozers.
grizzles 7y ago
Fluid transmissions have lots of interesting advantages. Some of the top robotics shops in the world have started using them. https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-hardware/beautiful-fluid-actuators-make-soft-safe-robot-arms https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-hardwa...
bayareanative 7y ago
Like Cubans under sanctions... the poorest people are the most inventive by necessity, while the richest tend to be the most wasteful and unimaginative. Mother of invention and all that.
trickstra 7y ago
are you in Nigeria?

c0vfefe 7y ago

I'd upvote the video even if it was an American kid, it's cool. The fact that it's from an impoverished country makes it cooler.

jklinger410 7y ago

It's called soft bigotry by low expectations.

hi5eyes 7y ago

i love when whitey tells me about my own culture/community and then I (a poc) somehow get excluded from the conversation because the worst thing you can tell a white person is their opinion doesn't matter

marmada 7y ago

The kid uses "wood and condemned laptop batteries to construct a moving excavator and a dump truck." That's pretty impressive to me, and something worth talking about. I am not sure why you assumed this is a post by a "white liberal" that automatically assumes a low opinion of Nigerians. To me, this is a post about something interesting that someone has done, and is made more interesting by the fact that they live in an impoverished part of the world (I watched a video on them, it's pretty clear they aren't rich).

_ph_ 7y ago

I wouldn't have predjudices about the intellect of an African kid, but I would assume that a random kid might not have as much access to resources as e.g. an American kid might have. Looking at the video, it looks quite as if fancy technology is replaced with a lot of practical creativity, like building a hydrolics system based on syringes.

apo 7y ago

The boy himself says: "When people see me on the street operating my excavator and tipper, they are usually surprised." I don't imagine he's flying to Beverly Hills to demo his projects and then flying back to Nigeria, but I guess that's a possibility. The environment the boy was filmed in suggests that he doesn't have a lot to work with. Maybe that's BBC going for the sensationalist angle, but I doubt it given that the article was originally produced for BBC News Pidgin: https://www.bbc.com/pidgin/tori-48130271 https://www.bbc.com/pidgin/tori-48130271 The initiative to actually implement his designs with limited resources is the hallmark of a hacker, and he belongs on the front page of this site. His young age makes it that much more interesting. I have worked with 15 year-olds before and let me tell you that there's a wide spectrum of abilities. In particular, the ability to reduce plans into an implementable format quantitatively (i.e., measuring and cutting accurately) is extremely rare even in the US. Very few wealthy US students could do what this boy has done.

lurquer 7y ago
Using syringes for hydraulics has been around forever. I remember instructions for making a 'hydraulic' backhoe in a Cub Scout booklet nearly 40 years ago. Go to youtube and search for 'syringe hydraulic.' I'm not knocking the kid, but the adulation over his accomplishment -- copying a DIY project off YouTube most likely -- is absurd.
- apo 7y ago
  And I have patiently explained to multiple teens in great detail how to turn a simple design into a drawing and that into a 3D artifact. 95% of them can't do it. If this kid figured it all out from YouTube, he's still way ahead of the rest of his peers around the world. The point for me isn't the syringes. It's the initiative and determination it takes to start with the idea and actually finish it, particularly among this age group.

steve19 7y ago

Someone posted an article on HN recently partly about a woman in Germany who makes fabric pillows shaped like cuts of meat and whose shop looks like a butchery. It's not hard to make pillows shaped like meat, but it's a fun quirky business and I enjoyed reading it. I would have just as enjoyed reading about a white kid in the UK who made the same sort of scale bulldozers.

grizzles 7y ago

Fluid transmissions have lots of interesting advantages. Some of the top robotics shops in the world have started using them. https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-hardware/beautiful-fluid-actuators-make-soft-safe-robot-arms https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-hardwa...

bayareanative 7y ago

Like Cubans under sanctions... the poorest people are the most inventive by necessity, while the richest tend to be the most wasteful and unimaginative. Mother of invention and all that.

trickstra 7y ago

are you in Nigeria?