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I built four eight-foot-long handwriting robots
- notamy 5y agoPreviously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28587458 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28587458
- pugworthy 5y agoI 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.
- teddyh 5y agoThese machines were built solely to send junk mail, and this is what they were used for. So you would be correct in your judgment.
- ryanwhitney 5y agoSurprised 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.
- anonu 5y agoWhy is this deception?
- Uhhrrr 5y agoBecause 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.
- jasonwatkinspdx 5y agoYeah, 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.
- _hilro 5y agoGiven that OP link is https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis/status/1438888219471491074 https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis/status/1438888219471491074 and the previously submitted link from yesterday(396 points, 156 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28587458 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28587458) is https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis/status/1438888219471491074 https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis/status/1438888219471491074, how did this end up being reposted so soon?
- slyall 5y agoI 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.