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Show HN: I built four eight-foot-long handwriting robots
- drKarl 5y agoReminds me of the story of Turry https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-2.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revol... Long text, search for Turry
- aarondf 5y agoHaha exactly right! I came across this WBW article when I was building these guys and thought wait... Am I building Turry?
- ipsum2 5y agoWhat were the letters for? Were conversion rates significantly better than typed letters?
- aarondf 5y agoIn Texas, the county puts a value on your house that then determines how much you pay in taxes. Usually they just kinda eyeball it. The homeowner is allowed to protest and say "hey that's super wrong, I protest!" It's a pretty broken system tbh. We are property tax agents that homeowners hire to do that "protesting" process for them. IF we save them money, we get paid a percentage of the realized savings. If we save them nothing, we get paid $0.00, so it's a pretty compelling offer. As for conversions, it's extremely hard to track because it's physical mail. But yes, the campaign did quite well!
- hellbannedguy 5y agoThat is a weird way to tax property. I still don't understand why you needed this autograph pencil?
- aarondf 5y agoIt is, I agree. We used them to write the addresses on the envelopes.
- michaelt 5y ago> I still don't understand why you needed this autograph pencil? To trick people into opening their junk mail, because they think it's a letter from a human.
- hellbannedguy 5y agoAh yes. I have gotten these before, but not produced this way. The ones I got looked like they were written by an underpaid employee. They have had signature machines for years though. The Kennedy's used them a lot. The only thing I would experiment with this project is adding significant error, and randomness to the writing. It would look more realistic? On a personal note, when I get these (Anderson Painting likes this approach.); I throw away the ad away immediately, or if printed on good stock paper--I save to pick up dust.
- tinco 5y agoIs it? How do other states do it? Here in the Netherlands it's the same, roughly judged based off average values in the neighborhood.
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- felixr 5y agoI don't think you answered the questions: Why was handwriting necessary? Are people more likely to read your mail if it has a handwritten envelope? My question would: Isn't it faster to just have some people write the addresses per hand? ... I would take "this is cooler" as an answer :-)
- aarondf 5y ago> Are people more likely to read your mail if it has a handwritten envelope? That is the theory! > My question would: Isn't it faster to just have some people write the addresses per hand? Undoubtedly, yes! Our plan was to try to make it a service pre-covid, but then we decided to double down on our main product (doing tax protests). There are lots of services out there that do this, but mostly they do low volume, high cost stuff - https://www.handwrytten.com/ https://www.handwrytten.com/ - https://www.scribeless.co/ https://www.scribeless.co/ - https://roboquill.io/ https://roboquill.io/ - https://handwrittenmail.com/ https://handwrittenmail.com/ - https://letterfriend.com/ https://letterfriend.com/ Lots of stuff like thank you notes, etc. We just wanted the addresses on the outside!
- tomcam 5y agoI LOVE your project and delighted in reading about it. But your offer is so compelling I doubt you need the fake handwriting.
- manquer 5y agoIt shouldn't be that hard to track conversion rates?, You could run A/B tests on randomized populations, to see relative performance of conventional methods to yours, keeping other factors like packaging, contents of the leter same ? You could even probably track basis demographic/ economic groups given that you are tracking home value, you have both property tax and location data with which to control for. Whether you should do is a different question
- aarondf 5y agoAh yeah I guess I shouldn't have said it that way. I'll rephrase: "It's hard for me, as the individual developer at a company, to spend enough time to devise a system to adequately A/B test the production and distribution of physical mail as compared to link clicks."
- ggggtez 5y agoSo, these are spam letters to people that currently have no business relationship with you? I hope you go bankrupt.
- jccalhoun 5y agoSo the tax equivalent of the lawyers that advertise on tv that they don't get paid unless you win.
- aarondf 5y agoYes, in the sense that we don't get paid unless we win. No, in the sense that we don't advertise on TV and we don't call ourselves The Texas Hammer [1] 1: https://twitter.com/JIMADLERLAWFIRM https://twitter.com/JIMADLERLAWFIRM
- varjag 5y agoNot sure how I feel about automating those last bits of human touch.
- mypalmike 5y agoYou don't love getting envelopes in the mail that appear hand written but turn out to be mass produced promotional garbage?
- stickfigure 5y agoThe only hand-written letters I get are from religious nutters imploring me to join their church. I'd rather have the promotional garbage.
- aarondf 5y agoDeal! DM me your address
- DonHopkins 5y agoAt least that keeps their hands busy writing letters instead of thumping bibles and pointing fingers. Idle hands are the tool of the devil. If the churches paid their fair share of taxes, then the real estate taxes wouldn't be so high for everyone else.
- ggggtez 5y agoIf you've ever received something that looked "hand written" it's either a convincing fake, or made by an intern/slave. I think we should probably question why this person thinks that revealing how the sausage is made will endear anyone to them.
- chrisseaton 5y ago> If you've ever received something that looked "hand written" it's either a convincing fake, or made by an intern/slave. Do you never receive genuine hand-written letters from friends? Sorry for you!
- gus_massa 5y agoIn the initial model the pen is slanted but parallel to the axis of the sheet, and in the last model it's vertical. Does this change the style of the writing? I think I hold the pen like rotated at 45°. What about that? Have you tried with a ink pen? What's the difference with an off the shelve pen plotter?
- aarondf 5y agoHolding it at 45 works well for e.g. a sharpie, but it didn't work quite as well for a ball point pen, which we ended up using. We tried a bunch of different pens and eventually ended up on G2 for reliability and "rollability," if thats a thing. Way fewer dead spots than some of the other pens. Also, we could see remaining ink and swap out early. > What's the difference with an off the shelve pen plotter? It's bigger! Seriously though, this was an off the shelf pen plotter (Axidraw) until I blew up one of the axes. So it's the same controller, same motors, same pen carriage, and one of the same arms. We simply took one axes and made it super long.
- aarondf 5y agoThe off-the-shelf plotter is called Axidraw, by Evil Mad Scientist: https://shop.evilmadscientist.com/890 https://shop.evilmadscientist.com/890
- anfractuosity 5y agoVery cool :) The results look really good! It looks like the pen plotter has 3 degrees of freedom, I'm just curious if you think adding any more would possibly have any benefits? I've got a very cheap robot arm, I plan to teach to draw sometime, but I don't think it's going to work well, partially because the lowest servos don't seem to have enough torque and I don't think it's especially accurate/repeatable.
- aarondf 5y agoThanks! It has ~2.5 degrees of freedom. The pen servo only controls the up part of the vertical axis, gravity controls the down. What I mean to say is that the pen carriage just slides down, it is not pulled down. To solve for that we used... rubberbands. It adds a little extra downward force to ensure the ink flows.
- endisneigh 5y agoThough this is technically impressive, the continued pretending of "personalization" is pretty disgusting to me. Why not just be explicit that it's automated? Because people don't like that. So we automate anyway and pretend. It's just sad. Reminds me of the deep-fakes that are becoming popular that allow you to "personalize" video messages. I'm curious of OP had any moral qualms about deceiving people, and I ask this with complete sincerity and with no desire to downplay the (technical) impressiveness of the project. --- Those comments aside, and in the interest of having a more productive, positive comment - I'll say that if the machine described could be miniaturized sufficiently - it, combined with some deep learning could be nice for those who are losing the ability to properly write.
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- aarondf 5y ago> I'm curious of OP had any moral qualms about deceiving people, and I ask this with complete sincerity and with no desire to downplay the (technical) impressiveness of the project. Hey! OP here. Great question. So I think one piece of context that's missing from all of this is that our service 1) helps people and 2) can never cost them net-negative. Our service is a property tax protest firm, where we represent homeowners in an effort to reduce their home's "appraised value," and thereby lower their taxes. If we succeed, we take a percentage of the realized savings to the homeowner, and leave them with the lion's share. If we fail, they don't pay us anything. There are lots of firms that charge flat fees regardless of success. Those are the bads guys in our eyes. I look at the handwriting as way to optimize open rates, just like writing a good subject line. I know that emails that say "Hey Aaron!" weren't written one-by-one by a well-meaning intern. Likewise I assume _anything_ I get in the mail is junk. We just want people to look at ours and think "oh wow they put some effort into this piece of junk mail." (We don't think we're junk mail, obviously.) Anyone that uses our service will either make money, or they'll be left in the same spot they were before. So I feel pretty great about that! > I'll say that if the machine described could be miniaturized sufficiently It started out mini! You can find it here: https://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/846 https://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/846
- Animats 5y agoThe Autopen AF is a commercial product for this.[1] There's also MAXWriter and RealPen. All have paper feeders, so they can turn out page after page, unattended. In China, some kids use automatic writing machines to do their homework. [1] https://youtu.be/3FHGO2i0bL4 https://youtu.be/3FHGO2i0bL4
- maddyboo 5y agoSee also the LongPen, conceived by author Margaret Atwood for remote book signings. I particularly like the name because it sounds like something out of her fiction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LongPen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LongPen
- PedroBatista 5y agoAnother week, another impressive technological display of amoral mass-douchebaggery. Even most crimes require a lot of work and many a fair amount of technical prowess, but at the end of the day they are a severely net-negative for society.
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- amelius 5y agoIt's a "hack", in this case to make people believe things they would otherwise not believe, and as such, it deserves to be on Hacker News. Perhaps someone else finds a better use of the technology.
- soheil 5y agoI think this is the most interesting video in the thread: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis/status/1438888791905865730 https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis/status/1438888791905865730 It'd be probably more realistic if it included random noise or used a GAN model to generate a unique looking letter every time.
- aarondf 5y agoHey! Glad you liked that one. So it does introduce random variation. I had the employee write each letter ~15 times, and then they are plucked at random and then more "wobble" is applied randomly. So each character is slightly altered from what she wrote. Her original stroke actually never shows up anywhere, which is kinda funny to think about. Letter spacing, word spacing, line spacing (y pos), line starting point (xpos), and baseline drift are all random as well. I don't know how to write and or use a GAN model so I didn't. Maybe next time!
- wombatmobile 5y ago> Letter spacing, word spacing, line spacing (y pos), line starting point (xpos), and baseline drift are all random as well. Did you consider varying intraline individual character y pos? The videos look like not.
- aarondf 5y agoYeah, that's the baseline drift I mentioned. The whole line kinda flows on a wavy baseline, like a human does. It doesn't look like it on the video because we're talking a few millimeters or less. But when you stand back from it you see that the baselines aren't exactly straight.
- wombatmobile 5y agoOK, nice.
- scottyp21 5y agoReally cool. I've seen a lot of handwritten letter writing services, but most lack realistic variations. It's a pretty crowded market, but this definitely has potential as a spin-off service. Also, thanks for the A in ACCT 229!
- kragen 5y agoIt's a literal spambot. While a handwriting robot is potentially wonderful (I'm a particular fan of Jaquet-Droz's automaton the Writer, finished in 01774, which is probably the first programmable pen plotter, containing perhaps the second vector font after the Romain du Roi), that's horrible. This is why we can't have nice things. Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl ... all these scenarios are in fact a race to the bottom. Once one agent learns how to become more competitive by sacrificing a common value, all its competitors must also sacrifice that value or be outcompeted and replaced by the less scrupulous. Therefore, the system is likely to end up with everyone once again equally competitive, but the sacrificed value is gone forever. From a god’s-eye-view, the competitors know they will all be worse off if they defect, but from within the system, given insufficient coordination it’s impossible to avoid. - https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ In this case, the value being sacrificed is that if you write a letter to the government disputing your tax assessment, you get a fair hearing. Stacked on the crooked timber of humanity, the best inventions immediately sink to the worst, most contemptible ends.
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- Nathanael_M 5y agoI think this is a misunderstanding of the use of the letters. Although there is definitely some truth to your statement, I don't think is as dark and wicked as it seems. This is a marketing technique to try and get customers to use their tax dispute service, not the communication technique to the government itself. The hypothetical worst case here is that people throw out handwritten mail because every company uses handwritten mail for spam, but, to be fair, if you've gotten a piece of handwritten mail in the last year you're in the minority.
- kragen 5y agoYou're right, I misunderstood some of Aaron's explanations. He clarified later that this is just garden-variety spam, which is still pretty dark and wicked, just not in the same way.
- forgotmypw17 5y agohttps://archive.is/NWfQK https://archive.is/NWfQK
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- zinckiwi 5y agoBut... but you could have used your powers for good! Nothing really against the OP, this is arguably more defensible than other similar initiatives. It's just a shame that so many inventive engineers are being put to work in the marketing machine and not more worthwhile endeavours.
- aarondf 5y ago> the marketing machine and not more worthwhile endeavours. Ah yes, but how do we tell the world about our worthwhile endeavours? Marketing! > Nothing really against the OP No worries at all. You should read some of the other comments!
- robbrown451 5y agoIt's not just that it is marketing, but this is specifically deceptive, in that the whole point is to trick people into thinking they got human attention (actual handwriting) as opposed to getting spam from a (literal) robot. That said, I totally appreciate the project from the technical perspective. I even can appreciate it in a "mischievous" sort of way, since tricking people can be fun. But still...
- philipswood 5y ago<tongue-in-cheek-mode "on"> Given the amount of effort that went into this (amortized over each letter) - I'd say the client almost did receive special attention. I mean they could just have hired a few interns (or even crowd-sourced some school kids). </tongue-in-cheek-mode> In the movie 'Her' the actors job was writing targetted, "personal", handwritten letters for a living.
- hamburgerwah 5y agoI was about to get out my pitchfork but then I discovered that this is not used for marketing false authenticity. It is actually used in a service that attempts to help people lower their property tax rates. Due to the peculiar aspects of how this works in Texas, a "handwritten" note can improve the chances of a reduction.
- aarondf 5y agoAh well, dust off that pitchfork. These letters are sent to homeowners, who then hire us, and we go in person to the appraisal district to represent the homeowner.
- 300bps 5y agoI received a letter from an attorney telling me I could lower my property tax. I expressed interest and he sent me a 5 page form to fill out. I looked up online that it was a 1 page form to dispute my taxes myself. Filled it out, was in the room for 5 minutes and my taxes went down almost $2,000 per year.
- aarondf 5y agoYeah you can definitely do it yourself! Usually they give homeowners "courtesy cuts" for showing up. Or sometimes they do stonewall them. Either way, many of our clients prefer to have us do it since we do that all day, every day, every year. A lot of people view it as found money. Sure they could take an afternoon to pull comps, go to the district, wait for the appointment, and then haggle with an appraiser for a small cut, or... they could just send us! Each person values their time differently. To quote Big Tom Callahan: Of course, I can get a hell of a good look at a T-Bone steak by sticking my head up a bull's ass, but I'd rather take the butcher's word for it.
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- jjk166 5y agoInstead of using a vacuum to directly place a sheet of paper, instead automate the placement of jigs. Design the jigs with self-locating features so they can be placed by a relatively inaccurate system.
- aarondf 5y agoYeah that sounds super cool. Alas, I am but one man, and one mildly skilled web developer with zero experience in hardware before this. I did watch a bunch of vacuum robot videos on YouTube tho, that was fun.
- zwieback 5y agoWe had better luck with Bernoulli cups to move paper from a ream to our platen where it gets printed on. We grab the paper by the short edge and drag it over, easier than trying to lift it off vertically. The platen has its own vacuum so the paper gets sucked down in place. Works pretty well but we still need to recover from errors, especially when changing paper types.
- aarondf 5y agoIn all my research I never came across (or didn't understand) Bernoulli cups. This looks like it might have solved our original problem with suction cups: they would pick up huge amounts of paper. We're talking like 5-15 sheets. We tried turning down the suction, etc, but there was no way it was ever going to be precise enough. Thank you for sharing this, I just learned something new and super cool. What's your application? You say your platen has a vacuum, did that affect writing quality (assuming you're writing)?
- zwieback 5y agoThis is for an internally developed printhead test tool (at hp) so money is not as much of an issue. We place the paper on a very flat vacuum platen and then print various test patterns with our (industrial) printheads. So the printing part is easier than what you're doing, printing more or less the same way you'd do in a flat-bed plotter. We did play around with various ways of picking paper and it's generally a tricky problem, even now we have to adjust the flow for different paper weights. We also came up with a simple way of dropping off extra sheets by forcing a little bow to the paper and shaking a few times for the extras to fall off.
- aerovistae 5y agoI feel like this person is a genius.
- aarondf 5y agoHa, thanks! That's a nice thing to say. I think a lot of times, persistence can be confused for genius.
- whatshisface 5y agoI think this comment thread in an interesting mix of people quoting Howl and comparing you to Moloch and people calling you a genius. Of course, Moloch mainly chooses genius to serve as his priests.
- aarondf 5y agoI've gotta admit I didn't read the whole comment about Moloch. I told my wife that HN was going crazy over the robots and tried to describe the range of comments and her response was "what's HN?"
- roflc0ptic 5y agoI think you should probably make sense of the criticism being levied at you, even if it appears at first off base. I had basically the same thought as the guy referencing Moloch, although I generally avoid the impulse to moralize to others about their life choices.
- max0563 5y agoThis reminds me of The Writer which was a handwriting automata created by Pierre Jaquet-Droz in 1770. It is incredibly impressive. https://thekidshouldseethis.com/post/writer-automata-pierre-jaquet-droz https://thekidshouldseethis.com/post/writer-automata-pierre-...
- analog31 5y agoOddly enough I've received fake handwritten letters for a long time, they're always junk mail, so like a lot of advertising ideas, the novelty wears off quickly.
- gruez 5y agoI've received a lot of handwritten-but-printed-letters (ie. it looks like handwriting at first glance, but if you look closely it looks printed because there's zero artifacts typically associated with handwriting), but I've never received junk mail that's actually hand-written (ie. this post, presumably I won't be able to tell).
- distances 5y agoIt looks easy enough to tell if you check the pictures behind the link. Lots of identical letters, and the lines are too straight for human writing.
- iambateman 5y agoOver the past few months, we've been playing with the Axidraw to bootstrap a handwritten card service, so I loved reading about the way you solved some similar problems – especially the jigs. For us, this has been much more challenging than expected...thanks for sharing your process, it was encouraging. For what it's worth, we're making FountainCards.com, which will be the easiest way to send a card written in fountain pen. If anyone is up for trying out the beta, my email is stephen@fountaincards.com.
- aarondf 5y agoMoloch! Glad you enjoyed it. I feel like the jigs were one of my best inventions. Especially the pen alignment jig that gave me a reference point for dead reckoning. When I figured that out I was pretty tickled. Good luck, reach out if you need anything!
- iambateman 5y agoHa! Moloch indeed. Fountain was born out of my utter avoidance for writing cards. After my wife had our first child, I had a whole list of people to write and thank…but didn’t…and I still feel bad. Soon, I will have invested a whole year of development time to avoid spending an hour writing cards. Engineering is a curse ;) Thanks Aaron!
- HeyLaughingBoy 5y agoWhy did you do alignment via jig? I've done this kind of manual configuration in the past when I needed to align two independently-controlled axes to each other (a pick & place handing off an object to another pick & place) , but for registration of a single axis, I'd normally use a "home" sensor.
- aarondf 5y agoThe jig aligns two axes! The jig is placed at a specific tooth (x) with a known Y offset. By placing the pen in the hole on the jig, both x & y are resolved
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- haikurion 5y agoIf I didn’t know better I would think this is a parody of morally bankrupt technologists. But it’s not a parody, it’s an obscene reality. - They have constructed a (rather impressive) mass deception machine, and put it to work. - They have convinced themselves that the mass deception is worthwhile because their clients can’t lose money. - When challenged, they seem to believe that the ends justifies the means, and that it is just marketing. The only constructive thing I can think of is that those of us who have the ability to build these kinds of things should take this as another case study of what not to do, and how not to respond to criticism.
- tyingq 5y agoThis was interesting too. Since he posted pictures of envelopes with people's names and addresses on Twitter, he was asked: >are these fake addresses or? His reply was: >All names and addresses are public data in Texas! Ugh.
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- rapind 5y agoI see marketing as a giant black hole of ingenuity and talent (that pays well). That being said, it's difficult to see the difference here from ingenuity in say SEO.
- specialist 5y ago> But it’s not a parody, it’s an obscene reality. Yes and: They're using spiffy tech to further accelerate inequity. aka Pay to play. "Property taxes represent the single largest source of own-source revenue for America’s local governments. Cities, counties, school districts, and special districts raise roughly $500 billion per year in property taxes, roughly 70 percent of local taxes. Whether residents rent or own, property taxes impact everyone. In many cities, however, property taxes are also inequitable: low-value properties face higher tax assessments, relative to their actual market values, than do high-value properties. This tax regressivity disproportionately burdens lower-income residents. To better understand these issues the Center for Municipal finance has reviewed millions of sales records for properties throughout the country. This site presents the results of these evaluations." https://propertytaxproject.uchicago.edu https://propertytaxproject.uchicago.edu "When’s the last time you thought about property taxes? We mostly accept them as a part of society, and assume that they’re being calculated fairly. But a leading University of Chicago scholar says that assumption is wrong. A breakthrough study from Prof. Christopher Berry has shown that, on average, homeowners in the bottom 10% of a jurisdiction pay an effective tax rate that is double of what’s paid by the top 10%. Essentially, the poorest homeowners are subsidizing the richest, with disproportion effects on people of color who own property. We talk with Berry about why this happening, how it’s affecting communities—and what we can do about it." https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/big-brains/why-youre-likely-paying-an-ezxNujW14E6/ https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/big-brains/why-youre-li... "How Lower-Income Americans Get Cheated on Property Taxes -- Many homeowners are paying a total of billions of dollars extra because of inequities in assessing property values." https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/03/opinion/sunday/property-taxes-housing-assessment-inequality.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/03/opinion/sunday/property-t...
- CosmicShadow 5y agoReally impressive and fun to build I'm sure. I bought an Axidraw last year to play around with making fake signatures of fake people and as well we were getting a ton of Etsy orders and we always write a hand written note, but we couldn't keep up at Christmas time and my wife's wrist was breaking, so it saved our bacon when we had to write like 600 notes in 6 weeks. The fact that you have to keep replacing the sheet and realigning is definitely a drag, but we made a system that worked well enough for us. Making the SVG letters is a pain and we are working on designing our own font from my wife's handwriting, but you can at least SVGize a picture of your writing and then touch it up in an editor. Gives a good excuse to buy lots of different fun pens and paper, but yeah it's annoying when a pen stops writing half a letter and I'm not sure if it's just an ink thing or a pressure thing. We've gotten positive reviews that mention our handwritten notes at least and lots of comments on great service and such, so we think it makes a difference.
- aarondf 5y agoCareful posting that here, you might get called Moloch (whatever that is) or an amoral douchebag! Seriously though, Axidraws rule. Glad it's working for y'all.
- CosmicShadow 5y agoI wanted to show my support for you and the cool things you did. Heaven forbid you participate in a direct mail campaign, a legitimate advertising method that is for sale by the post office themselves and as an entrepreneur try to optimize it. I get 0-4 pieces of junk mail a day, so who cares if one is hand written. There is no case where it will all go that way. You are an entrepreneur, feel no shame for those who don't get it. Most of the time it's not worth posting anything, because very few will appreciate it or not be a douche, even on HN. It's sad that it has to feel that way, that I'd rather not share cool stuff, because people will be dinks, but it's just not worth the mental exhaustion most of the time.
- aarondf 5y agoI really appreciate you saying this, truly. Thank you.
- sverhagen 5y agoI'm still surprised how often I get still direct mail with something "handwritten" on it, where it's obviously not, because every same letter looks the same. This seems like a problem solvable with just software, i.e. introducing artificial variations in the fonts. Why the seemingly overly complicated jump to using real pens in a plotter? It's the font improvements that could possibly fool me, not the indentation of a real pen.
- jahewson 5y agoAdobe’s CFF font format (found tucked away inside OTF font files) has a ‘random’ operator, though most font handlers I’ve seen don’t bother to implement it.
- aarondf 5y agoIt's hard to introduce random into actual fonts. I don't even know how I'd do that. What I could've done is just generate the SVG and then print it, that would've been a lot easier but way less fun. The reason you get crappy printed mail that's obviously a fake is because it's cheap and easy. Not everyone wants to build robots.
- ACAVJW4H 5y agohttps://www.calligraphr.com/en/docs/tutorial2/ https://www.calligraphr.com/en/docs/tutorial2/ How about this?
- aembleton 5y agoCreate hundreds of variations of a font by making small random changes to each character. Then set each character on an envelope to use a random font from that set.
- pvitz 5y agoI have no idea if this is possible, but I remember an article in Douglas Hofstadter's "Metamagical Themas" about Knuth's "Metafont". It sounded like one could define certain variables to alter the equations of the font. This could be one way of easily introducing randomness.
- bschwindHN 5y agoI thought this thread was shaping up to be "and now I can automate sending handwritten letters to my Grandma". At least that's what jumped into my head because I still send my Grandma letters. Don't want to automate it though :)
- aarondf 5y agoThat's where I draw the line. Call your grandma! Call your mom too, while you're at it. That's really wonderful that you still send your grandma cards. I guarantee you she saves every one.
- bschwindHN 5y agoDon't worry I call all of them too. I need to do it more often though, I've been slacking.
- bigiain 5y agoYou might get a kick out of this project: https://hackaday.com/2021/04/25/keep-in-touch-with-grandma-with-this-lo-tech-interface/ https://hackaday.com/2021/04/25/keep-in-touch-with-grandma-w... (Not mine, I just remembered and googled it...)
- bschwindHN 5y agoThat's awesome, I've wanted to build something similar like a walkie talkie that's connected to a peer over the internet, you just press the button to talk instantly!
- alach11 5y agoThis is so cool! I live in Houston and make a dashboard every year to help friends/family/colleagues find comps and negotiate their property tax rates. I had thought about direct mailing out drafts of info packets to people as a side-hustle, but never put in the work to make it happen.
- aarondf 5y agoNice, it would make a great side hustle if you have a flexible enough job to attend the hearings! Or if your angle was strictly preparing packets for homeowners to attend their own hearings. I say go for it
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoIn my district there are no hearings for this. You challenge the new tax rate with a business reply card and write the comps in a notes section.
- alach11 5y agoInteresting. Is this also in Texas or do you live somewhere else?
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoNot Texas
- joshuaellinger 5y agoI live in Austin TX and got one of the mailers last year. I was wondering how you pulled it off. The handwriting on the outside does make it look personal but, once you open it, it is obviously computer generated due to the consistency of the writing. If anything, I'd say the writing in inside undermined the message because nobody is going to handwrite a letter to solicit that business. You should test only doing the signature only and see if impacts your response rate. We also got a couple of 'we want to buy your home' mailings. It does feel like it impacts our open rate but I can't tell if it is just due to novelty. I think the main reason it 'works' as a business proposition is that the City is doing blanket increases and relying on protests to catch their mistakes. They do this (in part) because they are forbidden from using actual MLS data. It costs me 3-4 hours to do a protest so outsourcing it makes sense if your time is valuable. But when it came down to it, I wasn't willing to let them represent me -- something about it felt off -- and I wound up just accepting the increase. The system doesn't feel broken -- just wasteful. How else are you going to do a property tax? I do wonder if this goes the way of medical billing (overcharge at first because you know you are going to lose some to protests) or it creates a watchdog effect that make the City limit the increases to an amount that is not likely to draw protests.
- aarondf 5y agoNo way, you got one of our letters? That's crazy! I'd be curious which version you got. We sent a few different iterations. I'll have to look you up tomorrow when I'm back at the computer. Re: the system. I can't disagree there. It's a disaster and there has to be a better way. Counties rely on a certain percentage of people protesting and the ones that don't get kinda screwed imo. The unfortunate truth is that everyone should protest every year. That's a broken system. Some other states only revalue every third year, so the counties have a better shot at fairly valuing everything because they have 1/3rd the workload. Not Texas though. They revalue everything every year, so it all just gets ballparked.
- joshuaellinger 5y agoI assume it was yours. Everything fits your description and I don't think anyone else is doing exactly the same thing. I don't think the system is broken. It's just not an easy problem, especially if you can't use the market to set the price. California's only-when-you-sell system seems a lot worse. Now, you could have a fairer system, but this is America and we're not particularly concerned about fairness when you get down to it. Austin's system actually has some progressive features that it is quiet about so the State does make them stop doing it. For example, if you are over 65, you can defer your property taxes until you die and accrue simple (not compound) interest. And houses have a quality 'grade'. Lower grade housing stock gets smaller annual increases which makes the system mildly progressive. There is no state income tax so a lot of stuff gets funded through property taxes. It's not like the money is used to build bombs to blow up people on the other side of the world. Taxes are the price of a civil society and gaming the system was one of the primary causes of the decline of the Rome Empire. So I don't agree "paying the minimum taxes you can get away with" is the same thing as "being screwed". It literally is not worth my time to protest most years, or even to hire a 3rd party, and I'm okay with that. I see companies like yours serving to keep the system relatively honest. The only thing I would change is that I'd add a $20 filing fee which is refunded if they make an adjustment to cut down on the junk protests, which are paid for my property tax dollars.
- phgn 5y agoDoes he mention why he's building this? I understand that handwritten letters might receive a bit more attention, but doesn't it come across as unprofessional? It would for me - I would assume they don't have the money to properly print at least the address fields.
- retSava 5y agoObvious growth hack thing - try to bypass the brains "this is spammy mail ad crap" by making you first think it's written by a person and not a printer, thus it should be important.
- JohnWhigham 5y agoYeah this is just another example of the "best minds of our generation working on making people read more ads" quote. Sad, really.
- asteroidbelt 5y agoAt least ads are not trying to deceive, they are usually explicitly marked as ads. This is clearly an attempt to fool the recipient.
- sitkack 5y agoThis really should be a Best Of HN post. Great work!
- tinyshi 5y agoI am sure this is for common good. Well no. Is there anything good in this? It would be nice to receive a letter like this at home. Is this Turing test - letter edition?
- Keyframe 5y agoI guess this might be for future iterations... But.. aren't variations in inclination, pressure and stroke (direction and order of strokes) super important for handwriting? How would you handle these - especially pressure.
- aarondf 5y agoYes you are absolutely correct! That's the biggest flaw in this system IMO. And I don't think it's fixable without a fundamental redesign. The pressure is controlled by a rubberband. I could possibly use the servo to relieve pressure during certain strokes, but how much? I don't know how tall the paper is! It could be a ten sheet packet or an envelope. And to simulate pressure differences we're talking about fractions of a millimeter there. I can't crack it!
- weinzierl 5y agoFinally the machine from Franz Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" is possible:-) Joking aside I find this highly fascinating. Especially since (apart from applications like the one in Kafka's story) the results from a good printer are probably practically indistinguishable for most people. Handwriting robots are one example of a technology that became good enough and useless at the same time. They are fun though and I love to see them in action. (OK, not the Kafka one but the one one from article certainly).
- micromacrofoot 5y agocan we just stop trying to deceive people... I'm so tired of having to be skeptical of everything I ever encounter because we live in a world where a large number of people have to manipulate each other to make a living
- air7 5y agoWhile this is honestly very cool from an engineering perspective, it feels highly unnecessary and even disingenuous. the whole point of sending a handwritten letter "in this day and age" is to signal that real effort was put forth for this communication which indirectly shows its importance to the sender. The difficulty and tediousness of the action is precisely what gives it it's perceived value in the eyes of the receiver. And while it's arguable that building such an elaborate contraption to mimic handwriting is in itself a signal of the importance of the communication, it still gives off a sense of disingenuousness to me.
- teddyh 5y agoIt’s just like deepfaked video and audio; it undermines the value and trustworthiness of the real thing by flooding the “market” with hard-to-spot fakes. In this case, the “market” is people’s trust in the proof-of-work of a seemingly handwritten letter.
- didntknowya 5y agoI've got a few letters which looks handwritten but obviously automated. i appreciate the effort but if the content is an obvious sales tactic it kinda diminishes the appeal.