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The coolest robot I've ever built [video]
- superasn 3y agoThe title is verbatim. I have nothing to do with this channel, but the final product is really cool.
- skinkestek 3y ago[flagged]
- yuppiepuppie 3y agoStrange. I’m on chrome iOS and I didn’t see any ads. I’m not using the YouTube app, so perhaps that’s why.
- lucubratory 3y agoYou would consider paying for another video hosting provider but wouldn't consider paying for YouTube?
- ulrikrasmussen 3y agoFor me, yes. I do generally make sure that content creators that I like get paid, e.g. via Patreon. I still buy all my music, primarily on Bandcamp. I subscribe to streaming services and haven't sailed the seas to find movies for years. However, YouTube I will never pay for. Google has lost my trust, and I fear that they are in the process of destroying the internet and turning it into a walled garden riddled with unblockable ads everywhere. I use uBlock to block their ads because (1) I don't want to watch them, and (2) I want to actively hurt Google financially by spending their compute resources but not giving them ad impressions. I make sure that the content creators I follow get paid otherwise, so I think this is perfectly morally consistent.
- lucubratory 3y agoFair enough if it's a protest, I assumed you were looking for solutions and got confused.
- Toutouxc 3y agoI totally understand, I pay for Nebula but block ads on YouTube and refuse to pay for it out of spite.
- skinkestek 3y agoClearly. And for the longest time I didn't even block Google ads. It was kind of a deal between them and me: they serve me ads in exchange for excellent free services. Lately however the quality has sunk through the floor and the annoyance has skyrocketed. It is almost like they don't care about the ads pr se, it seems they only want to turn the lever up until I start subscribing. And it won't surprise me a bit if after a few years it is pay + ads. I use Google the way I use Microsoft, when it is convenient for me. They have broken so many implicit contracts with everyone of us that none of us owe them anything except what the law says. ------ The ads were always rubbish for me (I hear other people had scarily good ads) but "my" Google ads hit a few times in a decade. (Facebook was however scarily good: I hardly use Facebook or any of their properties at all, and still every time I log in they seem to have something I am tempted to buy).
- iamflimflam1 3y agoEveryone on YouTuve gets a different level of advertising. Evidently YouTube has decided that you have weed a high tolerance for adverts.
- alpaca128 3y agoIf that were true I wouldn't need an ad blocker.
- thaumaturgy 3y agoFirefox with uBlock Origin here. No ads at all. You might also try Freetube: https://freetubeapp.io/ https://freetubeapp.io/
- hutzlibu 3y agoSame here. But didn't youtube started to go against us ad avoiders?
- alpaca128 3y agoYes but it seems they can't do anything about uBlock Origin. I have it and only found out about the blocking spree from YT videos complaining about it.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y agoIt’s worth noting that the ad blocker-blocking is a slow roll-out. People with the same OS and browser/ad blockers will have different experiences. I’ve also never been blocked from watching but I do commonly see “Youtube is not free” dialogs pop up because I’m using an ad blocker. In my case it’s AdNauseam[0] which uses uBlock Origin behind the scenes. 0: https://adnauseam.io/ https://adnauseam.io/
- sgt 3y agoI have uBlock Origin and YT recently started blocking it. I had to whitelist YT in the uBlock Origin extension in Chrome.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bambax 3y agoThis is a cool project but I strongly disagree with its premise that we would need machines with "more personality". I don't want that. I want machines that are predictable; not "intelligent" ones that may do one thing one time and another thing another time, for no discernible reason. I expect machines to be deterministic.
- crystaln 3y agoWhat if the machine is a comedian?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Traubenfuchs 3y agoWhy not both? Someone might want to talk to a hologram of their celebrity crush in a skimpy outfit that always talks in a submissive way and sultry voice, while someone else might want a disembodied voice without discernible sex.
- Sander_Marechal 3y agoI just want Majel Barrett's disembodied voice echoing through my room :-)
- dotancohen 3y agoBonus points for asking for information in a flat unemotional Brent Spiner voice.
- stevekemp 3y agoIf you mention "personality", in the context of robots, the first thing that comes to mind is Marvin the paranoid Android, from Douglas Adams. He famously built Marvin with 'Genuine People Personality', though it seems to do little good for him, or those around him for that matter.
- no_time 3y ago
- lucubratory 3y agoThis is a really cool little project! I think projects like this, as well as Disney's recent incredible robots (e.g. https://youtu.be/-cfIm06tcfA?si=D3SKsNekOaDQFeVU https://youtu.be/-cfIm06tcfA?si=D3SKsNekOaDQFeVU) mean it's just a matter of time until we have pretty real, embodied robots in people's homes. There will probably be some viral videos about that, and I imagine some company that can sell at an attractive price is going to make a lot of money one day.
- amelius 3y agoIs this safe? How many kV is on the CRT?
- lopis 3y agoI was thinking the same. CRTs pull a lot of power, and everything is just exposed and crammed together. I'm sacred.
- LeonM 3y ago> How many kV is on the CRT? 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.
- amelius 3y agoI was thinking of children that might like to play with it. Isn't there a design principle that says that if you make something look cute, it should also be safe to touch?
- martin_a 3y ago> if you make something look cute, it should also be safe to touch I think this does not work. My one cat looks very cute but is not really safe to touch.
- 3y ago
- dools 3y agoSorry for the tangent dang but since this video mentions Alexa I gotta say that as an Australian I find the ubuiquity of Amazon in the US perplexing. To me, Amazon is a total mess. The account management is terrible. It has all these crazy region restrictions when you try to buy books, and I just assume that whenever I buy something from the store I'm getting scammed. Everything on Amazon looks like a scam. Then I hear people in the US buy their groceries on Amazon and use Alexa. It's crazy, what am I missing? The entire company seems like it's strung together with duct tape. I have zero trust in Amazon as a brand to do anything right.
- liamwire 3y agoIt’s hard to overstate the scale of their offerings and ubiquity in consumer mindshare in the states. Comparatively, we’ve had Amazon in Australia for what, seven years at this point?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- trabant00 3y agoI'm in Europe and I only buy stuff that is sold by or delivered by Amazon. Never had a problem with any scam in years and hundreds of products. The prices are good. Delivery to pickup locations is very convenient. 30 day return policy for any reason and it's very easy and free to actually send it back. 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.
- mft_ 3y agoSame here - my experience is that Amazon works very well in Europe. We picked up the Amazon habit when we moved house during the pandemic, and must have bought hundreds of times since.
- RugnirViking 3y agofor what its worth im also in europe and amazon isnt even in my country, if I want it I have to buy from neighboring country and it takes many weeks to months to arrive. Seeing as the interface and product selection seems tailored to getting you to buy the most flimsy knockoff imaginable for every product there is no reason to buy from them
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jansan 3y agoI love how the Roy Batty monologue from the original Blade Runner movie ("I have ssen things you people wouldn't even believe...") keeps popping up. The robot acutally looks like it was made J. F. Sebastian, so making it say the monologue at the end was a very nice touch IMO.
- mft_ 3y agoSide-note: I watch quite a lot of Youtube videos in this space, and while I quite liked the presenter and the project, I've rarely watched a video with more 'fluff' padding out the content. There were multiple sections of music and irrelevant images that stretched out to 30-40 second each which did nothing but waste my time. At least they're easy to skip. I get that not everyone wants a dense information-packed how-to video - and indeed, a lot of DIY creators (Colin Furze, for example) seem to have gradually trended away from this style over time. It may therefore be that trying to please the Youtube algorithm ('all hail the algorithm') can drive video producers in counter-intuitive directions, but I really hope that this is an outlier trying to boost their video length, and not the sign of yet more things to come.
- KolmogorovComp 3y agoI also noticed it but it the end didn’t mind, as it’s clearly an entertainment video and not a how-to and the ‘fluff’ was pleasurable.
- iamflimflam1 3y agoI was going to suggest that this might have been to get the video over the 8 minute limit which triggers mid rolls adverts. But the video is almost 20 minutes long..
- Yadayadaaaa 3y agoHe did this for fun and made a video about it. Based on his posting history it doesn't seem that he is playing anything just wanna make sure that his work gets visibility (thumbnail)
- rmuratov 3y agoThese were panoramas of Tbilisi, Georgia. I didn’t expect to see them either and thought that the author was somehow connected with Georgia.
- SPACE_LAWYER 3y agoHe lives in Tbilisi, he talks about it in other videos
- dazzawazza 3y agoI imagined a world full of robots with personality as well. I never imagined that that personality would be working for it's real owner (Amazon, Google et al) and trying to control me. Until it's MY friend, I am not interested in lending some of my soul to it. We're not on the correct path are we?
- yetihehe 3y agoIn the end he suggsted that further development of AI models will help with such projects. I think there will be a lot of opensource personal AI's available in several years when reasonably cheap accelerator chips become available enough.
- ilaksh 3y agoSome of the leading open source LLMs can perform about as well for what he demonstrated. It's not like it was writing code or something.
- elicash 3y agoMy experience hasn't been that my Alexa or that Siri tries to control me. I use it to set timers and play music and that's about it. 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.
- bloqs 3y agoWas posted a while ago. So fantastically cool
- specproc 3y agoI've actually had the pleasure of seeing this robot "in the flesh", as it were. The creator's an old friend and a real nice guy. He's got a really fun video with an old Soviet games console I particularly enjoyed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mqXT-zj47s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mqXT-zj47s
- lucubratory 3y agoHe was shopping in Tbilisi for this video, does he have some connection to the USSR? That would be a really, really interesting perspective for a tech YouTuber.
- maximg68 3y agoOn his page https://www.thomasburns.net/ https://www.thomasburns.net/ he mentions "Our family runs a small computer repair business in Tbilisi, Georgia" (under the rotary phone tile).
- lucubratory 3y agoOh huh, he actually lives there. I'm so curious as to why.
- jacquesm 3y agoWatching the video is worth it for the visit to the old style junk market alone. I love those places.
- xwdv 3y agoAn exposed CRT like that is quite dangerous no? Capacity discharge could easily kill.
- demondemidi 3y agoHe’s stuck in childhood. Computing should be ubiquitous in my opinion and completely non intrusive. Like the Universal Computer in Asmiovs “Nine Tomorrows”. I don’t ever want a 1980s goofy gremlin bot. I want the computer to completely disappear into the ether and only respond when spoken too. Less technology in sight not more. Edit: and if I need a physical robot I want its form to follow its function, not an outdated notion of a future we’ve already passed. Edit2: I think Alexa is the perfect model, but I don't have one because privacy is not taken seriously where I live (United States). Computing as a universal basic service needs to be wrestled away from the capitalism-winning megacorps, and that's about a century off.
- gumby 3y agoIs there a quick NV;DW about what made a robot cool?
- F2hP18Foam 3y agoHow it looks, basically. It's an anthropomorphized Amazon Echo.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rapunkill 3y agoReminds me of the old YTV's purple monster. "Snit"
- dansalvato 3y agoI really like his point about how our realized future of the "robot companion" is so lifeless and utilitarian compared to what we used to imagine. I guess it makes sense given how the adoption of voice assistants predated widespread LLMs by about 10 years, and voice assistants were never even close to feeling "alive" in any sense. I'd love to see something like this manufactured at scale once the LLM ecosystem matures a little bit. As someone who has never quite felt comfortable using voice assistants, it might actually be the ingredient I need to make the whole thing feel enjoyable.
- kleiba 3y agoI wish the people of the past hadn't forgotten to tell us that the robots of the future would collect our private data and store it on the computers of some gargantuan corporation so that they could profile us better.
- kridsdale3 3y agoWasn't that like, exactly what the MCP in TRON was about?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sim30n 3y agoVery cool! Looks like Wall-E.
- DonHopkins 3y agoWe made some "One Minute Movie" robot reality TV spots at the Stupid Fun Club, about Empathy [1] and Servitude [2], written by Will Wright, who also participated in Battlebots with his daughter Cassidy and their vegetative robot Super Chiabot [3] [4]. Empathy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXrbqXPnHvE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXrbqXPnHvE Servitude: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXsUetUzXlg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXsUetUzXlg BattleBots Missing Link vs. ChiaBot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rx3VKd8yDqI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rx3VKd8yDqI BattleBots Complete Control VS Super Chiabot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELZI2Cx6kWA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELZI2Cx6kWA The one minute movies never ran due to contractual problems between NBC and SAG. We used hidden cameras, and the humans were real unsuspecting people, but I'll admit it's true they didn't accurately portray the everyday lives of actual robots in the real world: the robot's injuries and Professor Johnson's phone number were fake, and the robot waiter was fired. The point of NBC's one-minute reality shows was to tell short entertaining two-part cliffhanger stories, which NBC would broadcast as interstitial programming at the beginning and end of commercial breaks, to compel people to keep watching TV and submit to more advertisements. But the point of Will's stories and performance was to explore how people interact and empathize with robots, discover what their beliefs and expectations are, and probe to test how easy humans are to fool or convince to play along with real-time tele-robotic wizard-of-oz man-behind-the-curtain mumbo-jumbo. https://web.archive.org/web/20141028194536/http://www.allentownproductions.com/project.php?p=nbc https://web.archive.org/web/20141028194536/http://www.allent... >In 2003, NBC attempted to add a new feature to prime-time television with "One-Minute Movies." Each original movie unfolded in its first 30 seconds and ended with a cliffhanger, and then a conclusion in the last 30 seconds. The One-Minute Movies were to be used as interstitial programming between commercials and possibly where a show ends a minute earlier than its scheduled running time. >The idea for the series was brought to NBC by John Wells (“E.R.”) and director Paris Barclay. The ten unique films were written, produced, cast, directed and filmed by assorted talent. Among the talent appearing in or lending their voices (one was animated) to the projects were Michael Richards, Tom Arnold, Carmen Electra, Bill Bellamy, Eddie Cibrian, Garcelle Beauvais-Nilon, Paula Marshall, Jackee Harry, Danny Masterson and Amber Valletta. >With mechanical robots designed and built by Will Wright (creator of “The Sims”), the two segments directed by James Moll are comedic short films featuring fully functional robots in hidden-camera situations. >The first, “Restaurant” features a robotic waiter. Coffee shop diners were asked if they would be willing to be seated at a table that will be served by a mechanical server. Then, surrounded by tables filled with hired “extras,” the unknowing customer is approached by a 6-ft tall, fully functional, computerized, talking robot. >The second film, “Empathy,” also features hidden-cameras. In this case, a broken down, severely damages robot was planted next to a dumpster on a side street in Berkeley, California. As people would pass the robot, it would suddenly move and talk to the passersby. “Help me,” the poor helpless robot would say. Hidden cameras captured various reactions, everything from apathy to empathy. >After airing only one of the films – featuring “The Pussycat Dolls” -- NBC decided not to continue airing the remaining twelve films. After a short and unsuccessful career as a waiter, Slats eventually decided that his one true goal in life was to reproduce himself. So we took him out in public around Berkeley, and shot some video of Slats attempting to seduce men and women off the street. It was kind of like Speed Dating meets Demon Seed: he tried to talk people into giving him their eggs and sperm, because he needed their genetic material to reproduce himself. Demon Seed Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNUEp5A9eKU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNUEp5A9eKU Demon Seed: The Birth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyjrQfNtK0I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyjrQfNtK0I Speed Dating with Cupid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVUP9OXmHTM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVUP9OXmHTM >Cupid $959 Are you tired of dating weasels, hedgers, pussyfooters and wafflers? Are you ready to dispense with all the beating around the bush you're forced to put up with just to find a yes at the end of a marriage proposal? Let Cupid, the Equivercator help you cut to the heart of things and land yourself the mate of your dreams. No need to wear yourself ragged trying to win the affections of the one you desire. Let Cupid help you secure the proposal, and then you can spend your time on more important matters: You've got a wedding to plan! The results of our research: It turns out to be a lot easier for a robot to talk a man out of his sperm, than to talk a woman out of her eggs. This is Slats, the unemployed robot waiter, roaming the streets of Berkeley: http://www.donhopkins.com/home/RobotMovies/Slats1.jpg http://www.donhopkins.com/home/RobotMovies/Slats1.jpg http://www.donhopkins.com/home/RobotMovies/Slats2.jpg http://www.donhopkins.com/home/RobotMovies/Slats2.jpg http://www.donhopkins.com/home/RobotMovies/Slats3.jpg http://www.donhopkins.com/home/RobotMovies/Slats3.jpg Nancy the Van Seat - Stupid Fun Club: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvXG4gQ2FWI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvXG4gQ2FWI Creativity by Will, Slats & the Stupid Fun Club folks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZljgktEr5E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZljgktEr5E