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This is simply brilliant. The escalation from a typical nerd's "I've optimised my social life" post to absurdity had me in stitches.
by timje1 13y ago
This is simply brilliant. The escalation from a typical nerd's "I've optimised my social life" post to absurdity had me in stitches.
- thisishugo 13y agoIt's perfectly written, and I don't know if that's a testament to Rob's ability as a creative writer, or to how much time he's spent engulfed in a startup culture where this sort of behaviour is far closer to the realm of possibility than one might imagine or (arguably) hope.
- timje1 13y agoThat's the thing, the initial steps sound like exactly what a hacker would look at. And we're so busy furrowing our brows to follow the technology that we don't realise the ridiculousness of what he's doing until there's a robot attending the date. He's basically played a trick on our left brain.
- Kurtz79 13y agoI think it's a perfect benchmark to see how much someone is engulfed in said startup culture. Just measure how far you had to read before thinking "ok, I get it, he is joking". I had to get to the part about the Odesk virtual assistant.
- froo 13y agoSame, virtual assistant. I could conceivably see someone utilising OpenCV to "try" to measure attractiveness. I could also see someone trying sentiment analysis with NLTK... but farming it out to a low paid worker is just insane.
- vdaniuk 13y agoI am curious, why do you consider it insane?
- dirtyaura 13y agoinsanity is in the eye of beholder. There are probably thousands of executives in the world that use the help of their personal assistants when organizing dating. Leap from that to use virtual assistants is not a biggie. however, there are probably none or just a few crazy geeks that even try to use the help of machine vision for dating.
- enjo 13y agoI have a friend who is, at this very moment, phone screening potential dates for her boss.
- DanBC 13y agoFarm it out to many people in return for some tiny (but not monetary) reward. OKCupid used to have a feature for "choose my best image". Users submit two images, then rate other people's images. One of your images is presented alongside one other image from some other user, and someone else has to pick which one they like most. OKC then used their stats to give some analysis to it. It was sort of great, except there were usually too few people to get any kind of sensible results. It's easy to see that this could be a useful approach.
- tseabrooks 13y agoI made it to the robot full of prerecorded videos before my eyebrow went up and alarms and whistles went off in my brain. I'd hope that is the furthest anyone would have to go to se the absurdity. I'd be interested if anyone made it past that before noticing it was a joke.
- bsaul 13y agosame here, the robot was the trigger. But i guess one point is to prove that everything is theorically possible.
- rfnslyr 13y agoI actually emailed this to all my friends/managers at work, then I got to the vibrator part, then I realized it was written in jest, then I frantically scrambled to recall the email.
- antsar 13y agoAnd this is precisely why I no longer share articles/links unless I've had time to read every word of them.
- mcv 13y agoWhen he started about measuring attractiveness. And then the ignoring their message.
- randallsquared 13y agoThe pre-recorded videos on a robot clinched it, but the first thing that struck me as weird was the pointless "in Ubuntu" when talking about the Python script at the start.
- pritambaral 13y agoThat didn't strike me as weird. I just believed his primary dev environment is Ubuntu. Like people say, "I created a presentation on my Macbook", as opposed to "my iPhone". Agreed, the tendency of people to refer to their phones/computers by their marketing names is much, much higher among Apple consumers.
- thenerdfiles 13y agoThe internet already has no small part in satisfying most of my other needs. That's the starting point.
- smsm42 13y agoI started to suspect it with the second canned message. Virtual assistant made it almost certain and the robot sealed the deal.
- saumil07 13y agoyup - until he got to the robot, i thought this was real. sigh.
- VladRussian2 13y agounion of concerned robots may have some concerns wrt. your comment and attitude it projects
- consultant23522 13y agoIt's sad that I thought it was serious/plausible right up until the robot doubles.
- akinity 13y agoYou're on to something when discussing Rob's ability as a writer. Smart money says communication is his real strength. By speaking in startup/engineer vernacular to starry eyed bored dreamers(you: hn, vice, digg, reddit consumers) he's generated millions in pre-sales and investment without delivering anything.
- baby 13y agotoo bad he talked about the "robot" too soon. He should have kept going the same way and I would have been pointless about it.
- Houshalter 13y agoThe robot isn't too implausible, if you could convince your date to accept a telepresence which is just weird and wacky enough it might work some percent of the time. The hard part would be getting the AI good enough, but it's not impossible.
- dkokelley 13y agoWeird and wacky? Sure. But if I were a lady I wouldn't want to be seen out on a date with a telepresence bot. (In fact, it's not even telepresence - it's surrogacy!) Perhaps if distance were an issue I would accept a Skype date at a restaurant (with a live date on the other end). Bringing my relatively inconspicuous iPad and conversing with another human is within the realm of socially normal behaviour.
- kaitai 13y agoI don't know. As a "female" I started getting that squicky dehumanized feeling... until I realized the possibilities. Put that boy on mute and you've got the makings of a lovely subsidized evening!
- angersock 13y ago"Put that boy on mute and you've got the makings of a lovely subsidized evening!" Aaaaand that's one more tally under the "women can be rather objectifying and crass themselves" column. Keep it classy.
- Houshalter 13y agoAre you serious. It's a bot.
- rayiner 13y agoI found it awfully dehumanizing of the "females" in the narrative. Maybe I just don't get the joke. Pro-tip: It's rarely idiomatic English to call someone "a female," unless you're purposefully trying to compare her to an animal.[1] Female is a species-neutral term (like "breeding"). When talking about humans, it's proper to use the anthropic term "woman." [1] My observation is that women refer to men as "male" much less often than the reverse, but when they do they often intend the comparison to animals.
- taybin 13y agoI'm sure that was deliberate. You're not supposed to think this is a good idea after reading it.
- mcv 13y agoIt was very dehumanizing, and I think (hope) that was the entire point. I'm also surprised about how often I see English-speakers talk about "females" rather than "women". I vaguely suspect that might say something profound about an aspect of American culture that's deeply wrong about how it views women.
- rsynnott 13y agoIt comes of watching too much Deep Space 9.
- mynewwork 13y agoOr, less cynically, because no one uses 'gals'. There is no female analog to 'guys'. Males under age 18 -> boys. Males 18-35 -> guys. Males over 35 -> men. For female, it's less clear. Calling a 20-something a 'girl' might be viewed offensively as diminutive. Calling college students 'women' can also seem awkward casual contexts (it's perfectly fine in most).
- JonnieCache 13y ago"Ladies" is probably the word you're looking for.
- S4M 13y agoI actually thought it was true - and was thinking "oh shit, this guy must be a good programmer" - until the moment he explains how the actual date involves a robot.