[HN Gopher] Show HN: I built four eight-foot-long handwriting ro...
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Show HN: I built four eight-foot-long handwriting robots
Author : aarondf
Score : 88 points
Date : 2021-09-19 20:06 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| anfractuosity wrote:
| Very 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 wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| 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.
| Animats wrote:
| The 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
| PedroBatista wrote:
| Another 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.
| [deleted]
| drKarl wrote:
| Reminds me of the story of Turry
| https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revol...
| Long text, search for Turry
| aarondf wrote:
| Haha exactly right! I came across this WBW article when I was
| building these guys and thought wait... Am I building Turry?
| soheil wrote:
| I think this is the most interesting video in the thread:
| 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 wrote:
| Hey! 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!
| ipsum2 wrote:
| What were the letters for? Were conversion rates significantly
| better than typed letters?
| aarondf wrote:
| In 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 wrote:
| That is a weird way to tax property.
|
| I still don't understand why you needed this autograph
| pencil?
| tinco wrote:
| Is it? How do other states do it? Here in the Netherlands
| it's the same, roughly judged based off average values in
| the neighborhood.
| hamaluik wrote:
| Same in Canada.. always seemed fair enough to me and I
| assumed it was standard but now I'm curious how many
| other ways they are and how they shake out.
| aarondf wrote:
| It is, I agree.
|
| We used them to write the addresses on the envelopes.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> 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.
| manquer wrote:
| It 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
| felixr wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| > 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.scribeless.co/
|
| - https://roboquill.io/
|
| - https://handwrittenmail.com/
|
| - https://letterfriend.com/
|
| Lots of stuff like thank you notes, etc. We just wanted the
| addresses on the outside!
| kragen wrote:
| It'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: stacked on the crooked timber of
| humanity, the best inventions are immediately turned to the
| worst, most contemptible ends.
|
| _Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable
| dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in
| armies! Old men weeping in the parks!_
|
| aarondf explains below
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28588086> that this was not
| built, as you might think, for marketing; instead, it is being
| used as a denial-of-service attack on a government property-tax
| dispute-resolution mechanism, crowding out unaugmented humans:
|
| > _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._
|
| So, to elaborate:
|
| _who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on
| Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up
| clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine
| shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of
| sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken
| taxicabs of Absolute Reality,_ ...
|
| _Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton
| treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations!
| invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!_
|
| _They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements,
| trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and
| is everywhere about us!_
|
| - 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/
|
| 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.
|
| What kinds of socially imposed incentives would be adequate to
| dissuade people from doing things like this?
|
| _Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is
| running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose
| breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!_
| [deleted]
| varjag wrote:
| Not sure how I feel about automating those last bits of human
| touch.
| mypalmike wrote:
| You don't love getting envelopes in the mail that appear hand
| written but turn out to be mass produced promotional garbage?
| gus_massa wrote:
| In 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 45deg. What about that? Have you tried with a ink pen?
|
| What's the difference with an off the shelve pen plotter?
| aarondf wrote:
| Holding 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 wrote:
| The off-the-shelf plotter is called Axidraw, by Evil Mad
| Scientist: https://shop.evilmadscientist.com/890
| endisneigh wrote:
| Though 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.
| [deleted]
| aarondf wrote:
| > 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
| everyone wrote:
| TLDR. OP had absolutely no moral qualms about deceiving
| people.
| IkmoIkmo wrote:
| Yes it'll be helpful for you and your clients, until everyone
| does it, at which point hand-written becomes meaningless. At
| that point it's both no longer helpful for you to drive
| commercial results, but also it means anyone who wasn't using
| it in a commercial way, will now have lost the signalling
| power of handwriting because the reader can no longer
| differentiate between someone writing a handwritten letter,
| and someone sending a digital letter through a handwriting
| middleman service.
|
| In other words, a bit of a race to the bottom.
|
| As for your appraisal company, I'm not familiar with it. I am
| familiar with the Dutch appraisal companies, which spam the
| shit out of municipalities with automated legal objection
| letters, overwhelming the paralegal capacity, and they make
| money off of a combination of upfront legal fees (paid not by
| the homeowner, but by the municipality, as 'everyone deserves
| access to the law' here) and savings on the property taxes.
| It's really approaching spam and has blackmail elements, as
| if the municipality doesn't respond within a legal timelimit,
| there can be fines or moneys awarded on-top.
|
| All of this is great for the individual owners who use the
| service, but terrible for the municipality and thereby for
| society. After all, the municipality is now doing a lot of
| unnecessary work responding to automated and entirely free
| (spamlike) appraisal objections. Of course the municipality's
| budget is paid for by the tax payers. So everyone is in the
| end paying for this nonsense, in the form of higher tax
| rates.
|
| Not only that, but in the Netherlands it's lead to a system
| where the appraisal values are severely distorted downwards,
| and compensated with higher property taxes. Instead of taxing
| 1% of $1 million market value, they'll simply appraise it at
| $600k and set the property tax at 1.6666%. Nobody can
| reasonably argue the $1m home is worth less than $600k, so
| the municipality is freed from these appraisal spam
| companies, and is still raking in the same tax revenue. But
| these unnaturally low appraisals are distorting other things
| (e.g. the national wealth taxes which are based on these
| undervalued municipal appraisals) and it's all not pretty.
|
| None of this is good for society and I'm pretty disappointed
| that we're now seeing tech move further into the field of
| spam, even in a physical sense.
| manquer wrote:
| Customers ( homeowners?) having a potentially risk free/ no
| downside transaction shouldn't have any relationship to
| whether they are interested in unsolicited mail or should
| receive one.
|
| It is a ultimately zero sum game I would think, if this
| improves your open rate in the short term, everyone from
| political campaigns to the local deli, will start doing the
| same and everyone would stop opening hand written mails, and
| yours(and everyone's) open rate will be back to the same, and
| we will no longer be able to open by grandmother's Christmas
| cards .
| aarondf wrote:
| > everyone from political campaigns to the local deli, will
| start doing the same
|
| It is definitely a matter of time until this stops working.
| From a quick google of "handwritten letters" here's what I
| got:
|
| * https://www.handwrytten.com/
|
| * https://www.scribeless.co/
|
| * https://roboquill.io/
|
| * https://handwrittenmail.com/
|
| * https://letterfriend.com/
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(page generated 2021-09-19 23:00 UTC)