181–190 of 208 posts
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Reinventing the wheel. Hand writing robots at scale was a market for decades from the 1950's. They went away when desktop publishing arrived.
Maybe, but what a fun wheel it was to reinvent! Honestly one of the more fun things I've done in my career. I guess I could've just made another static site generator though ;)
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Thats true for every product though. People are willing to pay more for something that pretends to be hand made rather than something manufactured. There is no new insight here.
They are willing to pay more for something they think is hand made, not for something they know pretends to be handmade. Fraud is not excusable.
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Last year I built an entire service [1] around the idea that scaling handwritten cards was a good business… Before ultimately concluding that you’re right, it’s pretty dystopian. So I called it quits. [1] fountaincards.com
Was it working / were you making money? Automated handwritten notes companies seem like they render text using a handwritten font and then potentially pass it off (via API) to a “print anything and ship it” company — is that an accurate statement? Is there a clear advantage to building and maintaining the hardware / plotting pen portion? i.e. isn’t that something you could do by randomizing font parameters? Also, it…
Bottom line it's like anything else -- if I don't know the person who sent it to me, I don't trust it. Automated handwriting is just more big-tech destruction of yet another facet of human to human communications.
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In Japan you can rent a family. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rental_family_service
In Nevada you can rent a girlfriend experience. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/sex-wo...
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They are willing to pay more for something they think is hand made, not for something they know pretends to be handmade. Fraud is not excusable.
Somehow Starbucks seems to excel at bringing prepackaged microwave food to a personalized premium price point. I stand there and watch them put it in the microwave.
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Maybe, but what a fun wheel it was to reinvent! Honestly one of the more fun things I've done in my career. I guess I could've just made another static site generator though ;)
Maybe a static site generator that throws in random noise/errors so it feels like a handwritten HTML/CSS site?
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I'm in upper middle class and switched away from an iPhone to an Android last year and felt like I dropped classes based on verbal reactions from my peers. I thought it was much more prominent as a status symbol in lower classes, but many of my peers also indirectly conveyed that my status had dropped. Some outright said it. I find it pretty bizarre and unfortunate, but now I'm back to getting the new iPhone because…
I find it bizarre that people talked to you about their perceived change in your status to you directly, much less simply due to a phone.
The bigger ramifications were ones I noticed myself. I wasn’t included in group texts organizing things where I usually would have before. I was still invited to things. Just no longer part of the organization messages. It was very subtle things like that where you notice people are treating you slightly different than they used to. Nothing major or dealbreaking but enough to make you realize there’s something there if you’re observant.
It’s tough to explain but the circles I’m in are so used to iPhones, that deviating from normality causes people to perceive you as no longer part of the collective group.
There was a brilliant Twitter thread last year showing a project to "hand write" with cnc robots thousands of personalised letters for a mailout. They initially started off with off the shelf hand writing robots, but ended up building their own massive ones to increase speed and efficiency. https://mobile.twitter.com/aarondfrancis/status/143888821947...
As an AxiDraw pen plotter experimenter, I think business notes is the wrong market for this. I’ve always thought wedding invitations would be better. Rather than faking handwriting the pen is used much in the way an emboss or deboss is - to raise the quality and prestige of the document. Fountain pens allow for intricate ink sheen and color combinations. Customers are also not price sensitive.
There was a brilliant Twitter thread last year showing a project to "hand write" with cnc robots thousands of personalised letters for a mailout. They initially started off with off the shelf hand writing robots, but ended up building their own massive ones to increase speed and efficiency. https://mobile.twitter.com/aarondfrancis/status/143888821947...