I made a robot to cut my hair with scissors [video]

It sucks for people aren’t videogenic though.

I guess it depends on your goal:

If you want to reach a large audience, you need a platform with a large audience. If you want to just publish something for the sake of archiving it, you don't need a large platform.

It's a bit of a tautology.

Shane wants to be a creator, so he needs to play in that competitive space. Which I guess is part of what being a self-sustaining creator is all about.

I have no evidence to back this up, but it seems to me that trying to make a living as a creator is akin to become a rockstar: far less likely than just putting the effort in to get a job in engineering.

EDIT: After scanning his blog, he has tens of thousands of dollars of equipment, or more. (Yes, I am jealous, but that is besides the point.) Perhaps money isn't a problem for him, but I don't know if this is BECAUSE he is a successful maker/creater, or in spite of it. Some catch-22 there.

> specifically youtube video with a clickbait subject (such as a self aiming basketball hoop)

How can the subject of a video be clickbait? The essence of clickbait is that an interesting title tricks you into clicking on uninteresting content. If the content is as interesting as the title, then it's not clickbait, you're just making something people want to watch.

Thank you for sharing the link. I prefer to read blogs.

The key issue here is discoverability. We used to have search engines, but with SEO tricks and Google wanting to prop its platforms higher, that doesn't seem to work anymore.

Then, there is the matter of following the blog for updates. Not everyone knows what a RSS feed is. Heck, I wanted to subscribe, but there's no meta tag, nothing in the footer or about page that gives a link to an RSS feed. I even looked at the HTML, hoping to know which blog engine this was running, then looked for its common RSS feed URLs [1], but that didn't work.

I don't disagree with your other points, but If I ran a blog, I would do it for myself and my readers, not as a billboard for advertisers to show them ads.

[1]: https://github.com/getgrav/grav-plugin-feed

I think youtube has some amazing content and creators, but at least for the kind I like I almost never discover them trough youtube itself but only via external means such as discussion forums, friends, etc.

Scrolling trough the home page or even video sidebar, altough heavily personalized, doesn't feel that much different than apathicly zapping trough tv stations in the past. Sure, YT gets the topics mostly correct, but the results are so heavily skewed towards shallow infotainment that is easily consumable and advertiser friendly, that it has become completly useless to me.

I was thinking that in one way podcasts and videos are better than blogs. You have to put more effort in stealing audio/video content, with blog you can wget all stuff and automatically shove it in some link farm. Even if someone stills your blog by translating it, I assume it would take not as much effort as making video or podcast from start. That said I have seen screen readers on youtube that steal news content from smaller news sites, slapping some photos from article. Text stuff can be automated quite quick, maybe with deep fakes on video it will be soon possible to steal video content as well. But I assume it is still quite harder.

Yeah that one is amazing. Also the auto-correcting basketball backboard that makes your shot always go in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FycDx69px8U&t=457s

Each of these projects is something I think I could probably figure out how to make in a year (but not really - I simply couldn't do the hardware side with my toolset).

Then I look at his youtube videos and see he is putting out one of these videos each week.

The level of productivity is insane.

For example, in the basketball 2.0, he mentioned doing the 1.0 version a few weeks before. Then in a few weeks, he is doing something equivalent to Mark Rober's dart board (that took Mark 2 years with help) - while creating other videos.

How is this possible?

For those fellow readers who do not know the Flowbee, here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK7_VSpTyVY

Quote: "This ingenious device lets you give yourself and family perfect haircuts everytime!"

I was the complete opposite, maybe I'm a hater.

The hard part isn't done. Controlling servos and motors is school level work. Combining it with 3D, a 400 level class.

But it doesn't actually work. Saying "I can collaborate with a stylist" is not the bottleneck. It's the precision, the irregularities between clients, and obviously more.

Its a cool YouTube video if you don't know design Engineering, but I was utterly disappointed and was surprised to see people praising him..

As an old prediction about robotic hair cutters goes:

— But people have different head shapes, what about that?

— Well, initially they do.

There's a similar device (possibly a Flowbee) used by the robot GERTY in Moon (2009).

https://invidio.us/watch?v=84Ewj-BOBuc

Yeah, my only reaction to “robot wielding sharp instruments within tens of millimeters of my scalp” is “nope, nope, nope!”

I think you'd enjoy michael reeves. Altough that guy is a bit out of his mind.

https://www.youtube.com/c/MichaelReeves/videos

Or with Chell's Portal gun you could cut the back of your hair directly :)

I've been cutting my own hair for some time now, and I have to say that after a while you develop a certain level of proprioception for where the buzzer is at. I don't even look at the mirror for most of the time I'm cutting, only to check if I did it right. And almost always I know the instant I cut too much (because I get the same kind of cringe feeling you get right when you throw a basketball and know instantly that you missed).

Then again, I have a "good enough" attitude for haircuts - but people are genuinely surprised when I tell them I cut my own hair. I think this is because I've gotten better at cutting my own head of hair than what a random barber would be capable of.

As a counterpoint, I didn't care for the project itself so much and he had me cracking at the robot jokes.

Liability seems like a show stopper. This thing could hurt someone if something goes wrong, which seems likely if in use by the general population. I also think a lot of people tend to like their barber.

His channel has only been running for a few months and I think he's still finding his style. I too prefer it when he sticks to describing the prototypes and what he tried to get these things to work. None of that takes away from the fact that he's doing some really cool projects and I appreciate that for what it is. I almost wish he'd do like Colin Furze does and split it into a showcase video and a build video.

That’s all I could think as well. I for one welcome our new robot hair cutters.

It's extremely far from a usable product.

The fact he couldn't cut his own hair, means he can't cut different hair, or different styles, or different textures or head shapes. No testing completed either.

This is really nothing more than a YouTube video.

Source- Design Engineer

I think you are over selling it, sure we are gonna use some new tools but I don't think schools nor teachers are gonna disappear just yet. Education is more than just learning theories from a book/site/app/whatever.

You sound like someone who hasn't cared about a child while trying to keep a full-time job. I bet many parents would support giving childcare/education professionals a raise after having to do the job themselves for a few months...

Because that mames it mire difficult and fun, I guess :)

I like his way of thinking: don't create new parts for your prototype all the time when they don't work but just fix them quickly so they will work (with tape, nails, glue and what not). And only when the prototype works create new parts that look good.

First iterate, then make it look good.

This way you can be consistently disappointed! Jokes aside, the complexity of this kinds of applications is not easy to grasp until you see stuff like this

SawStop does so with its table saws - instead of losing a finger or worse, they barely nick you (I've seen at least one report of it triggering and not even drawing blood).

I wish he kept the Mullet. It truly was art.

Or use electrostatic energy to pull the hair away before cutting. But I think vacuuming would work best.

That's what he did. You should watch the video, it's pretty entertaining!

Did you not watch the video?

Was there any ad there at all? [hint: uBlock origin]

Maybe everyone else is using an adblocker?

I used Firefox uBlock Origin and didn't get any ads.

Except that in many places you can't go to a human to cut your hair, because of COVID-19.