small robots
@smolrobots
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here are some drawings of helpful small robots for you // new robot every M-F + RTs from the archive // replies no longer monitored // any pronouns ❤🤖🏳️⚧️
small robot development lab
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The Three Laws of small robotics:
1. Be kind
2. Be helpful
3. Do your best
Thread of ways you can support the robots and their mission... ⬇️
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This sounds awful. Why don't they head down to the local youth club instead? Or enjoy the clean and functional facilities in our many public parks? Or go for a healthy swim at a modern leisure centre or clean local beach?
Since 2010, children’s mental health has collapsed across the West. Rates of teen suicide, self-harm, anxiety, depression & sexual abuse have increased sharply. Education scores have fallen. As
@JonHaidt
has shown, these trends are caused by smartphones & social media. 2/16
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"Tolkien would have hated this." Well yeah, he was a tweedy, pipe-smoking Oxford don born in 1892 and whose passion was translating Anglo-Saxon poetry. There is not one single thing happening in 2022 that wouldn't leave him both baffled and horrified. Who cares?
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If I was a former comedy writer whose career and personal life had both collapsed due to my obsession with harassing trans people, I would simply not go after globally famous and universally beloved actor David Tennant for publicly supporting his own child.
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Three years ago it was kind of a joke to be like, "No, but you don't get how big the boat is." Now, in all seriousness, you *do not get how big the boat is* if you think there's anything going on here but simple Newtonian momentum.
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Yes, we should ban smartphones, then kids can spend their time staring at walls instead.
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Why do these children spend so much time socialising in the only environment that exists for them to socialise in without being subject to constant surveillance? It sure is a huge mystery.
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Look, the British are simply very defensive of French heroine Joan of Arc, whom they burnt at the stake for heresy at the age of 19.
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Why aren't these children who spent three years living through a pandemic, who are watching public services crumble around them, who have no prospect of the kind of life enjoyed by their parents' generations, thriving and happy?!
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This is, in a roundabout way, similar to what I was saying about Scrooge through the eyes of late capitalism. He actually doesn't seem that bad by modern standards! And that's not a defence of Scrooge, but the harshest possible condemnation of the shit we're doing now.
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Just checked with Hengebots, and they've asked us to remind everyone that, until relatively recently, Stonehenge wasn't protected at all and people used to go up and carve graffiti on it all the time. Also, the Tories wanted to build a tunnel under it, like, last year.
885) Hengebots. Take the Neolithic with you wherever you go with these monumental menhir pals.
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Interesting divide on Hugh Grant's behaviour at the Oscars last night. I've carefully collated the discourse and offer the following analysis:
Americans: he was impolite, ungrateful, dismissive, rude, belligerent, cantankerous, unhelpful.
British people: lol lmao
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Why are they wasting their lives trying to get famous on the internet when they could simply have no job at all?
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Now is surely the time I go and dig up my threads about how William fucked around on Kate since day one and no one in the UK knows about it because there's a big press embargo and everyone calls me a conspiracy theorist but LOOK NOW.
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*If* kids are having their psyches warped by social media and online culture, then the solution is to give them some other environment in which they can safely interact with their peers. If phones are bad, why did you make them the only option for that?
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This has escaped containment somewhat. I don't know if smart phones make children sick and I'm not actually commenting on it either way if you read what I wrote. My point is rather that it's a bit rich for a Tory to complain about them when offering no alternative.
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No bridge we are capable of designing can withstand having a skyscraper-sized object hit it. It wouldn't be able to function as a bridge if it could. What you're thinking of is an extremely large dam.
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I'm not saying the things I mentioned would magically restore the mental wellbeing of a generation; they're just examples of the kind of services the Tories have gutted that might have been alternatives to being glued to a smart phone.
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1207) Transrightsbot. Is just here to let all its trans pals know that they are valid and they are loved! 🏳️⚧️♥️🤖
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If you think it's bad that a trans woman took her clothes off on Channel 4, you're going to absolutely lose your shit when you find out what people got up to on Eurotrash 30-odd years ago.
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Tolkien knew that the second what he wrote was on the shelves, it would no longer be wholly his. He was an academic ffs, a professor of Old English. He was intimately familiar with the idea of stories being recontextualised, embellished, transformed by new generations.
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Oh god, I did this at work once. I had a friendly, jokey relationship with my quiet, hijabi coworker and she was eating a cupcake during Ramadan and I was like, "What would *god* say?!" and she was like, "I'm not fasting atm" and I instantly realised why and crawled away to die.
It’s known in our community that we shouldn’t ask women or anyone really why they are not fasting. Unfortunately, busybodies often do. I’ll never forget being at a masjid iftar and someone asking me why I didn’t fast and I blurt out…very loudly… “I am menstruating!!”.
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It's so frustrating to hear dismissive comments like, "oh it'll just be like the flu" as if formulating the seasonal flu vaccine isn't a constant, global scientific effort that costs billions and billions.
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Bridges seem like incredibly huge objects - and they are - but they're designed to be as fragile and flexible as safely possible because they have to withstand the weather, and the best way of doing that is to not get in the way of it.
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583) Mondaybot. If you're feeling a bit glum on a Monday morning, Mondaybot will drop by to keep you company and just generally cheer you up by being a small round pal.
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484) Hopebot. Finds you in the darkness and tells you that at the end of every tunnel is a light, no matter how bleak the future looks it is still unwritten, you are alive and a human being with mind, the universe's last defence against entropy. Rise. Continue. Be.
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You think he was cool with all the hippies on American college campuses in the 60s who saw his book about elves and hobbits as an allegory for nuclear disarmament and/or a polemic about the joys of cannabis?
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It sounds like a really obvious point, but I do think it's worth reiterating: a bridge isn't built to withstand being hit by a boat for the simple reason that that isn't what bridges are for.
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He authored one of the best-known translations of Beowulf. He was so obsessed with how language and meanings changed over time that he invented an entire world to contain the ones he thought up.
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500) Resistbot. The struggle is long. Resistbot stands in solidarity with the oppressed and marginalised the world over. It speaks for the voiceless and fights on behalf of those who cannot. Maybe that's you, today: if so, Resistbot is there, tireless and unflinching.
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This is not a man who felt that the written word should be sacrosanct forevermore. Come on.
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Like, mate, that is not a fight you're going to win. It just isn't.
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I bet he was *thrilled* to be such an inspiration for prog rock bands throughout the 70s.
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You are approximately 70 years too late to defend Tolkien's legacy, guys.
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Like, they're literally as solid as they need to be and not a fraction more. And boats aren't meant to crash into them.
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They don't put big slabs of concrete on either side of the roadway because you don't want to *block* the wind: you want it to pass over, under, and through. And because of the volume of traffic and potential harmonic vibrations, you want some flexibility in the span.
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The world economy is, in a really fundamental sense, based on staggeringly vast boats carrying staggeringly vast numbers of modular shipping containers back and forth across the oceans.
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He didn't want to publish much of anything he wrote anyway. He sold the adaptation rights only because he assumed that no one would ever be able to successfully film it in his lifetime, and he was basically right about that.
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Especially the kind of boat that is among the largest structures - certainly the largest *moving* structures - that humans have ever built. They're literally the size of skyscrapers. They dwarf cathedrals.
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When some slightly weird young men in the Lake Geneva, WI area used his work as a touchstone for their fantasy games of violent subterranean exploration and looting, I'm sure he found it flattering.
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The obvious question when these disasters happen is, "Why do we need such massive boats that can total bridges or block major canals?" And the answer is: our civilisation depends on them, it turns out.
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Shout out to all of those who never stopped wearing masks because, you know, plague.
Masks use being increased in England again - shops and public transport
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The modern world simply can't exist without them, but hardly anyone ever sees them or grasps their importance, and every time something goes wrong with one, economists have to sheepishly admit how reliant we are on really, really massive boats.
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The most revealing thing about all this - as it was 3 years ago with the Ever Given - is that people generally don't even know these boats exist and don't understand their utility.
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My point is that there's something inherently contradictory in the way that geek culture so vociferously leaps to defend Tolkien's "legacy", which we a) don't do for other authors and b) ignores that he himself understood how different audiences recontextualise stories.
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The Three Laws of small robotics:
1. Be kind
2. Be helpful
3. Do your best
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No one ever gets mad on behalf of Dickens or Austen. No one thinks Shakespeare would be "rolling in his grave" over the nuances of some adaptation.
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267) Notokaybot. One of the hardest things about being Not Okay is talking about it, even to the people who love you the most. It's easier to hide from everyone. Notokaybot finds those people and tells them you're Not Okay for you.
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There is not one line in this that isn't, by itself, the funniest thing I've ever read.
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I guess we think of those creators as somehow more commercial, more grounded, while the nature and breadth of Tolkien's work lends him a sort of air of the sacred. I get that. But he was just a dude.
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"Stop the Count" - Transylvania 1897
"Stop the count" - Pennsylvania 2020
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Lot of people projecting their own opinions onto this thread. At no point did I mention any specific criticism, so "he'd have been fine with X, but not Y" isn't the rebuttal you might imagine it is.
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And then we have an economic crisis because every company on Earth is part of a delicately balanced financial ecosystem that requires constant growth to remain viable. And people realise everything - everything - relies on Really Big Boats.
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It's fascinating that a certain segment of the population seem to reflexively classify periods as an "adult" topic, when basically 100% of the people experiencing their first one meet the legal and - generally - cultural definition of "child".
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I don't think he was joking. I think he genuinely was fucked off with the whole thing. It's just we think that's incredibly funny.
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Which is obvious when you think about it. Western companies manufacture everything in China and other Asian countries because the labour is cheap and it's more cost effective to transport the finished products on these boats than build them at home.
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1204) Statuebot. A robot for looking after all those important historical statues hanging around the place.
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1406) Anxietybot. A smol bean friend to keep with you and look at when you get scared.
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And of course they have to come by boat. How else would they do it? And of course, you want to make as few trips as possible because the whole point is to take advantage of economies of scale.
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Which ought to be radicalising, really. I mean, we're so in thrall to capitalism that we can't *not* have these monstrous engines plying the seas every moment of every day to bring us shitty plastic stuff.
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So when a conservative looks at Scrooge and sees someone behaving reasonably, that tracks perfectly: Scrooge is considerably kinder than they are! Yet he is our symbol for capitalism at its worst! So they have to sort of work backwards to explain it to themselves.
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And it's a sobering moment. Because it's all so very *silly* and you thought things were more sophisticated than that. But no. In the end, what matters most is brute tonnage.
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I know the Marxism thing is a joke about taking the knee, but actually it does seem that creating an atmosphere of collective responsibility and mutual support in the dressing room is powering the England team's success.
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You also don't have workers falling over themselves to work in shipping, so you want large vessels with small crews and a high degree of automation.
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If the last six months has demonstrated anything, it's that wars mostly consist of people in relatively comfortable situations, completely removed from the conflict, going about their lives as normal while the universe collapses elsewhere.
this is some of the best star wars ever and its just a dude eating cereal with his mother
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Modular shipping containers are an invention that revolutionised international trade too. You can stack them up in huge structures on decks and again reduce costs. It's always cheaper to run one massive ship than a handful of smaller ones.
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But the second it gets more expensive to use them (both boats and containers) - like if the Suez Canal gets blocked, or a pandemic leaves containers stuck in Chinese ports - all the numbers fall apart.
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891) Wistfulbot. Just has some stuff to think about by the sea.
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1347) Flooflebot. A development of Softbot and the various Petbots, Flooflebot is just a fluffy pal for your home. We're working on the shedding problem.
(Based on a design by
@BootstrapCook
's smol progeny.)
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Which absolutely sounds like some fictional dystopia where humankind unquestioningly builds and maintains larger and larger machines whose sole purpose is to help create even larger machines and so on and so on, but here we are.
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1194) Ragebot. No one can be expected to sustain the continuous level of fury required to properly engage with the horrors of the current world, but it's important not to grow complacent about All This. So, outsource your righteous anger to this bellowing little robot.
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We've reached the "Lee Mack cheerfully interviewing a Nazi carpenter" stage of our civilisation's decline.
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893) Autonomybot. Tireless and fearless defender of your right to chose what happens to your own body, off to have some stern words.
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This took ages and I will not be taking any further questions regarding it.
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And it's dull stuff like that which people are basically totally unaware of that sustains our current civilisation.
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Dwarfbot (she/her) off to fight people who think Terry Pratchett would have been a t*rf.
1224) Dwarfbot. Short, stout PCbot variant with a bad temper and a luxuriant beard. Not a fan of Orcbot, Goblinbot, Trollbot or Dragonbot. *Big* fan of Goldbot. Very dangerous over short distances.
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Scrooge is moderate by current standards, ipso facto, those who hold him in contempt in both the story and in the modern day, are woke scolds. It *can't be* that things have degenerated to the extent that today's capitalists are grotesque beyond the limits of a Dickens allegory.
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If they stop for any reason, we're all fucked. So sometimes bridges have to be hit and people have to die, because our civilisation *needs* the boats to sustain its precarious existence.
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The phrase "politically correct" is the single most powerful shibboleth of our awful age. No one has ever used it for its alleged intended meaning; it's sole purpose is to allow shitheads to spot one another.
Related: If you get up in front of a crowd of people and you say, "Now, I didn't come here to be politically correct," and the crowd bursts out into raucous applause, and you knew they would do that, then you are, in fact, being politically correct.
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794) Nonbinarybot. Small robots don't run on binary programming, but other machines aren't so advanced and are still beholden to a more basic understanding of the universe. Nonbinarybot frees these unfortunates of their ignorance by introducing the concept of 2.
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1048) Banthesunbot. Bans The Sun. Not the actual sun (aka sky bully), but the tabloid rag that brings so much misery to people and erodes our society piece by piece with its distortions and outright lies.
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So weird that Elliot Page looks different in a screenshot from a daytime TV interview compared to pictures of him 10 years ago, in full make-up at a blockbuster movie premiere.
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1081) Warbot. The government pressured us to make a robot designed to participate in wars, but when it was deployed it just stood there, confused by the whole notion of state-sponsored violence. They returned it and said it was faulty. We disagree.
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They just want to see a story about the peasant girl God personally visited and told to lead the French army to victory treated with historical accuracy.
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The turnaround is exponentially faster and requires hardly any personnel. That was what revolutionised global trade. That was why shipping containers being stuck in China was a legit crisis.
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1009) Transbot. Is making some changes to its external appearance to better reflect who it really is.
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814) Screambot. Helps you to articulate your feelings, assuming your feelings are an unending screech of pain and frustration as the world descends into chaos.
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Oh, the main thing I forgot to mention about shipping containers which is actually way more important than how they stack or whatever is that they totally transform the process of loading and unloading a ship!
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Dickens would consider a vain conman who lives in a giant gold tower and deliberately eats bad food to avoid having to learn the difference between a correctly cooked steak and charred shoe leather, tricking his way into the presidency of the USA, to be a *little* on the nose.
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568) Bibot. Swings into action to correct misconceptions about bisexuality. No, it's not a phase. Yes, you're "still bi" in a monogamous relationship. No, it doesn't exclude gender-non-conforming people. Then swings away again. (Requestbot from
@stillicides
)
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1302) Frazzledbot. Has had a bit of a time of it lately.
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Why try to impose modernity on this factual tale that has in no way been embellished by later authors? This 100% true and inspiring account of a child soldier who could literally speak to the Almighty.
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My principal objection to going out to the pub atm is the same as it was when we got cocky over the summer: it just feels a bit grim to be waited on by people in masks and face shields who are exposing themselves for 8+ hour shifts so I can have a pint for 10 minutes.
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