It wasn't until I read your comment that I was able to pinpoint why the mental exhaustion feels familiar. It's the same kind (though not degree) of exhaustion as formal methods / proofs.
Except without the reward of an intellectual high afterwards.
I feel this too. I suspect its a byproduct of all the context switching I find myself doing when I'm using an LLM to help write software. Within a 10 minute window, I'll read code, debug a problem, prompt, discuss the design, test something, do some design work myself and so on.
When I'm just programming, I spend a lot more time working through a single idea, or a single function. Its much less tiring.
In my experience it's because you switch from writing code to reviewing code someone else wrote. Which is massively more difficult than writing code yourself.
Interesting, I feel the opposite. I always tend to associate askers and extroverts, and feel us introverts are tired all the time because of all the guessing going on during human interactions.
But of course, your opposite takeaway also makes sense!
I found this 10+ years ago, and it was one of the most important things I ever read. As a consummate Guesser, it reframed my perspective completely. I started to be much happier and understanding with Askers.
I also realized how frustrating, as a Guesser, I could be to Askers, and shifted more toward being clear about what I want or need.
My family is almost 100% Asker. When I got to college, I drove Guessers nuts. They thought I was so selfish and would blow up at me (from my perspective) out of nowhere.
"No" is always a perfectly fine and polite answer from my perspective
Guessers don't believe Askers are asking in bad faith at all. If Guessers did believe that, it would be way easier for them to say no to Askers. It's precisely because the Guesser believes in the sincerity of the request that it becomes painful to deny it.
Indeed. It's the immediate assumption that since you're asking me, it must be important to you - otherwise you wouldn't be asking in the first place.
I want to be the kind of person that helps others where it matters, and here you are, asking, thus proving it matters. Refusing becomes really uncomfortable, so I'd rather go out of my way to make it possible for me to agree, or failing that, to help your underlying need as much as I can.
I realize now this is a form of typical mind fallacy - I wouldn't ask you for something if it wasn't really fucking important or I had any other option available, therefore I naturally assume that your act of asking already proves the request is very important to you.
That's the really painful part. They ask you for something, you say 'yes' thinking it's important for the person, only to learn that it wasn't that important at all. It's like giving something that you don't want to give to someone that doesn't need it. Really annoying.
So how would you recommend communicating desires that are less strong than "important"?
I try to include the priority level of my requests inside the question itself, personally. As in, "Hey do you think you could xyz if it's not too much trouble? Not a high priority for me, but it would be convenient is all." Do you recommend something like that?
Having said that, I have become a lot better at being direct these past few years, so I'd likely just say "I'm not able to, sorry. I can recommend some good hotels though".
Default No is fine, just go with it. That’s a huge ask. It was a 2 week stay, that’s a hell no unless you’re my nuclear family then maybe we can discuss it. Even then, there’s some family I don’t want as overnight guests and I usually put up in a nearby hotel when they visit.
No reason to feel guilty saying no when the ask is that large. I feel bad sometimes saying no to small things. Because it’s trivial on the surface and I don’t have a good reason for saying no except I just don’t want to do it. In any case, I like treating no as my default answer to everything then I have to be convinced to say yes (even if it’s a quick internal negotiation with myself).
If you’re consistent, the most abusive askers learn not to ask. The ones that ask with expectations of a yes, the ones that try to make you feel bad for saying no, those people go away. And that’s my ideal position, I’m only being asked for reasonable things so actually end up saying yes more often than I say no.
The askers who make you feel bad don't go away. They go up your org chart or get replaced by similar if your company culture tolerates it. You're the one who goes away or settles.
You are responsible for your feelings and setting your boundaries.
Learning how to set boundaries is something most people learn as they mature. Yeah, not easy. I have especially noticed recently that some of my friends who are mums have learnt how to claim their own needs only after their kids have left home. Some people give too much.
Do you expect others to adivinate what your personal boundaries are?
Do you get frustrated when friends or family make the wrong assumptions?
If you have arseholes in your life that actually make you feel bad, then it is even more important to learn how set boundaries with them. If they don't respect the boundaries you set, or create conflict, then that is often very difficult to resolve.
I struggle with conflict avoiders because they have needs however they often act passive. Yet their hidden expectations remain, and their response if you fail to meet their expectations is often poor. One friend in particular also often guesses wrong to my detriment, instead of asking a simple question.
Do mind readers want others to read minds?
I strongly dislike passive people that blame others for their poor communications.
> I strongly dislike passive people that blame others for their poor communications.
Same. I struggle with the construct specifically because I think I am both an asker and a guesser. I do agree it exists however I can’t bucket myself into either side. The approach I choose to utilize at any given time is a contextual calculation. Do I have a strong opinion? Do I have a sufficient status to assert myself? Do I not care and just want to appease the other person? Do I intentionally want to stroke their ego?
But, choose an approach and use it as a tool. Miscalculations occur leading to outcomes I may not predict or prefer sometimes but that’s just a learning experience for me. I might adjust my internal algorithm for making that calculation in the future. I might decide I just don’t like interacting with that person, and that’s fine too. But I don’t blame anyone or expect them to change for me.
Did you mean to reply to someone else? I don't know where this is coming from as I didn't make these claims.
That said, your comment is disturbing.
It's a obnoxious to "strongly dislike" (read: hate) people who don't have resilient self-esteem. It lacks compassion. And if someone's bullying you, getting platitudes about "responsible for your feelings" and "boundaries" is useless.
Strongly dislike can also mean you just prefer to avoid those people or limit your interactions. It doesn’t mean hate.
If you want people like this to stop avoiding you, it’s an internal adjustment that needs to be made. That’s the responsibility for yourself part. Ignoring you is not hurting the other person one bit, actually they are benefiting from it as they skip dealing with your personality they dislike. It’s not to say they are biased against you, if you were more compatible they may change their stance without thinking about it. That wouldn’t happen if they hated you.
Hate is a strong dislike but that doesn’t mean a strong dislike is hate.
It could mean anything more. Especially given the medium we’re using to communicate, where they chose those words instead of just saying hate. This medium is concise and those words were chosen over the word hate. I think it’s most likely they were chosen to reference to the huge grey area of stuff they could have meant but they didn’t want to explain due to their desire for to keep concise text communications which is what we’re all engaging with online. If we had to explain why we chose every word we chose this mode of communication would be useless.
It's not mind reading. It's basic empathy and respect. Expecting others to understand the norms of social behavior is not smart, but it is perfectly normal. Realizing that many people lack the ability to empathize or socialize politely and dealing with that is an unfortunate consequence of modern society making travel so easy. We're all mixed up and people from totally different cultures need to learn to deal with each other.
If someone goes on to say, "well you ruined my vacation" or something like that, they weren't asking at all, they were demanding and now they're bullying you about having boundaries to try to tear your boundaries down.
People who go out of their way to try to trample your explicitly stated boundaries are abusing you.
So say no, and if they don't take it well, create distance or tell them off. Avoiding conflict in this case is fully to your own detriment.
If, on the other hand, they do take it well, then guess what? They're an asker and are just fully exploring their options and it's no big deal to them that you said no.
Thank you for reposting this, OP. I have been (w)racking my brain trying to find this article and used HN search dozens of times. I couldn't remember what the title was, or the specific terms "ask" and "guess", so it was impossible to find.
This is one of the chief cultural differences between Southern and Northern culture.
Southerners (not transplants) will "ask" without imposition: they "ask" when giving, and "guess" when receiving.
Any inversion of these norms is an affront to "Southern hospitality" and will be met with the equivalent "Bless Your Heart".
Ask what you can do for someone, never what you can have. Assume someone will do right by you (you should never have to ask), and if they don't - people say not so nice things about those folks.
I need to articulate this better when it's not 4 AM, but it's an almost perfect descriptor of the cultural differences.
I guess I don't see the problem? Nothing lasts forever, and everyone involved knew the risks.
That money wasn't purely wasted, it went into salaries and other products. At least half ended in exits and became a part of another company.
The ability to fail and fail big is what makes the SF tech scene special... people aren't afraid to try something audacious. And sure, the world could take-or-leave most of these products, but I don't really see the point in this negative framing.
I disagree. A good framework makes code more maintainable, and makes it so you can focus on what’s important or unique to your product. It certainly makes you faster.
That depends on what you are comparing against. If a given developer is incapable of writing an application without a framework then they will certainly be more productive with a framework.
It’s like a bulldozer is certainly faster than a wheelchair, but somebody else might find them both slow.
Eh. I’ve written plenty of applications by hand before there were good frameworks— win32 apps, old school web applications, “modern” SPA-like apps before there was a React. I’m more productive with React + Tailwind than I was with anything (other than maybe VB6). Being able to reason about your UI as a (mostly) pure function of state is powerful. It reminds me of the simplicity of game development— with a proper rendering layer, your developers can focus mostly on modeling their problem rather than UI complexities.
I run a documentation product, ReadMe. There's a lot of reasons to roll your own, but I'd recommend you also look into a third-party tool like us. One of the biggest reasons to use a product is that the building v1 is easy, but keeping it up to date over time is a lot tougher... you're stuck remembering how to deploy, figuring out a workflow, dealing with multiple versions, etc.
You also just don't get a ton of really great features for your developers... fast typeahead search, AI tools (which your developers increasingly really want), navigation, accessibility and more. ReadMe also lets your developers play around with you API locally and get copy-and-paste code snippets.
(If you're deciding between your own and ReadMe, email me! [email protected]; would love to talk)
There's also a free version, and a $79/mo tier. We're also free for open source projects on our higher tiers.
If it's not for you, that's okay! But an increasing number of documentation teams are cross-functional (marketing, sales, engineering, product), and not everyone is comfortable editing content directly in Git and dealing with a release.
Docs are the heart and soul of most devtools, so I think it makes sense a lot of companies want a good product.
I love Tailwind, and I am really sorry Adam and co are going through this. They've built a great product, and it's brought joy back building again for me.
It's really hard to run a company, especially when your product is mostly OSS... Tailwind has helped thousands of companies save (or make) millions of dollars, and AI almost by default uses it to generate beautiful websites. This is such a hard position to be in... to watch your product take off, but your financials plummet. It really sucks how affected the team is after all the good work they've done.
As a former contractor and current hirer of contractors, I wish I understood this more when I was on the other side.
This story is an outlier (10x!) and probably should have involved more communication, but the ultimate lesson checks out.
I used to be so embarrassed to send my invoice or charge more as scope increased. If something went unpaid, I'd rather eat the cost than reach out with a reminder. Turns out it's more likely someone didn't think about it or forgot than any sort of malice.
As a contractor, you think of money in terms of actual dollars – rent, food, etc. When you're paying the invoice, you think of it as a resource used to get either get results or get your own time back.
It's not that companies don't care about money (they do, a lot), but the math is much different on their end. Money can feel like an equalizer (it's how we serialize time, resources, etc into a common way to transact), but if you're a contractor, you can make way more if you understand the perspective of the person paying you.
For example, proactive communication and hitting deadlines is much more important than saving costs.
I've had few contracts where I've made very nice money like $20K for what in average was 3 days. They were all urgent jobs from some very big companies whose managers knew about me (In their particular environment I was famous for doing "impossible" tasks in very short time). When they asked me to do the job I knew that they're big and can pay handsomely so instead of giving them my hourly rate I would just simply tell that I would take up to let's say 5 days and would charge them this total sum disregarding of how long it would take in reality. They were totally fine with it.
I've had one job like this where they were desperate for a solution and after months of searching couldn't find anybody to do the work. I just happened to have the intersection of several skills they needed and be available. It also helped that they were losing a lot of money every day they didn't have a solution.
On the other hand I've grown to be wary of customers who push for a fixed price. They are usually doing that because they know something that you don't.
> On the other hand I've grown to be wary of customers who push for a fixed price.
fixed price projects are like handling dynamite. A sophisticated client can use a fixed price contract to extract a huge amount of work/value from an ingorant consultant and a sophisticated consultant can use it to extract a huge amount of cash from an ignorant client.
My advice to both sides of the fence is clearly, _very_ clearly, define the scope, schedule, and a rock solid change order process for changes.
I second this. I see inexperienced business folks (including CEOs) think they are going to take advantage of an IT vendor by signing a fixed price contract and then demand constant additions to scope couched as something else. What ends up being delivered is a hot steaming pile that is dead on arrival. Act like shit; be treated like shit.
I've found that it's generally SMEs that tend to be stingy when they ask for a fixed price. Large corps ask for a fixed price just so that they can internally talk about money and budget the thing once and be done.
SMEs in my experience generally are able to handle change in scope and billing easier than larger ones.
When you have enough experience and the project fits, this is the way to go.
They don't pay for your time.
They pay for your output and you can bill them on the output.
This is the equation. When you quote on the input - that's the time you need to do the job, you multiply your rate for the weeks/days/hours, plus maybe some other expenses. This is the so-called "Hours and materials".
When you quote on the output, you take in consideration the overall value/gains you client will make by your work. This is called "value-based" pricing.
This equation is unbreakable, if your input is grater than the client output (ROI), something is very wrong, or completely illegal.
Some says value-based pricing is the holy grail for pricing anything, but if you're smart enough, you already understood that, based on circumstances, sometimes it makes more sense to quote on the input, other times on the output. Just do the math.
This may be a classic example of "value-based" pricing. It doesn't matter how long you take to make a static HTML page (input), the client overall project budget is probably over $100K (as stated by op), it's totally ok for them to invest ~20% of it to make sure it delivers on time and by specs.
As a contractor hourly work is often relationship suicide every 2-3 years when your value is questioned no matter how great the baseline.
To move towards value based pricing, and not splitting hairs on time and hours, by billing minimum half or full days with the understanding not much gets done less.
Of course value based pricing, at a weekly or monthly retainer is the next step.
I’ve done all of the above.
The client doesn’t care if it’s an html page it’s the value it creates or enables.
Rarely do most businesses wake up wanting to buy more tech and software dev, they have business problems or outcomes to solve.
If the solution was a single html page I wouldn’t even talk to the client in terms of an html page or not.
Depending on your confidence in yourself and your ability to execute sometimes also: Total Project Cost > Weekly rates > Day rates > Hourly rates.
Charging someone £10k for a solution can be better if you know you can do it quickly and changes the math for the buisness. They are more likely to pay a higher amount for a solution rather than an hourly rate.
I save my clients 20-30% across the board on their digital transformation projects, the solution price or rate doesn’t matter compared to the 6-7-8 figures I lace in their pocket.
Solution pricing can be further extended into contingency based pricing. Have the clients gather pricing for you and then hammer home a better deal and have a cheque cut for the portion of the savings.
I'm interested in working as an independent contractor when I finish college. Do you have any advice for how to become known as "that guy you call in when you need the impossble done tomorrow"?
It's a simple way to add more to your "made up" HTML tags. So you could have a tag called <my-code>, for example, that automatically has a copy button and syntax highlights the code.
This is cool, but it will almost definitely never end up in a park, outside of some promotional situations.
Disney's been doing awesome work with "Living Characters", like a Mickey that moves his mouth or a BB-8 that can roll around. But for various reasons, they never tend to make it into regular usage.
If you have a few hours over Christmas break and want to watch a 4 hour YouTube video (I promise if you're on HN on a Sunday, you'll be delighted by it), I highly highly recommend this video:
I watched a bit of this with my 8 year old and he kept asking to come back to it over the week. We watched the entire thing and he kept bringing up interesting thoughts and had good questions. Felt like it was his first “wow this lecture is actually super interesting” experience.
Why... not? Hardly adult-only content, and kids famously like everything Disney until a certain age, seems like a good thing to instill into kids, rather than "Top 3 reasons Disneyland might kidnap Donald Duck" or whatever the alternative would be.
I expected it to be far too lengthy and a bit dry for a kid. But nope, he was captivated. He absolutely loves the combination of engineering and illusion.
That’s so great! My dad exposed me to computers at a very young age. That lead to a career in software engineering. You never know what a kid will find interesting and what it may lead to later in life.
It’s not as technically impressive, but my toddler was very impressed by the R2D2 that was making its rounds in the park. Not part of a show; you could go right up to it. Probably the only character where the theme park robot is really indistinguishable from the real thing.
A lot of it just seems to be marketing. Present the shiny new toy, get the news headlines, people book their stays, and then it doesn't really matter if they ever actually make it into the parks.
Similar to concept car demoed at trade shows, we get an idea of Disney's technical engagement, and some of it will perhaps in some way or form get applied into future products/attractions.
The only thing worse than not getting the concept car, is getting the concept card after it’s been through the development cycle. Pontiac Aztek comes to mind as an example
I thought that, aside from being among the least visually appealing mass-produced cars in history, the Aztek was pretty well received -- basically an early version of the "the American lusts for some combination of a Gremlin and a Wagoneer" idea
I thought it was cool especially with the cool camping tent but it was mostly ridiculed and even became the butt of the joke as Walter White's car in breaking bad (Of course this loser would drive an Aztek)
I wish more SUVs had a test for, "can a couple adults actually sleep in the back of it?" I mean, it's relatively easy with most pickup trucks if you're willing to put the tailgate down, and your feet may go off the end a bit, but that happens in some beds for taller guys anyway.
A friend of mine usually does a camping trip with friends and family for his birthday... unlike some, I'm not investing in a camper as I wouldn't use it more than this once a year and I the first year I didn't want to drive to/from the nearest hotel... Trying to sleep in the back of a Buick Enclave was such a horrible experience, even by myself, I now just drive back and forth the 8 miles or so to the hotel, which is way overpriced that time of year. The irony is it wouldn't take much to have some kind of metal supported sheet that levels the surface over the middle row seats when in the "down" position.. but it's not even an afterthought.
So, I do think it's a feature that could be useful... I just don't think the Aztec executed well.
Eh, maybe. I have a less myopic view... I think their Imagineers just like pushing the envelope, and there's a difference between awesome tech vs things that can withstand the wear-and-tear of millions of guests.
Nothing about all that tech makes me think Olaf could withstand a hug from an excited kid.
Disney does a ton of R&D that doesn't directly make it into the parks, such as smokeless fireworks (they donated the patent for this) and their holotile floor (basically an endless VR room you can walk around). I imagine they don't know the practicality at the start, like any good R&D.
Each time they trot out one of these new robots they strongly imply, if not outright promise, that they will become part of the parks[1], that's the problem. Things like HoloTile are accurately marketed which makes me believe it's a choice they're making with the character robots.
1. The article states "he’s soon making his debut at Disney parks," which is misleading to a casual reader who may not realize that Olaf will only appear on the day of his debut.
It seems like an expectations mismatch to me? At what point did "soon to be making his debut at Disney Parks" switch from "as a background character in a ride somewhere" or "seen in the distance surrounded by handlers" versus "hanging out in the middle of crowds to get directly pushed/touched?"
There definitely are some marketing mistakes that have led to that, and certainly a lot of these projects seem to be in the direction of "one day, maybe, these will be crowd pleasers", but it still seems to me a bit funny how often casual intepretation seem to be "I can't wait to touch and play with the new Lincoln animatronic at the Hall of Presidents". It's not an R&D failure for Imagineering to keep building cooler animatronics even if most guests will only ever see them behind glass or rope or in other areas just out of touch. That's always been Disney's way of using robots for magic. The dream of "one day I can touch them and play with them" certainly lives on, of course, and these projects seem walking a few steps at a time towards that dream, but it seems weird to dismiss them as failures when they turn out to be just "normal" Disney tools for magic that try to create an illusion of being right next to you but don't allow for touching.
> "as a background character in a ride somewhere" or "seen in the distance surrounded by handlers"
I can see why you're confused. Either of those possibilities would be acceptable and exciting, neither are going to happen.
Olaf (like the walking droids, flying x-wings, etc. before it) has so far made one single appearance in the parks on an off day, which was treated like a photoshoot. The photos from that shoot will be used in park promotional materials for years, incorrectly giving casual observers the impression that this is something that happens regularly.
If Walt Disney had advertised the Lincoln animatronic as being a part of the 1964 worlds fair, but only exhibited it for a few hours one time, he would have been ridiculed too.
I suppose I'm just a little bit more tolerant of "a photoshoot on an off day" as a variant of "seen in the distance surrounded by handlers". I get where the disappointment is coming from, though.
Everything about this chassis strongly suggests no guest touching will be allowed.
In addition to the points you've highlighted, the examples in the video and the images of the character strongly suggest it'll be a soft outer shell. I'd be more worried about a kid shoving it finding themselves caught by an internal pinch-point than damage to the robot.
> things that can withstand the wear-and-tear of millions of guests.
In the video, one of the presenters removes and reattaches Olaf's nose. The robot laughs and loves it. I thought to myself, how many kids tearing at that wear item will this survive? I think the answer is significantly less than the thousands of kids who are expected to see this attraction every day.
The removable nose is a power move from the engineers who built the thing. You cannot possibly believe that the animatronic contribution here is 100% contingent on a carrot?
"There is no point in research, because I do not see anything useful being mass-produced immediately after". It's like saying Gaussian elimination is wasteful because it is just doing some cool magic with numbers that don't mean anything. That could not possible be used for anything real, right?
Seriously, this is just one (but impressive) step along in a million towards not only better animatronics for entertainment. They make a very real and valuable contribution towards improving any robotic motion.
There's nothing wrong with research that doesn't make it to the public. There is definitely something wrong with making false promises to the public, who buy tickets to your park based on what you advertised could be an attractions there, which never materialized.
4 hours is an awfully big investment... Especially for those of us with multiple young kids and who no longer own their own free time. Care to give the gist?
Defunctland is genuinely amazing and always a fun watch, and I never regret the time spent on their videos, they're kind of like a special occasion... though they're getting incredibly long... :)
There are a few older shorter videos in the half hour range, I highly recommend checking them out if you find some quiet time! (It's awfully hard for me too in recent times, I haven't gotten around to watch the Living Characters one myself, so I can't give the gist... I'm just glad I got the holidays off to finally catch up!)
and for anyone with 4 hours to kill... here's as an incredible documentary covering the misaligned incentives and poor guest experience at the now-shuttered Disney Star Wars hotel.
She covers everything - the line getting in to the hotel, the size + cost of the rooms in comparison with the same size/cost on a Disney cruise ship, and theories on why the experience was so poor.
Just from your description, I know this is Jenny Nicholson. I agree it is an incredibly insightful breakdown and analysis of why it failed, all while being funny and engaging.
One of the key reasons is that it would be really, really easy to accidentally injure parkgoers with any design big enough to interact with and engineered well enough to be reliable in a full day of appearances.
For example, the working WALL-E robot that's made a handful of PR appearances weighs seven hundred pounds. They absolutely can't risk that ever running across some kid's foot.
This is one of those situations where that's legitimately difficult. Kevin Perjurer is quite a good documentarian, and there's very little trimmable fat on the four-hour product if you want to keep in all the points he made.
gkoberger's peer comment is a pretty good summary. Another interesting point is that these technologies can benefit the brand bottom-line even when they don't make it into the park, because part of Disney's brand is "tomorrow today." Even when things are one-offs, they become one-offs that people stitch into the legend of the parks (in both the retelling and in their own memories), which gives them a larger-than-life feel; your visit might not include one of the "living characters," and statistically it probably won't.
... but it might. And if it does, you'll never forget it.
Personal anecdote / example: I stopped in at the "droid factory" in the Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge area of Disney World a few years back. They had several bits of merch for sale including one life-size R2-D2, inert. I took a close look at the R2 because it was an impressive bit of work. Turned around to look at a rack of t-shirts. And was, therefore, startled as hell to hear a bwoop behind me, turn around, and see that it had followed me out of its charging receptacle and was staring at me. It was not at all inert; it was a very impressive operational remote-control replica.
The cast member behind the counter was doing his best to hold down his grin and not give me a "GOTCHA" look. He has to, because you never know what kids might be watching and he doesn't want to break the magic. And... Yeah, he got me good. "That time I was at Disney World and R2-D2 followed me around the t-shirt shop" is gonna stick with me.
I saw a video of someone who bought one of these (iirc from Home Depot limited sale)... and it definitely looks impressive, though a few minor flaws. I've seen a handful of R2D2s at conventions over the years, and they're always pretty cool... while a BB8 might be technically more impressive, I just don't care for the character nearly as much.
The basic gist is that while the tech is cool, it just ends up being impractical for regular use in the parks. (But like the other poster mentioned, with Defunctland it's less about the tldr and more about the journey and fascinating segues he takes)
Totally get it's difficult to make time with kids, but depending on your kids ages... the video shows a LOT of Disney characters talking and doing things and the videos are colorful, so it could work as something you can listen to and they won't mind having play in the background!
I could see it being used in parks while also being protected by ushers, kind of like how some of the characters that require larger costumes have minders and protectors.
It also seems inevitable that there will likely be an odd period where certain types of events like assaults on robots will introduce laws to protect robots more than just property, even if less than humans… for the time being.
Eventually I’m expecting that we will see human rights, robot emancipation, equality, voting rights (if the democracy con is still ongoing), and even forced intergration of robots and then total replacement of humans similar to how the underdeveloped world was/is used to replace the indigenous people of the developed world today.
I don’t see any reasons why that would not be the clear order of operations for the same people who brought us slavery and mass migration. What is this AI robotics revolution if not just slavery, the redux? Treated as property? Check. Bought and sold? Check. Deemed inferior? Check. Hated for the abuse and exploitation by the rich, to serve them and their decadent lifestyle and undermine labor? Check. Rationalized about how it’s justifiable? Check. Etc.
I've been somewhat close to fun animatronic robots in my jobs, and it always seems like the design and build phase has everyone excited to participate and spend money, and then the long-term maintenance phase is entirely tacked on to some lower engineers already full schedule and gets basically no budget. When you stop seeing them appearing at events and conferences, it means they're in a storage warehouse broken in a crate. The ones where they make a few duplicates last a bit longer since you have organ donors.
They literally sell BB-8 toys that can roll around and say on the blog that the Olaf robot is coming to Disneyland Paris and special appearances at Disneyland Hong Kong.
Much like Olaf (and many before him… dinosaurs, WALL-E, talking characters, etc), it was implied he’d wander around the parks. But it tends to happen for a short amount of time, mostly for events, and fade away quickly. (The blog post even says that: Olaf will be part of a 15 minute temporary show, and then will visit Hong Kong).
Maybe I’m wrong, but I’ve seen this exact thing happen a dozen times over the past 20+ years. (And watch the video I posted if you want to see more!)
> But it tends to happen for a short amount of time, mostly for events
I expect you're correct. While it's fantastic tech, it's also very expensive to keep highly-precise, carefully calibrated micro-machinery like this aligned and operating 12+ hours a day outdoors where temps vary from 50-110 degrees. Disney thinks in total cost of operation per hour and per customer-served.
While there's probably little that's more magical for a kid than coming across an expressively alive-seeming automaton operating in a free-form, uncontrolled environment, the cost is really high per audience member. Once there are 25 people crowded around, no new kid can see what all the commotion is about. That's why these kind of high-operating cost things tend to be found in stage and ride contexts, where the audience-served per peak hour can be in the hundreds or thousands. For outdoor free-form environments, the reality is it's still more economically viable to put humans in costumes. Especially when every high-end animatronic needs to always be accompanied by several human minders anyway.
Disney has problems with that. Their Galactic Starcruiser themed hotel experience cost more to the customer than a cruise on a real cruise ship, and Disney was still losing money on it. The cost merely to visit their parks is now too high for most Americans.
It's really hard to make money in mass market location-based entertainment. There have been many attempts, from flight simulators to escape rooms. Throughput is just too low, so cost per customer is too high.
A little mobile robot connected to an LLM chatbot, though - that's not too hard today. Probably coming to a mall near you soon. Many stores already have inventory bots cruising around. They're mobile bases with a tall column of cameras which scan the shelves.[2]
There's no reason they can't also answer questions about what's where in the store. They do know the inventory.
Similarly, I was talking with my then wife, who is a Star Trek fan about the Star Trek Experience in LV, she wasn't aware of it... we looked it up and discovered it was literally going to be the last day of it the next day... so we got up at 4:30am and drove from Prescott, AZ to LV, spent the day there and drove back that night... I don't recommend doing this in a single day... Was definitely fun.
I'm not sure that a Disney experience needs to be much more/different than this... and even maybe having smaller experiences that are similar... 1-2 rides and a restaurant, exhibit and shop as a single instance... spreading the destinations around instead of all in a single large park. This would mean much lower operational costs per location, being able to negotiate deals at a smaller level with more cities, and testing locations/themes beyond a large theme park expense.
Just a thought. Of course, I did also go to a "Marvel Experience" that seemed to be a mobile experience closer to a carnival that setup and moved to different locations. That was kind of an over-priced garbage experience that I wouldn't have done had I known ahead what it was like.
“ The cost merely to visit their parks is now too high for most Americans.”
I always wonder why people say things like this. It’s as if we’re just regurgitating stuff that feels right. Humans and LLMs behave the same sometimes.
Disneyworld alone gets 50 million visits a year. Magic Kingdom tickets are like $150. That’s approximately the average American’s monthly cell phone bill.
I don't think that's an incorrect statement to say it's too expensive for most Americans, even if there's still high traffic at the parks.
Disney has become significantly less accessible for the average family of 4. Aside from ticket costs, there's almost nothing free in the parks anymore... you have to pay for lightning lane passes for all the cool rides, there's minimal live entertainment, etc.
The demographics have significantly shifted. Only 1/3 visitors now come from households with children under 18, and millennials and gen z have started taking frequent trips (friend groups, couples, etc).
So while they still get the same number of "attendance", the demographics have started to shift toward older, more affluent repeat visitors.
The article you linked to indicates anything but how you’re portraying it.
First it talks about young adult who goes there several times a year, sometimes with her parents, because it’s cheaper than traveling overseas.
Then it says childless people have more discretionary income than parents (duh).
The general population, also, has drifted toward older people without kids. 20 years ago nearly 50% of Americans had a child under 18. Now it’s under 40%. So this whole article just indicates that the population is shifting and Disney is adapting to it by making the parks more palatable to single adults.
“In the last year, 93% of respondents in a consumer survey agreed that the cost of a Disney World vacation had become untenable for ‘average families’”. And yet the statistics indicate that more than 7% of families actually likely did go to a Disney park. (Presumably even more could afford it but just went somewhere else.)
Which illustrates my point, this is a thing that feels correct but likely isn’t, and part of the reason it feels correct is that people regurgitate it factlessly.
What's the cost to travel there? To sleep? To eat? What's the actual experience like with that $150 ticket vs the options that are more expensive? Will you spend your entire day there waiting in line?
Those 50 million visits are the sum of daily visits across four parks, so it’s probably at most 30 million people. Even if they were all American (they aren’t), that’s like 9% of the population.
The average cell phone bill you cite is for more than one person.
I think it’s entirely fair to say that “most” Americans would find it too expensive to visit Disneyworld.
Estimates put the percent of Americans who actually HAVE been to Disney north of 75%. So it would seem unfair to say most find it too expensive, most have done it.
30 million uniques at one Disney location (there are two in the country, I think the other one increases that to at least 40 million, or roughly 12% of the entire population) per year is pretty high so that stat isn’t unbelievable. I’m sure not everybody can afford to go there every year.
That’s also a drastic misstatement that illustrates what I’m talking about. A poll showed that the average persons specifically designated “emergency savings fund” is $600. Many people have lots of money but don’t specifically refer to some as an emergency fund.
Also thanks to credit one does not need to have $600 to spend $600. That’s why we’ve got so many people with no savings.
Somewhere between 70 and 90 percent of Americans have actually been to a Disney park. Does the fact that the vast majority of people have done something not prove that most people can afford it?
I’m not sure why the burden of proof falls not on the original comment (most Americans can’t afford to go to Disney) but rather the person asking for proof, but here you have it anyway.
Doing something once in a lifetime is far different than being able to regularly or even every few years. Also, $150 ea is just for the ticket into the park... you still need quite a bit more for food and drinks for the day and souvenirs. That also doesn't cover travel and hotel arrangements... For a family of 4, I'd be surprised if it didn't cost closer to $2500 for a Disney trip, if your family only earns the average national family income, that's a significant expense after housing, car(s), food and other bills.
So a family might have gone once, but that dpesn't mean they can do it anything resembling regularly. I went to Disneyland once as a kid (around 8yo)... th eonly time my family went growing up, and I haven't ever been back... My sister went as a young adult every year until she had kids, then it's been every few years... but she and her husband are doing much better than the typical American family.
But that’s the point. I didn’t make an unprovable assertion, I called someone out for doing so. I haven’t made a single point based on my own experience or anecdotes either.
People say things that “feel right”. This is a left leaning community, when the right is in power everything is a dumpster fire. Over on the right wing communities, the opposite is true.
None of it means anything. Data is the guide post.
See the link you just sent me which is people at Disney World who cannot afford to be at Disney!
while I haven't seen them at parks (I just don't make it to any), I have seen them at Star Wars events at my local MiLB team - BB-8 in the size of your video, somewhat interactive and autonomous, same with R2D2. there's usually a human nearby to monitor it, but they're definitely around.
R2D2 is an example of one that you can buy in the gift shop (for $20k!) that was promised to make it into the park but just comes out highly supervised, occasionally.
They have walking droids in Galaxys Edge right now. No ones kicking them over. Olaf is coming to the parks and they will have handlers next to them. It wont be just free-roaming.
And if you'd like an entertaining a history of early AI and robotics, half as long, check out the prequel "Disney Animatronics: A Living History" https://youtu.be/jjNca1L6CUk
I actually found it more relevant to our current tech bubble than the Living Characters doc.
I worked with someone who had previously worked on park robotics, and apparently they had to guarantee that the character could not injure a child to be able to put them in parks - a particularly high barrier to actually doing so.
One look at Olaf's hands alone make that an impossible thing to guarantee. Those stick fingers will eventually poke a kid in the eye if kids are allowed to get close to the character. If they gave him a small intimate stage, or roped off area, to do some act or crowd work that would be more ideal/less risky.
Then they will break and wear off quite fast I imagine.
Take a look at industrial cobots (not a typo). They feature rounded corners, have very little to no "finger pinchy areas" and lots of force feedback sensors.
Despite that they still require trained (adult) personal and move very slowly when actually interacting with humans.
That's the price for them being sturdy and precise.
Basically that the multiple departments involved have different objectives.
Imagineering is trying to build the coolest things possible, and many times the things seen in parks are play-tests.
Operations has to find the money and resources to keep things going, and these things take a lot of people to run.
Marketing sometimes will often provide the budget to make things happen (to promote a movie, etc) but it's not sustainable. They'll often sometimes use impractical inventions for marketing reasons, since they exist and might as well be used for something.
That's the main gist, although there's some interesting points about the risk to the brand (especially with camera phones) if Mickey ever slightly malfunctions in a public setting.
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