Eric Rachlin

@sethharpesq Love the look of the film in this example. Alas, most of the photos shot on film from my own childhood look blurry and bad. In contrast I have thousands of high res photos of my own kids that I never would have even captured with a film camera. It ain't all bad.

Technology is making the world worse. Nothing good has been invented in the last 25 years. Superfluous, spurious innovations that seem impressive at first, like the iPhone, take back more than they give and ultimately benefit only oppressive governments and their oligarch allies.

Just ordered a breakfast burrito and an iced coffee and got a coupon for a free pre-roll What a time to be alive!

New York is where the world comes to play. Now every player gets a card. Make yours at on.nyc.gov/playercard

@conhugh Robotics hardware is way too specialized. We're all just waiting for the nanobots to show up

it's a rare privilege to be bitter-lesson-pilled in robotics

Time to start following more people to add new beautiful moots to my TL

@alpervm You are not alone

The voices in my head want me to start a robotics company. Hard to resist the urge

@AndrewCurran_ For better or worse the book wouldn’t have worked as well with a Super Smart AI Computer as a character. We’re lucky Andy Weir wrote it when he did. Even if the book did include AI, we’d just read the book a decade from now and be like “But why didn’t they just send robots?”

Watched Project Hail Mary (I liked the book). What immediately struck me was how stupid and useless the ship's computer was. LLMs have probably already broken the vast majority of sci-fi worldbuilding done over the last thirty years. Probably explains some of the author ire.

@fofrAI Wow, nice!

@eerac That feature is there in the video, a menu item, I didn’t demo it though. Was going to but couldn’t find my cube.

A quick first experiment with Sol this morning to see if it can help me learn how to solve Rubik's cubes. > A website that shows a Rubik's cube that can be rotated, turned etc. Randomised feature makes a valid mixed up state. Two things: 1. Go through steps to solve 2. Teach me how to solve as I go through. It needs to be a tutor and explain how to work out the next move, teach the method. Would be cool to have voice explaining the next move.

@paulg 760 is a great score, but I think the admissions essay is where you're really going to shine.

I took an SAT English practice test. I got two questions wrong, which meant my score was 760. One was a grammar mistake I might have caught if I'd checked my answers. The other was about a fictional character's state of mind and there were two answers that seemed reasonable.

@mattturck Golden oalies

@mattyglesias Vibes are similar in Boone, NC. America, man. Who knew?

July 4 celebration in Brooklin, ME

@imjaredz Moderately upset?

life lesson: always double check your bagel order before leaving trust but verify imagine how upset I would have been at home to discover “lox-cream-cheese” instead of lox & cream cheese

It is indeed odd that the reading/vocab part is so much more aligned with 11th/12th grade-level knowledge than the math. I don't actually know why they can't make the math harder, but to your point, the way the whole thing works is self-perpetuating by design. To make each year's tests they: 1. Create lots of problems 2. Test the new problems 3. See which problems are well-correlated with existing bell curve (i.e. you want "hard" problems to be mostly answered correctly by only the high scorers). The test is designed to serve as a consistent filter for the same kinds of students year-over-year.

I didn't realize this till recently, but the math section of the SAT is a de facto second English section. For whatever reason they can't give you problems that are mathematically difficult, so the only way to add difficulty is to make the problems hard to read.

@mountainwesttax We have two boys and I always say that 1 - 2 is the hardest age for travel. As a baby, your kid needs lots of equipment, but mostly stays seated on planes and often sleeps. As a 2+ year old, kids can pay attention to screens and other toys. As a 1.5 year old... chaos.

husband and I take two vacations every year. we visit family at Christmas and July 4th. current trip with a sick 1.5 year old feels closer to warfare than vacation. I am never traveling again

@lessin Would this be true if you were on a family plan with multiple admins? Seems like a real shortcoming. Would be better I think if they let you add a mandatory time delay with some kind of repeated alert once a request is initiated

An ATT Catch-22 ... this is funny / sad... I dropped my phone off a mountain & had anti-sim-swapping block on my number -- but ATT's second factor to prevent sim swapping is... texting your phone. So even if you go to an ATT store and show id, etc. you simply cannot get your number back! ATT support gives you no option. Anyone know a solution? This is a hilarious and deep Catch-22.

@ratlimit Trashy is great if you add “trash” before can though. Either way, epic headline

Trashy Knicks fan nicks Knicks can; gets canned, fined; Knicks can fine

@levelsio Your gf sounds smart

I've been trying to convince my gf for years sunscreen is cancerous but have as of yet been wholly unsuccessful

My favorite drink at home by far. For me, it's clearly the best flavor, but given the huge range of flavored seltzers on the market in the US, there must be a pretty wide range in preferences. Even just from visiting people's houses, it's a complete roll of the dice what brands/flavors they have on hand. Grapefruit, tangerine, key lime, coconut, everything is on the table.

I have no idea how they make this It's just sparkling water with squeezed lemon (like literally what I normally make myself and drink 99% of the time) but in a can and I don't know but it tastes even better It has no sugar, just 1g carbs and 3 calories

Big fan of @Ultraroboticsco, great call out! For a normal business, buying a robot creates more problems than it solves. Instead of focusing on technical details, try to imagine how one of your customers would describe a successful deployment to another. That's the language you want to tap into.

Received 100+ DMs across this and my fundraising post. A few insights and tips: 1. A lot of people are still building robots for robotics sake. I empathize with the desire to build novel technology but if you're trying to build a business, you need to be solutions oriented. Study @Ultraroboticsco. 2. There are two primary failure modes re customer development: a) reaching customer, b) converting customers. I highly recommend reading The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick and applying as much of it as you can to your practice. 3. Stop using Claude-slop to build your deck/memo and website. It's poor taste for an early stage company. At this point, these are the only artifacts that communicate what you're working on. Put in the effort to make sure it comes across as your own. 4. "Middle market manufacturers and logistics companies" is not an ICP. It's fine for marketing or fundraising material but you should be thinking about customer development with more granularity. Ex. "Automative components manufacturers in Michigan with at least one robot welding cell". 5. If you're getting customer conversations but failing to convert then you're having the wrong conversations. Coming back to #1 and #2, stop trying to sell robots and start understanding your customers. A good rule of thumb is to never pitch your product/company on the first metting. 6. Incredibly humbled by the talent and drive of the robotics founder community. We are going to do amazing things.