TaylorAlexander

Joined 13 years ago

Karma

18,479

Submissions

5,084

Member since

Feb 4

Hi I’m Taylor or Sequoia! (she/her)

I make robots mostly. I want to figure out how robots can help solve social problems. Read my writing or see my portfolio at tlalexander.com and see my robots at http://reboot.love

My cool robot arm: https://twitter.com/TLAlexander/status/1455320442642714625

See my farming robotics work here: https://community.twistedfields.com/t/a-closer-look-at-acorn-our-open-source-precision-farming-rover/108

And:

https://community.twistedfields.com/t/join-the-solar-farming-revolution-support-acorn-and-empower-farmers-worldwide/370

You are welcome to email me but usually I don’t end up responding to out of the blue emails (due to procrastination or disorganization). [tlalexander at gmail]

View on Hacker News

Recent submissions

Comment · 1 year ago

Very much worth saying that many of the people what write code at Apple are women. Some of them are my friends.

Comment · 1 year ago

Do you mean to suggest women have a lower sex drive? When I started taking estrogen and suppressing my T, my sex drive changed a lot but it didn’t reduce. It’s just more impacted by emotional factors like life stress and anxiety.

Comment · 1 year ago

Certainly the ire of Andrew Tate fans should be thoroughly ignored. You can have whatever sex drive you want, and their contempt is childish and misguided. If you did want to try experiencing a higher sex drive, try edging daily for a week without getting off and see how you feel on day 7.

Comment · 1 year ago

20 years is an eternity in terms of innovation. This has an extreme effect compared to the natural state (no IP restrictions). I argue that the effects of patents is actually poorly understood, and most arguments for how they work fail to explain how and why open source works, revealing serious flaws in the foundational theories of IP restrictions.

The sole function of a patent is to restrict innovation. That’s the only direct result of patents. All other claims about encouraging innovation rely on beliefs about secondary and tertiary effects which I believe are incomplete, out of date, and often simply incorrect.

Edit: Even the pure capitalists don’t like it: https://youtu.be/hoSWC_6mDCk

Comment · 1 year ago

I’m vegan too. Someone will say “what about the microorganisms in your gut” or something. People often have a negative reaction to vegans and that’s not going to change.

Comment · 1 year ago

Yep even in Oakland California where they don’t sell BYD cars, they recently replaced all the school busses with BYD electric.

https://thedriven.io/2024/09/04/the-biggest-electric-school-...

Comment · 1 year ago

Sure, their choice to give it away may not have gone as they hoped, I’m just pushing back against the idea that making copies of a thing the creator explicitly gave permission to copy is “stealing”. The core of open source is that making and distributing modified or unmodified copies is good. Calling it stealing undermines the very important social work we can do with open source.

Comment · 1 year ago

Prusa gave everyone permission to make copies of their i3 series machines, make modifications, and distribute modified versions. It’s not theft if you have been given explicit permission to make copies.

“You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty.”

“You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1 above.”

https://github.com/prusa3d/Original-Prusa-i3/blob/MK3S/LICEN...

Comment · 1 year ago

Hah. I mean it did blow up (the booster), but not due to impact from a failed soft landing. The soft landing succeeded, then it blew up.

Comment · 1 year ago

One time I had to run a very old version of Eagle CAD on Linux and it turned out that even tho I had a native Linux version, it was easier to run the windows version in wine! I guess stable interfaces have their advantages.

Comment · 1 year ago

> In terms of quantity

At the very least China is generally gonna have everyone else beat on quantity of people involved in quite a lot of things.