> For a long time, building shitty robots meant Giertz never had to face failure, even if the robots themselves failed. “One of the things that I've been trying to figure out is: Was building shitty robots in some way a method for me to minimize myself, to make myself smaller?” Giertz says. “Because that's what I notice—a lot of women being really scared to step up and be an expert.”
This rings really true, and as funny as the shitty robots were, I really have been enjoying her later videos a lot more than those. She's really funny and talented and deserves a lot more than shitty robots. And I hope she'll be ok.
I have a lot of mixed, mostly melancholy feelings about her self reflection there. The talk about imposter syndrome and self deprecation is something that rings true to a lot of talented people, not just women, and the power of her videos is that she demonstrates that failure is a part of success.
With most media you usually see a carefully choreographed final product that appears flawless and intimdating. You don't get to see the process or what lead up to it. What her videos demonstrate is that failure and imperfection are ok and part of the process.
A good example of this is Bon Appétit Magazine, it arrives as a finished product that appears, on the surface, to be perfect and unassailable. If you watch their videos on Youtube you get a much different perspective and get to see all the flaws and mistakes in the process that leads up to the magazine. Giertz brings that to engineering and that's what's so powerful about her work.
I agree that there are a lot of people, not just women, who are afraid to step up and be an expert. I believe that fear is what drives people to become experts, while simultaneously holding them back. Her growth and self actualization are both powerful and inspiring, and at the same time sad because it means she probably can't create more of those early videos that were very special. Even still her growth and continued aspirations will produce ever more inspiration for others.
Simone made shitty robots in the same way that Rodney Dangerfield got no respect. Simone was never the Queen of the Shitty Robots, she was the person who created the Queen of the Shitty Robots. And in so doing, she showed how to make a success out of something that appeared on its surface to be a failure. Hell, she even took a fucking brain tumor (in her own brain!) and turned it into humor. It is hard for me to imagine a more worthwhile thing a human being can do. Simone, like Rodney, deserves tremendous respect.
To say nothing of the fact that Truckla is just fucking awesome.
Dangerfield's shtick was being as shitty as possible in every possible way. He pretended to be a terrible human being, a terrible comedian, a terrible everything. It was hilarious.
A lot of people weren't in on it though. They thought he was washed up, not knowing that that was the joke.
Another good comparison would be heels in professional wrestling. Those people work hard to get as low as they are, and they suffer for it as much as the medium benefits from it.
On the contrary, it's a bit sad that she failed to see the real value she was offering - she didn't have to worry about the robot failing, but she most definitely had to worry about the VIDEO failing. An uninteresting video with a flawless robot is far less interesting than a video from Simone about a knife chopping robot that can't really chop, because it was still funny and insightful.
She started the genre but it's now bigger than her, with interesting characters like Michael Reeves. Apparently he's not bogged down by the same insecurities as her, which just sucks. I'd rather have dumb but interesting robots from both of them and not just one.
But they were also a gimmick. A single joke, repeated. And sticking with the same joke would be sad. She can do other things, and she's daring to do other things now, and those other things are hilarious. They are not uninteresting in any way, they are much richer than the simple joke robots.
> I ask her whether [the brain tumor] helped mark this turning point for her. The answer is yes, but also no. Even before the brain tumor, Giertz says, she was starting to feel like “it was harder and harder to come up with ideas. I was always concerned that it was eventually going to be like beating a dead horse, and that the joke was going to be over and I didn't have anywhere else to go.”
I don't read this being about insecurities but rather more about physical comedy not really being something that comes easily for Giertz, and the stress associated with the brain tumour forcing the early abandonment of that sort of work.
I can see how it was true, but I thinnk the shitty robots had real value -giving people 'permission' to experiment, and much about with robotics without havin to worry about 'success'.
I don't think her shitty robots are something to look down at, she not only used a decent amount of technology but also had imagination, creativity, fun and had a talent to get the viewers involved.
It takes an expert to get to her level, and a lot of guts.
I wish her luck and success in every way she chooses, but I find the new Giertz more bland and less fun (and I don't like the fact she has left Sweden when I moved in)
Making "shitty robots" seem to me as the perfect stepping stone towards building actually good robots. I don't see that there can be any better way to learn really (It makes you deliver something that also makes you learn something). Except maybe doing that while also studying all the theory that you may possibly make use of when building robots.
But as she says, she wasn't doing that. She was making funny videos about crap robots so she wouldn't have to face the fear of trying to build something good, and failing.
That isn't learning, it's the exact opposite. And that is why she stopped.
I think there's more nuance to it than that. I could not build any of her "shitty" robots. They were almost certainly a learning experience. That she also managed to entertain and even inspire others through that learning experience is a great accomplishment.
She shouldn't be so hard on herself. If calling the projects "shitty" gave her permission to fail, well, failing is also a part of learning.
Now she's ready to progress to "useful" robots—or other projects altogether. That makes sense.
Allowing ourselves to fail (and learn and have fun) is a powerful thing. I discovered this a few years back playing a (new to me) board game with friends. I didn't know it well enough to win, so took the point of view that I'd probably lose, but have fun at the same time, learning this new game. All too often we are told that we have to win, succeed, make a passing grade. This definitely puts in a level of not fun and anxiety. But once you give yourself permission to fail, that dynamic changes.
> Allowing ourselves to fail (and learn and have fun) is a powerful thing.
I agree completely, and it changed my life to realize this as an adult. I try to teach my kids that it's OK to enter practice mode when they do things that are hard (video games, drawing, homework) and that it's OK to fail as long as they learn or at least have fun.
For me it was the video games Dark Souls 3 and Bloodborne that taught me to fail and press on. I had a fixed mindset before, and would mostly do things that came easy to me. In DS3 the bosses, and even regular enemies, can kill you with a couple of blows, but if you figure out their movesets you can easily counter them.
The first time you meet a new boss you have to be prepared to die a couple of times (or 10 or 50) as you learn their attacks and how they're telegraphed, before you can defeat them. A common suggestion is to not at first even try to attack a difficult boss, but to just dodge and study their moves before they inevitable defeat you. Then you apply that knowledge the next time you try.
I've come to the point where I feel cheated if I beat a boss at the first attempt, because you don't get to experience the full range of the boss and you don't get the same high as when you finally beat them.
DS3 and Bloodborne has made me better at video games in general, and I think better at being persistent outside of games.
Another thing is watching people practice speedruns of video games. They fail over, and over, over again, and I greatly admire the players that can just restart that section of the game and practice over and over. I hate speedrunners that rage at the game, but absolutely love the calm ones that just keep trying until they can reliably beat a difficult stage.
>She's really funny and talented and deserves a lot more than shitty robots.
Why? There's nothing wrong with moving onto other things and pursuing other interests, but she has this perplexing perspective (which you echoed in this statement) that somehow the 'shitty robots' content was something to look down on. It was good stuff, and if she wanted to continue, it would have been perfectly fine and something you could build a career around.
Nobody has said that they were anything to look down on. They were funny, they were successful, they made her famous.
However, it can at the same time be true that they represented her own fear of failure, and were holding her back from actually fulfilling her real potential.
I don't really get the impression that she is looking down on it, just that she was ready to move on.
“it was harder and harder to come up with ideas. I was always concerned that it was eventually going to be like beating a dead horse, and that the joke was going to be over and I didn't have anywhere else to go.”
And there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, that's great. Sometimes people don't know when to give up a shtick and end up being typecast for decades.
The part that's perplexing is why she (and some others) see that content as somehow beneath her and why she has this general negative and insecure attitude towards the "shitty robots" content she created. That content entertained a lot of people and allowed her to stand out from the mass of other Youtube content creators.
I think you're missing an overarching lesson, that she may be really funny and talented, but perhaps she is that now because when she started she was allowed to make "shitty" things? I'm of the opinion that people need space to fail before they can become good at things, and public spheres of expression sometimes don't allow time for that period of growth.
I do hope we still get to see her failures. I watch a lot of hobby/project channels and I like to know about the hurdles they faced. When a project becomes a complete failure and no product whatsoever is created I like to watch the postmortems.
My daughter, who is interested in science and engineering loved the shitty robot videos. It was a form of engineering comedy. I guess if she wasn't a women, creating shitty robots would be just funny and inventive way that she figured out how to make money. Comedians make people laugh using inventive and unexpected constructions, she was no different. A lot of comedians do things that are in one way or another demeaning to themselves or showing a lack of self-respect, but they do it because they actually incredibly confident in themselves that they can stand up and make those jokes.
How was her videos not that different than the stchick that is Mr Bean. Rowan Atkinson is definitely not an idiot in real life, but that stchick sure got him attention he wouldn't have gotten any other way, because it was unique and over the top and funny.
It is also fine for her to move on to other topics. No one is forced to stay in any specific role they have invented for themselves, no matter what fans think.
Would like to mention Mehdi (ElectroBOOM) here as he seems to match the description, but with electricity and physics: https://www.youtube.com/user/msadaghd
Seconded, this guy is great. He plays it well enough that it takes a little while of growing incredulity before you realise he’s doing it all on purpose.
> A lot of comedians do things that are in one way or another demeaning to themselves or showing a lack of self-respect, but they do it because they actually incredibly confident in themselves that they can stand up and make those jokes.
Many struggle with anxiety and depression, and are self deprecating as a defense mechanism because the criticism of others is less harsh when you've already done it to yourself.
I have to admit that I am surprised that neither the article nor any of the HN posters have mentioned Rube Goldberg, whose humorous cartoons involving improbable contraptions to solve everyday problems seems to me an obvious predecessor to Simone Giertz.
I have a random observation about the comments sections of the types of videos she makes. In videos that feature female makers, commenters seem to address them by first name far more often than happens in the male maker videos. I am not sure why it bothers me but it feels off.
You're right, and it's not just youtube comments. There was a large study at Cornell last year; it generalizes to society at large, and has detrimental effects for women [1].
I had a female CS professor who noticed (and disliked) that students were a lot more likely to use her first name while calling male professors Dr. Whatever.
A lot of men) tend to perceive women as warmer, more nurturing, more approachable than their male counterparts; their approach to them is less formal, less respectful, more chummy. There are situations where that approach is appropriate, but the tendency to use it with every professional woman you meet is a problem.
I always thought it happens because we tend to use the identifier that is the most unique. We had a CS professor (male) who had an unusual first name, everyone referred to him by using the first name. Obviously not in a formal way but when we discussed him.
Because women tend to be less numerous in CS and similar engineering professions, their name tends to be more unique than male counterparts. I know it's anecdotal but it seems to line up with my school years where depending on whether your first name or last name were often we fell back on one other other. A girl with a common first name was called by her last name, while a guy with common last name was called by his first name.
Few examples in popular culture:
Hillary,
Bernie (relatively unusual first name),
Trump,
Warren (I think no one calls you just Elizabeth, her first and last name are relatively generic so usually people use both)
In Formula 1:
Lewis,
Alonso,
Vettel,
Max (or Verstappen),
Lando.
This is the story of most comedians. Good comedy is easier than good drama and deep art and invention. It's a young person's game. Good to move on to something bigger and better.
Yes, Simone is a better robotocist than most of us. That's not a compliment to her, because her dreams aim higher.
The sexist fear angle of the story is unfortunate, though. People shouldn't hold themselves back because of imagined differences in what they are allowed to do.
>"There are so many things that are amazing that are not perfect. And there are so many things that are perfect that are fucking boring," [Giertz] says. "Perfect is a corset. It doesn't let you breathe. It doesn't let you roll around. It's a small pen to be in."
They did invite her to the launch event but then told her not to bring the Truckla. She did a funny video looking a bit baffled at the event. They should have let her drive it on stage before the real thing. That would have been funny and I'm sure she'd have been up for a stunt like that.
I don't think Tesla needs to license her design as there is no trademark or patent. They can start manufacturing mini-pickups any time they want to. They probably aren't because the market for small electric pickups with miniature beds is a small one. The direction they are going seems like the right one to me; big, powerful, featured, luxurious vehicles that absolutely out-class ICE vehicles and leave us wondering why we spent a century going the wrong way, is the correct market to address. Musk being a dick driving around LA in his hulking machine is also correct and brilliant marketing.
This rings really true, and as funny as the shitty robots were, I really have been enjoying her later videos a lot more than those. She's really funny and talented and deserves a lot more than shitty robots. And I hope she'll be ok.