[HN Gopher] Dead Startup Toys (2021)
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Dead Startup Toys (2021)
Author : segasaturn
Score : 22 points
Date : 2024-07-16 18:26 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (deadstartuptoys.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (deadstartuptoys.com)
| jaydouken wrote:
| Some of these are obviously stupid and deserve to be ridiculed,
| but I don't think this site needs to be as hard on the "one
| laptop per child" one as they are. That seemed like a well-
| intentioned product designed to do good in the world, not
| everything ends up working out.
| jszymborski wrote:
| I had the same reaction. The product also existed and
| represented some interesting developments for the time tbh.
| mechagodzilla wrote:
| I think their goal was interesting for the time, but its
| release coincided first with the whole 'netbook' craze which
| meant, all of a sudden, you could buy a _regular_ laptop for
| $100-$200, rather than the maybe $700-$800 low-end laptop
| price that had prevailed before that, and then with smart
| phones becoming ubiquitous and dirt cheap all over the world.
| devbent wrote:
| One laptop per child is why there was a netbook craze!
|
| They basically showed it was possible to get a machine at
| that lower price point and then capitalism and mass market
| manufacturing did the rest.
|
| Is this so often the case innovation requires someone to
| prove what's possible and then going down the same path is
| much easier for those who come later.
| yellowapple wrote:
| One thing those netbooks didn't/don't do that OLPC aimed
| to do was mesh networking. Internet connectivity is
| still... spotty, at best, in a lot of countries - even in
| some of the so-called "developed" ones.
|
| I watched a video1 today about the ongoing civil war in
| Myanmar, and while the video focuses on the rebels' use
| of 3D-printed firearms, there was a smaller point about
| how a lot of Rohingya villages ended up entirely caught
| off-guard during the most recent wave of genocidal
| purging because news would travel too slow from village
| to village; as the Junta forces would descend upon one
| village, there was no effective way for that village to
| warn its neighbors.
|
| First thing that popped into my head: "ain't this
| something OLPC and other mesh network attempts would've
| been able to address?"
|
| A lot of mesh networking experiments, including that of
| OLPC, seem to have failed - but some have shown some
| recent success. Maybe it's time to have another go at
| deploying mesh networks to the masses at scale, learning
| from those failures and successes?
|
| ----
|
| 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0oXupwf2D4
| nytesky wrote:
| Aren't AirTags a mesh network of sorts? Or do the tags
| just piggy back on nearest device.
| yellowapple wrote:
| My understanding is that they just piggyback on the
| nearest Bluetooth-enabled Apple device, which then pings
| Apple's servers; non-Apple-specific equivalents like Tile
| work the same way (just with different host-device-level
| software and different centralized servers).
|
| That said, Bluetooth mesh networks are absolutely a thing
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth_mesh_networking)
| , and it'd be neat if low-power devices could capitalize
| on that.
| jt2190 wrote:
| SugarOS was really interesting and still exists [1], but the
| hardware was always a solution looking for a problem. Sure the
| hardware might have been kind of neat, but it was always too
| expensive and obsolete and never worth the huge investment. [2]
|
| [1] https://www.sugarlabs.org/
|
| [2] https://cacm.acm.org/research/one-laptop-per-child-vision-
| vs...
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| The laptop also was not called "the one laptop per child" or
| "the OLPC". That was the name of the project. The laptop was
| the XO.
|
| The website getting this wrong makes it harder for me to take
| them seriously.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| I think the assessment, harsh as it might be, is fair. Morgan
| Ames' excellent 2019 book on the OLPC project, "The Charisma
| Machine" [1], does a really good job looking at all the things
| that went wrong in the project. There was a lot of hubris in
| this project from top to bottom -- a lot of Ivy League
| intellectuals who believed they knew how to best teach the
| developing world and that somehow, this device would be the one
| to do it. It wasn't.
|
| Well-intentioned or not, I think its broader impact is probably
| overstated in many circles (the notion that we wouldn't have
| sub-$300 laptops without OLPC is just silly), especially since
| many of the promises behind the device (the price, the crank,
| the way it would "reshape" education") were just untrue.
|
| Is it a blind waste of investment looking for a problem to
| solve like Juicero? No. Is it a scam like Theranos? Also no.
| But given the poor-execution of the project, the imperialist
| nature of its whole raison d'etre, and the negative effects its
| failure had on the EdTech movement as a whole, I think it is
| definitely worthy of critique.
|
| [1]: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262537445/the-charisma-
| machine/
| mikestew wrote:
| If nothing else, I liked the page design. The Elizabeth Holmes
| cherubs are a nice touch.
|
| Everything is sold out, but best I can tell from a light skimming
| is that these toys have actually been produced at one time, or am
| I just falling for the joke?
|
| EDIT: ah ha, they did actually produce the toys:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40980942
| nytesky wrote:
| I don't understand the juicero. If you are "juicing" what is
| basically canned fruit, in what world could that be better than
| blending and straining fresh fruit?
| mikestew wrote:
| And now you know why it failed (well, that and product reviews
| that were rivaled only by the ones for the Humane Pin for their
| scathing take). I don't know how much you know about the
| product, or how much of the blurb you read, but VCs threw money
| at a company making a complicated hydraulic/electric military-
| grade internet-connected industrial press suitable for stamping
| out automobile doors. Turns out, though, you could get equal
| results just squeezing the bags with your hands, skipping the
| $800 hardware piece.
| latexr wrote:
| Scrolling is a bit janky on Safari on iOS. The page "jumps"
| occasionally.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| This is from a MSCHF drop from 2021. I bought them all, of
| course, and they are some of my favorite stupid little toys ever.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| MSCHF drop from (2021)
|
| Discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27811047
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