> oomwoo is organized so the community can build it in parallel. The robot and its software are split into self-contained modules. You pick whatever module interests you, work on it whenever you want, and submit your work as a pull request. Multiple people can tackle the same module — the best solution surfaces over time.
I think one major advantage of open source over commercial alternatives, is the possibility of endless improvements. Similarly, 3d printing as a manufacturing method allows for a short iterative cycle, high degree of design freedom, customisation as a product feature, local production, and an high degree of repairability.
It’s going to be interesting to see how well git(hub) and discord serves as collaborative tools in this case. Hardware files are often binary, hardware components have complex interfaces between them, and hence depends more on human communication and collaboration.
I really hope this project succeeds. I’d love a cloud free robot vacuum that I can trust.
I’m excited about the genAI future. I’m a software engineer interested in product, user experience, architecture, and entrepreneurship. After 4 years in the industry, mostly within fintech, I have gotten tired of slow organizations, company politics, nontechnical managers doing the decisions etc.
I’ve saved up a couple of months of salary, have a couple of bootstrap ideas that I believe are within reach for me equipped with a coding agent to build. Hosting can be done almost for free. What used to take entire teams and hence millions of dollars to build can now be done a lot cheaper. If I’m lucky one of those ideas can pay my bills soon. If not I’ll go back to consulting for a couple of months.
I had a conversation with my industrial design teacher at university once about how slight ugly and uncommon design might have a positive effect on consumer demand over time.
I don’t know if there is a psychological term for that phenomena in design but I think it’s related with mere-exposure effect [1]. A design that stands out and is uncommon, will evolve a deeper relationship over time with the observer than a well-polished predictable design.
It’s beautiful to see. They have put in such extreme amounts of hard work to get that thing into the air. Designing a robust affordable liquid propelled rocket from scratch is hard. There are so many design decisions, complex simulations, manufacturing difficulties, and tests for every little part of that 11+ m rocket. Accounting for extreme forces, heat variations, vibrations, wind, atmosphere, liquid sloshing, rotation, etc during ascent and descent. It’s not only mechanical/aviation engineering but also software, electrical, sourcing donations, documenting everything in forms of design and risk assessment reports etc etc.
You also have to try to account for every little possible failure mode before launching which is why rockets seldom succeed on the first attempt.
And then dealing with authorities to create new launch sites and permits which probably hasn’t been done in decades in Canada.
Space Concordia, a Canadian university space-oriented student group, which is sort of amateur-level given that it’s driven by students and donations, attempted to reach space not that long ago with a liquid fueled single staged rocket. Here is a video of the launch https://www.youtube.com/live/610YciEs8qg?t=4594&is=aAWo8Y7vi...
thank you for the feedback, it totally makes sense to want those fetures. and yes, I've also seen that there are a lot of sites like that.
its tempting to implement but also comes with more complexities, which Im at this stage not that exited to hop on. I'm thinking of:
- need for a backend with login/authentication -> kills the endless scalability aspect of only having a frontend.
- there are soo many competing tools already existing. Im not sure what my moat would be.
- For me, as a freelancer with max 1 assigments per month so far, a standalone pdf-maker like this one is preferred over being locked in to a Saas product.
- in that case I would want support for e-invoices which seems a bit bureaucratic to get in place
Thank you for testing it and the feedback! I have added support for a second VAT row now (withholding VAT) which is negative. Let me know if it covers your needs :)
It’s going to be interesting to see how these types of bans play out.
One alternative to bans could perhaps be if the EU created an IdP or something similar, with a fee for each authentication request, and then forced all commercial services within Europe to use it. I’m not sure if the fee should go back to the user or be paid as tax to the government, but either way, it would change the incentives around connecting traffic to you and making profit from it by harvesting data or steering recommendation engines.
Because I do think there’s nothing wrong with the government doing this, just like in the physical world.
And in some cases, we might prefer cheap authentications… like when posting comments, to avoid trolling/manipulation/bullying. Perhaps when doing “writes” on the internet, if there’s a robust way to identify that type of traffic.
Making a good mechanical design is difficult, it usually involves making several iterations which in the physical world takes a lot more effort than iterating on software.
One thing that always bothered me is that most people with 3d printers seem to design things on their own from scratch and rarely take on others designs, improve them and share them. There is little collaboration going on for 3d prints in comparison to software. Except from maybe ~10 widely successful projects that now have healthy communities improving them.
Why is GitHub and similar sites not used more among makers?
> "Education" is nice and all, but millions of people keep smoking despite the obvious harm and decades of education
I think there’s a missed opportunity for media to make it explicit that by giving their time and attention to these platforms, people are directly generating profit. Way too many assume their involvement has no real effect, but it does. I suspect people would be far less willing to log in if it were clear that each session generates, on average, X dollars in revenue. It’s a business model most people still haven’t fully digested.
I dont hink doom scrollers are the root cause, but I belive in that we would have a better political debate and better successful politicians if people who spend a lot of time in feeds were aware of the income they generate for platform companies, and how this fuels the attention economy, which in turn amplifies these problems. One of them being: it incentivizes politicians to be populistic in order to be heard through the noise and be successful.
One of the main reasons we end up with populist leaders who make decisions not in the interest of their population, but in service of their own pursuit of power, is social media and the attention economy.
If people stopped spending hours each day scrolling through Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook feeds, media incentives would change. Journalism would become more thorough and responsible, rather than optimized for outrage and clicks. People’s attention spans would recover, making them more capable of listening to opposing views and engaging in meaningful discussion. The overall quality of public debate would improve, and political leaders would be chosen based on objective, long-term policies rather than emotional manipulation.
The reinforcement-learning algorithms that drive these feeds are fundamentally unnatural. They represent a massive, uncontrolled social experiment on humanity—one that is far too powerful for our psychological reward systems to handle.
What needs to happen is education. Education on how the attention economy works. People must learn to resist becoming social media junkies, because every hour surrendered to these platforms reinforces the very systems that distort public discourse. When we lose control over our attention, we don’t just harm ourselves—we actively worsen the societal conditions that enable manipulation, polarization, and poor political leadership.