Philadelphia Hackers and Others Offer Brotherly Love To Fallen Robot

An anonymous reader writes: Since a hitchhiking robot was destroyed in Philadelphia over the weekend, there has been an overwhelming show of support according to its co-creators Frauke Zeller and David Smith. Makers from all over Philly have reached out and offered to help rebuild the robot. "We'll say that at this moment, if we get the OK from the creators to repair or replace the needed parts for HitchBOT, we'll be happy to do so," wrote Georgia Guthrie, executive director for a local makerspace called The Hacktory. "If not, we understand and we may just build ourselves a HitchBot2 to send along on its journey. We feel it's the least we can do to let everyone, especially the Robot community, know that Philly isn't so bad."

Comments

Thug culture is to blame.

[Anonymous Coward]

In the United States, there is something called "thug culture". It glorifies things like not getting any sort of a useful education, not getting a legitimate job, joining gangs, engaging in violence, engaging in the abuse and peddling of drugs, engaging in the abusive use of guns, committing theft, committing robbery, committing murder, and so forth. Rap music is one of the main ways that this culture is glorified and promoted in the media.

This is the kind of culture that resulted in the destruction of this robot. It's also the kind of culture that results in its participants attacking police officers, then getting shot by these officers when they have to defend themselves from violence.

The worst part, though, is that many Americans refuse to acknowledge (although they do know it to be true) that this is a rotten, degenerate culture. In fact, they blame everybody but the thugs for the situation that the thugs are in! According to these apologists, it isn't the thugs' faults that they totally rejected all of the free education provided to them and refuse to participate in legitimate society. And according to them the police should just stand there and allow these thugs to violently attack them. As long as these apologists keep on defending what really is an indefensibly terrible culture, we'll keep seeing incidents like this where police are maliciously attacked, and things like this travelling robot are unnecessarily destroyed.

Re:Thug culture is to blame.

[JMJimmy]

Umm, no. It was a couple douchebag "pranksters" looking for fame. The culprits are Jesse Wellens & Ed Bassmaster, the last people to pick up the hitchbot & the ones who released this fake video: https://twitter.com/CBCNews/st... You can tell its fake because Google maps shows there's no surveillance cameras in the area (confirmed the local Fox News affiliates) and the angle is too low. What they did was stage it, they left the bot in one place (shown on local news footage) but later returned to stage the publicity stunt using their own camera & adding effects to the video to make it look more like security footage. Like so: https://twitter.com/JMJimmy1/s... Fortunately they're complete idiots and people saw through it right away. Not only did they recognize Ed Bassmaster in the video, they noticed his truck parked across the street. Meanwhile they've generated hundreds of thousands of views on various YouTube videos to rake in $$$ for their vandalism.

Trim your damned URLs ...

[gstoddart]

Come on guys, what the hell are you doing posting URLs with so much tracking crap embedded in it?

The third URL is arstechnica.com/the-multiverse/2015/08/we-can-rebuild-him-philadelphia-hackers-offer-brotherly-love-to-fallen-robot/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+arstechnica%2Findex+(Ars+Technica+-+All+content)

And the entirety of "?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+arstechnica%2Findex+(Ars+Technica+-+All+content)" is just tracking crap which shouldn't even be incluced.

Are you guys getting affiliate clicks? Or are you just too damned lazy to not give us URLs full of this crap?

To the guys offering to fix this, kudos and good on 'ya.

Re:American Cities

[Lord Bitman]

The robot will *always* have been vandalised. That is the only end condition. It is a social experiment, to see if the robot gets vandalised, which runs until it happens. The experiment can be viewed as:

while !robot.IsVandalised() {
  if robot.NeedsRepair() {
    community.Repair(robot)
  } // do nothing
}
community.ExpressOutrageAtHumanity()

This only proves "at least one person will vandalise a (reports indicate already-broken) robot". We already knew that.

Re:Where is it?

[JMJimmy]

Unreal that this is still going on. It's FAKED. They shot the "surveillance" footage themselves: https://twitter.com/JMJimmy1/s... - they stole the head and left the dismembered body behind to generate clicks & views.

Walnut and 16th St

[Applehu Akbar]

This should have been the neighborhood where the robot landed. It's near UPenn and has an Apple store, but it also hosts a significant population of Linux Orthodox. Either group would have given him shelter, fresh downloaded updates and a pint of RustOleum for the road. Instead he ended up in the Windows part of town. Had he looked around and seen the graffitoed blue screen stop codes all over the walls, he could still have taken a bus to safety with his remaining Bitcoin. Situational awareness, people!

Re:Where is it?

[JMJimmy]

To clarify, "They" are Jesse Wellens & Ed Bassmaster.