The Pokédex

Speaker 1: Heads up, this one is about a fictional computer from a nineties children's anime television series. It's like thirty minutes just about that. So, that's what this is. And now I'm going to play the Pokemon theme music but all playing in a mall at night ified. In the pilot of the very popular 1997 animated television series Pokemon, we are introduced to a portable computer, basically like the smartphone of the pre smartphone world of Pokemon, called a Pokedex.

Speaker 2: Just like it says in the Pokedex. While being trained, a Pokemon usually stays inside its Pokeball.

Speaker 1: For some of you, me even explaining what a Pokedex is is exceptionally weird because it's very obvious. For others, it would be equally weird if I didn't explain what a Pokedex is. The Pokedex has evolved endlessly over the years, but the original is a small, red, portable computer. If you can Google image it safely, giver. Otherwise, it has a book style form factor with, you know, a small screen, a couple buttons, almost looks like a half a calculator on the right side, and what's basically a Game Boy layout on the left side. And then, almost like a camera or sensor or something, which the Pokedex could importantly use to identify Pokemon.

Speaker 3: The the general use shown in the show is like you walk up to like a Squirtle, you hold it

Speaker 1: up, and it's, like, that's that's a Squirtle. And it tells you just enough about the Pokemon that the person watching the show now knows what that Pokemon is. Which implies that it has computer vision And text to voice synthesis because it could tell the protagonist, and by extension the young audience, important exposition about the Pokemon. For what now to me as an adult seems like marketing purposes.

Speaker 2: A Pidgey. Pidgey is a flying Pokemon. Among all the flying Pokemon, it is the gentlest and easiest to capture. A perfect target for the beginning Pokemon trainer to test his Pokemon's skills.

Speaker 1: The screen? Very 1997. But it was otherwise a very futuristic portable computer. It could do stuff that would have been pretty challenging for a portable computer to do until like the last few years. And Ape, who we've been hearing, recently hacked one together.

Speaker 3: And I think if you look at the history and, like, evolution of hardware and devices that we deal with, a lot of them take inspiration from fiction, their science fiction ideas or whatever that eventually became feasible. And I think a lot of the time what what's really happening is like technology is progressing and it's enabling things that are non obvious. And I think a lot of times the people who come up with these ideas in the real world get the inspiration for that OS that, that warmth, that edge that makes it, you know, that last 10% that really makes it notable. They get that from fiction.

Speaker 1: The fictional computer from my youth is now a homebrew DIY project. He three d printed the body, used this cool blend of still relatively new APIs that we're going to talk about, and built a custom Pokedex OS to kind of like stitch it all together. So, you can open your Pokedex, point it at a Pokemon or rather a sculpture, toy, drawing, any rendering of a Pokemon. It will identify it, display its stats, and tell you about it in the original voice of the Pokedex.

Speaker 3: We're getting to the point with three d printing technology and access to programming tools and like these cheap parts and all this stuff where it would be feasible for you to really build something that you used every day, but like from scratch in quotes. Like, you could make a laptop. You could make a a case for your you could make these things. And I would love to see more people seeing a project like this and having that reaction that is like, oh, that's really cool. I could do something like that, or

Speaker 1: I could take this idea and do my own thing. Sometimes we've got to talk about heavy cybercrime type stuff on this show. We're you're gonna be getting a few of those in the next couple episodes. And sometimes I get to talk about stuff like this, about a fictional computer from a nineties anime that Abe hacked together. This was a fun one. This is my conversation with Abe Haskins, a k a at Abe Today on YouTube, about the DIY Pokedex, Here on Hacked. Abe, thank you so much for, sitting down with me.

Speaker 3: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1: Okay. So just broadly speaking, for anyone that doesn't know, what is a Pokedex? In the games, on the animated show originally, What is it and what does it do?

Speaker 3: So a Pokedex is a small device given by a a Pokemon professor when you when you decide as an 11 year old that you're going to go capture Pokemon, I guess, for for a living. For your job? Yeah. Yeah. For your job. They're like, alright, you're 11 years old. You don't know anything about Pokemon. Here's this magical, device that somehow has all the information about Pokemon. And the the general use shown in the show is like you walk up to like a Squirtle, you hold it up and it's like, that's that's a Squirtle. And it tells you just enough about the Pokemon that the person watching the show now knows what that Pokemon is. But it's basically just like, it's a tool in the show to explain what Pokemon are, both, like, technically a tool, but also, like I said, for the audience to understand and learn about, you know, the dozens and dozens of Pokemon that exist. But, but, yeah, physically small little red device handheld kinda looks like a a palm pilot or a PDA, like something kinda, you know, nineties ish. Most of the designs of these are from the late nineties, early two thousands. So they're kind of that version of a toy computer kinda looking thing. And like I said, there's some other, like, stuff in there in some episodes. They'll they'll actually, like, use the on screen thing to, like, call someone or something. But it's it's not really it's not used much. It's it's like one random time they needed a plot device and it could become that. But mostly just identifying Pokemon is its main thing.

Speaker 1: Yeah. It's funny. When I was thinking about this before our conversation, I was just sort of remember. I was like, oh, this is basically a it's an encyclopedia of Pokemon, but you are right that it functions as a little bit of an expositional device. Like, it is a means by which they can just transmit information to the audience. Here's what a Raichu is or whatever.

Speaker 3: Yep. Yep. Exactly. Yeah. And I think that's like, I think a big problem in the show originally because they're like, we have a 150 Pokemon we have to explain, and we have to get kids to love and correlate with this. The the other interesting thing this is already a tangent from the Pokedex, but the other thing they did to help people understand all the Pokemon was on commercial breaks, they would do this who's that Pokemon segment where they would show an outline of the one then. Yeah. Yep. And then you come back. So that is also helping kids to memorize all the Pokemon. And they also had a song at the end, which was a hilarious 1998 rap song about all the different Pokemon to also help you remember. So they were really clearly trying to drill this home because I don't know if they were just like, we don't know which Pokemon are going to be important in the show or if they were just like, we're trying to get people to remember every single one. But there were multiple things, including the Pokedex, which were just designed to get people to the point where they knew what a Lapras was, which they probably failed because most people, I don't think, know what a Lapras is. But, you know, they they were clearly putting a lot of work into it, and this device was, you know, part of that.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Kind of the beating heart. So okay. I I could get pulled off on the tangents about the poker wrap, all all day.

Speaker 3: So poker wrap is good. You should have it on your iPad. It's really funny. You should

Speaker 1: have it on your iPod, if you if if we're talking about nostalgic tech. But just to zoom in on the tech itself, the show premiered in, I checked this before we talked, 04/01/1997 here in the West. At that time, this technology, which was a PalmPilot type device, with, like, a camera that could identify a thing in the real world and then talk to you. 1997, this technology, a portable computer, this was not possible. Just not to put too fine a point on it, but, like, what was impossible about the Pokedex when this came out? Given that you did make one recently, what was it possible?

Speaker 3: So we had, we had small form factor devices. Right. So we had. Small things that were battery powered that had some level of operating system on them. Some of them had speakers. So you and, and screens. So we, we had like several of the core chunks, right? We had the form factor of a Palm pilot PDA kind of device. Things like phones were, cellular phones were starting to show up. They still weren't commonplace in '97, but like they, they were getting there for sure. And so you have a couple of core components there, right? You have a screen, you have the ability for it to make noise. You have input of some form. You have the form factor, the battery, the cellular network to assume like somehow this is like fetching information from that professor who gave it to you or like it's accessing an encyclopedia somewhere that isn't actually on the device. All of that was close to possible, at least possible if like a company the size of, you know, whatever Pokemon company in the show makes these was like doing the research. Like we could get close. The part that really was not there was the computer vision and the ability to take a photo and have any idea what was in it. That. Well, like the, the technology they had at the time was like, maybe they could take a photo and like see the shape of a person in it. And, like, maybe they could do some very basic analysis. But, like, cameras weren't really there. Webcams, any sort of digital photography just as a whole was was not really there. The first digital cameras were coming out in the nineties really. There might've been a couple early ones, but they were around that time that they were like becoming feasible and like they weren't good. So like these pictures not only are very bad pictures compared to traditional photography, but we also didn't have the computational knowledge or power to like analyze them and be like, this is the thing. So the, the computer vision aspect of it and the understanding of what it is seeing that wouldn't come around to anything close to capable of doing that until probably twenty fourteen ish. So it was it was quite early. But everything else like the hardware, it was it was not that far off. The hardware was close to reasonable.

Speaker 1: Relevant to your project in the last, you know, year and change. Boom. We all get, you know, pretty easy API access to really, really, really good computer vision. Uh-huh. And you were able to use that amongst a couple other things to DIY hack together this device, a Pokedex. Do you wanna take me through the basic, you know, sequence of technologies that goes into building this thing?

Speaker 3: Yeah. So the the problems you have to solve if you're building any device, any any handheld device like this, whether it's a little game console or something like this, there there's kind of those table stakes of, like, you need battery for it. You need some sort of processor microcontroller, probably need some sort of display and need some sort of, like, button input. All of that are they're they're not really like solved problems, but they're things that people have done. There's nothing that crazy about that. You can kind of look up, you know, how can I add a rechargeable battery to my microcontroller project? And you can figure it out. So the core components there are, like I said, microcontroller that is actually the brain of the little device. Some sort of screen. I used a little OLED screen in mine. You know, there's a bajillion options that you could go with. All of that will get you to the point where you have a device with a screen and a button. And after that, that's when you get a little bit more into uncharted territory. And it comes to that, like integration with those APIs that are available. Chat GPTs, GPT four vision API. There's other models available that have, you know, vision capabilities. And that is stuff that although technically reasonable to do on these really low power, like a microcontroller, you know, a modern microcontroller, you can compare the processing power it had to probably like, somewhere between a Game Boy Advance and a PSP. So they're they're pretty light device. Like they're pretty weak devices, but they're not crazy weak. Like they're they're okay. Especially considering that they cost like $6 so the part that gets tricky is writing code that can deal with these APIs and talk to these models and deal with the unexpected nature of And, again And again, like, this is not uncharted territory for one of these little controllers. Most of the time, these little microcontrollers are used to, like, read a sensor and post that up to a server somewhere. We're not doing something that different, reading a camera input, sending it up to chat GPT. But like the devil is really in the details of the software here to make it nice, to make it feel reliable. You know, even dealing with stuff like wifi connections or something we take for granted on a mobile phone, it, you know, really flawlessly switches between cellular and wifi and stuff like that. These micro controllers, they're much lower level. There's times when like wifi just won't connect. You have to deal with that. All sorts of little details. So. Yeah. But that's kinda where you get to. You get, like, the hardware that is not that, you know, new. People have been building little portable devices for a long time in the hobbyist world. And then just kinda pushing into, you know, what type of safety net? What do we have to design in those large lang like, when interacting with those large language models to make it feel complete and feel like a thing that actually works versus, like, something that works, like, 10% of the time and and crashes and and all that stuff. But, yeah, that's that's kinda where

Speaker 1: the where the difficulty lies and where the the balance kind of is. It's funny. When I first read coverage of it, I was thinking, this is so cool, but it I can imagine how it works. You know, it's you using ChatGBT's, computer vision. Mhmm. I you you sort of imagine it, and then you realize you actually watch the way it works. You're like, no. Yeah. Yes. You can analyze the image using that API, but you have to get the answer back out and then display it as this low resolution version of the thing. Like, the art of it really was in recreating the Pokedex OS, for lack of a better term, to make sure that that's that process of using it felt seamless and analogous to what was in the show.

Speaker 3: Yeah. And I I I think that's the case a lot of time where, with technology, especially. And I think if you look at the history and like evolution of hardware and devices that we deal with, a lot of them take inspiration from fiction, their science fiction ideas or whatever that eventually became feasible. And I think a lot of the time, what what's really happening is, like, technology is progressing, and it's enabling things that are non obvious, that are that, like, extra percent you're talking about where it's like, yes. We technically could do this, but there's a design element to it. There's a like a warmth to it that makes it magical to a consumer. And I think a lot of times the people who come up with these ideas in the real world get the inspiration for that OS, that, that warmth, that edge that makes it, you know, that last 10% that really makes it notable. They get that from fiction. So, you know, the Pokedex, it's not a really great example of this, but it's kind of the same thing that like, what makes this project interesting is its connection back to that and the great design of the original device that it's so simple. Like it's, it's a really cool little thing that they designed. And now I can kind of stand on those shoulders and make make a realer version of it. But it's, you know, because of that original design work that was so good that I can then be like, okay, now when I have all these random components that aren't that interesting on their own, if I make it into this thing that was already cool now, it, you know, feels like something grander than the sum of its parts.

Speaker 1: It's poking at some deep core memory. Warps is such a good word for it. I'm every so often I'll be traveling. You know, the phone is such a regular part of your life, it kind of just becomes invisible. It's just wallpaper at a certain point. But whenever I go traveling and I find myself in an unfamiliar environment and I get the SIM card plugged into it and I bring up Google Maps, I have this, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy moment where I'm suddenly, like, I'm out there in the world, but I have this thing and it gives me access to all of the information I could ever need. And the capability and the utility that is inherent in this thing that is, again, invisible to me, you know, ninety nine days out of a 100, suddenly it becomes clear again.

Speaker 3: Mhmm. It it and

Speaker 1: it it is only that connection to a fictional device rooted in sci fi, through which I am able to do that. It's an interesting it's an interesting point.

Speaker 3: Yeah. And it's cool to have those moments, right, where you realize, you know, the the, like, really sci fi world we're we're living in. Because, yeah, things like just even having a map in your pocket. I mean, that that's a completely novel idea. It's it's amazing that it works as well as it does. You know, I I used to work at Google. I I worked near the Google Maps teams, and I, you know, always really respected the design of Google maps specifically in terms of product design and visual design as well, keeping it as simple as it is. But, you know, having this really, really hard technical problem of digesting a world of map data and taking it and making it so simple and so approachable that everyone in the world, one of their top, like, three use cases of their phone is using Google Maps. Like, that's crazy. And it it's it's a really Google Maps specifically is a really magical thing that summarizes the world of information into something that is so approachable. It's really a notable example of this type of thing where it it's more than the sum of its parts, but it's also hiding so much complexity under the surface.

Speaker 1: Well put. You use the term warmth, and I I think that so much of the when I when I think of that device from the nineties show, I picture the hardware and I think about the voice. Because as you said, it was an expositional device for the ninety's show. You used a service called, I think, PlayHT for the voice. Take me through that cloning process. How did you get this thing talking?

Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean the cloning was, I mentioned in the video, but it was trivial. I looked up a clip of the Pokedex talking on YouTube, downloaded that clip, and, like, converted it to a WAV file. And it was a really bad clip too. It was, like, maybe ten, not even ten seconds of voice and handed that over to that language model. And it immediately got, you know, what I would consider somewhat close. Depending on who you ask, it's closer or farther from from the original voice. Mhmm. But, yeah, the actual process was functionally nothing. It was, you know, minutes of work to get it to be able to generate something that sounded reminiscent of the original voice.

Speaker 1: It was unreal. We've every so often, every couple years, we've done check-in episodes on the state of, voice synthesis on this show. And from where we were even two years ago where I would have to record fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes of speaking a specific script into a system to get a result that I would call, like, a c c plus maybe, to where we are now where I can shout at a phone for fifteen seconds, and it will do a a recent like, a not bad version of of my voice. It's pretty wild.

Speaker 3: It's yeah. It's it's incredible. It's definitely a very recent improvement. I I was amazed when I did it that it worked as well as it did. Yeah.

Speaker 1: That one's a little bit of a magic trick. And then the other part of the pipeline, and this was the I hadn't heard of PlayHT for the voice cloning, but it was it was similar to things I had bumped into. I'm I'm familiar with this the OpenAI API. And then I I came across the Pokemon API. Mhmm. Hadn't heard of that one. Can you tell me a little bit about it?

Speaker 3: Yeah. The Pokemon API is it's, like a fan project to provide every bit of information about Pokemon you could possibly want in a structured format. In other words, like a machine readable API format. It's really mostly used for, like, educational stuff. It's it's really common for university students who need a big data set to just, like, poke around with, like, something they're mildly familiar with. It gets it gets used a lot for that. And yeah, it it has more detail about Pokemon than you could ever possibly imagine, like down to the, you know, sprites for every single game every Pokemon's ever been in, including all the offshoots. It has every bit of flavor text that every Pokemon has ever been described as in every Pokemon game. So the amount of that that I used was really minimal. I basically pulled Pokemon names and associated those with sprites that I thought would look good on the black and white screen. But it's really a very impressive dataset. I think it's like mildly out of date now. Like it hasn't been, it might be trailing a little bit with the new games, but I mean, it's a really cool resource and it's something great for, like, people who are beginning to program because it's just so much data to poke around with and, you know, build an app on top of or whatever.

Speaker 1: Okay. That makes a lot more sense now, the educational use case, because on the, you go to the website, it says it's serving a billion API calls each month. And I was like, I get that Pokemon is popular. Good Lord, what are people doing with this thing?

Speaker 3: Yeah. There's, there's a bit of a catch 22 with things that are examples for programmers. The the same issue happens with example.com. Example.com serves an absurd amount of requests because it's used in every textbook and every example as, like, the default domain. So it's kept up basically as a public good, for programmers to practice against.

Speaker 1: Right. Sure. That's yeah. You don't want that one falling into the wrong hands because a lot of textbooks suddenly become kind of insidious.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. You gotta keep it safe. I think Microsoft owns it. I I might be wrong though. Microsoft.com is also a very common one where they were like, please stop using us as an example because it's just sending absurd amounts of traffic, especially for young programmers who, like, write an infinite loop that curls the website a thousand times a second.

Speaker 1: Right. They're like, please stop doing that. Okay. So you got PlayHT doing the voice. You got ChatGPT doing your, computer vision. You got PokeAPI with the with the hard data. Tell me a little bit about the hardware. How'd you put this thing all together physically?

Speaker 3: Yeah. So the like I said, the the electronic components, nothing nothing too new there. You can get, you know, screen modules that have good documentation that are basically like wire it to a microcontroller in this way. Buttons are easy. Speakers are a little trickier. Just cause anytime a component is moving, which a speaker does, it has the magnetic element of it that's physically moving to produce sound. You, you get a little sketchy because anytime things move, it's a, it's a little harder, but all of that pretty, pretty reasonable. Like you could, you could Google any given component of that and find a dozen tutorials explaining how to wire it up. So that, that part was all pretty straightforward. And then like the big issue with these types of projects is just, you know, if you have an iPhone, that internal circuitry is super precisely engineered and very carefully laid out and designed to fit in that small package. Even something the size of the Pokedex, which is, I don't know, maybe three quarters of an inch thick or something like that. That's pretty tight when you're dealing with like off the shelf. Screens or you're dealing with off the shelf batteries or whatever. So the tricky part there is really just designing a three d case and printing it in a way that once you have that, all your components actually lay perfectly and the device has a form factor and the thickness that you want. It's not that difficult, but it is the type of thing that if you don't really think ahead, you'll be like, all right, my project's almost done. And then you go to close the cover and it just doesn't actually close because you didn't think about the wires or you didn't think about two things sitting on top of each other or like the solder joints, which add like a millimeter of height or whatever. You're like, dang it. Now that doesn't quite fit. But yeah, the the main process, you know, as outlined in the video, right? You figure out the gist of the components you want to use. Go do a three d modeled case, print out the case, hope everything fits, iterate on that when things inevitably don't fit, and you can you can get there pretty quick.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I I caught a short that you posted where you were talking about how the sort of, like, primary use case for this is pointed at a toy, three d object of the Pokemon, and then you did sort of a quick, pencil crayon sketch of a Gengar. Mhmm. And you took a snap of it. I guess this is basically just a question about the reliability of the Chachibuty API, but, to get abstract here, if you were to come across a Pokemon in the real world, just like it just like a Charmander chilling, do you think it would work? Like, do you think that it would, correctly identify a a living animal?

Speaker 3: It's a good question. I I would say probably. So, you know, we'd have to get a real charmander, to

Speaker 1: test us. But Expensive.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. Expensive. We'd have to genetically engineer a Charmander. Yeah. Probably worth it, for the test, but

Speaker 1: If you got the money.

Speaker 3: Yeah. No, I I think it's I think it's feasible to think it would. You know, these, these models are really good at understanding things that are adjacent to things. Right? So if you're looking at a cartoon drawing of, of a Pokemon that that is adjacent to a three d rendering of a Pokemon, something like detective Pikachu, where you're like, these are not, you know, super realistic models, but they're, they're real, you know, they're close enough. And then you can imagine that as adjacent to what an actual photo of a real charmander would look like. And I think it's reasonable to think it could make that leap through kind of those things. I think if we had less data about Pokemon out there, if, for example, we only had the sprites from like the original games, which are just black and white pixel art, that it, that jump, it would never make. But because we have thirty years of fan art and fan renderings and movies and all of these things, like it's understanding of the geometry of a Charmander is probably actually quite good, but it probably also breaks down with newer and newer Pokemon because it has less and less, resources to pull from and understand. Right. Later generations aren't quite as carefully and thoroughly indexed across, you

Speaker 1: know, decades and decades of media.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Exactly. And they're they're just newer. Even if it was the same rate. Right? They haven't had the same time to get that exposure. But a Charmander specifically, I think you'd have a very good chance.

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Speaker 1: You obviously do a lot of, you know, DIY open source projects like this. How has the response from the community been to this in particular? Have you thought about collaborating with others on something like, like a gen two of this? You think about open sourcing it? Like how is the, how have people received your Pokedex?

Speaker 3: No, I mean, I think people really like it. I think there is, you know, a really positive reaction from most people. I do think there there's an interesting cultural thing that I think is, is interesting that I've had with a few other projects, which is where I'll create something like the Pokedex, which I just do basically for fun. I mean, it's, it's part of my job as a YouTuber, but it is mostly entertainment. And the reaction people have is, like, can I buy that? Like, will you sell it to me? Are you planning on turning it into a product? You know, that type of thing. And to me, the answer is obviously no to both of those things. One, because, you know, it took me a long time to make it. I'm not going to guess if anything you would buy it for, it would not be worth it to me to sell. But also, like, that's not the point. And I think that's kind of the interesting reaction people have to this type of project and something that I think would be really cool to, to work on as a, as a culture is to say, like, we're getting to the point with three d printing technology and access to programming tools and like these cheap parts and all this stuff where it would be feasible. For you to really build something that you used every day, but like from scratch in quotes, Like you could make a laptop, you could make a case for your time. You could make these things. And I would love to see more people seeing a project like this and having that reaction that is like, oh, that's really cool. I could do something like that. Or I could, you know, like, take this idea and do my own thing versus the reaction I get now a lot, like I said, which is like, can I buy this? Which is also great. And I appreciate that, that support and enthusiasm. But my real goal is to have people walk away inspired to like learn about these technologies and. Technologies and to do their own thing because we're at a point more than ever where it is feasible to, like, make your own stuff. And I think that's super cool, you know?

Speaker 1: Yeah. Can I buy that is so flattering for a hardware project you built out of parts of this? It's really, really cool. And I would've I I'm reticent to even bring this up because it feels like summoning a very litigious Bloody Mary, but it is also the point at which an open source DIY project intersects with a large corporation that does have lawyers and IP that they like to protect. Like, how do you how do you navigate creating an open source project like this knowing that it is based on that preexisting intellectual property?

Speaker 3: Yeah. You know, I I think it's always a fine line. Nintendo specifically, who's obviously a big big owner of the Pokemon company who owns the Pokedex IP, They are known for being particularly litigious, which I which I get. And I I respect as someone who's, you know, worked for a lot of big companies, done a lot of complicated projects. I get why they need to do that. I think with something like this, you have, you have a bit more leeway, especially if you're not selling something, if you're not, you know, really monetizing it in any way. And you're, and especially something like this where it's clearly a prototype, clearly, a a demo. You know, I'm not going out and saying that this is, you know, anything. Mhmm. You know? Mhmm. Even something like, fan games that people will sometimes do. You know, they'll remake Mario or whatever, and Nintendo gets mad about that. Even that's quite a bit different because it's closer to a real product in a real space that Nintendo would get into. But, you know, I I'm not particularly concerned about that. I but that's, you know, I wouldn't I would never sell like, I would never productize this and sell it to begin with, but I would also not do it because as you point out, it's not my IP. And and I think there's just, like, a a bit of an ethical quandary there where I'm, like, I'm not particularly interested in in doing that. But if someone wants to take this, make their own version, do whatever, make it something like a Pokedex, but not. You know, a lot of people suggested in the comments, like, oh, it'd be great if this worked with real animals or if it worked with plants or whatever. Like, if you wanna take this and and run with this idea and turn it into something like that, that's an original idea that is not, you know, it might now have a reminiscent form factor, but it's, you know, it's its own thing. So I think those types of things are really cool. But, yeah, it's always a little bit of a minefield if you're doing anything that isn't completely original IP. Mhmm.

Speaker 1: To me, this is such a good, even more so than I think that those other games built on, you know, obviously they're reworked versions of the preexisting games, but even that is so much, more based on a creative output from the Nintendo corporation that this is fan culture. This is, you know Yeah. Somebody who just loves Pokemon and wanted to make a thing from the show and had access to the technology to make it.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. I I view it more akin to, like, prop making and cosplay.

Speaker 1: That's a good way to

Speaker 3: play it. Yeah. You would never look at someone dressed up as master chief and be like Wait a minute. You're about to get sued. Yeah. No. They'd be like, oh, that's cool. It's cool that you made that armor. And Yeah. This is, you know, it's a bit more functional. But, yeah, same same kind of space.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Just imagining while you're sprinting around a con.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Just tackling Totally. One person after another.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Before we figure out there's more of us than there are of them, You bring up an interesting point, you know, I think about you're talking at the very start of our conversation about sci fi technology that inspires and at some point becomes just technology. Uh-huh. And I think about this device, which is basically a multimodal AI with computer vision that you carry around in your pocket. And then I think about the Meta Ray Bans, which are a pair of glasses with a camera that does basically the same thing. You can ask it to take a photo and tell you what you're looking at. I think about, a device like the Rabbit AI, which none of us really know if that's any good yet, but where do you think devices that would evoke a Pokedex, you know, twenty years ago are going next? What do you think we might be carrying around in our pockets in ten years that sort of evokes the classic Pokedex?

Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, the smartphone is the obvious. Sure. Obvious parallel. Right. Yeah. And I don't think that's a form factor will be will be leaving anytime soon. And I think the truth is for the vast majority of people, even if devices like, the Rabbit, doohickey is really novel and really successful, like, it's much more likely that the UI or UX Yes. Improvements that that thing has are gonna merge back into the devices we already use. I'm like I'm carrying around a rabbit. But I I do think that kinda funnels into what I was saying earlier about this idea of like home brewing devices and electronics becoming more accessible. Because I think there is a value proposition as we get more connected to, you know, big companies and clouds and all that stuff. There, there becomes more of a value to detach from that and be like, no, my, you know, device I use to text my friends is not something I bought to app from Apple that's connected to Apple's clouds. It's this, you know, slightly esoteric device. But I know the only people who can possibly read this chat log is me and my friends who also have this device or whatever. And I think we, I would love to see more stuff like that come up more of that hobbyist hacker culture because it is more accessible now. And I think we could get a lot of creativity and novel ideas. I think most people would never get into that type of space, but I do think, you know, it would be feasible to to see people going down that route more, and we might get some really cool innovation out of it. But, yeah, practically, I imagine we'll see a lot more smartphones and a few VR headsets around. But beyond that, I I don't see any other huge waves coming down

Speaker 1: the road. You know? I I think I think you put it well that that hobbyist hacker side of it is, you know, I appreciate the bleeding edge slick polished $3,500 headset as much as the next guy. But I'm definitely much more emotionally invested in what people are able to put together Yeah. And share on a YouTube video. It's just it's I mean, you used the word warmth earlier. It's just there's a warmth to it.

Speaker 3: Yep. Yeah. It's it's the electronics equivalent of, like, cottage core. There's a reason people wanna be, you know, out in the woods on a farm. And it's because there is there's a warmth to it. There's a joy. And I think all these AI models and algorithms and stuff, they they do great in a lot of ways. You find a lot of stuff that's really cool through them, but they do lose some of that organicness. And I think it would be reasonable to see a pushback and see more people hunting for that again, through their electronics and the sites and the communities and everything that they get involved with.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Who is the musician? The the sort of, like, archetypal. Bonnie Vare, go into the woods and record an album in a cabin type thing. It's the, it's the hacker equivalent of that.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Definitely. It's that same human thing of like wanting small community and wanting small, you know, connected feelings versus being like part of Instagram where you're like, it's cool. I have an Instagram account, but it's this gigantic thing I can't understand. You know?

Speaker 1: Mhmm. Well, maybe we we wrap up there. So in terms of hacking stuff together, computational cottage core, what what are you building next?

Speaker 3: I mean, I always got a 100 things going. I was just talking to my fiance the other day and she was saying, she's like, I don't know how you move all these projects forward. And it's just, you know, you get blocked on one and you jump to the other, you get upset about one and you do the other one for a while. So there there's a lot coming down the pipeline. You know, explorations of historical tech and things that are now simple that were very, very difficult a few decades ago, I think is, a trend I would like to keep working on. So similar to the Pokedex, how that was not feasible, but has become reasonable. I think, like, that's cool. So I'm doing explorations around three d printing discs that store data on them. So basically creating my own version of CDs. Woah. Out of three d printed filament. Or doing, you know, similar Types of devices that are cheap, low powered devices, but customizable and have that warmth to them, that nostalgia to them. So I'm going to be doing a bunch, bunch more stuff with that as well, but yeah, nothing, nothing specific to, to announce, but there's always so many cool things to build. The list of ideas is pages and pages long. So, it should be a lot of fun stuff.

Speaker 1: And it has three d printed storage on it. That rules.

Speaker 3: Yeah. That's if I get that to work, it's gonna be cool.

Speaker 1: Yeah. That's really neat. Please send that to me if you do it.

Speaker 3: I'm staring at the three d printed disc right now thinking about how it doesn't quite work yet. But, hopefully hopefully we'll get that sorted. But, yeah, that's that's that same type of thing though. You know, physical media, that feeling of, you know, I have my favorite movie in my hand and all that stuff. It's that same warmth. And I I think that might be the overarching thing of all my projects is trying to get technology back to being cozy and fun again in that way. You know?

Speaker 1: Abe, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me. I love this project. And the chat was a lot of fun.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

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