291–300 of 547 posts
Note that this is not a Teenage Engineering product. This is a product sold by Rabbit - and they hired TE to help as a design agency.
Thank you, this is an important detail. Teenage Engineering isn't mentioned anywhere on the linked page, so I was confused about the HN title. I figured Rabbit was a new venture by TE.
I'm not sure people want an LLM assistant that can actually do things like spend their money. A minor convenience when it works well. A major inconvenience when it doesn't. (And it doesn't take a lot of imagination to come up with nightmare scenarios.) Love the gadget, though. I feel like I want to eat it or build a Lego castle around it, or just look at it more.
They have a confirmation dialogue in the keynote. As long as they do that well and for every important action, I don't think it will be a problem
There's a fundamental tension here: either you limit the LLM to a set of fixed actions that a user can individually understand and confirm. Or you let it figure out what to do and how to do it given a higher-level goal.
In the first case, it's limited and not really better than a well-designed site or app. In the second it's powerful but can run amok.
E.g., did it really fill out that four page order form for that e-bike you asked it to order? Maybe it uses the debit card instead of your credit card and your checking account is overdrawn. Maybe it sets the delivery address to your brother's address. Maybe it orders two bikes or 10 or the wrong model or wrong size.
OR
It asks/confirms each step of the way so there's little chance for mistakes.
This is an inherent problem with any kind of delegation. You either micro manage the details or trust your agent to get them right.
This is HN... so what OS do we think this is running? Android under the hood? Anyone know more about hardware or screen res? I wonder how hard it would be to root this device and use it for the hardware.
Based on the rabbit keynote showing a colour screen - take a Playdate device, turn 90 degrees counterclockwise and reduce the height-now-width since you don't need a controller, just a roller wheel, pushbutton, and rotating camera.
Quick web search states a Playdate device has a 168MHz ARM Cortex M7 and a 400x240 LCD B&W screen.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think there has been a single successful hardware startup in the last decade, so the answer to your question is safely "no" without even going into specifics. Which is sad, because I'm sure there's room for a lot more innovative devices in the world outside of a single glass rectangle in your pocket that everyone must plug into in some way. The economics of the industry just makes it very hard for them to sur…
There are tons of successful hardware startups in recent history. You just don't hear about them because they're not selling to you. They make business, commercial, and industrial hardware. Consumer hardware is very hard because consumers are extremely demanding of hardware. Just look at how difficult it is to convince people to spend even $5-10 on useful software or sign up for a $100/year SaaS product with near zer…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The economics of the industry just makes it very hard for them to survive Care to expand on that?
Hardware companies have (1) greater costs to get off the ground (2) longer periods of development (3) higher incremental cost per sale (so harder to scale) (4) slower iteration speed, and (5) just overall a lot riskier than pure software. A VC fund is going to see a startup with a groundbreaking innovate hardware device next to one building a cookie cutter SaaS app and still invest in the latter, because it just make…
Rabbit means to solve that by creating a "LAM", a "Large Action model", which is a service by Rabbit that will click interfaces for you. I'm not sure this is the right approach - if it is successful, it will lead to more centralisation around Rabbit.
I agree this is a problem, but I feel a better approach would be to have a market of agents that for a small fee actually handle the whole transaction for you. So there might be multiple parties that say they can buy Delta Flight DL101 tomorrow 21:10 for various prices - some might be a service like the Rabbit LAM, others might be booking platforms, and there might even be airlines themselves. And now an agent-concierge that you choose once at the start will look at all the parties, and then pick and buy the right flight for you. This will make the problem a problem of an open market, where good speedy service is promoted, and prices get ever lower. And if the Rabbit LAM gets outcompeted by an ever better speedier solution, that would be a good thing. (This will also allow us to move away from our current dreaded attention-based economy where e.g. a booking websites tries to exploit your required presence during waiting times, which the LAMs would also solve, but, like I said, let's not move towards more centralisation.)
I feel like the R1 is getting a lot of weird hate here on HN. I get it, it's a bit pretentious and wants to be very Apple-like, yadda yadda. Probably not that much value generation, it's overpriced, and no one wants to carry another thing in their pocket. And yes, the company will likely go bankrupt (or pivot into something less exciting). It's also all in the cloud (no local inference) so it doesn't really even "do"…
I'm not sure what conclusions to draw from this observation however.
I feel like the R1 is getting a lot of weird hate here on HN. I get it, it's a bit pretentious and wants to be very Apple-like, yadda yadda. Probably not that much value generation, it's overpriced, and no one wants to carry another thing in their pocket. And yes, the company will likely go bankrupt (or pivot into something less exciting). It's also all in the cloud (no local inference) so it doesn't really even "do"…