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Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video]

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Re: Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video]

#41

Post by windexh8er »

saltsaman wrote: post #19
arrakeenrevived wrote: post #11

His spiel starting at 14 minutes in about how seemingly every tech product these days is a partially-baked, unfinished, barely even usable, yet full-priced product with a vague promise of "it'll receive updates and be better" rings very true, and is frustrating as hell. Marques specifically mentions it happening in video games, cars (Tesla self-driving), smartphones, and these AI things as particular offenders. I've…

It's his core philosophy: "Never. Ever. Buy a tech product based on the promise of future software updates." https://x.com/MKBHD/status/1383616274693951494

It's unfortunate that the only reason this problem exists is because people buy into the marketing. But the amazingly ironic part about this is that MKBHD / Marques Brownlee has hocked this type of garbage (aka sponsorships) for years, propping up a lot of this bad behavior along the way. Personalities like him are "celebrities" from a lot of consumer's perspectives, and they trust what he says verbatim. From an objective stance his reviews are lackluster: they contain very little data and no fundamental framework that underscore his "reviews". He's a YouTuber with an opinion that is being influenced by sponsor marketing money. Yet his well crafted productions are pretty and easy to consume, which sells and Google puts it front and center. To say that he has a "core philosophy" is laughable. The entertainment I would watch is if people like him had to disclose all earned income along with these videos. I'd gather a lot of his loyal following would start putting those dollars to sense with respect to how his videos are positioned: call-out, hype generating, brand supremacy, etc...

Re: Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video]

#42

Post by tazu »

bane wrote: post #39
__loam wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the mindset is like, we've done a bunch of development, let's sell it to deliver some value now rather than wait for it to be perfect. It makes sense from that agile manifesto perspective but I miss the days of buying something like a game boy advance cartridge that ships once and mostly just works.

The product owner in a company should be defining success for the development goals in agile, not beta tested on the paying public.

I agree. I wonder if the AI-aspect muddled things, like engineers saying "we just need more data for , let's push for a cheap product and iterate fast"...

Re: Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video]

#43

Post by throwaway5959 »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #29
budududuroiu wrote: post #20

Off topic but all these LLM-pin/tool/device keep building around chat. Chat is a genuinely horrible interface for conveying information to users, but it provides a nice layer of polite plausible deniability when the response is total garbage.

Likewise, after mastering how to find answers by typing in the correct few keywords, why go backwards and use slow/ambiguous written or spoken conversation as a query language?

Because frankly Google and the open web is so bogged down by ads that it’s become unusable. Try visiting any news site or a site like Fandom. Some sites I can’t even read because the ads take up the whole page on mobile and I can’t close them. Ads just totally ruin it. Meanwhile, with ChatGPT, I can ask it questions and it just gives me an answer. It’s not perfect, but neither are search results.

Re: Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video]

#44

Post by cjk2 »

ninth_ant wrote: post #32
phmqk76 wrote: post #22

I love how people compare products like this or Apple Vision Pro to the original iPhone to make the point that products with limited appeal can flourish into something incredibly useful. The comparison is bad. The iPhone promised to be three things: a phone, an iPod, and a web browser. And it performed these tasks well! It didn’t oversell what it was, and it was a revelation. I owned the first gen shortly after it ca…

The Apple Watch is a useful device. It integrates seamlessly with my phone, has various fitness tracking features including water activities, delivers important notifications without making noise, and gives me access to use voice commands on my phone. Its overnight charging gives me a nightstand alarm clock. It's not a world-changing device, but it's a very useful accessory.

50/50. I wore one for nearly 4 years. Then one day I took it off because I was travelling somewhere really dangerous. And I never put it back on again. Turned out it was more ritual than utility for me.

Re: Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video]

#45

Post by kevinkeller »

ein0p wrote: post #34

When I see such things I immediately ask myself a question, why is this not an app? There’s no good answer to that question in this case. IDK why they even bothered with the hardware side. It’d seem to me that you could do it later if app gets sufficient traction

These AI assistants (Rabbit R1, Humane AI Pin), as they exist now, probably can be replaced by apps. However, if you give them the benefit of the doubt and think about what they're supposed to be (or eventually will be), owning the platform is a must.

An example: Google/Apple doesn't allow third-party apps access to call audio. So you couldn't implement live translation/transcription, by just being an app.

Google/Apple will jealously guard their turf in their ecosystems (to make space for their own AI assistants probably), so this level of third-party access is unlikely to be forthcoming.

Re: Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video]

#46

Post by charlie0 »

__loam wrote: post #14
arrakeenrevived wrote: post #11

His spiel starting at 14 minutes in about how seemingly every tech product these days is a partially-baked, unfinished, barely even usable, yet full-priced product with a vague promise of "it'll receive updates and be better" rings very true, and is frustrating as hell. Marques specifically mentions it happening in video games, cars (Tesla self-driving), smartphones, and these AI things as particular offenders. I've…

I think the mindset is like, we've done a bunch of development, let's sell it to deliver some value now rather than wait for it to be perfect. It makes sense from that agile manifesto perspective but I miss the days of buying something like a game boy advance cartridge that ships once and mostly just works.

I'm seeing this play out at my workplace. Going down the wrong path just because we couldn't add an extra week to think things through and go down the right path from the beginning.

Re: Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video]

#47

Post by bonestamp2 »

ein0p wrote: post #34

When I see such things I immediately ask myself a question, why is this not an app? There’s no good answer to that question in this case. IDK why they even bothered with the hardware side. It’d seem to me that you could do it later if app gets sufficient traction

Ya, my hope is that this device pushes Apple and Google to bake some of these features into our phones. For example, I should be able to tell my phone to email or text the photo I'm looking at to and it just does it.

Re: Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video]

#48

Post by cjk2 »

budududuroiu wrote: post #20

Off topic but all these LLM-pin/tool/device keep building around chat. Chat is a genuinely horrible interface for conveying information to users, but it provides a nice layer of polite plausible deniability when the response is total garbage.

Yes the chat interface is terrible. I actually had an LLM try and gaslight me into changing the subject a couple of weeks back. I’m not sure how I managed to get down that hole but it was frustrating. And eventually the information was wrong.

If I wanted that experience I’d talk to a human.

Re: Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video]

#49

Post by tazu »

kevinkeller wrote: post #45
ein0p wrote: post #34

When I see such things I immediately ask myself a question, why is this not an app? There’s no good answer to that question in this case. IDK why they even bothered with the hardware side. It’d seem to me that you could do it later if app gets sufficient traction

These AI assistants (Rabbit R1, Humane AI Pin), as they exist now, probably can be replaced by apps. However, if you give them the benefit of the doubt and think about what they're supposed to be (or eventually will be), owning the platform is a must. An example: Google/Apple doesn't allow third-party apps access to call audio. So you couldn't implement live translation/transcription, by just being an app. Google/App…

I agree as someone who's wanted to develop an iOS app for years but can't get over the App Store monopoly risk.

But, from a business sense, doesn't it seem like they're doing it backwards? Why not make a best-in-class AI assistant app, build a big userbase, and take the money to research hardware and harass Apple concurrently? Why start with hardware first?

Re: Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video]

#50

Post by cjk2 »

arrakeenrevived wrote: post #11

His spiel starting at 14 minutes in about how seemingly every tech product these days is a partially-baked, unfinished, barely even usable, yet full-priced product with a vague promise of "it'll receive updates and be better" rings very true, and is frustrating as hell. Marques specifically mentions it happening in video games, cars (Tesla self-driving), smartphones, and these AI things as particular offenders. I've…

I laughed at the big cloud providers comment because my job these days is filing support tickets with AWS when their ancillary services don’t work properly for some reason.

While I don’t think maturity has improved or got worse really, considering the general state of things 20 years ago, it should have by now.

As someone who likes to solve a problem rather than create two new ones, I will always go for a mature solution these days.

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