Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video] • Hacker News Board

Re: Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video]

#51

Post by m463 » Tue, Apr 30, 2024, 4:40 AM UTC

windexh8er wrote: post #41

saltsaman wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 obje…

You're not the target market.

I've seen interesting products, and either been curious or ready to buy. Unfortunately, the only available information to me is the marketing.

Seriously, look on amazon. You can see pictures of the product, read the description, and read the reviews. this leads to 2/3 of the information being by the marketing team, and quite possibly much of the final 1/3, the reviews.

Being able to view a video of the product by someone (anyone!) on youtube gives you a chance of critical information you need for a decision.

Who cares if he's lackluster. If he even in passing gives you an idea of what the product might actually be like, you've been helped.

By the way, even consumer reports, formerly the gold standard in unbiased reviews is part of the gravy train. When they switched from the magazine to online, they acted like a funnel to purchases. sigh.

Re: Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video]

#52

Post by cjk2 » Tue, Apr 30, 2024, 4:45 AM UTC

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

I think a better question is: “what problem in my existence does this solve”.

This one is a definite none.

Re: Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video]

#53

Post by chaosprint » Tue, Apr 30, 2024, 4:46 AM UTC

Rabbit's UX use cases are not novel enough. AI Pin seems to be a little less complete, but at least the innovation in the direction of combining software and hardware is worthy of recognition. As for Rabbit, it completely imitates the ideas of Google Assistant and Lens. From an industrial perspective, look at Apple's headset, even if the experience is not there yet, the entire industrial design and integration level are very amazing. But Rabbit, which looks like a college student's graduation project, is actually very easy to complete with ESP32 at its core. If this esp32 is combined with groq, maybe the experience will be even better.

I think this project itself has a lot to do with teenage engineering. The success of TE (low tech, high marketing) gave them inspiration. In terms of musicality, TE is far behind, for example, Elektron, which is also from Sweden, not to mention the master of analog sound by companies such as Moog. TE may only have a very impressive hardware innovation in TP7 (which is not so popular). As for other popular pocket operators, KO2, and OP1, there are too few hardcore innovations, and hype and trend culture have the upper hand.

With that being said, looking at the sales of Moog and the outcome of its acquisition, it must be admitted that marketing is still very important. But musical instruments are different from mass-market commodities. After all, the former can be collected and one does not have to consider their practicality too much.

Now the easy access of AI service at the backend will obviously lead to more and more low tech, which is normal and just a phenomenon. But I will give more praise to hard-core innovation. If there is hard-core innovation and excellent UX use cases, it will be icing on the cake.

Re: Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video]

#54

Post by __loam » Tue, Apr 30, 2024, 4:48 AM UTC

charlie0 wrote: post #46

__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.

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.

Time to think is unfortunately a luxury.

Re: Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video]

#55

Post by charlie0 » Tue, Apr 30, 2024, 4:50 AM UTC

__loam wrote: post #54

charlie0 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Time to think is unfortunately a luxury.

The trap here is thinking that starting fast is also the way to reach the goal the fastest. That doesn't always work and is especially true the more complex a project is.

Re: Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video]

#56

Post by giantrobot » Tue, Apr 30, 2024, 4:59 AM UTC

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.

Not only is chat a poor UX, I don't want to talk to shit to use it. In a pinch I'll use Siri to set a timer or alarm but in general I just don't want to talk to things. I also don't really want my things talking to me most of the time.

I can read faster than the computer can talk and type/touch faster (and more clearly) than I can talk. Unless the voice output is really finely tuned a lot of stuff I usually search for sounds like gibberish when read back with TTS. I've yet to find even AI TTS that recognizes source code or technical abbreviations and reads them correctly.

Then there's of course the privacy aspect, or complete lack of privacy.

Re: Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video]

#57

Post by ein0p » Tue, Apr 30, 2024, 4:59 AM UTC

cjk2 wrote: post #52

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

I think a better question is: “what problem in my existence does this solve”. This one is a definite none.

There are multiple problems this could solve, actually. I can think up of at least one every day that a sufficiently advanced agentic AI could do for me, freeing me up from mundane bullshit. Imagine having a secretary onto whom you could offload bullshit tasks using freeform human language without any accommodations needed for the AI, and with near perfect contextual knowledge of what you’re currently dealing with. That’s the promise. But that promise is years away and in the meanwhile I’d be inclined to conserve my runway a bit more, especially when entering the era where borrowing costs are relatively high.

Re: Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video]

#58

Post by cjk2 » Tue, Apr 30, 2024, 5:08 AM UTC

ein0p wrote: post #57

cjk2 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a better question is: “what problem in my existence does this solve”. This one is a definite none.

There are multiple problems this could solve, actually. I can think up of at least one every day that a sufficiently advanced agentic AI could do for me, freeing me up from mundane bullshit. Imagine having a secretary onto whom you could offload bullshit tasks using freeform human language without any accommodations needed for the AI, and with near perfect contextual knowledge of what you’re currently dealing with. T…

I had a human one of them. I spent more time interacting with it and dealing with misunderstandings and corrections than I gained from not solving the problems myself.

As pointed out elsewhere I was gaslit into changing the subject by an LLM the other day and then it got stuff wrong. End game is it created more work than not using it.

And that’s what we need to be careful of. The promise versus benefits of technology are not always obviously swayed towards the benefit end.

Re: Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video]

#59

Post by recursivecaveat » Tue, Apr 30, 2024, 5:25 AM UTC

dotnet00 wrote: post #36

monkmartinez wrote: post #23

It should be called the MINECRAPIFICATION of EVERYTHING! Who knows if Notch was the first to herald in this new paradigm of half-finished products? It's the first thing that comes to mind every time I experience, read about or witness a product, service or idea that isn't quite fully baked. I say, "Self, they are just cashing in while they iterate and extend... or not."

Am I missing something? What does Minecraft have to do with half-baked products? It seems like they went with an approach of having a free alpa/beta release until they had a release ready game, then have spent a decade adding more content to it?

Minecraft sold over 850,000 copies before even exiting alpha. (though these labels are really kindof arbitrary in the end) I think this was fine for that game: the game was fun, $10, and largely bought on its own merits. Sandbox gameplay + procgen exploration + multiplayer + modding can wring an incredible amount of life out of relatively few assets. It definitely led to a trend of over-promised and commercialized early-access though. When you can get a big chunk of the bag for pre-selling based on a small chunk of the work with minimal risk, the incentives are obvious.

Re: Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video]

#60

Post by fooker » Tue, Apr 30, 2024, 5:52 AM UTC

There are two things about this I am looking forward do.

Generative UI, and teach mode as mentioned in this video. If they manage to get these to work, I believe a future iteration of this product can seriously challenge smartphones.

I doubt the science is there yet though. It's easy to over promise here.