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Comment by chewmieser | Hacker News Reader

There really isn't anything of substance in this article. Just a low-quality complaint about AI and AI devices with such hot-takes as:

> You will notice that many of these tasks are just interacting with the lazy Silicon Valley dipshit treat ecosystem that already exists.

Honestly I'm hesitant about AI devices as well but dismissing it entirely is very Luddite-like. Will these smart AI devices succeed? Who knows... It's a risk but I can absolutely see areas where these devices will succeed - like bringing tech to the tech illiterate (or even just illiterate).

And Rabbit's price-point puts it in a very competitive position to be the iPhone of AI devices. Worth watching to see how these things continue to develop.

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It’s pretty stupid that apparently we need a separate device because Apple watches over our hardware with loving grace. This should be a drop-in Siri replacement, but the only way that will happen is if Apple deigns to buy them, and then I still won’t have choice.

Luddites aren’t anti-tech but pro-worker, so being skeptical of AI is a fine thing to Ludd.

Luddites aren't pro-worker, they're pro-worker's-status-quo. They want workers to be artificially insulated against change at someone else's expense, which is really to the long-term detriment of workers.

The author is a self-deprecating gamer, not a Luddite. He runs a YouTube channel on gaming called "Highight Reel". In reading the review of the presentation I did not detect any predictions about the future success or failure of the "Rabbit R1", except some line about whether he thinks the Apple and Google app stores will accept an app. Instead, he is just asserting that this thing is not for him. He is giving his opinion. IMO, his review is entertaining and refreshing considering the garbage put out by "tech journalists". Making predictions is low brow "content". Like reading horoscopes.

It's enlightened ludditism.

Think of the ophthalmologist who wears glasses but sells you LASIK surgery. (He's skeptical of it due to an intimate understanding of the risks.) And now they're complaining that a type of LASIK surgery is being inflicted on everyone, as all consumer devices shoot beams at your eyes to auto-correct your vision.

This site is a bunch of ex-Gawker, ex-Vox and ex-Vice people submitting articles en masse to places like Reddit and HN. Why would it have anything of substance?

I think it's correct to say it is Luddite like to complain about a worse interface to the pocket computers we all already carry. As the article correctly states - what's the point? Why waste resources building these weird little AI gadgets that could be reduced to an app on all the devices we already have.

I mean, I get it, someone thinks they're going to be the AI iPhone and become the next Apple. What I think they're missing is many people enjoy using their phones to watch cat videos on Tik Tok, and very few people want to use their communicator badge to sell bitcoin.

Have you ever seen anyone struggle to even use an iPhone? I have. These interfaces aren't completely natural enough for everyone to grok. As I stated, I saw a potential use-case with the illiterate - tech or otherwise. I think this is valid reason enough, but not everything has to be some major innovation vs the previous one.

This is a startup and tech community. What's the point of Dropbox when "you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem"?

Just because there's alternatives doesn't mean this product doesn't have a space in the market.

I think the overemphasis on dumb, natural interfaces actually makes the situation worse. "What's a computer?" We're just reinforcing the idea that computers are these magical things that people couldn't possibly understand. Most people can! They just have learned helplessness about technology.

The value in Dropbox is paying someone else to handle durability and availability for your data. It's very undifferentiated now.

Informed tech discussion needs to scrub "Luddite" from its vocabulary as some kind of "gotcha" criticism. And not only that, serious study of the Luddite movement will actually inform today's conversations as we continue to see the rollout of bogus technologies which are a sign of enshittification & VC hype rather than meaningful progress.

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