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Comment by KoolKat23 | Hacker News Reader

Aside from something bad like this security hole, I can't understand the hate, it's pretty obvious the R1 was a fun novelty, a gimmick.

Anyone with a basic understanding of tech, would understand you're not going to get Apple level breakthrough engineering from a start-up and at that price point.

I feel this got swept up in the wave of hatred for the Humane AI Pin (again very obvious what it'd be). Humane's biggest fault was that they marketed it as being at Apple level quality, an impossible goal they set for themselves.

Reminds me of Magic Leap.

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I think the hate directed their way has more to do with the outsized claims of the founder, Jesse Lyu. For example, he claimed that you're buying a device with a "LAM" but it turned out to be playwright scripts wrapping APIs + OpenAI APIs, and the underlying action model was missing (or very nascent at ship). The team also took a lot of shortcuts security-wise and is getting wrecked for it now (it's not just one hole):

https://x.com/xyz3va/status/1805689140639408277

https://x.com/xyz3va/status/1805985433156759781 (this is the OP)

https://x.com/xyz3va/status/1805993239368860069

Doesn't help that he was shilling crypto right before rabbit. What people love about the form factor has mostly to do with Teenage Engineering's quirky design. Somehow Jesse is a board member there, it seems.

In general I don't recommend trusting their software. If you like the hardware, you can flash AOSP and use google assistant -- it's way more capable and AOSP isn't harvesting your credentials. https://github.com/RabbitHoleEscapeR1/r1_escape

Coffeezilla did a nice piece on this, piecing together some of the crypto threads. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLvFc_24vSM

This is the reason; the product is imbued with the negative externalities of the people and ideas associated with it.

Well and the realities of bad security, bad usability with touchscreen typically disabled, crappy battery life ^^'

>Somehow Jesse is a board member there, it seems.

With my eternal love/hate relationship with Teenage Engineering (cheap enough music gadgets vs overpriced metal folding table and OP1 price inflation) I'm almost excited to find more reasons to stop giving the company any more brain time / money ever again.

> I can't understand the hate, it's pretty obvious the R1 was a fun novelty, a gimmick.

I get pretty annoyed when people lie to me to sell me something even if it's obvious they're lying.

Even moreso if I want to try the thing they've actually built and want people experimenting with this stuff. If I didn't care I could just ignore it.

But if I do care and also I know their main claims are deceitful it means I have to waste energy wondering if the claims that aren't obvious nonsense are also deceitful.

On top of this they managed to make major news rounds with their bogus presentation. This means my family who don't usually consume tech news, and for whom none of it was obvious nonsense, got super hyped about it and I had to tell them no, this is just tech people lying to you.

We SHOULD encourage hacking on form factor, novelty gimmick devices or not. Lying and misrepresenting when doing so is the opposite of that, it makes it harder for the next folks to want to give it a go.

>I get pretty annoyed when people lie to me to sell me something even if it's obvious they're lying.

Exactly. When companies put out half-baked products to try to ride a hype wave, they're betting on idea that their customers are idiots with the same low standards. Companies need to hold themselves accountable and have enough respect for themselves and for customers to not inflict crap onto the world.

>it's pretty obvious the R1 was a fun novelty, a gimmick.

And the founders asking for billion dollar buyout? Just a little joke.

And the $200 you spent on a device that doesn't do what it was advertised as? Just a prank, bro.

The $1B buyout was Humane

> I can't understand the hate

I think it's because of the promises of the team (new Large Action Model) vs what's actually being delivered (the model is some scripts). The team has a history of over promising and underdelivering (or scamming - depending on your perspective). It's also economically unviable. Somehow you're meant to get free LLM calls for life but there's no way for them to actually cover those. There's not really any communication about how it might be a limited time thing for early adopters or how it could ever get to be sustainable.

If they had focused on what they have, they probably could have charged the same amount and people would generally be OK with it. But they've over promised and under delivered again. I think the reaction is pretty understandable.

> The team has a history of over promising and underdelivering (or scamming - depending on your perspective).

Their attitude of not communicating anything and basically inventing stuff the R1 can do without actually having the engineering to back it up is what is "scamming" to me. Over-promising and under-delivering is one thing, but lying about what something can do and then going back to the engineering team to "just make it happen" is what I am reading between the lines here.

> it's pretty obvious

...to you. Someone who lurks hacker news.

Given what my some of the people I work with think AI is, I can't even imagine how bad it is out there.

I speculate the hate comes from the people invested in smart phones as they are today. Magic leap didn't get mainstream hate like the rabbit did afaict

Sure it did. They promised something completely made up and at launch it looked to be about 1/10th of what they were saying it would be like. The Rabbit did the same by promising one thing and shipping another.

I think Humane seemed the more honest out of all of them with what actually shipped, but should have probably sold it at $200 instead of the price of a higher-end phone.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/8/17662040/magic-leap-one-cr...

You're thinking people don't want a startrek communicator (if it worked)? Do you have any evidence of that?

I just think they were too harsh in their judgement toward experimental and boundary pushing tech, treating it like it should be as polished as smartphones. Same people would applaud iPhone{n} for some incremental step forward even at a high price point

Because the magic leap was an innovative new product for early adopters.

The Rabbit promised to be a smartphone-killer, when all it was was a shitty android phone that only runs one app.

I think people are mad about being scammed, not out of having an unsuccessful product.

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