bcj

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Youtube recommended the verge's review of another new 'ai' gadget and I love algorithmic recommendations so you know I had to watch it.

And the reviewer correctly recognizes this is crap that will probably not be useful but it's so sad that the reviewer talks about how nice it would be to just have a device that was a 'spotify ipod' and it's like 1) that's just a shittier iPod 2) this literally is a device you could buy for ¼ of the price 3) there is no real recognition that the verge & co all went all-in on the phone as a replacement for all other devices by credulously republishing press releases as articles. The killer is inside the house dude. He even has the gall to talk about how a voice recorder is useful as a journalist so it's nice that this can be a voice-activated voice recorder (before it falls on its ass doing that). Just buy a fucking voice recorder dude what are you talking about?

And, setting aside the device itself, the reviewer is still big on the idea of these devices because obviously the dream is a device talking to me in a voice that makes the tiktok voice sound pleasing or let me order delivery without even having to interact with an app. A truly antisocial future. I guess it's not a fucking coincidence that the four apps this device pretends it can operate are Spotify, Uber, Doordash, and Midjourney. A real who's who of convenience through precaritizing and hiding labour.

I feel like the reviewer really dropped the ball by not connecting the two giant dots here. Rabbit was the company that releases a laughably bad steve jobs impression keynote at CES about how we all hate phones now because Apps have such hard-to-use interfaces and how the Rabbit would solve this through it's quote unquote large action model. What is the biggest problem with this device? It's not that it doesn't work—I took that as a given. It's that the interface for it was unusable. This company is not responsible for most of the technology it's shipping. It doesn't make ChatGPT and any models they have are just built on top of that. It didn't write the machine vision library that it sounds like is actually responsible for the app automation. The one thing this company is responsible for is putting these things together and they absolutely fucked it up. To treat the makers of this device as anything other than charlatans is a disservice to the low bar of tech journalism.

It takes some effort to come off as more of a tool than the absolute trash you're reviewing but tech folks are so scared of being the person who said the iPod sucked that they will bravely tell you that every piece of junk with a bold pitch has potential

* probably not you the reader


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in reply to @bcj's post:

Literally what's the point of a "spotify ipod". Hardware that's only useful to stream something from some closed service that'll get support dropped within like two years tops makes zero sense. If someone made one it'd be getting bad reviews for literally the same reasons as this

Anyway anyone who can afford to spend money on a pointless novelty device like a "spotify ipod" can afford to buy their own music, and should