I sat behind a department head of theirs on a plane once. He was ranting to the flight attendant about how inefficient their baggage storage solution was because of how he had to check his carry-on. The flight attendant very calmly said "That's an interesting idea, sir." as he was mid diatribe about the lack of integrated sensor technology in overhead bins. He ended with a "I'm going to Tweet about this, this is totally ----ing unacceptable." A few minutes later he stood up to take pictures of the overhead bins and the flight attendant made sure he had a good clear view. "Let me help you, gotta get a good pic for the gram". Mr. Humane, with all the indignant condescension he could muster, said "Uh, it's for Twitter, not Instagram." Flight attendant responded "Ooh, Twitter, my apologies." I found the tweet while waiting for take off. I wonder if he ever got around to disrupting the space.
This is what I get for connecting in San Francisco. The flight attendant did give me a dozen packs of those little ginger-snap cookies, though, so I may be biased.
Would that be this guy? I was laughing at his tweet yesterday where he asserts that all the negativity around their bad product is our lack of "optimism"
edit: not sure if the previous comment was edited or I imagined it said it was their marketing guy before, but I'm editing his name out of the comment to not potentially tarnish his search engine results
I feel for the guys at Humane, it was my first thought after seeing mrwhosetheboss and MKBHD.
It's probably terrible, but oh so hypocritical. I can think of many occasions in the last 15 years these reviewers have cited the potential of gimmicks and latched on to the manufacturers promise to improve.
Would you happen to have any examples showcasing their hypocrisy?
Though hyperbolic, I thought the reviews were balanced. Products shouldn’t primarily be built on hype and optimism, they should fulfill a job to be done. The software for AI Pin will improve but so will AI capabilities for smartphones in parallel.
I don't disagree with you on the review being balanced overall or having merit. It's more the framing, very hyperbolic as you say. They all have "worst product ever reviewed" in the title perhaps it's the only way to stay relevant to the algorithms these days.
Don't have time to go look for one. But can think of many occasions they'd mention the manufacturer has promised to update and improve this and then give them a free pass on whatever gimmicky aspect of the product they're looking at, usually software. Overlooking that aspect rather than lambasting them.
I mean perhaps a slight stretch, but their coverage of the Apple Vision Pro, have they had much reason to use it, aside from the demos? There's also some UX issues mentioned but they're given a free pass as they expect Apple to improve it with time.
They'll say "not there yet" rather than "worst product ever".
I returned my AVP but these things don’t happen in a vacuum. Humane is a company that might not exist in 6 months whereas Apple has a proven track record on iterating and improving on the devices they release. The Apple Watch Series 0 is a good example of this IMHO.
I’m not saying the AVP will fix all its issues but it is so much more impressive than a cellular device hooked up to OpenAi’s APIs.
Also, let’s not forget that Humane wasn’t even planing to use AI for their product until the last year or two when AI took off. Maybe you can say it was a smart pivot but to me to reeked of just jumping on the AI bandwagon (which, does make some sense I’ll grant you).
He seems like a guy super invested in changing our trajectory from techno-dystopia to techno-utopia. I really respect that shining optimism, but it may have gotten in his eyes a bit with Humane.
Charging customers full price, including a monthly subscription, for a product that he admits is "not where it needs to be — full stop" seems more techno-dystopian than techno-utopian to me.
Should a marketing person be “full stop”-ing the criticism of the product? Yes, I get it’s an affinity exercise, but one I don’t think marketing should be doing unless there’s something tragically wrong about it.
If I was working on the product, I’d probably feel okay full stopping. If I saw the person representing us full stopping Id probably think something like hey, nobody died here. And also I feel like a full stop is reserved for maybe one or two people at a company.
add to that, making an obviously inferior first gen product, so that they could sell you a "new and improved" second gen and get you on an upgrade cycle for this completely extraneous thing that costs as much as a phone (that it will never, ever get rid of)
They have been serving those on airlines for a while now. A solid choice. Hopefully a 'BuyItForLife' kind of choice for the airlines.
Wonderful on planes and wonderful at home. Also great when dunked in milk. Make sure you let a small bit (or one whole) 'accidentally' fall off into the milk and rescue it later. Hmmm....
You can buy them in stores. Be warned though that eating them too often can ruin them. They're an awesome random treat but a little much when you have a whole package of them. Learn from my mistakes.
It's actually a specialty from belgium / north of France called speculoos, biscoff being just a brand of that type of biscuits that managed to export them worldwide.
In the north of France where I lived for a while, it's an absolute staple akin to what peanut butter is to an american maybe or Matcha to a Japanese. Speculoos butter is spread on bread, lots of pastries are speculoos flavoured etc.
When you’re in SF, you can go to the Pier and there’s a little coffee shop near the entrance near the aquarium-Biscoff Coffee Corner—where they will serve you one with every coffee drink you buy, unprompted.
In truth the coffee there ain’t great, and the prep is a bit hit or miss, but the folks behind the counter are nice, and you can buy all of the cookies and cookie butter you could want; but it’s probably best not to overdo it. I think they even have a cookie butter latte but never tried it since that sounds too sweet.
Right? You're hurdling through the sky at 600mph in a vehicle which is safer than driving a car, at a cost less than a half-week's pay for the median income in the US. This is still utterly magical, even if we don't seem to care any more.
I remember the first few times I flew a plane, I simply stared in awe out the window for the entire flight. I remember telling myself "No matter how many more times I fly, I must never forget how amazing this feels", and I like to think that I've kept that amazement alive even though I've probably flown over a hundred times now.
I like the Captain Disillusion quip about these things:
"What began as a primitive box with a light source projecting low quality pictures onto a matte surface, has been developed for over a century into a high resolution, self-illuminating, interactive panel so thin and light, it's easily integrated into powerful mobile devices we can take with us wherever we go.
"And now the developers of the [originally Cicret, here HumaneAI] want to take the next logical step: detaching the image from the mobile device, lowering its quality, and using a box with a light source to project it onto a matte surface."
Thank you for the introduction. I finally have proof that all those "videos from the future" are fake.
I knew they were, just didn't know what planar tracking was.
On another note: the Humane AI is released. Maybe the scam is that it's damn slow?
Seems a bit much calling it a scam. That to me implies malicious intent which I don’t think is in place here. Bad/imperfect products happen even to well meaning companies.
Must admit I’m surprised by the aggressiveness of it all. It’s almost like an echo chamber where people have decided it’s ok to pile on
> Seems a bit much calling it a scam. That to me implies malicious intent which I don’t think is in place here. Bad/imperfect products happen even to well meaning companies.
There's no malicious intent in producing glossy promos videos of a device you know a priori does not (and cannot) work, becaue it violates a few laws of physics? I feel like some folks around here have become very innured to false advertising
Strange hill to die on. Lots of people scam by expecting to right their wrongs in the end. Hell even Theranos may have believed with enough scam money they could eventually have made right with the tech. Still a scam. Same here. If it’s not what you’re selling, it’s a lie, and a lie is a scam.
Not at all strange. The problem is that scam has certain meaning and if we use scam more liberally we dilute the meaning.
If every company is a scam(as almost everyone intentionally overhypes or does something similar to humane), then no company is a scam. Is google a scam as they scripted the gemini video?
I think the issue here is that arguably startup culture has _redefined_ scam to _not include_ "fake it till you make it gotta get funding" bullshit. In a previous era that stuff might arguably have been non-controversially been though of as a kind of scam. My own experience with startups is that they often hew as close to the line of scam as they can get away with and this behavior has been normalized.
This has nothing to do with startup or current times. That's why I gave example of Google. Google is not a scam in my definition but still has clearly faked gemini demo. Even Wright brothers admitted to faking a lot of news and claims before they could make real working planes.[1][2]
It still counts as a scam even if someone eventually succeeds. Whether the given thing is a scam depends on whether, at the moment of utterance, the statement is a lie meant to accomplish some goal or not. It doesn't exclude the possibility that success might happen someday. This is what I mean about the bizarre morals of startup hustler types. Lying to extend your runway is still lying and normal people still think its a scam.
Do you use any word to distinguish what google did in my example vs what theranos/FTX did? Or would you put both in the same category as one small lie is same as basing existence of a company on lie.
> The problem is that scam has certain meaning and if we use scam more liberally we dilute the meaning
Language is not something you can manipulate so easily and you absolutely cannot fight language changing, but also I promise that no one is diluting the meaning "scam".
If my boss uses my social security number to get a credit card it's not "diluting" the word fraud just because SBF also did fraud at a much larger scale.
No kidding. I get the sentiment but the argument doesn’t hold water. A scam is a scam. There are big scams and small. There are lies big and small too. We can even call the small ones white lies. But they are still lies.
Is selling something knowing that it can never deliver on the promise a scam? I think so. P.T. Barnum hawked shows outside the tent that couldn't deliver inside. Theranos could never deliver. Nor Magic Leap. Nor Elon on his crazy promises!
Despite this (and SpaceX seems to be the company of his that he is least involved in on a day to day basis) he has made many documented false promises. Playing with rockets shouldn’t excuse that https://elonmusk.today/
SpaceX was the company he was most involved, and still is pretty involved. Just watch any factory tour he made, be it the 2005 ones or the new Texas ones. Or hear what people who worked with him talk.
And I can't trust that site. An example:
3,129 days since Elon Musk said Teslas would have 1,000 kilometer (621 mile) range within a year or two. (9/23/2015)
"My guess is probably we could break 1,000 kilometers within a year or two. I'd say 2017 for sure."
An altered quote taken out of context. Here what he actually said from the interview[1]:
Q: When will we break the 1000km range mark for an electric car?
M: A thousand kilometers, hmm. Well, it depends under what circumstances for a thousand kilometers. As it is, the record right now for Model S is 800 km. That is the furthest that anyone has driven a Model S...
Q: So we could be close?
M: Yeah, we're pretty close. Now, in order to do that they did drive at a relatively slow speed. So, you know, we're taking, I think they drove maybe at 40 or 50 km/h or something like that. But I think, my guess is probably we could break a 1000km within... a year or two?
Q: Okay, so within 2016 maybe even?
M: I say if you say 2017 I'd say 2017 for sure.
Teslas can self-drive from NY to LA all on their own? That's out, and everyone has it? That's what was promised.
If you sell someone a cherry pie to be delivered tomorrow, take nearly a decade, and end up handing them a bag of cherries and a dusting of flour with a label of "cherry pie" on it, you didn't meet your promises.
Do we credit calculus to Isaac Newton, the guy who invented it, or to Charles II, the random schmuck who happened to be king at the time? Why on earth should we give founders credit for work done by other people?
Musk is a lazy ketamine addict. He doesn't do anything other than tweet at himself from his alt accounts and fail upward, disproving meritocracy in the process.
They can, and they should. Sometimes it is done. But to me it feels that many times a disproportionate amount of credit goes to founders/CEOs. People even fighting over whether for example Elon is successful or not, and completely disregarding everyone else in the organization. Or course the organizations are complex, but also mostly opaque - we do not know who does what.
When has Elon said that the failures are the faults of his employees? Hell, he seldom claims that it's his success. Every Starship test flight he's congratulated the team for a job well done.
It's the random people constantly looking for excuses to not believe his successes ("he doesn'thave much to do with SpaceX" or "he stole Tesla"), as well as idiotic article headlines ("Elon Musk's SpaceX does X" etc) that have made up those ideas.
- he can identify incredibly good companies and products, and (usually) is able to lift them up, fund them, and leave them mostly be. It's not him running Tesla day-to-day (nor was tesla started by him), nor is it him running SpaceX, nor...
- at the same time, everything that he's involved in directly is just abysmally stupid
Your post may or may not be correct, but does not answer the question in the comment you were responding to and has zero supporting arguments for both assertions you make.
I watched a "locked in" man use a computer mouse with a brain implant in 2002. It remains to be seen if this is actually better than what's been done before other than torturing a bunch of monkeys running needless experiments.
Also I doubt Musk had much to do with the brain implant other than being someone to push people forward and being a bag of money for it. Did he design the implant? Did he insert it? Did he code it?
Agreed, Musk seems to have bought and paid for mostly legitimate companies, and most "broken promises" seem to come from how desperate he is for attention on Twitter, often at the reputational detriment of said companies. If anything, he's just lucky his first big break company was PayPal, not Theranos.
Probably most people are sad he went from cool sci-fi CEO to weird divorced dad energy on bird website CEO.
3,129 days since Elon Musk said Teslas would have 1,000 kilometer (621 mile) range within a year or two. (9/23/2015)
"My guess is probably we could break 1,000 kilometers within a year or two. I'd say 2017 for sure."
An altered quote taken out of context. Here what he actually said from the interview[1]:
Q: When will we break the 1000km range mark for an electric car?
M: A thousand kilometers, hmm. Well, it depends under what circumstances for a thousand kilometers. As it is, the record right now for Model S is 800 km. That is the furthest that anyone has driven a Model S...
Q: So we could be close?
M: Yeah, we're pretty close. Now, in order to do that they did drive at a relatively slow speed. So, you know, we're taking, I think they drove maybe at 40 or 50 km/h or something like that. But I think, my guess is probably we could break a 1000km within... a year or two?
Q: Okay, so within 2016 maybe even?
M: I say if you say 2017 I'd say 2017 for sure.
But one hypermiler reporting a long range under perfect conditions is exactly what he described at length while making that claim. It was pretty clear to me. And that was exactly what we got in 2017.
If one wants to lie by twisting what he said, what happened or putting purposefully out of context to gain clicks or drive up hate against the guy, that is another thing. You should not do that. Nowhere he said what the site or you are implying.
I'm tired how people are getting radicalized because they hear absurd things ("pizzagate") and instead of doubting it they believe it and become outraged. If you actually hear people talking, they are usually much more reasonable than what they seem if you just take a few of the most negative phrases out of context.
It takes a lot of effort to undo fake news. A few more examples from that website:
"Rocket Fuel Solves Climate Change", an absurd extrapolation on what was probably a tweet about ISRU for Mars.
And this juxtaposition that makes you think he just sold what was paid to them, when instead it is 10% of what they had bought previously if you actually follow the link:
Hodl [Link]
1,120 days since Elon Musk promised to hold bitcoin instead converting it. (3/24/2021)
"Bitcoin paid to Tesla will be retained as Bitcoin, not converted to fiat currency."
Elon Musk in a Tweet
1,087 days since Elon Musk converted $272 million to fiat currency. (4/26/2021)
As reported by Nate DiCamillo in yahoo! finance
You might argue that the second move goes against the spirit of what he said in the tweet and all that, but you have to agree with me that this site is being purposefully deceitful on how it is presenting this to promote hate and radicalize more the people.
Theranos faked blood test results. This is not the same thing as ‘being slow at delivering self driving’ to quote one of the other people in this thread.
Not getting treated for a disease you have, or taking medication for a disease you don’t have, versus buying something that wasn’t yet as good as the product video.
People have died due to someone believing that a Tesla could handle normal driving conditions when it could not. That doesn’t seem like an incredibly huge gap in terms of impact.
There's certainly a difference in terms of the possible severity of the impact of the two things, but that doesn't speak to whether or not they're both scam behavior.
If you're claiming things about your product or service that aren't true (even if they may become true eventually), and especially if you're faking evidence to support your lies, you're scamming.
Every once in a while a highly funded startup launches a hilariously bad product. Five or so years ago everybody (rightfully) made fun of the juicero. Before that we had Google Glass (glasshole). Today the Humane Pin has to suffer slings and arrows.
Humane AI would never have been able to raise 230+ million had they been truthful about what could be built with the current state of technology. Did the investors understand that you have to recharge the Humane Pin every 2 hours? Did the investors know their laser projection press photos are photoshopped? Did the investors know the laser projector doesn't meet the advertised resolution? The Humane Pin is science fiction.
In many ways the Humane Pin is like Theranos. Holmes probably didn't mean to defraud people. She just raised money for a product that couldn't be built with the current state of technology.
I don't know if Google Glass really fits in with the rest of that list. That wasn't some overfunded VC startup that ended up releasing a bad, overhyped product. It was essentially a side-project from Google. I don't think was ever publicly available - it was only sold to a small number of select applicants, and as far as I remember it did what they claimed (which wasn't much).
Elizabeth Holmes was repeatedly told by domain experts that many of the types of blood assays she wanted to perform are physically impossible with a single drop of blood extracted from a finger-prick. She didn't simply raise money for a product beyond the current state of technology, she persisted in a narratively convenient fantasy until it caught up with her.
Exactly. Some tests just need a decent sample size to even contain the things you're looking for. Its like thinking you can have a good sample of the entire US population by asking three people a question. It's not just a matter of "the technology just wasn't quite there", it's a matter of just not being a statistically relevant sample size or issues with where you're actually collecting the sample.
I think if I were investing a few million into something, I might ask "what's the battery life?" or "Can I try it on my hand?" before coughing up the cash.
But then, I'm not a VC. I guess they go off vibes?
Those questions probably get asked, but long before any real product exists, so the answer is optimistic or just plain imaginary. By the time the real product exists, a lot of money has been spent and there is a lot of pressure to drum up hype for a product that probably doesn’t deliver.
You'd think, but VCs are lemmings and the moment you convince one to invest a clock starts ticking that makes thorough diligence difficult for everyone else.
Get one person to fall for 'just trust me bro' and the hype train follows.
Then she should've stopped at some point. But she didn't. She kept on making claims that she must have known were not truthful. At that point, at the latest, "didn't mean to" becomes a bit of a hollow word.
The part where the investors invest this much money without going through the technical detail of the product always confuses me. How can yo spend that much money responsibly without having enough expertise onboard to evaluate the technical feasibility. Maybe I am just too naive.
By definition, it isn't "piling on" for this blog to have been written, last December, before the CES AI gadget hype. Anticipating, long before launch, issues that are being discussed now, when reviewers have the device in their hands. Nor, in any way, shape or form is it unusual for a bad/imperfect product to receive poor reviews. That is not piling on--it is normal and expected.
No one is literally saying that an individual contributor at Humane is a "scammer" just because they happened to have worked on a project that arguably takes perfectly good sand and subtracts value from it. That happens. A lot. Sometimes you intend to make a product, and you end up working on an empty product-shaped object. Heck, sometimes, say in healthcare, the drug or device you hoped would help people not only does nothing, but actually causes harm. That doesn't mean you were foolish to have started work, but simply because you started with "good intentions" doesn't mean a product belongs on the market.
Humane is charging $700 for a device with $24 monthly subscriptions. If someone thinks that such an offering is worthless, or nearly so, it is hardly surprising if they use "aggressive" language to warn people away.
If there is anything unusual or unsettling it is that some people in tech seem to feel that it is "unethical" to treat tech companies as anything less than bold innovators, irrespective of what that they ship. If someone is despairing over past week's discourse, one only can imagine how they'd deal with something like Apple's "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" commercials.
It’s an unfortunate trend, but it is also an age-old reaction to hubris. Humane made the fatal PR mistake of trying to convince the world they had a revolutionary product that would change everything… without selling the benefits of the product.
That triggers a bunch of memes, from emperor’s new clothes to pride before a fall. Add in a general societal distrust of tech and AI, plus the age-old derision for geeks/nerds, and Humane could not have set themselves up better for fiasco if they had tried.
I do think it was all well meaning and earnest, not at all a scam. But their over-the-top marketing for v1 of an experimental tech gadget was really clueless.
> Humane made the fatal PR mistake of trying to convince the world they had a revolutionary product that would change everything
Segway walked so Humane could run.
As a college student I remember the lead up to the Segway reveal on Good Morning America. I was so excited for it that I set my alarm for 6AM to watch it. I remember being so confused and annoyed. Fool me once...
I remember the marketing around it. I was so incredibly excited too. They really marketed it as having discovered a room temperature superconductor.
Takes me back to a time when you were still able to shroud things with mystique and excitement. The Matrix, Blair Witch Project, and the PlayStation 2 with the emotion engine were all larger than life. Cloverfield was the last of that kind.
I do think it's a really cool thing with good use cases but the marketing of "We'll design cities in new ways because of it" might've been overstating things a bit lol.
Agreed that scam implies intent, but it is a hell of an ego trip. They so much wanted to create a new product category on par with the smartphone they could not admit the right thing to do was pivot to making it a peripheral. Android has all the underlying software, from a secondary screen API for the projector to Google Lens to an AI assistant that they could have done a peripheral that cost 1/3 as much, weighed half, didn't need a midday battery swap, and didn't get burning hot. Samsung would have done that. Maybe they still will.
Yes, that is bit much but the main point being this projection technology is nowhere novel, I have been playing with pico projectors and modern ones comes with Android OS so it's just a mini projector. However the only thing innovative here is natural voice interaction powered by modern AI but that also seems to be very slow for any practical purpose.
But it is something novel that requires serious research. Even if the result is disappointing, it is novel enough to not make the it a “scam using old te vc projection”. That was the point of my rhetorical question before.
I remember my buddy casually controlling the volume in his car by rotating the index finger cw/ccw with his hand on a gearbox handle. It was round 6-7 years ago. Nothing projected on his hand though, as it was all projected on a windshield, only visible to him. BMW 7, iirc.
Thats fair. I guess I am biased with one of the initial story that described the genesis of the product during a cliff top retreat on Benioff's property. All the hype, the demonstrations, but the actual product falls flat of any real functionality. There is a disconnect between the hype they sold and what they released. That is scam territory.
hand is just a surface bro, I don't think it has anything to do with hand, light will bounce back on any opaque surface, just think of it as a mini projector and it's not even full RGB spectrum colour.
It’s a scam targeting VC investors, not the public.
Instead of pitching a practical and attainable product, one has to aim for the moon in order to get the VC $$$$. The wilder, the better.
Call me crazy, but as a society we’ve decided that “possible” is too boring.
While many VC funded companies only want to get bought out (instead of actually being a freestanding successful company), I strongly feel there are a sizable subsection of “founders” that don’t even want to get bought out…
They only just want to play the game and collect high salaries along the way…
Sadly, they aren’t even to blame. Too many Fortune-50 executives just try not to embarrass themselves long enough to collect insane levels of compensation.
Is a wonder that VC founders do the same?
Too many startups are really just “playing house” — really flashy website, monochrome headshots of executive team, multiple officies, plethora of partner logos… Only missing substance and a real product.
My only career regret is that I went for "technical chops" rather than charisma and "storytelling chops". Over and over we see founders hauling in millions from [evidently] gullible VCs who hear a story and Want To Believe.
I agree with you semantically, but these days I'm less and less concerned with "intent" when it comes to scams. It ultimately just revolves down to empty moralism about "people today," and fails to grasp the issue at hand.
Like how phone scammers are often themselves trapt in a system beyond their control [1].
Or even case in point with this thing. Maybe the owners aren't malicious, but if not, they are clearly somewhat being scammed themselves by AI hype, to the point they are willing to invest so much in the chatbot box, tie their entire business presumably to one current API or another, however bad an idea we know that is.
There are just many long chains of debt, confusion, hyperstition that are knotting around us, with no clear source. One person's scam turns into another's "innovation" before turning again back into a scam for the end user.
If we are really getting ready for the AI future, we need to get used to being wronged and taken advantage of by technically blameless entities, whose intent is logical, capitalist, and at least nominatively "benevolent."
The era of morality itself might soon turn to something else! In a world so predetermined and calculated, where there is such advanced science around influencing thought, cybernetics, etc, how does it even make sense anymore? Or at least, how is focusing on something like intent here even satisfying anymore beyond saying "bad people do bad things"?
I agree that intent is not relevant, but humans must be held accountable for outcomes. Ever since we've had algorithms that appear to make decisions, we've been fighting this idea that _humans_ are "technically blameless entities", just following orders from the black box. We must not get used to it.
They are not calling this product a scam, but rather noting its similarity to laser projection projects of the past that (obviously) turned out to be scams. A subtle but important distinction.
> Humane’s website and other promotional material have a series of fake still images (“Photoshopped” images overlayed on hands). While even these pictures are pretty low-resolution (much less than a true 720p image), they turn out to be much better than what is seen in the videos of the Humane projector.
That was my initial reaction, the word scam is overused these days. But then I reached the comparison section between the photoshopped/ generated images and the real photos.
Yeah, it's a very aggressive statement. The product as-is is obviously pretty crappy, but I do believe there's a reasonable path forwards imaginable.
The hardware itself seems to be decent-ish, albeit suffering from the usual first-gen issues. The AI-focused software stack is currently quite bad, but software is easy to update. Pair it with a smartphone, allow 3rd party apps, and it's essentially an alternative to a smartwatch. You lose the screen, but you gain a camera. I'd probably be quite tempted to buy a gen2 myself, even if all the AI stuff doesn't work out.
Aah yes. Classic cult tactics. If anyone calls you out on your nonsense, they are all haters. Recently saw this guy Alex Hormozi, complete scammer, use this strategy on YouTube.
> Must admit I’m surprised by the aggressiveness of it all. It’s almost like an echo chamber where people have decided it’s ok to pile on
This seems to be a really common occurrence recently - I know the internet can be mean, I've been on it since the peak of IRC, but it seems way more intense these days. The moment something is marked as the bad thing, hordes of people absolutely pile onto it out of nowhere.
Is this something I've just not noticed, a more people online thing, long term effects of covid (the virus itself and/or the lockdowns), a result of whatever algorithm tweaks Elon has been making, are people just pissed off in general, etc?
It feels bizarre how aggro the internet has become!
I think psychology might call this Splitting, which honestly seems to describe the business model of social media platforms these days too, so maybe there's a connection there.
Off topic but using as an example of this: This tweeted photo, showing a pub in the UK that allows dogs, but bans children. Bit edgy, sure, but look at the bloodbath in the replies/quotes! It's absolute chaos!
> The moment something is marked as the bad thing, hordes of people absolutely pile onto it out of nowhere.
This isn’t “out of nowhere”. Humane and their AI pin have been marketed an d talked an kur all over Internet tech spaces for a very long time. I’ve been seeing talk about the Humane AI pin in these same channels (YouTube, Twitter, tech websites) frequently since they were funded.
People have been forming opinions and skepticism for a long time. The key thing that changed is that the product finally transitioned from hypothetical to reality, and suddenly everyone’s thoughts were confirmed all at once.
This is nothing like your photo of a pub getting talked about on Twitter for a brief moment. AI and AI hardware have been a hot topic for years and Humane has been pushing marketing materials and demos on social media for a long time.
They made themselves the center of the conversation. Now the rubber hits the road and they have to deal with being the center of the conversation without having the substance to back up their big social media push.
The real mob mentality is all of the people who are arriving late to this multi-year buildup and trying to scorn the reviewers and critics.
I don’t see this sort of review as aggressive or hostile; rather, it displays the sort of inductive reasoning that we should all be doing more of in the face of wondrous claims that follow a recognizable pattern.
Hype artists and bad faith actors thrive on amnesiac audiences, and it’s about time we were all a bit less credulous.
Aye fair point, I guess I've just been noticing it happening more because I noticed it happen and am now tuned to see it - that Baader-Meinhof frequency illusion thing.
The annoying thing, to me, is having Steve Jobs, in the same row as the convicted fraudsters.
I know that he's adding him, to compare against the fraudsters, but I'm not so sure the positioning is accidental.
For the record, I think that SJ was one of the most successful bulshitters that has ever walked the Earth. He could not only convince a room full of geologists that the world was flat, but also sell them all tickets on a boat ride to the edge.
It's just that he actually ended up (after numerous false starts), having an actual product. Several, in fact.
> I have learned to be suspicious of the Steve Jobs pretender look through the years; it’s not a complete tell, but it should make you suspicious.
Totally agree with your comment, there are several images like this and that note should've been in one of the captions.
On a separate note, even Steve faked the 2007 iPhone demo [1]. It couldn't play entire songs or videos without crashing. It constantly crashed unless tasks were performed in a specific sequence. The team programmed the phone to display five bars, and brought in a portable cell tower, for the demo.
When the iPhone came out, all these bugs had been smoothed over, and the news of the demo didn't break until 2013. I guess that's the difference—people were using the iPhone, loving the screen and interface, and tolerating the flaws (no copy and paste!).
> The 55 miles from Campbell to San Francisco make for one of the nicest commutes anywhere.
There are a thousand people every day who get the train from my little town into London. 80 miles. 125mph. Someone else does the driving. There's wifi and a power point and a refreshment trolley that will sell you a coffee. Watch a movie, read a book, browse HN or Reddit or whatever.
"Nicest commutes anywhere"? Least terrible car journeys in the US, perhaps.
GP refers to the controversy around how you should hold an iphone so it doesn't lose reception. First few versions had a receiving system which could be easily interfered with by not holding it right (shorting notches on the outer rim) if you were used to hold a phone at the top, i.e. palm at your ear (vs cheek). Jobs suggested to not do that.
> Humane’s projector lacks color and grayscale depth. Humane’s display a monochrome cyan (blue-green). There is no ability to even highly anything with color. Secondly, they demonstrated very limited grayscale depth; they showed just “on,” “off,” and a half-level. Even if grayscale is theoretically possible with the Humane projector, the ability fo see a grayscale image is severely hampered by using skin as a screen and the lack of contrast due to ambient light.
Not to mention blue is the hardest color to see already. These people are idiots.
> Scotopic vision occurs at luminance levels of 10−3[5] to 10−6[citation needed] cd/m2
They should have more than enough brightness to be clearly visible in those light conditions on almost any visible wavelength they chose for the laser, so it's weird if they optimize for this instead of the outdoor performance.
Is this ready to use? No. But I'd like to point out what may be novel UX ideas here that are worth improving on.
* raise your hand in front of device to activate the projection
* move hand to increment/decrement a number
* close hand to tap
With image recognition, other gestures with the projection hand like tapping fingers or touching the image with the off hand would allow other interactive inputs.
I’m personally impressed by how you navigate the radial menu by tilting your hand as if you were balancing a marble. With some improvement, this would feel very intuitive!
If this is not a scam, then they must be betting heavily on going beyond class 2 for the laser so it will be usable outdoors. 1mW is very low, and my back of the envelope calculation says that it's equivalent to a display to around 120 nits, with the generous assumptions of
1. It's a green laser (it isn't)
2. It's projected onto a white surface, (again, it isn't)
3. 9cm^2 of projected surface area (3cm x 3cm)
Maybe they can modulate the brightness by the amount of stuff present on the projected screen, and maybe even have an outdoor mode, where they use light fonts, that are displayed on a higher brightness, so the overall energy emitted still classifies the device to be class 2. Still, 1mW must be very very limiting here, a 120 nits display is nowhere near usable outdoors, let alone a 120 nits display that reflects the outdoor light just as well as the projector's.
Why on earth they aren't using a green laser if they are limited to class 2 is beyond me though.
Well, on their website they say that it's 720p right now, and you can order it. If that info is false, then it's just straight up scam.
Granted, they indeed don't write anything about brightness, apart from the class 2 classification, which they could very well meet. Just not bright enough to be very usable.
Do we even know if Humane developed their own laser technology and it's not just an off-the-shelf, or custom-ordered part from another company?
The one thing Humane seems to have done good is make a nice piece of hardware with a sleek, Apple-like industrial design. It's functionally a paperweight that can read some LLM hallucinations to you from the convenience of your sagging shirt lapel, but it IS nice-looking and reviewers have said it feels sturdily-made.
Aside from that, it seems like the main things that might have made this thing seem impressive or stand out aren't even developed by them. I haven't seen any indication the laser is anything revolutionary they made themselves, and as much as they'd like to pretend they've developed some crazy AI, it seems to be OpenAI doing all the heavy lifting and everyone and their grandma has been using this technology for over a year now.
A former colleague of mine works at Humane as an engineer, and the laser tech is apparently closely guarded. They were reluctant to even give a demo when we ran into each other, stating that the laser tech was particularly sensitive topic. I got the sense it was very custom.
I wanted to replicate many parts of the Ai pin and did research into laser projectors. It’s probably a MEMs projector. The cyan color they use is custom, at least. Minifying that tech and making it robust enough to be knocked around on a wearable device is pretty challenging and I couldn’t find anything of a similar size off the shelf. They also run pretty hot and apparently the pin has heat issues (and according to folks at CES (?) using the laser a lot makes it over heat.
The tech used for investors was different to what ended up in the product. There are some videos of Oculus/Meta VR labs that show what a room filled with mirrors, lasers and cameras can demonstrate.
Maybe. In the article the photoshopped images look like as if it was green, but the screenshots from the demo videos look blue to me. The article says that it's cyan. Of course white balance could be way off in any of those pictures.
The blog post propagates the myth that you can't project black on skin. Even though the solution is blindingly easy: You scorch the skin quickly with the laser so it becomes black. If that isn't projected black I don't know what is!
They have got really positive (relatively) reviews though https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TitZV6k8zfA "The Worst Product I've Ever Reviewed... For Now" at least a different league then the other scams listed.
Isn't his conclusion essentially "nobody should buy this"? Sure, it's "relatively" positive if you compare it to a literal scam, but still not exactly praising.
To me the gist of the review was that it's sluggish and lacking in features/integrations. Both extremely common attributes of 1st-gen products, and not particularly dramatic.
A lot of topic but I find it funny once I set aside the small spelling inconsistencies, that the author's name is Guttag and the founder's name is Bongiorno, which are almost "good day" in German or Italian.
On topic, if the product is real but their marketing demos still show unrealistically different capabilities, then it's fair to call it a scam. Looking at the material provided, the marketing images show a usable device, and the real ones an unusable one in terms of contrast, resolution, and projection deformation. But because they do show real images I'd stop short of calling it a scam. You can after all make your own opinion based on reasonably realistic demos.
Just look at the expression on the face of the woman in the leather jacket (I think its one of the co-founders?). She looks visibly uncomfortable, not smiling, and unsure of what she is selling. Whoever let the picture slip, well, it says everything about this product.
Can you imagine working at such a cold, brutalist tech company? Devoid of any color or perceptible emotion or excitement? I think it says a lot about the character of the types of people who would give money to a venture like this. Probably brought up in uncaring, unloving homes themselves and now they feel it is their duty to inflict the harshness of their souls onto the rest of the world.
If there's anything about their work atmosphere I've gleamed from seeing employees talk about the company over the past few months it's quite the opposite of a cold, brutalist tech company. It's cult-like if anything. They've been acting way too impressed by their own product, and now that it's out and reviews have panned it, they tweet about how we all need to be more "optimistic about the future" and similar handwaving. It takes real faith-like buy-in to be shipping something like this and not feel totally embarrassed.
Sadly I have worked for such places. At the top somewhere is someone with an ego so large it will always prevent them from taking any accountability or offering a shred of humility. If the market doesn’t like the product, they will blame the market before admitting to any defect in their own thinking.
Narcissistic personalities are constantly rewarded in tech, they play right into the greed of VCs and unmask the fact most investors are completely incompetent.
wow it looks horrible. did their "AI" got the eclipse location wrong? April 8th was over NA but the AI said that the ideal location was in Australia?
The interaction is awful. you have to touch it to operate it via voice commands? that means you cant use it in public. There's also a notification light? how is someone wearing it on their chest supposed to see that? I dont think this is a scam for the consumer, because no one in their right minds is going to watch this and want one. They are just cashing in on the AI crazy happening right now.
Yeah, that video infamously had mistakes of it telling him the wrong location to view the eclipse, as well as saying a handful of almonds had WAY more protein than it should have.
There were more than a few “Wait a sec, that’s really hard to do” light bulbs that popped into my head watching that.
I wonder if the result is more of a product management/focus failure than a technical one? Perhaps the outcome would have been better if they had just picked one or two hard problems instead of trying to make the everything device right at launch.
10 years is just the right amount of time for a new generation of victims who never heard about it. $200 million is impressive, those arent rookie numbers anymore.
This thing is just such a manifestly bad idea. You'd have a much more functional solution if you added a camera to a Jawbone, with all the AI stuff running as an app on your phone. The laser projector is such nonsense that it can easily be deleted.
Karl Guttag is right about everything having to do with displays and optics. It's very much worth subscribing to his blog if you want to know this stuff long before everyone else (note that this article was written last year before anyone had reviewed the device).
I take issue with the word "scam", but other than, a very well-done rebuttal. It's not just v1 issue, Humane is a product of the most brainless assumptions you can make:
a) That a palm-size laser projector could work as a display.
b) That awkward hand gestures are a great way to navigate UI
c) That voice could work as a primary input.
d) That people would be willing to pay $700 and a monthly subscription for a device that barely works.
It's at par or even worse than Juicero. The team and its supporters should stop hiding behind "it's v1", and "we were trying to invent a new paradigm." The device has to be promising now, not in some imaginary future. And trying to invent shouldn't mean you're going to forgo questioning the basic foundational ideas.
I feel bad for the hardware engineers that worked on both. It seems like they did a great job under the design constraints they were given, too bad the product as a whole sucked.
It was exceptionally well-engineered. The people who worked on it should be proud of the machine they designed.
The problem with it as a product was that it was worthless. Yes, it did what was claimed, but the machine and all that great engineering was completely unnecessary to get the insanely overpriced juice out of the bags.
Add "putting an inductive charger against the users skin" to that. The heat issues aren't going to go away with the form factor they came up with, wireless charging isn't getting any more efficient.
People that perform well in corporate jobs, like these founders, often arent at all innovative or good product people. They just excelled at working with others and playing the corporate game
I mostly feel bad for them. I generally hate pile ons on principle and HN tends to be nasty about anything new even when it is wildly successful so nastiness here is no signal (and hardware is hard, it's good for people to try new things, etc.). AI is a new capability and there is an opportunity for new hardware that can use it.
That said, the Humane marketing reminded me of Magic Leap and I find it irritating. Particularly the big build up to what was going to be 'new information' and then it was an ad with no information. When the marketing is so divorced from what's delivered I think people are often nastier about it.
The irony to me is that in a lot of ways they're trying to be Apple, but without Apple's strategic thinking - it's more cosplaying Apple. Ben Thompson had a good write up today in Stratechery that touched on some of this: when the iPhone came out it worked with Mac and windows - the dominant computing platforms of the day! They didn't try to immediately create a standalone device from the get go and they had iterated on a narrow use case with the iPod for several years already to perfect some things.
Also - people love their phones! They may make overtures otherwise, but observe their behavior.
This is a lot more akin to what rewind aka limitless is doing. Start small/focused with a good product that solves a well tested use case while working with the existing platform (mobile) then leverage that to grow and build an ecosystem as you go.
There's so much about the Humane product that is strategically poor/user poor: a separate phone number, terrible battery, the extreme cost, etc. etc. even if the product actually worked (it doesn't) it's strategically DOA.
You don't get to mars by starting a company and building a mars rocket - you have that as the end goal and a path to get there that requires doing a ton of other stuff first so you have a shot at achieving that goal.
Any company that achieves great things builds a machine to build the machine - otherwise you just get a expensive art project if the product even works at all.
Still they did build and ship something and I like their industrial design so they deserve kudos for that. Plus I like to see people experiment so it's good when people try even if they fail, but I don't think it's helped by pretending something isn't a failure.
> The irony to me is that in a lot of ways they're trying to be Apple, but without Apple's strategic thinking - it's more cosplaying Apple
I hope this is the main lesson people will take from Humane. Not the "scam", "AI hype", "laser bullshit" angles. The top execs fundamentally deluded themselves into thinking that "the process is the product". During their stealth startup years their marketing was almost entirely "we're from Apple, we're perfectionists, we believe tech should feel like magic". They did Jony Ive-style videos. They talk about "intent", "craftsmanship", "design". And now they're adopting the reality distortion field. But they're merely cosplaying Apple, without the substance. They made a "less-intrusive" smartphone-killer that relies on the most intrusive input method ever! No product-market fit, no viable go-to-market ($700 + $24/mo).
It's Helene Deutsch's "as-if personality", but as a startup. The execs confuse appearances with reality. Liz Holmes copied the clothing, they're copying "the philosophy", but misunderstood its essence. They're almost Shakespearian characters, but the employees should leave now before it meets a tragic end.
We need to invent "Touch Grass Driven Development" TGDD.
These products are clearly built by people who live in the SV bubble.
Nobody is going to use this pin in their day to day if you can't wear a seatbelt with it. Nobody is going to be able to easily use it outside. This is obvious to anyone who has been outdoors in the last decade.
They used to work at Apple so they feel that they can match Apple’s success but doing it the “Apple way”: internal iterations instead of early feedback ie the Build it and they will come strategy which is hard to get working outside of Apple. The only team I’m aware of that was able to do it successfully was Nest, but it later ended in disaster.
The difference is Apple has incredible momentum behind it pushing the Apple way. It took them decades to get to this point (and Steve Jobs, the real one).
I love this take on Humane as a s̶c̶a̶m̶ business reselling the last decade laser projection b̶u̶l̶l̶s̶h̶i̶t̶ dreams with adding AI (edited, the question of scam/not scam is not the point).
And probably poisoning the well for other, simpler and laser-less personal AI devices as a side effect.
Btw, you can buy a 60g wearable device whose hardware is prepared for 24/7 microphone listening, has ML accelerator, 24h battery life, and has, for some reason, kept free 16GB of storage that the user can't access and the OS doesn't use.
I like to leave my phone at home, and I load all sorts of content on to my Apple Watch. For me it is practical to have a lot of my favorite music permanently on my watch, then podcast and audio books are transient. If you have an Apple Watch, give it a try.
Does your watch show more than 8 GB synced? Mine does not.
There's 32 GB of storage, sync uses 8, and it is really hard to fill more than other 8 with OS, apps & data.
> Apple Watch limits the amount of music which can be stored on the watch and is typically limited to 24% of the available space on the watch, so given you have a watch with 32GB of total space, 8GB would the maximum you can store.
I could see a few situations where I could use something like this, for example for reading a book projected on a chair in front of me in the airplane, instead of carrying a ebook reader. It would only need to recognize one command - 'turn page". But it would need a stabilization tech, so the image does not move when I move.
They want a AI world where that becomes the UI but it turns out to look like a pain in the ass to use. Maybe in 5 years and if they add an AR google. You still need visual input and reading on your hand is worse than holding a phone, you need AR
I am disappointed by the really harsh criticism of what seems to me a product researching new ideas. I see so many tech articles where writers give lame business ideas too much praise and exposure. The attacks on Humane AI seem weird, comparing other product reviews.
I actually was tempted to pre-order one of these devices many months ago but decided my Apple Watch was a practical solution to the problems this device is meant to solve.
Anyway, I guess we will never get to see what version 2 of this product would have been.
Now hold on, you could carry around a miniature white projection screen with you. Maybe about the size of a plating card but thicker, maybe a little bigger, but sized so you could comfortably hold it in one hand but still fit it in a pocket or purse. And then stiffen it a little so that it doesn't rattle around in the wind. Maybe add a grippy back? And it could double as an extra battery for the pin...
Scam is a bit too strong IMHO. But yes it does just appear to be hacking together a bunch of long existing tech into a package that’s not particularly novel in the history of such things.
If they’re guilty of anything it’s likely not adequately learning from why all the previous attempts in this space were big flops. That, plus the halo of arrogance that one feels from the marketing materials and presentations, setup a perfect storm for the likely unrecoverable PR dumpster fire they now find themselves in.
Here is a novel idea: why doesn't humanity instead of projecting a laser on a hand somehow create a small screen with high enough resolution and even bright colors that could be attached to a hand and every time one raises a hand it turns on to display information? Oh. Wait...
Calling it a “scam” is disingenuous, the product may be a bit crap for a v1 but their intention is to release people from the over-reliance on smartphones which is to be commended
Did they know or did they have hopes that their first implementation could be improved upon? I'm open-minded they've done something fraudulent I just haven't seen the evidence
As TFM mentions, pico-projectors have been around for a while and have not improved (physics does not care how much you want it). Thus no sane non-scamer would "hope that their first implementation could be improved upon"
This company was not even in business of developing new laser display tech. So who would improve it for them? And why would they have not in the previous decades?
>If Humane really had better technology, why didn’t they release it as a software application rather than developing this terrible device?
Because on smart phones you can't do always on recording or control the lock screen. The real game changer AI devices will bring is when they always on record which you can't do without controlling the hardware.
Since always on recording is also seemingly what kept meta and snapchat glasses from succeeding (and god thanks), that's a huge bet. Tis feature is the only thing that don't make it a subpar (and gadget - a cool one) smartwatch.
no, I don't think this is accurate. You can have processes run on a device in the background, you can pair bluetooth to it, you can send data back with it.
This is what I get for connecting in San Francisco. The flight attendant did give me a dozen packs of those little ginger-snap cookies, though, so I may be biased.
https://twitter.com/samsheffer/status/1779854070372561184
edit: not sure if the previous comment was edited or I imagined it said it was their marketing guy before, but I'm editing his name out of the comment to not potentially tarnish his search engine results
Ah just like telekinesis, it only works when the skeptics aren't around
It's probably terrible, but oh so hypocritical. I can think of many occasions in the last 15 years these reviewers have cited the potential of gimmicks and latched on to the manufacturers promise to improve.
Though hyperbolic, I thought the reviews were balanced. Products shouldn’t primarily be built on hype and optimism, they should fulfill a job to be done. The software for AI Pin will improve but so will AI capabilities for smartphones in parallel.
Don't have time to go look for one. But can think of many occasions they'd mention the manufacturer has promised to update and improve this and then give them a free pass on whatever gimmicky aspect of the product they're looking at, usually software. Overlooking that aspect rather than lambasting them.
I mean perhaps a slight stretch, but their coverage of the Apple Vision Pro, have they had much reason to use it, aside from the demos? There's also some UX issues mentioned but they're given a free pass as they expect Apple to improve it with time. They'll say "not there yet" rather than "worst product ever".
I’m not saying the AVP will fix all its issues but it is so much more impressive than a cellular device hooked up to OpenAi’s APIs.
Also, let’s not forget that Humane wasn’t even planing to use AI for their product until the last year or two when AI took off. Maybe you can say it was a smart pivot but to me to reeked of just jumping on the AI bandwagon (which, does make some sense I’ll grant you).
If I was working on the product, I’d probably feel okay full stopping. If I saw the person representing us full stopping Id probably think something like hey, nobody died here. And also I feel like a full stop is reserved for maybe one or two people at a company.
Wonderful on planes and wonderful at home. Also great when dunked in milk. Make sure you let a small bit (or one whole) 'accidentally' fall off into the milk and rescue it later. Hmmm....
In the north of France where I lived for a while, it's an absolute staple akin to what peanut butter is to an american maybe or Matcha to a Japanese. Speculoos butter is spread on bread, lots of pastries are speculoos flavoured etc.
In truth the coffee there ain’t great, and the prep is a bit hit or miss, but the folks behind the counter are nice, and you can buy all of the cookies and cookie butter you could want; but it’s probably best not to overdo it. I think they even have a cookie butter latte but never tried it since that sounds too sweet.
I remember the first few times I flew a plane, I simply stared in awe out the window for the entire flight. I remember telling myself "No matter how many more times I fly, I must never forget how amazing this feels", and I like to think that I've kept that amazement alive even though I've probably flown over a hundred times now.
"What began as a primitive box with a light source projecting low quality pictures onto a matte surface, has been developed for over a century into a high resolution, self-illuminating, interactive panel so thin and light, it's easily integrated into powerful mobile devices we can take with us wherever we go.
"And now the developers of the [originally Cicret, here HumaneAI] want to take the next logical step: detaching the image from the mobile device, lowering its quality, and using a box with a light source to project it onto a matte surface."
On another note: the Humane AI is released. Maybe the scam is that it's damn slow?
I will too, in fact.... just one more comment...
Must admit I’m surprised by the aggressiveness of it all. It’s almost like an echo chamber where people have decided it’s ok to pile on
There's no malicious intent in producing glossy promos videos of a device you know a priori does not (and cannot) work, becaue it violates a few laws of physics? I feel like some folks around here have become very innured to false advertising
But it's not a "scam" to release third-rate hardware after overhyping it. Magic Leap and many other startups did the same.
"Scam" should be reserved for actual fraudulent startups like Theranos and Outcome Health.
Not at all strange. The problem is that scam has certain meaning and if we use scam more liberally we dilute the meaning.
If every company is a scam(as almost everyone intentionally overhypes or does something similar to humane), then no company is a scam. Is google a scam as they scripted the gemini video?
That video was more of a fraud than a scam, but I think we're just splitting hairs at that point.
[1]: https://www.nps.gov/teachers/classrooms/the-wright-brothers-...
[2]: http://wright-brothers.wikidot.com/
>Digital Library, “birds of a feather” identified inside sea of information so communities and groups could be tracked in an organized way
"Highlands Forum", DLI (NSF, NASA and DARPA), MDDS program, In-Q-Tel etc
https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo...
Language is not something you can manipulate so easily and you absolutely cannot fight language changing, but also I promise that no one is diluting the meaning "scam".
But like sure, tilt at that windmill.
They're all scammers.
is it incredibly bad at doing such things? yes.
is a smartphone a much better device at doing all the things the AI pin does? yes as well.
So i wouldn't call it a scam, its just a bad product.
And I can't trust that site. An example:
An altered quote taken out of context. Here what he actually said from the interview[1]: His prediction turned out completely accurate[2].1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bl5vLC3Xlgc&feature=youtu.be...
2: https://electrek.co/2017/08/04/a-tesla-model-s-100d-just-dro...
As one of those people, it's pretty bad, especially at navigation which Navigate on Autopilot was very good at
Can't wait for his BS about record number of activations this quarter after he force activated it on the fleet
That said, if it weren't for all the lies and hype, we'd probably all be blown away by what it can do
If you sell someone a cherry pie to be delivered tomorrow, take nearly a decade, and end up handing them a bag of cherries and a dusting of flour with a label of "cherry pie" on it, you didn't meet your promises.
It's one of the number one reasons I'd never work for him. Every failure is your fault and every success is his. Yet all he contributes is tweets
Musk is a lazy ketamine addict. He doesn't do anything other than tweet at himself from his alt accounts and fail upward, disproving meritocracy in the process.
> Why don’t you think it’s fair or accurate to credit founders with the work their companies do?
Also do you have any evidence for the either of the two attacks on Musk?
It's the random people constantly looking for excuses to not believe his successes ("he doesn'thave much to do with SpaceX" or "he stole Tesla"), as well as idiotic article headlines ("Elon Musk's SpaceX does X" etc) that have made up those ideas.
- he can identify incredibly good companies and products, and (usually) is able to lift them up, fund them, and leave them mostly be. It's not him running Tesla day-to-day (nor was tesla started by him), nor is it him running SpaceX, nor...
- at the same time, everything that he's involved in directly is just abysmally stupid
Also I doubt Musk had much to do with the brain implant other than being someone to push people forward and being a bag of money for it. Did he design the implant? Did he insert it? Did he code it?
Probably most people are sad he went from cool sci-fi CEO to weird divorced dad energy on bird website CEO.
He places a lot of bets, though, and that some of those bets may pay off in no way takes away from the fact that he engages in pretty scammy behavior.
In my view, his SOP is pretty much exactly what Theranos tried to do: fake it (scam) until you make it.
1: https://elonmusk.today
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bl5vLC3Xlgc&feature=youtu.be...
2: https://electrek.co/2017/08/04/a-tesla-model-s-100d-just-dro...
https://www.tesla.com/model3
One hypermiler reporting a long range under perfect conditions is not how any normal buyer is going to interpret that claim.
If one wants to lie by twisting what he said, what happened or putting purposefully out of context to gain clicks or drive up hate against the guy, that is another thing. You should not do that. Nowhere he said what the site or you are implying.
I'm tired how people are getting radicalized because they hear absurd things ("pizzagate") and instead of doubting it they believe it and become outraged. If you actually hear people talking, they are usually much more reasonable than what they seem if you just take a few of the most negative phrases out of context.
It takes a lot of effort to undo fake news. A few more examples from that website:
"Rocket Fuel Solves Climate Change", an absurd extrapolation on what was probably a tweet about ISRU for Mars.
And this juxtaposition that makes you think he just sold what was paid to them, when instead it is 10% of what they had bought previously if you actually follow the link:
Hodl [Link]
You might argue that the second move goes against the spirit of what he said in the tweet and all that, but you have to agree with me that this site is being purposefully deceitful on how it is presenting this to promote hate and radicalize more the people.If you're claiming things about your product or service that aren't true (even if they may become true eventually), and especially if you're faking evidence to support your lies, you're scamming.
Humane AI would never have been able to raise 230+ million had they been truthful about what could be built with the current state of technology. Did the investors understand that you have to recharge the Humane Pin every 2 hours? Did the investors know their laser projection press photos are photoshopped? Did the investors know the laser projector doesn't meet the advertised resolution? The Humane Pin is science fiction.
In many ways the Humane Pin is like Theranos. Holmes probably didn't mean to defraud people. She just raised money for a product that couldn't be built with the current state of technology.
But then, I'm not a VC. I guess they go off vibes?
Get one person to fall for 'just trust me bro' and the hype train follows.
Then she should've stopped at some point. But she didn't. She kept on making claims that she must have known were not truthful. At that point, at the latest, "didn't mean to" becomes a bit of a hollow word.
No one is literally saying that an individual contributor at Humane is a "scammer" just because they happened to have worked on a project that arguably takes perfectly good sand and subtracts value from it. That happens. A lot. Sometimes you intend to make a product, and you end up working on an empty product-shaped object. Heck, sometimes, say in healthcare, the drug or device you hoped would help people not only does nothing, but actually causes harm. That doesn't mean you were foolish to have started work, but simply because you started with "good intentions" doesn't mean a product belongs on the market.
Humane is charging $700 for a device with $24 monthly subscriptions. If someone thinks that such an offering is worthless, or nearly so, it is hardly surprising if they use "aggressive" language to warn people away.
If there is anything unusual or unsettling it is that some people in tech seem to feel that it is "unethical" to treat tech companies as anything less than bold innovators, irrespective of what that they ship. If someone is despairing over past week's discourse, one only can imagine how they'd deal with something like Apple's "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" commercials.
That triggers a bunch of memes, from emperor’s new clothes to pride before a fall. Add in a general societal distrust of tech and AI, plus the age-old derision for geeks/nerds, and Humane could not have set themselves up better for fiasco if they had tried.
I do think it was all well meaning and earnest, not at all a scam. But their over-the-top marketing for v1 of an experimental tech gadget was really clueless.
Segway walked so Humane could run.
As a college student I remember the lead up to the Segway reveal on Good Morning America. I was so excited for it that I set my alarm for 6AM to watch it. I remember being so confused and annoyed. Fool me once...
https://www.wired.com/2001/01/ginger-may-be-motorized-scoote...
No.
Their PR and marketing was AWFUL to build the level of hype they did around the product they released.
If you're releasing a scooter for mall cops and tourists you don't go on Good Morning America to advertise it as a world-changing technology.
They advertised the release of a world-changing technology and released nothing like that.
Takes me back to a time when you were still able to shroud things with mystique and excitement. The Matrix, Blair Witch Project, and the PlayStation 2 with the emotion engine were all larger than life. Cloverfield was the last of that kind.
But it is something novel that requires serious research. Even if the result is disappointing, it is novel enough to not make the it a “scam using old te vc projection”. That was the point of my rhetorical question before.
I am defining “serious for a consumer product company”. Putting that in a small device seems quite a feat.
If you define “serious” as “particles colliding” or “drugs that cure some type of cancer”, then no.
Keep in mind that I am using “serious” as opposed to “scammy”. I thin this pin is far from a scam.
You speak with such confidence. Always a reliable red flag that you don’t know what you are talking about.
Instead of pitching a practical and attainable product, one has to aim for the moon in order to get the VC $$$$. The wilder, the better.
Call me crazy, but as a society we’ve decided that “possible” is too boring.
While many VC funded companies only want to get bought out (instead of actually being a freestanding successful company), I strongly feel there are a sizable subsection of “founders” that don’t even want to get bought out…
They only just want to play the game and collect high salaries along the way…
Sadly, they aren’t even to blame. Too many Fortune-50 executives just try not to embarrass themselves long enough to collect insane levels of compensation.
Is a wonder that VC founders do the same?
Too many startups are really just “playing house” — really flashy website, monochrome headshots of executive team, multiple officies, plethora of partner logos… Only missing substance and a real product.
Like how phone scammers are often themselves trapt in a system beyond their control [1].
Or even case in point with this thing. Maybe the owners aren't malicious, but if not, they are clearly somewhat being scammed themselves by AI hype, to the point they are willing to invest so much in the chatbot box, tie their entire business presumably to one current API or another, however bad an idea we know that is.
There are just many long chains of debt, confusion, hyperstition that are knotting around us, with no clear source. One person's scam turns into another's "innovation" before turning again back into a scam for the end user.
If we are really getting ready for the AI future, we need to get used to being wronged and taken advantage of by technically blameless entities, whose intent is logical, capitalist, and at least nominatively "benevolent."
The era of morality itself might soon turn to something else! In a world so predetermined and calculated, where there is such advanced science around influencing thought, cybernetics, etc, how does it even make sense anymore? Or at least, how is focusing on something like intent here even satisfying anymore beyond saying "bad people do bad things"?
1. https://www.propublica.org/article/human-traffickers-force-v...
> Humane’s website and other promotional material have a series of fake still images (“Photoshopped” images overlayed on hands). While even these pictures are pretty low-resolution (much less than a true 720p image), they turn out to be much better than what is seen in the videos of the Humane projector.
Now they are getting the Fisker treatment.
The hardware itself seems to be decent-ish, albeit suffering from the usual first-gen issues. The AI-focused software stack is currently quite bad, but software is easy to update. Pair it with a smartphone, allow 3rd party apps, and it's essentially an alternative to a smartwatch. You lose the screen, but you gain a camera. I'd probably be quite tempted to buy a gen2 myself, even if all the AI stuff doesn't work out.
This seems to be a really common occurrence recently - I know the internet can be mean, I've been on it since the peak of IRC, but it seems way more intense these days. The moment something is marked as the bad thing, hordes of people absolutely pile onto it out of nowhere.
Is this something I've just not noticed, a more people online thing, long term effects of covid (the virus itself and/or the lockdowns), a result of whatever algorithm tweaks Elon has been making, are people just pissed off in general, etc?
It feels bizarre how aggro the internet has become!
I think psychology might call this Splitting, which honestly seems to describe the business model of social media platforms these days too, so maybe there's a connection there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology)
Off topic but using as an example of this: This tweeted photo, showing a pub in the UK that allows dogs, but bans children. Bit edgy, sure, but look at the bloodbath in the replies/quotes! It's absolute chaos!
https://twitter.com/hifromkyle/status/1779548610528415809
This isn’t “out of nowhere”. Humane and their AI pin have been marketed an d talked an kur all over Internet tech spaces for a very long time. I’ve been seeing talk about the Humane AI pin in these same channels (YouTube, Twitter, tech websites) frequently since they were funded.
People have been forming opinions and skepticism for a long time. The key thing that changed is that the product finally transitioned from hypothetical to reality, and suddenly everyone’s thoughts were confirmed all at once.
This is nothing like your photo of a pub getting talked about on Twitter for a brief moment. AI and AI hardware have been a hot topic for years and Humane has been pushing marketing materials and demos on social media for a long time.
They made themselves the center of the conversation. Now the rubber hits the road and they have to deal with being the center of the conversation without having the substance to back up their big social media push.
The real mob mentality is all of the people who are arriving late to this multi-year buildup and trying to scorn the reviewers and critics.
Hype artists and bad faith actors thrive on amnesiac audiences, and it’s about time we were all a bit less credulous.
Putting this one down to "words are lossy compression for thoughts"
I know that he's adding him, to compare against the fraudsters, but I'm not so sure the positioning is accidental.
For the record, I think that SJ was one of the most successful bulshitters that has ever walked the Earth. He could not only convince a room full of geologists that the world was flat, but also sell them all tickets on a boat ride to the edge.
It's just that he actually ended up (after numerous false starts), having an actual product. Several, in fact.
Totally agree with your comment, there are several images like this and that note should've been in one of the captions.
On a separate note, even Steve faked the 2007 iPhone demo [1]. It couldn't play entire songs or videos without crashing. It constantly crashed unless tasks were performed in a specific sequence. The team programmed the phone to display five bars, and brought in a portable cell tower, for the demo.
When the iPhone came out, all these bugs had been smoothed over, and the news of the demo didn't break until 2013. I guess that's the difference—people were using the iPhone, loving the screen and interface, and tolerating the flaws (no copy and paste!).
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/magazine/and-then-steve-s...
But they were able to release something that ended up changing the world.
It’s always a bit jarring to watch pre-smartphone movies and TV shows.
These things have become ubiquitous.
I liked the “flick-pen,” from Geostorm, though.
Crashing Happened a lot in demos back then, nowadays it's not so common.
> The 55 miles from Campbell to San Francisco make for one of the nicest commutes anywhere.
There are a thousand people every day who get the train from my little town into London. 80 miles. 125mph. Someone else does the driving. There's wifi and a power point and a refreshment trolley that will sell you a coffee. Watch a movie, read a book, browse HN or Reddit or whatever.
"Nicest commutes anywhere"? Least terrible car journeys in the US, perhaps.
I see no reason the others are not doing the same.
Looking the part is half of actually being the part.
Not to mention blue is the hardest color to see already. These people are idiots.
They should have more than enough brightness to be clearly visible in those light conditions on almost any visible wavelength they chose for the laser, so it's weird if they optimize for this instead of the outdoor performance.
However, apparently I'm the idiot because red, not blue is hardest to see due to various reasons. At night we are all but blind to it.
1. It's a green laser (it isn't)
2. It's projected onto a white surface, (again, it isn't)
3. 9cm^2 of projected surface area (3cm x 3cm)
Maybe they can modulate the brightness by the amount of stuff present on the projected screen, and maybe even have an outdoor mode, where they use light fonts, that are displayed on a higher brightness, so the overall energy emitted still classifies the device to be class 2. Still, 1mW must be very very limiting here, a 120 nits display is nowhere near usable outdoors, let alone a 120 nits display that reflects the outdoor light just as well as the projector's.
Why on earth they aren't using a green laser if they are limited to class 2 is beyond me though.
That said, like most AI startups right now it is a cash grab that might pan out as a longer term product, but likely not.
Granted, they indeed don't write anything about brightness, apart from the class 2 classification, which they could very well meet. Just not bright enough to be very usable.
The one thing Humane seems to have done good is make a nice piece of hardware with a sleek, Apple-like industrial design. It's functionally a paperweight that can read some LLM hallucinations to you from the convenience of your sagging shirt lapel, but it IS nice-looking and reviewers have said it feels sturdily-made.
Aside from that, it seems like the main things that might have made this thing seem impressive or stand out aren't even developed by them. I haven't seen any indication the laser is anything revolutionary they made themselves, and as much as they'd like to pretend they've developed some crazy AI, it seems to be OpenAI doing all the heavy lifting and everyone and their grandma has been using this technology for over a year now.
Perhaps it's my jaded view seasoned by the observation of decades of tech bullshit, but that could go one of two ways:
1. The laser tech is full of trade secrets that we dare not reveal just yet.
2. We don't want anyone to find out that we bought these laser things off AliExpress.
(Or maybe it's tech you could buy off Amazon ten years ago, who knows? https://www.amazon.com/Brookstone-FBA_mp-796246-Projection-V...)
On topic, if the product is real but their marketing demos still show unrealistically different capabilities, then it's fair to call it a scam. Looking at the material provided, the marketing images show a usable device, and the real ones an unusable one in terms of contrast, resolution, and projection deformation. But because they do show real images I'd stop short of calling it a scam. You can after all make your own opinion based on reasonably realistic demos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyPxwp3SxdU
If there's anything about their work atmosphere I've gleamed from seeing employees talk about the company over the past few months it's quite the opposite of a cold, brutalist tech company. It's cult-like if anything. They've been acting way too impressed by their own product, and now that it's out and reviews have panned it, they tweet about how we all need to be more "optimistic about the future" and similar handwaving. It takes real faith-like buy-in to be shipping something like this and not feel totally embarrassed.
Narcissistic personalities are constantly rewarded in tech, they play right into the greed of VCs and unmask the fact most investors are completely incompetent.
That doesn't sound Humane. (sorry, I'll see myself out)
The interaction is awful. you have to touch it to operate it via voice commands? that means you cant use it in public. There's also a notification light? how is someone wearing it on their chest supposed to see that? I dont think this is a scam for the consumer, because no one in their right minds is going to watch this and want one. They are just cashing in on the AI crazy happening right now.
I wonder if the result is more of a product management/focus failure than a technical one? Perhaps the outcome would have been better if they had just picked one or two hard problems instead of trying to make the everything device right at launch.
10 years is just the right amount of time for a new generation of victims who never heard about it. $200 million is impressive, those arent rookie numbers anymore.
a) That a palm-size laser projector could work as a display.
b) That awkward hand gestures are a great way to navigate UI
c) That voice could work as a primary input.
d) That people would be willing to pay $700 and a monthly subscription for a device that barely works.
It's at par or even worse than Juicero. The team and its supporters should stop hiding behind "it's v1", and "we were trying to invent a new paradigm." The device has to be promising now, not in some imaginary future. And trying to invent shouldn't mean you're going to forgo questioning the basic foundational ideas.
The problem with it as a product was that it was worthless. Yes, it did what was claimed, but the machine and all that great engineering was completely unnecessary to get the insanely overpriced juice out of the bags.
> It's at par or even worse than Juicero.
Sounds like a scam to me.
That said, the Humane marketing reminded me of Magic Leap and I find it irritating. Particularly the big build up to what was going to be 'new information' and then it was an ad with no information. When the marketing is so divorced from what's delivered I think people are often nastier about it.
The irony to me is that in a lot of ways they're trying to be Apple, but without Apple's strategic thinking - it's more cosplaying Apple. Ben Thompson had a good write up today in Stratechery that touched on some of this: when the iPhone came out it worked with Mac and windows - the dominant computing platforms of the day! They didn't try to immediately create a standalone device from the get go and they had iterated on a narrow use case with the iPod for several years already to perfect some things.
Also - people love their phones! They may make overtures otherwise, but observe their behavior.
This is a lot more akin to what rewind aka limitless is doing. Start small/focused with a good product that solves a well tested use case while working with the existing platform (mobile) then leverage that to grow and build an ecosystem as you go.
There's so much about the Humane product that is strategically poor/user poor: a separate phone number, terrible battery, the extreme cost, etc. etc. even if the product actually worked (it doesn't) it's strategically DOA.
You don't get to mars by starting a company and building a mars rocket - you have that as the end goal and a path to get there that requires doing a ton of other stuff first so you have a shot at achieving that goal.
Any company that achieves great things builds a machine to build the machine - otherwise you just get a expensive art project if the product even works at all.
Still they did build and ship something and I like their industrial design so they deserve kudos for that. Plus I like to see people experiment so it's good when people try even if they fail, but I don't think it's helped by pretending something isn't a failure.
I hope this is the main lesson people will take from Humane. Not the "scam", "AI hype", "laser bullshit" angles. The top execs fundamentally deluded themselves into thinking that "the process is the product". During their stealth startup years their marketing was almost entirely "we're from Apple, we're perfectionists, we believe tech should feel like magic". They did Jony Ive-style videos. They talk about "intent", "craftsmanship", "design". And now they're adopting the reality distortion field. But they're merely cosplaying Apple, without the substance. They made a "less-intrusive" smartphone-killer that relies on the most intrusive input method ever! No product-market fit, no viable go-to-market ($700 + $24/mo).
It's Helene Deutsch's "as-if personality", but as a startup. The execs confuse appearances with reality. Liz Holmes copied the clothing, they're copying "the philosophy", but misunderstood its essence. They're almost Shakespearian characters, but the employees should leave now before it meets a tragic end.
It’s tragic, but also a little amusing how people copy the outside looks without understanding the inside value.
These products are clearly built by people who live in the SV bubble.
Nobody is going to use this pin in their day to day if you can't wear a seatbelt with it. Nobody is going to be able to easily use it outside. This is obvious to anyone who has been outdoors in the last decade.
And probably poisoning the well for other, simpler and laser-less personal AI devices as a side effect.
Btw, you can buy a 60g wearable device whose hardware is prepared for 24/7 microphone listening, has ML accelerator, 24h battery life, and has, for some reason, kept free 16GB of storage that the user can't access and the OS doesn't use.
It is called Apple Watch.
Like we’ve seen with all the shitcoins, rug pulls etc in the crypto space.
This is just bad product management in effect.
I use nearly all of those GBs of storage on mine with synced music and audiobooks for running.
> Apple Watch limits the amount of music which can be stored on the watch and is typically limited to 24% of the available space on the watch, so given you have a watch with 32GB of total space, 8GB would the maximum you can store.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253403298?sortBy=best
Sounds like it's used for data collection and surveillance.
Handheld projectors won't catch on until the next breakthrough in physics
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KbgvSi35n6o love with your heart, use your head for everything else
They want a AI world where that becomes the UI but it turns out to look like a pain in the ass to use. Maybe in 5 years and if they add an AR google. You still need visual input and reading on your hand is worse than holding a phone, you need AR
MKBHDs for Everything - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40059835 - April 2024 (173 comments)
this is just the usual Silicon Valley bias, with leather jacket weather year round (I'm only half joking)
I actually was tempted to pre-order one of these devices many months ago but decided my Apple Watch was a practical solution to the problems this device is meant to solve.
Anyway, I guess we will never get to see what version 2 of this product would have been.
If they’re guilty of anything it’s likely not adequately learning from why all the previous attempts in this space were big flops. That, plus the halo of arrogance that one feels from the marketing materials and presentations, setup a perfect storm for the likely unrecoverable PR dumpster fire they now find themselves in.
Wow wtf.
How?
This company was not even in business of developing new laser display tech. So who would improve it for them? And why would they have not in the previous decades?
Because on smart phones you can't do always on recording or control the lock screen. The real game changer AI devices will bring is when they always on record which you can't do without controlling the hardware.
Would have thought this was completely obvious.
Once they figured out how their new AI assistant needs to look like their own rules for 3rd party apps won’t matter anymore.