this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2024
509 points (97.9% liked)

Technology

59322 readers
5041 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 218 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I'm honestly surprised they made 10,000 sales.

[–] [email protected] 120 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Every web outlet and influencer with more than 1000 followers bought one. But that's all they're ever going to sell.

[–] [email protected] 96 points 5 months ago

Isn't it ironic that most likely, all their sales were used to make videos roasting their shitty product?

[–] [email protected] 147 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I am also seeking a $1 billion buy out, to compensate for years of being underpaid! What a coincidence!

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I'd buy you out but all I have is my 20 bucks from streaming music revenue and I'm going to spend that on beer.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (3 children)

If you even made one dollar off your own music, that's fuckin cool. You earned that beer!

What's your band called?

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (3 children)

A 6 pack of good beer or a 30 pack of piss?

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 106 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (4 children)

No one wants badly executed overheating slow Google assistant in a pointless little box. You already have a superior assistant in your pocket, reacting to your voice.

[–] [email protected] 96 points 5 months ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 34 points 5 months ago

What if I use a Samsung Note 7?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 months ago

I am contesting this match because you cheated. Something like a vibrating flaming AI insertable had to have helped you.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Buy an old Samsung S7?

Edit: Ah fuck. It's the note 7 and I fucked up.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 months ago

And bluetooth pins that allow you to talk to the AI in your pocket already exist. That's without that projector screen thing but still.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

Sure sure, but this one is very close to your skin and vital organs and could burn you or just plain explode, so how about it?

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 79 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

ask for 1B valuation with only ~7M in sales + ~240k/mo subscription revenue… hmmmm gonna be a no for me Dogg

[–] [email protected] 62 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

The entire company was a pump and dump scheme. They're gonna continue the pump until dump or bankruptcy.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago

Don't forget about the dangerous batteries and looming recall (due to court action I'm sure)! They'll soon have ZERO customers, in a way.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago (1 children)

So, if we do some sloppy rounding and say that the subscriptions make them 3 million a year . . . it'll only take a bit more than 330 years for anyone buying Humane at the asking price to break even. My cat could figure out that wasn't a good buy. (Of course, he'd prefer to invest in a tuna cannery . . .)

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 54 points 5 months ago (21 children)

I'm sure there's some MBA douche stupid enough to buy it.

load more comments (21 replies)
[–] [email protected] 44 points 5 months ago (3 children)

I don’t see how the AI assistant won’t eventually just end up on the smartphone. And, given that it’s not always appropriate to talk out loud to your phone, being able to use it with a screen makes it the perfect device for it.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 5 months ago (3 children)

That’s why they made it a pin.

Sure you can sell an app on the App Store, but most people won’t pay more than 5 bucks for an app, and even that’s stretching it. And the subscription market is already over saturated. So how do you make a boatload of cash? Sell overpriced hardware that needs to be “upgraded” every year or 2 to use new features, and include a subscription to use the thing in the first place.

They wanted to pull an Apple and lock people into their hardware ecosystem. I guarantee there was a plan for them to release an AI phone in the next 5 years if this thing did well.

What they missed is Apple products are generally pleasant to use on a daily basis. From what everyone said, this thing was hot garbage and slow to respond to queries.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

It will just come as standard with phones. Apple made a deal with OpenAI so it’s only a matter of time until Samsung does the same. Then it becomes a selling point for the device.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

There's totally a use case for a peripheral like a watch... But it's only so you don't have to pull your phone out of your pocket.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 43 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

"MKBHD takes out another company" /s

[–] [email protected] 32 points 5 months ago (1 children)

How do you actually get the oil from the snake though?

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 31 points 5 months ago

I’m also be seeking for a 1 billion payout

At least my product is working as intended

[–] [email protected] 26 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Huh - so it turns out people liked how smartphones consolidated all their various devices into one?

I guess the era of the hardware app is over…

[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 months ago (2 children)

You can't conclude that from this. The fact that there was hype and excitement about this supports an interest in the concept. This was simply utterly horrible execution and that is all.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 5 months ago (10 children)

Which hype? lol. Everyone hated this idea since reveal.

load more comments (10 replies)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

I actually agree. I would cite the Playdate as a counterexample.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 months ago

Inevitably. That's the goal of most tech startups; hype themselves up and sell out for as many millions as possible. Meanwhile honest labor, education, and trades workers can't afford houses.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago

Thinking about the cost of maintenance, liabilities, and ethical/moral decisions

  • you couldn't pay me enough to take on that company

good luck to anyone else thinking otherwise

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago

HP is reportedly one of the companies that Humane was in talks with over a potential sale

They didn’t learn the lesson with webos? They lost billions even if that was a good os with good phones.

Can’t imagine anyone wanting to buy this company for more than 1million and that’s just because of patents and devs (acquihire - where the buyer is only interested in ip and devs and doesn’t care at all about the actual product)

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago

I could draw a kitten for that kind of money if anyone is interested. At least there are no monthly costs to it.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago

What an insane valuation, lol. I wonder how gullible their seeders/initial investors were when they pitched the company initially. Needing to get that much money to settle bills and debts just blows my mind. Shit like this is why I sold my AMD shares at its peak a few months ago and why it's probably worth considering selling Nvidia now as it's peaking. The AI boom may peak a bit higher, but I think the frenzy is going to begin waning within the next ~6 months as more and more investors realize the tech is still very limited outside of backend enterprise use (e.g. using LLMs to ingest all your SOPs, regulations, technical documents, etc. and then make it available for employees to query for random work questions).

But who knows, I've been wrong before.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago

saying the quiet part out loud out of desperation

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

Humane as a company is worth the cost of exactly 10,000 units.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Ed Zitron is going to have a field day with this one.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

I listen to Better Offline and I’m as jaded and cynical as the rest of us, but even I find some of his episodes too much to take.

Like he has no impartiality at all, particularly his takes on LLMs. Our small company of software developers and engineers have saved so much time with Visual Studio CoPilot. The fact is there are uses where they’re extremely useful; just maybe not as the MSM portrays it.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

Tell me it's being bought by a data mining company?

load more comments
view more: next ›