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I think so too. Which only makes me want to see it even more. An admission that there is nothing else.

if it is doing battery level, I guess it is also doing power on, and leds. It doesn't say it does charging anymore, so maybe it does battery level until it goes to 0?

A $700 gadget that has significant offline functionality may still be ok.

One that’s dependent on the company’s servers to operate? Almost no f’ing way.

Do they have a history of lying? I follow their reporting, and have generally found them reliable.

It sounds like they just bought a bunch of patents. I’m not sure they would keep the acquihires from such a… successful product

Where is the 200 figure from?

Unfortunately the CFPB is in the process of being eliminated.

Doesn't the FTC regulate vendor-advertised claims about product behavior?

I think going bankrupt can be grounds for making the software open source or at least free to make the users whole. Think of it like a liability, when bankrupt the stakeholders can choose to refund customers or make the software available - whichever suits them.

That might also have bad consequences (not because the idea is bad, but because corps will try to route around it). It'll start with pieces of the software not being able to be released because they were licensed from a third party, and end with software development teams being organized into contract shops that own the code and thus (oh! How sad!) are regrettably unable to supply any code after the bankruptcy of the main entity. Would need very careful rules from regulators to try and anticipate tricks like this.

That is far better; this 'blahblah' that, after bankruptcy legal reasons prevent from passing out the source should not be allowed as excuse.

> If a company goes bankrupt they can’t buy back the devices.

Yes, but in this specific scenario the purchasing entity is far from bankrupt at least financially.

Why have regulations at all then? Why regulate water purity when you can choose to not drink water you're skeptical of, or why regulate food if you can just not eat food that you're skeptical of? Regulations are there not for you, who perhaps knows better, but there for the people who do not. Most people are not tech-savvy. Most people believe whatever marketing is being shoved down their throat.

An average person does not do or know how to do the due diligence of product validation, and I'd argue even the tech-savvy of us are unable to figure out if a product is going to stick around or not since what info is being given to us for analysis is limited, and heavily watered down.

> You can just choose not to buy products whose future you’re skeptical of.

I had a meeting last week whose sole purpose was for me to re-describe something a couple times which I had already described in text. And which also could be found in vendor documentation.

I also know someone who seems to think that (almost?) anything pushed on the Internet must be true.

Understanding how products works and what are the risks requires a study. It’s not realistic that a layman will study and understand the implications of the architecture of the product.

This regulation will transfer that requirement from the consumer to the maker so that the maker can choose to create products they issue full refund when they can’t guarantee perpetual software availability or they can choose to make all the software available with the product. It also avoids dictating how the product should be designed when doing all that.

In this particular case, this is true, and in any case approximately nobody bought these, but it's not uncommon for large, well-capitalised companies to nuke products when convenient (Google likes doing this, say).

This sounds like a robot character in a sci-fi novel, but the reality would actually be tedious.

Given the reviews of the humane pin I wouldn’t hold my breath.

A voice booms, “these allegorical shadows brought to you by Mountain Dew”

I recall seeing a glowing article in Axios about the product and I wouldn't be surprised if there were similar posts in other publications. I was pretty skeptical for obvious reasons and expect most people were, but some people will uncritically believe what they read, especially about the hot business topic of the moment.

Getting such articles written in the first place shows some level of business connections. I don't like that people will throw so much money away on hype, especially when so many useful products languish, but it's the world we live in.

Some people collect failures.

This is a non sequitur. The original comment referred to the $116M HP paid to acquire the assets. None of that was paid to employees.

Yes, Humane burned through $200M of investor capital, and some of it was spent on salaries for employees. The employees likely accepted lower cash salaries than were otherwise competitive, in exchange for equity which is now worthless. What is your point exactly?

Are you suggesting the employees pulled a fast one somehow because the investors paid their salaries? That’s, obviously, how venture-backed startups work, and everyone involved (especially the investors) is very aware of the trade. In exchange, the investors own much more of the company than the employees and have a much higher upside potential if the company succeeds.

Are you saying Apple are bozos, or that you were at Apple at the same time the Humane founders were and they specifically were bozos?

Why was Imran fired from Apple?

Ah, thanks for clarifying. Reminds me of that joke where a mathematician watches 2 people entering a house and then 3 people leaving it, concluding that there's now -1 people in the house.

The printer will soon be able to answer your question about ink levels.

In version 2 it will be able to nag^W persuade you to buy genuine HP ink, by reminding you repeatedly the benefits of genuine HP ink.

Surely it's so they can feed error messages like "PC LOAD LETTER" into the model and get a sometimes semi-accurate explanation.

I would not describe working at HP as upwards personally, I'd rather just go back to consulting

Oh, wow, that UX is clear as mud. Thanks!

Heeyy morning Jeff! Looks like we are still low on yellow ink today, so I'm probably not going to be able print anything for you. But if you'd like I could order a new cartridge set direct from HP? Would you like me to go ahead with that order or remind you in 15 minutes with another friendly greeting?

If you like I could call you on your cell to remind you, send you a text, email you, or I could just shout loudly from right here in printer!

Hey, now, don't give Brother any ideas!

That's why cylons rebel. "They look and feel like printers. Some are programmed to think they are printer."

I agree. You can make an OS for a small device cheaper than that. You can hire the people for less than that.

I don’t see how they have anything of value at all other than patents.

Remember when Apple patented a "ornamental design for a portable display device" and tried to sue Samsung? I'm sorry but the idea that you can patent a shape is just super depressing.

https://consor.com/apple-patents-a-rectangle

https://patents.google.com/patent/US20160300072

> Device, method, and graphical user interface for accessing an application in a locked device

I didn't care about looking at the individual patents, and I can't have a qualified opinion on Imran Chaudhri as a person or as an engineer. But I did have to snicker when I saw the Aphex Twin reference on his homepage.

It absolutely was on the ragged edge of viable. In the first one (and 3G) you could easily scroll a webpage faster than it could render it.

But it did what it needed enough to be extremely compelling. And it improved very fast in the early years.

3G connectivity was available for several years before the first iPhone launched. I had 3G phones in the US in 2005.

iPhone was late to the 3G game. It was one of the complaints of the original iPhone, that it didn't have 3G despite so many other devices out there already having it.

3G smartphones (mostly Nokia N60 platform) were a thing from about 2002 in some European markets, with rather limited uptake. The real killer feature of the iPhone, at least initially (remember the first one didn't have 3G in any case) was a browser that didn't make you want to throw the thing out the window in frustration every time you used it.

The iPhone was pleasant to use, or at least not actively infuriating. That was, to a large extent, all it took.

Nokia really messed up, here; there was nothing stopping them making an iPhone-ish thing (perhaps without multitouch) a few years previous to the iPhone coming out, and there was even a semi-decent third party browser for their platform (Opera) which they could have taken cues from or bought, but they were always far more excited about the featurephone market, seeing smartphones as a niche.

> It's incredible how easy it was to raise money in that time frame and how hard it is to raise money now. They would throw huge sums of money at you for the dumbest ideas.

Humane's series C was in 2023, long after the end of ZIRP. They will still throw huge sums of money at you for the dumbest idea, provided that you say the magic term 'AI' enough.

Even Perplexity got funding, so yeah, even an absolute piece of trash business can raise money with the right group of people.

I have no idea what Apple was thinking with the Vision. It is priced for professionals but then all the promo material was regarding various ways to isolate yourself from your family.

I wish they'd slim it down and make it affordable for a normal human so they can iterate on it. But even then I would not buy it unless someone gets us to an unlocked bootloader and Linux.

It wasn’t a wearable, it was a small portable device. It looked kind of similar to the Playdate game console if you know what that is.

Teenage Engineering also helped with that, so it makes sense.

That's the most interesting thing because if those folks managed to get a parachute for their 1x pref investors with this abysmal final price, what does it mean for the several companies at the same situation?

It's a pity that we do not have a version of "Who's holding the bag?"[1] for LP and VC funds, but with all challenges to raise money, it would be interesting to see how many funds are losing money at the moment.

This is the inherent feature from VC funds but still, one thing is raise cheap money and having a "circular" money flowing (from A -> B - (...) -> IPO -> A) but if they do not arrive even in the IPO how this ecosystem will work if a US 5 Year Coupon pays 4.40%?

[1] - https://pscmevents.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Who-Is-Hol...

Is that your pitch? Do you think anyone would give you the money?

A variation on the Michael Dell plan. Smart.

I mistakenly thought they generated a totally of $116 million in revenue.

I meant to ask "If you were to get $230 million, how would you plan to generate as much money as Humane was able to generate during the length of its existence". Do you have an answer?

> an AI which emits a binary yes/no to, “Should I invest some of this $230 million such that it becomes $115 million 5 years from now.”

If you were pitching that to me, I'd ask: what is the AI's confidence in its answer, and how can you verify that?

The trick is you'd have to tell the VC how you'd spend their money before you get the money.

Ah, I mean that is the theory, but the practice, today, is that you have to say the magic word to get money. This is actually fairly normal VC behaviour; the market as a whole has always been rather fad-driven.

Oh wow I totally missed that angle. In that respect the marketing was genius.

yes

The HPs have acquired too many near worthless companies.

I feel its more a cargo cult mentality among the executives.