Tag: Feedly

I’ve spent a day with the Rabbit R1, and to say that I was underwhelmed would be an understatement. In fact, I was surprised at how little it offers at the moment, and even from what it offers, what a poor job it does at that. According to the CEO Jesse Lyu, the R1 is “the worst this technology will ever be,” which is kind of the nature of technology but not a great selling point—especially when you’re charging 200 bucks for it. If I were to streamline my thoughts on this device, these are the 10 things that left me considerably unimpressed.

1. It’s half-baked at best

This has been the most common complaint about the R1 so far: it is an unfinished, half-baked device. You get a bunch of painfully basic, AI chatbot-like features, and all the exciting stuff is promised for later this year. This includes teaching the R1 actions that it will be able to generalize for various applications and a teach mode that will allow users to create personalized agents to handle specific tasks.

The company has been transparent about this and the CEO admits that the device “is in a very early stage”. Considering we’re required to pay full price for an incomplete product, this is less than ideal.

At the moment, the R1 isn’t even close to providing value that’s worth the price. Paying this amount for a gadget that is only able to tell you about the weather and play a song is ridiculous. It’s apparent that we’re simply the Rabbit’s guinea pigs here beta testing their debut product for them.

2. A very strange app menu

There are four apps you can use on the R1 out of the box: Spotify, Uber, DoorDash, and Midjourney. The app selection didn’t excite me because I use Lyft and Uber Eats for my rides and food deliveries. My coworker, Kyle, uses Seamless to order food and he wasn’t too happy about the app menu, either. I also find the inclusion of Midjourney pointless and a very random attempt at making the device as AI-heavy as possible.

3. Too many mess-ups

I may have forgiven the R1 for its limited app menu (considering more options are allegedly on the way) if the apps at least worked. Uber got both my pickup and drop-off location completely wrong the first time but worked on the second attempt. For something like calling a ride, I wouldn’t want to trust a product with a 50% success rate. And if I have to double-check the R1 to see if it got everything right, I might as well use my phone for the job.

This gadget’s overarching aim is to “save you time” and minimize the taps on your phone by “eliminating the need to navigate multiple apps.” But with the current number of glitches and the things it hallucinates out of nowhere, it’s actually wasting my time.

Spotify was a complete mess. It would sometimes acknowledge my command to play a specific song but still not play anything, and would also often completely ignore my repeated requests to pause playback. It constantly got song and artists’ names wrong and played Josh Levine when I asked for Avril Lavigne.

The biggest disappointment was that it completely failed to recognize my personal Spotify account even though I was logged in via the Rabbithole. I asked it to play a song from my playlist titled ‘paki’ and it started playing a random Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan song with the word ‘Pakistan’ in it.

4. Woefully average Vision feature

The Rabbit Eye-enabled Vision feature is pretty bare-bones as is. You point the camera at something and the R1 can tell you what it is. It’s a feature we’ve had for years on Google Lens. Except, it was average at best at that, too. It got some queries completely wrong and other answers were very vague.

It confidently labeled my colleague’s black shirt ‘red’. The response to another question wasn’t incorrect but vague to the point of being useless; he was expecting an exact name for a brand of shoe.

5. Mediocre translation feature

The R1 allows bidirectional translation between an impressive number of languages but I wouldn’t trust its translation capabilities in a situation when I’d actually need them. They’re unreliable and often inaccurate. It did a passable job with Urdu and Arabic but stuttered a lot with Hindi. Again, Google Translate exists and is free, so the middling translation abilities of the R1 didn’t impress me.

6. Poor location services

I should have guessed this device has no idea where I am when I asked for a weather update and it gave me the weather report for Anaheim, California (I’m in Manhattan). It did eventually get it right but I could have spent half that time checking the weather app on my phone.

Though the R1 boasts GPS services, it got my zip code completely wrong upon asking. I corrected it and it apologized for the error, but still recommended a Starbucks in Indiana when I asked for the closest one.

7. Connection drops with RabbitOS

I was often asked to wait after making a request because of an unexplained connection drop with RabbitOS. The R1 would take a while, tell me it’s working on reestablishing the connection, and then get back to my request. This could be fixed with the next software update, but it’s pretty bothersome.

8. Incredibly short battery life

The 1,000 mAh battery on this device lasts around five to six hours and takes an hour to recharge. Even with the recent software update that slightly improved idle battery performance, I don’t see this gadget as something that could be my all-day pocket companion. It went down by 6% when it was just on standby for two and a half hours.

9. Your sim service is the subscription fee

The folks at Rabbit made sure to reiterate multiple times that, unlike the AI Pin, there’s no monthly subscription fee on the R1. But you still need cellular service (along with Wi-Fi) to operate it. So you’re still technically paying a monthly fee to be able to use this device. The monthly expense on the AI Pin is $24, and getting another phone line for the R1 is going to cost you roughly the same.

10. Not as context-intelligent as advertised

The demo video showed Rabbit’s CEO asking the R1 to play a song, and then asking it to play “another song from the same album.” The device’s memory and the ability to understand context were the main capabilities being marketed here. I tried the exact same prompts countless times. It couldn’t get it right even on one attempt. Half of the time, it played a completely random song, and on other occasions, it asked me what album I was talking about.

LONDON — SpaceX’s Starship will be a game changer for space-based solar power generation and will make orbiting power plants not only affordable, but cheaper than many other methods of generating electricity on Earth, according to Michigan-based start-up Virtus Solis. 

Virtus Solis, founded by former SpaceX rocket engineer John Bucknell, introduced their solar power beaming concept at the International Conference on Energy from Space held in London on Wednesday, April 17. 

"For space-based solar power to work, you need to have heavy-lift launch, you need to have wireless power transfer and you need to have the economics," Bucknell said at the conference. "Once you have low-cost access to space, that’s one less miracle that you need to have solved."

Related: Space-based solar power may be one step closer to reality, thanks to this key test (video)

The cost of launching satellites to space has plummeted in recent years thanks to the advent of reusable rockets pioneered by SpaceX. The company currently charges under $3,000 per kilogram of payload, but that’s still too much for space-based solar power generation, which will require enormous orbiting arrays larger than the world’s largest currently orbiting object, the International Space Station. 

SpaceX promises that once Starship is fully up and running, it will cost as little as $10 per kilogram to loft satellites to space. Although that estimate might be a little too optimistic, Bucknell says that once the cost of launch into low Earth orbit falls below $200 per kilogram, space-based solar power will become cheaper than Earth-based nuclear plants or gas and coal-fired power stations.

"Once Starship is fully reusable, that will drive down the cost," said Bucknell. "SpaceX has recently flown a Falcon 9 booster for the 20th time and they are recertifying for 40 launches. Conceivably, Starship could do hundreds of launches. But we are basing our assumptions on a 15-times use."

Currently, Earth-based photovoltaic panels provide the cheapest source of electricity at less than $30 per megawatt-hour. But the sun doesn’t shine at night, and energy experts struggle to make up for that daily drop with other renewable sources. So far, nuclear, gas and coal-fired plants need to be on standby to cover the demand after dark or in bad weather. But gas and coal need to be phased out for the world to meet its emission reduction goals. 

And nuclear power, Bucknell said, is much more expensive. "The cost of nuclear power is between $150 and $200 per megawatt hour," said Bucknell. "We think that our system could get down to around $30 per megawatt hour once at scale."

Virtus Solis wants to build giant photovoltaic arrays up to 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) across that would be assembled in orbit by robots from 5.3-foot (1.6 meters) wide modules. Hundreds of such modules would be delivered by a single Starship into the Molniya orbit, a highly elliptical orbit with the closest point about 500 miles (800 km) above Earth and the farthest at 22,000 miles (35,000 km). 

A satellite in this orbit takes 12 hours to complete one lap around the planet, but the nature of this orbit is such that the spacecraft stays for more than 11 hours in the most distant region from where it can view nearly an entire hemisphere. 

A constellation of two or more such arrays would therefore provide constant "baseload power" to a region, said Bucknell. A system of 16 arrays would cover the entire world, beaming energy in the form of microwaves to giant receiving antennas on the ground. 

Bucknell said the company is now working on improving the efficiency of wireless power transmission, which is another major stumbling block for space-based solar power. Current systems have efficiencies of around 5 percent but for practical use, efficiencies of around 20 percent will be needed. 

In February, Virtus Solis announced plans to launch a demonstration power-beaming satellite in 2027 that would test in-space assembly of solar panels and transmit more than one kilowatt of power to Earth, according to Space News. The firm hopes to build a commercial megawatt-class solar installation by 2030.  

Despite dedicating years of innovation and research toward convincing consumers to buy electric vehicles, automakers are still grappling with a lack of charging infrastructure across the United States. But California — a leader in EVs — says that isn’t too much of a problem for its residents.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced last week that there is now one EV charging station for every five gas stations in the state, which is home to more than 39 million people. There are now 105,000 public or shared private electric charging stations in California and 500,000 at-home chargers. California has also approved a $1.9 billion investment plan to help deploy 40,000 additional EV chargers across the state. California had already put $1.8 billion into efforts to improve its zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) infrastructure.

“California dominates in this space,” Newsom said Friday in a video posted on X, formerly known as Twitter. “We want to maintain that leadership — maintain that dominance — as we transition from dirty tailpipes to a low-carbon, green growth future.”

A lack of easy access to charging is one of the most commonly cited obstacles to growing EV sales. Everyone from Ford Motor Co.’s CEO to the U.S. secretary of energy has run into issues finding an electric charger. And even if you can find a charger during a road trip, JD Power has found that 1 in 5 attempts to use a public EV charger fail.

A lack of access could be a major wrinkle in California’s plan to phase out the sale of new gasoline-only cars by 2035. The process will start in 2026, with a new mandate that requires 35% of all news cars sold to be electric or plug-in hybrid cars.

More than 1.84 million ZEVs have been sold in California to date, according to the governor’s office. More than a third of all ZEVs sold in the U.S. are sold in California. If California seceded from the U.S. and became its own country, it would be the fourth-largest seller of EVs worldwide, behind Germany, the U.S., and China.

As part of the push from carmakers to expand EV charging access for their customers, every major Western automaker has made deals to adopt Tesla’s North American Charging Standard (NACS). Exact amounts vary, but those companies’ customers will gain access to more than 15,000 Tesla Superchargers across North America under their respective deals.

“This move will improve the public charging experience by giving our customers even more choice and is a vital part of our growth as an EV brand,” Ford CEO Jim Farley said in a statement earlier this year after his customers gained access to Tesla’s chargers. Ford was the first major automaker to sign a deal with Tesla.

Seven automakers — including Stellantis, GM, and Mercedes-Benz — have also formed a joint venture to launch the IONNA charging network, which aims to have at least 30,000 charging stations across North America by 2030. Those stations will be compatible with Tesla’s NACS and the Combined Charging System (CCS).

This article originally appeared on Quartz.

DARPA announced successful tests of its new autonomous vehicles on Wednesday, all part of the agency’s Robotic Autonomy in Complex Environments with Resiliency (RACER) program. And while the tests sound impressive, we found ourselves transfixed by one little visual detail: The 12-ton tank’s glowing green eyes.

The RACER Heavy Platform (RHP) vehicles are enormous, weighing in at 12 tons and measuring 20 feet long. The vehicles are programmed using the Textron M5 base system, already used in many driverless vehicles by the U.S. Army, and are meant to complement the RACER Fleet Vehicles (RFVs) which are comparatively small at just 2 tons and 11 feet long.

The vehicle tests, aided by teams from the University of Washington and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, happened at military training sites in Texas back in late 2023, but are just being announced by DARPA today.

Videos from the Texas tests are now available on YouTube, demonstrating the fully autonomous driving of these gigantic vehicles in off-road conditions. And again, we can’t stop staring into the vehicle’s glowing green eyes. They give the entire demonstration an almost Pixaresque feel. Just look at that little face.

DARPA also posted a new video to YouTube showing the smaller RFV tests, which were notable for their adaptability in an autonomous mode. The teams running the tests had no experience in the area, making it as close to fresh for them as possible. The goal, of course, was to see how these types of vehicles could perform in a completely foreign environment.

“Using fully unoccupied RFVs, RACER demonstrated autonomous movement within a 15 square mile terrain area including highly diverse ground vegetation cover, trees, bushes, rocks, slopes, obstructed ditches, and creek crossings typical of the varied, complex Texas terrain familiar to armored maneuver,” DARPA said in its press release.

DARPA has been working on autonomous vehicles for decades, starting in earnest back in 1983 with the Strategic Computing Initiative. And it’s incredible how far the U.S. military has come. During testing, the Autonomous Land Vehicle of 1985 would get confused with just a little bit of snow on the road. But that kind of obstacle is clearly no issue here in the 2020s.

“Having two radically different types of vehicles helps us advance towards RACER’s goal of platform agnostic autonomy in complex, mission-relevant off-road environments that are significantly more unpredictable than on-road conditions,” Stuart Young, RACER program manager, said on Wednesday.

DARPA didn’t respond to emailed questions about the glowing green eyes, which we still can’t stop staring at. But we’ll update this post if we hear back. Do you know what purpose the green eyes serve? We’d love to hear about it in the comments.