Not as cool as a dinosaur statue, but practical! Of course!

Even now they’re already leveraging their OS-level control. The Android Authority guys said in their report, “the Rabbit R1’s launcher app is intended to be preinstalled in the firmware and be granted several privileged, system-level permissions — only some of which we were able to grant”. I don’t work at Rabbit, so I don’t know exactly what modifications they’ve done to their AOSP fork, but they’re doing something.

If I had to guess, I’d say they’ve messed with the power management of AOSP and probably the process scheduling somehow? I say this because the Rabbit R1 is hands down the fastest way to access an assistant that I’ve used. I have a ChatGPT shortcut on my homescreen of my Pixel 8 phone and the ChatGPT app is constantly killed in the background, so often times I go to access the assistant but I have to wait for an app to load. The R1 is instant.

And that’s without counting the time it takes to face or fingerprint unlock the phone, then tap an icon.

No, I would have not paid $200 if Rabbit was an app. I have ChatGPT and Perplexity on my phone, I don’t like the experience compared to the R1. I paid $200 for the end to end Rabbit experience.

Btw, I get that some people don’t mind unlocking their phone, tapping an icon, waiting for it to load, asking a question, then getting an answer. That’s fine. If you’re happy with that experience, then the Rabbit R1 is not for you.

It needs to be separate hardware because Google and Apple have a strangle hold on their respective OSes. No way in hell Apple/Google would give a random app deep integration with AI. Although not currently present, it seems like Rabbit (and Humane) want to give a ton of control over the system, data, and apps to the AI.

We know it’s just ChatGPT (and Perplexity). That’s why we bought it. It’s just a fun frontend for a chat bot. That’s like the main point.

First I thought this was dumb, but actually… It doesn’t seem like taxes really get distributed to everyone. I live in a poor neighborhood and our streets are all jacked up, but somehow the rich neighborhoods always have nice streets. Am I paying taxes so the rich people get nicer streets? How do I get the city to fix our roads too?

Unfortunately, I bet these guys don’t care. I used to work at a company you might have products from and I would constantly hear “Hey, we’re a business” as an excuse to degrade the user experience. :(

I was wondering the same thing. It seems more proper to run a separate government Mastodon server. Otherwise, they’re showing preferential treatment to one company.

Although… they probably can’t handle self hosting? But really? The all mighty US can’t self host a server?

Wait, so how does this work? What number would I dial if I wanted to reach her?