David Pierce

Tom Coates was recently at a meeting with Meta’s Threads team talking about ActivityPub, the fediverse, and the future of social. He took a lot of interesting notes! And in those notes he has a near-future roadmap for Threads’ decentralization plans:

I’m in Samsung’s CES booth this morning, where I finally got to see the new Ballie robot in action. It was cool! Helping with workouts, tracking air quality, making calls. And then… it got very confused about how its projector screen worked, and eventually stopped showing anything at all.

We ran into her at Samsung’s booth, where she was doing... a SmartThings cooking show, I suppose you’d call it? Somehow I doubt Martha’s using a ton of Bluetooth appliances and smart ovens, but hey, you never know.

Rabbit’s not shipping its new AI-powered R1 device until March, but the company just launched it officially today at CES. I got a few seconds with founder Jesse Lyu’s device, which didn’t do much thanks to crappy hotel Wi-Fi. But it’s a really nice-looking little device! The buttons feel good, the orange glows super bright, and the whole package is surprisingly light.

That was the setup, anyway, during this CES presentation. But I was watching Izumi Kawanishi, Afeela’s president and COO, as he was steering the latest prototype onto the stage, and I would swear he didn’t move his thumbs at all. Plus, he then made a comment about how this was just for tech demo purposes. So color me skeptical. But either way, at least someone is trying to make my dream of car controllers come true.