> - Gesture navigation steals user input when swiping on the left/right edges of the screen,
Well I've seen even 1B+ dl apps failing to handle that (on a Google Pixel), so at this point I'm putting the blame on Google. I've switched back to three button navigation. Though even some trivial OS gestures like screen unlock fail reliably on my Pixel 6a. (As in, I do the gesture, it fails to register the gesture, i try to make the gesture "with more conviction" through the whole screen and it still fails, and after few minutes it ends up okay somehow)
Don't worry. Google broke it as well with shitty "edge-to-edge" nonsense to make the apps more "engaging" by forcing them to deal with the disappearing bottom bar. By default.
Kyutai's unmute has great latency, but requires a fast small-ish, non-thinking, non-tooled LLM. What I'm currently working on is merging both worlds. Take the small LLM for instant response, which will basically just be able to repeat what you said, to show it understood. And have a big LLM do stuff in the background, and feeding back infos to the small LLM to explain intermediary steps.
This is the key aspect for future development of models - small instant reasoning, ideally on device that funnels through tho a larger model for reasoning.
So, my brain defaulted to "people are smart, so it makes sense", so it understood it as "it's the toy you keep within reach". But if you look at Pollen Robotics product, you see they have a "Reachy", which can indeed move, and has arms to interact with its environment. So yeah, it's a weird name. It reaches your heart through the feeling it communicates to you with its antennas?
Looking at the BOM (6 cheapest servos, one usb camera, a usb hub, a microctronller ,two mics, 30cm-high low-precision plastic) the price looks fairly realistic to me. I could imagine it at half the price on aliexpress. The manufacturing or sourcing doesn't seem complicated. So overall it looks like a very realistic endeavor.
The only negative point I see: Pollen Robotics doesn't seem used to do mass market/cheap products. But as I said, it seems to be a pretty simple production (I mean, they are probably running everywhere like crazy because nothing is ready and everything is broken, but they should be able to accomplish this)
My experience is that BoM estimates tend to be inaccurate. Look at Apple kit.
There’s the cost of materials, the cost of distribution and storage, Corporate Overhead, NRE, and then the “Because We Can Get Away With It” surcharge.
As someone who had to tweak many times LMK and Android's way to compute which process/app has which priorities, and how is a service restarted, I want to scream very loudly. But I guess that works.
> - Samsung has their own basebands but only uses them on their premium phones
Uh? There are Samsung Exynos devices not using a Samsung baseband? (Exynos spans a large size of the range, just not the sub-100$)
> Utterly unbelievable that no Western government has tackled that situation. The market for basebands is completely and utterly rotten:
There is a global problem that in a lot of areas there is a monopoly lock-in via standards. Those companies are growing their strategies to control the way standards are written, to make it more complicated and costly for 3rd parties to implement.
One example of making standards more complicated which adds more patents is DVB-T2 [1]. 95% of the usage of DVB-T2 compared to DVB-T1 is increasing modulation rate and improving FEC, but it also adds PLP (which I've seen maybe three demos of), which is covered by several patents, largely increasing complexity and patent cost.
FWIW, I love standards and I agree that the industry should largely participate in making standards. I agree that standards needs to have "SHALL", you can't make everything optional to allow for lower costs. And I won't pretend there is an easy solution to those problems.
Sadly, the only way I can see to improve this situation, is to increase government's public funding into standardization.
[1] FWIW, I know nothing of how DVB-T2 has been written and who did it, so it's just an example of complicated requirements increasing the number of patents and thus cost of implementation. It's possible that those requirements have been added in good faith.
> Uh? There are Samsung Exynos devices not using a Samsung baseband?
The S23 for example runs a Qualcomm X70 baseband on either a Samsung Exynos or Qualcomm Snapdragon depending on region. Why that's the case (both using a Qualcomm modem and different CPU vendors for the same device), no idea.
> Sadly, the only way I can see to improve this situation, is to increase government's public funding into standardization.
IMHO, the thing that should be funded is the fundamental research. As it is, most research in the RF and codec sector is in private hands, so no wonder that things like patent trolls eventually arose.
But eh, that's not gonna happen, not in the US (for Trumpian anti-intellectualism reasons), not in Europe (we lack the money, the brains and the willpower to cut through the red tape) and not in China either.
