Hardware is Hard

Friday’s post was, of course, a massive subtweet of Human’s "Ai" pin, which finally made it out the door to what can only be described as “disastrous” reviews.

We’ve been not entirely kind to Humane here at Icecano, so I was going to sort of discretely ignore the whole situation, the way you would someone who fell down a flight of stairs at a party but was already getting the help they needed. But now we’re going on a week and change of absolutely excruciating discourse about whether it’s okay to give bad products bad reviews. It’s the old “everything gets a 7” school of video game reviews, fully metastasized.

And, mostly, it’s all bad-faith garbage. There’s aways a class of grifter who thinks the only real crime is revealing the grift.

Just tobe crystal clear: the only responsibility a critic or reviewer of any kind has it to the audience, never to the creators, and even less to the creator’s shareholders.

But also, we’re at the phase in the cycle where a certain kind of tech bro climbs out of the woodwork and starts saying things like “hardware is hard.” And it is! I’ve worked on multiple hardware projects, and they were all hard, incredibly hard. I once watched someone ask the VP of Hardware Engineering “do the laws of physics even allow that?” and the answer was a half-grin followed by “we’re not sure!”

I hate to break it to you, hard work isn’t an incantation to deflect criticism. Working hard on something stupid and useless isn’t the brag you think it is.

Because, you know what’s harder? Not having a hudred million dollars plus of someone elese’s money to play with interest-free for years on end. They were right about one thing though: we did deserve better.