Shipping 100 hardware units in under eight weeks

Please stop multitasking while driving.

The tech seems neat and all but please stop multitasking while driving, encouraging others to multitask while driving, and building products specifically designed to encourage multitasking while driving.

If you want to work while you're in transit: take public transit.

I agree. For safety mostly but even for "fuck cant we just drive somewhere and that be considered enough achievement, like it is 1989"

In 1825 people would stare at an ox’s ass for days straight thinking about nothing much.

In 2025 we can’t spend 10 minutes without doing something else while traveling at speeds that would make a sailor blush.

I agree that we should find ways to limit instead of instigate multitasking while driving.

Building tech is usually clearer than finding a clear use case for it. As we find ways to mature the tech to be aligned with the ultimate vision we have, we will test various problems the immature tech can solve.

With that being said, if you have any ideas where this could really help people (for instance people with motor disabilities), please share them. We would like to serve people and build with humility.

People with motor disabilities seems like a great use case! Cooking and watching TV are two activities that benefit from voice control (due to dirty hands and remotes going missing). Nursing mothers often literally have their hands full.

Lots of folks in safety critical situations rely on multitasking and voice commands: law enforcement, firefighters, pilots, heavy equipment operators, armed forces, etc. Many of them are in situations in which not multitasking isn't an option and receive special training to minimize risks. That being said now you're entering heavily regulated industries where the stakes couldn't be higher... not exactly an easy place for LLMs and startups to play.

On the other end of the spectrum there is a tried and true industry for tech innovations where the stakes couldn't be lower: adult entertainment. There's millions of adults wishing they could operate screens without needing a hand free. Might not be as glamorous as helping firefighters and people with motor disabilities, but we all need to make a living.

Best wishes!

+1

People do not multitask well. The median driver can barely keep a car on the road in perfect weather on a good day. Please stop helping distract them!

Luckily, most states lave laws about this, and drivers will get fined. Sadly, manufacturers rarely get fined. The people who made the original "hands on wheel" defeat device for Teslas got away with it, IIRC

The problem is that probably over 98% of the roads in the country are almost 0 chance of unexpected event. Nearly empty roads, small towns and cities with crosswalks that never see a single pedestrian.

In the bay though. Holy crap driving here was a wake up call for me. You cannot drive distracted here. I've driven in every major US city. The bay is by far the worst. Yes even then NYC, ATL and Miami. Chicago or Houston is a probably 2nd worst.

At the same time my partner often gets mad at me for refusing to do anything but focus when I drive. So I agree in general but I'm not everyone. This device seems like it will help people avoid incidents.

Please hand your driver's licence and car keys over at your nearest police station.

Quickly, before you kill someone

You can't be distracted from driving no matter where you are driving or when. When driving you have to be 100% focused in driving because every tiny risk you take can be fatal or worse.

I hate to be this guy but I've lost too many people for small stupid mistakes. The equivalent of this is getting killed when you accidentally bump into someone in the supermarket. This is just not fair.

Never take a chance, stay safe, life is precious and fragile.

For me voice control is not only about multitasking, but just being able to continue to work without being sitted down. For example I use voice control while standing or walking and I get more ideas that way that being sitted

As someone who walked away from a 5 car sandwich this past week

HANG UP AND DRIVE!

Don't talk, don't try to do anything other maybe listening to some music while you're driving.

Multitasking is mostly for those who have muscle memory in driving home to work and back. I have a hard time remembering going to the grocery store on the way because of muscle memory

Try a demo where you're doing work that needs your hands! Laundry, gardening, child/pet care. A cool demo could be using Blue to look up tutorials and order parts for pick up at the hardware store while fixing something around the house. Or maybe a demo where someone schedules an appointment while holding a fussy baby.

Counterpoint: don't blame the founder for leading with driving use cases. It's audience selection bias, not the founder being reckless. He's showing what gets traction, not necessarily what he thinks people should actually do

I'm contributing to a similar open source coding tool [1] and I see the same skewed reaction: voice control of "whatever" while driving gets 5-10x the clicks of any other demo.

There's a logical reason so many people think of voice control while driving. It's not because they're reckless.

It reflects the hierarchy of needs. People with long commutes (often younger, lower-paid engineers living further out) spend 2+ hours driving daily.

This is their biggest time sink, so of course they think about making it productive. When you're living far out for cheap housing and hear "coding while driving", its easy to think: finally, a way to get ahead without choosing between career growth and seeing my family.

Again, I think its just an off-the-cuff reaction, not actually what people will do. Just like people try your app and tell you its amazing but then never pay. Doing stuff while driving just sounds nice until you know... you think about it for 3 seconds and yeah, its bad idea.

[1] https://github.com/slopus/happy

Your partner is trying to stop you from killing yourself. The majority of country roads have no pedestrian lanes, foliage obstructing oncoming traffic and wildlife like deer threatening to put Safelite back on your speed dial.

I concur with the other comments, this is a "yes dear" moment that you'll appreciate once you're older.

"Don't anthropomorphize the founder, they're just responding to market pressures" is not the defense that you think it is. For the same reason you don't want to do business with Oracle (see the great rant from which I borrowed this phrasing [1]) you don't want to do business with someone who will advertise their product for unethical use cases - they'll cross other ethical boundaries too involving screwing you over.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=1981s

Agree with everyone else. This will directly lead to, or at least enable, people getting killed. I don’t think that’s hyperbole.

That being said, my bike ride to work is a quiet 30 mins. This would be insanely useful for that. I always get to work with a stack of messages piled up, both ways.

> Your partner is trying to stop you from killing yourself.

Or worse, someone else.

If someone kills themselves because they are driving distracted and they chose to distract themselves, that's just evolution IMO. But if anyone else is hurt, then it is a tragedy.

Driving while drunk is a major crime if you get caught these days. People still do it anyway. People who are caught have to get a device installed into their car that they have to blow into to prove they're not intoxicated. They still drive intoxicated. They get sent to jail and they still get behind the wheel. Talking with your phone because driving is boring as shit is fairly harmless because people are going to do dumb ass shit regardless. The better answer is to promote comma.ai and similar ADAS like blue cruise, because I think that'll lead to fewer accidents. We have the technology to take a lot of the human out of the equation. People are dying. Why are we waiting?

it's boring as shit and people are gonna do whatever anyway. including being drunk while driving. Comma.ai works using only cameras and radar so the technology is there. Why are we waiting? People are dying!

Let me rephrase this. I am feeling empathy for the Blue founder because I am in a similar position to show voice control to people and the overwhelming response is "cool, I'll use it while driving". And similar to people here, I don't like that conclusion. So I think it feels bad for the Blue founder to have people pile onto the driving detail that he likely already agrees with meanwhile people ignore the hardware accomplishment.

To me the point of voice control is walking. I'm thinking of Einstein, Darwin, Thoreau. They believed that physical activity helped stimulate his mind and spark creative thought.

You walk, you think, and occasionally you say something.

But in practice people have been quick to jump to conclusions that surprise me. Such as "the point is to try to kill people".

So I'm merely working backwards to figure out why people want to jump in a car first thing.

And the charitable explanation is the people are just not thinking to carefully and are just excited by seeing a computer respond to voice with a low enough error rate.

Glad you made it

I'm all for applying the principle of charity when it comes to "someone just heard of this and that was their first idea", and even with "there are maybe some responsible use cases involving driving".

But the blue founders here don't fall into the first category, and they made a 2 minute ad advertising their product that doesn't fall into the second category either. Charity only stretches so far.

I'm not a startup investor, but I'm quite serious when I say that ad would give me serious doubts about doing business with this founder for purely practical reasons (on top of other ethical ones). That doesn't mean the product is bad, but a business is more than a product.

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HN definitely does have a dog piling problem where one issue is picked out by the community and discussed ad nauseam to exclusion of all else. To be honest between the magnitude of this issue and the fairly significant discussion downthread about other topics I'm not particularly feeling that it is a problem in this thread though.

You make a wrong comparison: you can easily stare at a 3D printer for hours how it prints the object layer by layer.

Try it out - watching this is sooo soothing and relaxing. :-)

zoning out while driving doesn't mean you should pay even less attention to the road

Your self rightousness got in the way of your reading comprehension.

I dont drive distracted but i can understand why others do. I like anything that helps them focus more.

Your self rightousness got in the way of your reading comprehension.

Your self rightousness got in the way of your reading comprehension.

Not OP but why?

Sounds like their partner is not trying to do that, if they're getting mad at OP for refusing to not focus on the road?

You mentioned a 3D printer and I immediately thought you were going to suggest 3D printing an ox's ass for staring at.

I'm not sure if it'll help people avoid accidents.

On the one hand, you might get a few people who would be handling their phone to keep their eyes on the road more.

On the other hand, it might facilitate phone use in a way that people might use their phone now when they wouldn't have before (because handling it felt too distracting but this doesn't). I think this is a tangible risk.

There have been papers published that point out that hands free use isn't anywhere near safe.

Side note: not sure why the downvotes or what the other somewhat strident replies are about. I don't quite agree with you but it's not downvote worthy.

I would do this just for the meme of it, complete with screenshot, if it weren't for the fact it'd be huge and take up a ton of filament.

now here's a legit ai use case: saving on filament for meme production

At this point you could have just said it generally: "stay 100% focused, stay safe, life is precious and fragile".

There's a really cool thing called a train where you can go places and do whatever you want in the process. If you want to be drunk and fuck around with your phone I recommend taking a train or bus.

Just thinking that an unexpected event can't happen on the road shows a huge lapse in judgment and that's just the first sentence. Thinking they're special and different other people is another big red flag.

Muscle memory is good, until you get unexpected unexpected.

I remember an experiment about driving there the subjects had to go to a simulator and drive the same simulated route for some time, until they know it and it got boring. So, after a few days, suddenly a deer/pothole/kid/car/whatever appeared.