A new party concept in Montreal is reimagining nightlife by moving it to the morning hours, blending coffee culture with dance music. Croissound, launching this week, transforms local cafes into daytime dance venues where DJs spin tracks from 11 AM to 2 PM, taking inspiration from similar parties in Los Angeles and other cities.

The format represents a significant shift in how people engage with music and club culture. By hosting events in neighborhood cafes rather than traditional nightlife venues, Croissound wants to create an accessible and inclusive atmosphere while spotlighting local DJs and hidden-gem venues. 

The concept taps into people's changing attitudes towards alcohol-centric socializing, driven by health consciousness, budgetary constraints and after-dark safety concerns. Habits are evolving, and more consumers — particularly Gen Z — are seeking alternatives to late-night partying. The first Croissound event will take place on 22 February 2025 at Cass Café, with its organizers using a pop-up model to explore cafe spaces across Montreal.

This week, the startup Humane—which raised $240 million to build an iPhone-killing Ai Pin—announced its sale to HP for $116 million. While far short of the company’s original $1 billion asking price, it’s astonishing that the brand scrapped for anything at all. A product that had promised to change the world instead became a worldwide laughingstock, indicative of the worst tendencies of Silicon Valley-founder hubris. Universally panned, Humane sold fewer than 10,000 units. Sometimes, its returns outpaced its sales. Units could catch fire. 

Humane cofounders Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno thanked their few loyal customers by announcing their Pins would no longer work in 10 days. Well, for anything but checking the battery level.

“This investment will rapidly accelerate our ability to develop a new generation of devices that seamlessly orchestrate AI requests both locally and in the cloud,” said Tuan Tran, president of technology and innovation at HP, in a press statement. “Humane’s AI platform Cosmos, backed by an incredible group of engineers, will help us create an intelligent ecosystem across all HP devices from AI PCs to smart printers and connected conference rooms. This will unlock new levels of functionality for our customers and deliver on the promises of AI.”

Heh. I can understand why the world was fooled by the Ai Pin when it launched in 2024. I have a little less sympathy now for HP execs, who have just completed one of the most tone-deaf acquisitions in corporate history.

The Ai Pin was flawed from the beginning

Mystique around Humane had been swirling for years by the time Chaudhri took the stage at TED in May 2023 to present the idea of “the disappearing computer.” After spending his career at Apple working on some of its most important launches such as the iPhone, he pitched a screenless AI interface that “allows us to get back to what really matters: a new ability to be present.” By simply asking his computer to “catch me up,” it was able to cut through endless notifications to tell him what was important. By Chaudhri holding up a candy bar, his computer could tell him if it jibed with his lactose intolerance condition. And when his wife (and company cofounder) called, well, her name “magically” appeared right on his hand.

Little did the audience realize: The computer had merely disappeared into Chaudhri’s jacket with a needle and thread. 

Even a bad magic trick can fool people who want to be fooled. And Humane’s vision struck a chord with a society that felt guilty for using its phones all the time. Freeing our eyes and hands sounded like liberation, and the promise that an AI could do everything from translate languages in real time to examining the foods you’d eaten that the day to determine if you’re aligned with your diet seemed like the sort of just-out-of-reach magic that could finally be real. And, wait, was that a LASER BEAM THAT JUST SHOT ONTO HIS HAND?

The next time the Ai Pin arrived on stage, it (well, a prototype of it) would be worn on the lapel of Naomi Campbell—true supermodel royalty—at Paris Fashion week. The closest parallel I could remember was Beyoncé donning an Apple Watch around its announcement. The product was starting to feel too big to fail. Its investors—including Tiger Global Management, Microsoft, Qualcomm Ventures, and Softbank, alongside individuals including Salesforce’s Marc Benioff and OpenAI’s Sam Altman—fed an $840 million valuation. It felt like something that deserved to be taken seriously.

Still, the TED Talk had struck me as funny for reasons I couldn’t articulate. Later, Chaudhri canceled an on-stage interview with me where he’d promised to speak about the product for the first time. He also declined an interview after my in-person demo (I’ve experienced a hundred or more product walkthroughs in my career, and I’ve never been unable to ask a question of the company after any of them, except this time with Humane). What I generously interpreted as shyness—Chaudhri’s soft-spoken magnetism cannot be denied—seemed, increasingly, to be protecting a thin veneer. 

Five months before Marques Brownlee nuked the Ai Pin into oblivion by calling it the worst product he’d ever reviewed, I’d been saying the same to friends in the industry who eagerly asked about my experience with the device. It was difficult to explain to people that this wasn’t hyperbole, that when I arrived in San Francisco in November 2023, the demo was really that bad. That every query took painfully long to answer, even inside a perfectly closed environment. That all the magical dietary foodstuff computations didn’t seem to work. That I was expected to ooh and ahh when the Pin told me the weather. That I wasn’t even allowed to use the device myself. 

Still, Chaudhri and Bongiorno (who, note, always wore the Pin on a thick jacket lapel to support its weight) had already planned for countless special-edition releases, with the Pin in all sorts of limited-edition candy colors. It didn’t work, mind you. The Ai Pin was nothing more than a smartphone without a screen, stuck to your chest. Its limited capabilities somehow put technology in the way more. But the entire brand and packaging promised to usher us into a new era of computing, because Humane was focused more on optics than function.

The project didn’t seem salvageable, though I was actually surprised (impressed?) when the world of tech reviewers mirrored my initial take. These are people who review Android phones for a living! And they hated the thing.

Where this leaves HP

Humane was always going to sell as scrap. There was just too much invested in the company for there to be nothing to show. Its carefully engineered chipset (the Ai Pin used little off-the-shelf hardware) is unlikely to be worth much of anything outside the device itself, but perhaps HP has a purpose. Humane’s 300 patents around various AI/UX interactions likely have an appeal to any tech company, if only because AI isn’t going anywhere. And the purchase price isn’t beyond what companies will spend to acquire tough-to-recruit technologists.

I’m more surprised that HP has made such a public bet on the ashes of Humane, which has been immortalized in memes as a pile of bogusness. If this was some attempt at capturing whatever lingering spirit was left in the Humane brand, the two companies snuffed it out when bricking their devices. 

HP says that Humane “will form HP IQ, HP’s new AI innovation lab focused on building an intelligent ecosystem across HP’s products and services for the future of work.” For a company that’s still making billions in profits annually from predatory printer ink subscriptions, perhaps it’s a fitting end. The worst AI company of the past decade will linger as some sort of “smart” notification that your magenta is low.

Throughout the years, we’ve featured performances of Choir!Choir!Choir!–a large amateur choir from Toronto that meets weekly and sings their hearts out. You’ve seen them sing Prince’s “When Doves Cry,” Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun” (to honor Chris Cornell) and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”

If you dig through their Youtube archive, you can also revisit performances of two Talking Heads classics–“Psycho Killer” and “Burning Down the House.” (Both below.) Which brings us to the video above. According to Consequence of Sound, Talking Heads frontman David Byrne has long been a big fan of Choir!Choir!Choir!. He writes on his web site:

I’ve sat mesmerized watching online videos of the Canadian group Choir! Choir! Choir! They somehow manage to get hundreds of strangers to sing beautifully together—in tune and full-voiced—with rich harmonies and detailed arrangements. With almost no rehearsal—how do they do it??

They manage to achieve lift off—that feeling of surrender when groups sing together—when we all become part of something larger than ourselves.

And back in 2018, Byrne got to experience some of that lift off firsthand. Hear him sing a moving version of David Bowie’s “Heroes” with Choir!Choir!Choir! Enjoy.

Psycho Killer

Burning Down the House

Related Content:

David Bowie Performs an Ethereal Version of “Heroes,” with a Bottle Cap Strapped to His Shoe, Keeping the Beat

Producer Tony Visconti Breaks Down the Making of David Bowie’s Classic “Heroes,” Track by Track

David Bowie’s “Heroes” Delightfully Performed by the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain

Depeche Mode Releases a Goosebump-Inducing Cover of David Bowie’s “Heroes”

Shopify says they only closed Kanye West's store because they thought he might not actually ship the Nazi t-shirts, not because they were Nazi t-shirts. Truly a principled stand.

In the message, which was posted on Shopify's Slack Tuesday morning, general counsel Jess Hertz said the swastika-emblazoned T-shirt listed for sale by West was "a stunt" and "not a good faith attempt to make money." [...]

Shopify instituted its acceptable use policy in August 2018, following criticism over its handling of right-wing groups using its platform to make money. The terms allow "space for all types of products, even the ones that we disagree with, but not for the kind of products intended to harm," CEO Tobi Lütke said in a blog post at the time. He had previously argued that Shopify should not withdraw services from merchants because "products are speech and we are pro free speech."

Like I keep saying:

Put yourself in this hypothetical. You own a company. It is a for-profit corporation, not a public utility. Today, you have to pick one of the two checkboxes that read,

☐ Be in business with actual Nazis;
☑ Do not be in business with actual Nazis.

In a world full of gray areas, that's pretty fucking charcoal.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.