I Hate My Friend: The chatbot-enabled Friend necklace eavesdrops on your life and provides a running commentary that’s snarky and unhelpful. Worse, it can also make the people around you uneasy.
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You can conveniently ask the device around your neck a question.
You then must pull out a different device from your pocket with exactly the same functionality to get the answer thereby saving you 0 time.
This privilege costs over $100.
As an added bonus, you get overt spyware to wear around your neck so it can listen to and log your every conversation.
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You also have the right to smear shit on your face, but don’t be surprised if no one wants to hang out with you.
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But I’m still able to use it, so.
yeah. except when you’re not.
because this “I can do whatever I want” Ron-Swanson-wannabe brand of libertarianism is very predictable.
if you go to a dinner party and the host notices your Spyware Amulet and says “turn that off or leave my house” would you respect their property rights? without pissing and moaning about it?
if a bar or restaurant banned them (like happened with Google Glass) would you respect that rule as well?
if you were on a date, and your date noticed and said “that’s kinda creepy, would you mind turning it off?” would you do it? or would you start ranting about how it’s not infringing on your date’s rights?
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But I’m still able to use it, so.
yeah. except when you’re not.
because this “I can do whatever I want” Ron-Swanson-wannabe brand of libertarianism is very predictable.
if you go to a dinner party and the host notices your Spyware Amulet and says “turn that off or leave my house” would you respect their property rights? without pissing and moaning about it?
if a bar or restaurant banned them (like happened with Google Glass) would you respect that rule as well?
if you were on a date, and your date noticed and said “that’s kinda creepy, would you mind turning it off?” would you do it? or would you start ranting about how it’s not infringing on your date’s rights?
Those places aren’t public places, so of course I’d turn it off or leave.
If I was in public and someone told me to stop recording, I’d likely say “no.” Hasn’t that been a major point of pushback against police demanding that we not record them, for example?
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Totally normal
In our meeting, he asked us not to unbox the devices in front of him because he is in love with someone and wants the first time he witnesses a Friend unboxing to be with her.
Sliced bread is cheaper and just as effective as being a useless part of your internet communication. Hell, just take her out for a nice meal.
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Yeah that adds up. Everything is about naked, cynical capitalism now. I guess my millennial brain is stuck in the era where I thought the point of consumer electronics was to make cool devices that people wanted to buy.
I blame Carl Icahn. Sure, he made a shitton of money, but only by restructuring the entire U.S. economy around quarterly returns – and seemingly quarterly layoffs.
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The AI-powered Friend pendant is now out in the world. If you live in the US or Canada, you can buy one for $129.
The smooth plastic disc is just under 2 inches in diameter; it looks and feels a little like a beefy Apple AirTag. Inside are some LEDs and a Bluetooth radio that connects you (through your iPhone) to a chatbot in the cloud that’s powered by Google’s Gemini 2.5 model. You can tap on the disc to ask your Friend questions as it dangles around your neck, and it responds to your voice prompts by sending you text messages through the companion app. You can reply to these messages with your voice or via text to keep the conversation going.
It also listens to whatever you’re doing as you move through the world, no tap required, and offers a running commentary on the interactions you have throughout your day. To perform that trick, the device has microphones that are always activated.
If the idea of a microphone-packed wearable that’s always listening to your conversations raises privacy concerns for you, just know that you’re not alone. If your experience is anything like ours, wearing the Friend will likely earn you the ire of everyone around you. Curiously, you might even end up being bullied by the chatbot itself.
Schiffmann posits himself as older now, wiser, more experienced than he was when he first debuted the Friend necklace. (He is 22.) He has grown out his hair and cultivated a beard
A wise 22 year old with a beard… okay
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If I wanted to READ ai “snark”, I would spend more time on facebook, or go back to reddit. How hard could it be to slap a battery and 4G/5G modem on a google home or alexa? Eiter of which would be easier to run on a phone or tablet, which also includes speakers.
How do these morons that can’t match the convenience of existing privacy nightmares, or even DIY stuff, continue to get VC funding?
Get VC funding… like this:
Schiffmann posits himself as older now, wiser, more experienced than he was when he first debuted the Friend necklace. (He is 22.) He has grown out his hair and cultivated a beard
A wise 22 year old with a beard…
The VCs are clueless, they jump on a bunch of “feels good” and “disruptive young blood” stuff, hoping that maybe 1 in 10 will not fall and burn.
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Get VC funding… like this:
Schiffmann posits himself as older now, wiser, more experienced than he was when he first debuted the Friend necklace. (He is 22.) He has grown out his hair and cultivated a beard
A wise 22 year old with a beard…
The VCs are clueless, they jump on a bunch of “feels good” and “disruptive young blood” stuff, hoping that maybe 1 in 10 will not fall and burn.
Oh, I’m fully aware. It just boggles the mind how the same tired outlook has endured for decades now.
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You can conveniently ask the device around your neck a question.
You then must pull out a different device from your pocket with exactly the same functionality to get the answer thereby saving you 0 time.
This privilege costs over $100.
it’s so much more sinister than that and I never thought about any of this before checking this vid out, to be honest. The “they’ve reached the end of what they can Hoover up online and now they have to go into the real world to steal more data” part is uhhhhh concerning
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why are techbros so obsessed with AI-wearables? first the Rabbit, then the Humane pin, now this? We already have phones that listen to us 24/7, why do they think anyone wants another thing to lug around?
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Fortunately, you can punch them in the face to provide some badly needed attitude adjustment.
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Oh, I’m fully aware. It just boggles the mind how the same tired outlook has endured for decades now.
Appearances, preconceptions, stereotypes… are shortcuts used to deal with complex issues. Since VCs don’t really care about 90% of the startups, they only need to weed out the worst ideas, in the quickest way possible.
Story time: When I was 20, I had some job interviews lined up, so a family friend helped me pick a decent looking suit and robe that weren’t too expensive. Got offered 3 different jobs in a single week
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