Show HN: The First Non-Smart AI Pendant (NotFriend)
notfriend.orgFor those who don't get it: this is a parody of a recently launched AI wearable called friend https://www.friend.com
https://www.friend.com is very cringe.
Took me three visits to the website to find the video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_Q1hoEhfk4
From the youtube comments: "My favourite part was the guy gaming with his human friends and feeling lonely, until his magic necklace talks shit about him and he feels better."
That part made me chuckle as well. "Let me show you how to GAME bro".
After the singularity happens, when humanity is reduced to a tiny group of rebels engaged in guerrilla war against the machine, this is how we will find the infiltrating shapeshifters.
Forcing them to speak in slang in day to day conversations and seeing them fail... like the screenwriter of this ad. :D
> "if A24 made commercials" is not a good way to pitch a product
That video was so unsettling
Jesus Christ that can't be real.
It's a viral marketing campaign for the next season of Black Mirror.
Legitimately I don't know if you're joking or not. And the Internet isn't helping me.
1.8M spent on a domain name feels very much like the dot com boom
Especially when they only raised $2.5M, leaving about a quarter of that to make the actual product.
It's the Dril candles tweet but with domain names.
I read (but didn't confirm), that it's on a payment plan. So maybe it's more like renting the domain, which makes at least this detail sound more reasonable.
A 24 month payment plan for that amount is still... $75k per month. So... no not really.
That is indeed wild. Did you confirm it's 24 month term?
That’s a typical term for domain payment plans. Look it doesn’t matter what the payment terms are: a $1MM domain name is absolutely apeshit for just about any company, never mind a company with no product, no revenue, no traction, etc etc
24 months is more than enough to pump their grift, recoup their investment, and have some extra left over to do it again later.
dot com grift, crypto grift, AI grift. The gift is always the same, just the first name changes.
Do you just think every mass tech adoption is a grift? Don't miss the forest for the trees, scammers will latch onto any popular movement, and an investment bubble often occurs as well since not every bet will play out with speculative technology.
But to discredit the entire movement as a grift is to give authority to these scammers and not real builders and technologists spending their time and effort trying to innovate and improve society.
We made it past the dotcom boom and it turns out the internet wasn't a scam. Don't write off decentralized commerce or generative technologies either. See the bigger picture. You can be skeptical and curious at the same time.
Except each and every one of them are grifts.
As soon as VCs get involved, the startup becomes a grift for VCs, private equity and wall street to make a return by gutting the startup into a shell of itself.
dotcom boom - .com IPO or bust, move onto the next grift.
VC backed startups - Decacorn valuation or bust, move onto the next grift.
crypto - to the moon / lambo and blockchain, or bust (dump tokens on retail), move onto the next grift.
AI - automate, accelerate and keep proclaiming "AGI coming soon" or bust, move onto the next grift.
In modern times, the interest rates rising made it easier to find the grifting startups.
I've worked as a web developer for my entire career, and spent a lot of time in the cryptocurrency space, since 2010. I've seen the entire space rise and fall, and expect a continued periodicity until the technology actually matures. I was always against short- and mid-term speculation of assets, and have been very outspoken against grifters.
But your comment entirely misses my point. There's nothing grifty about decentralized commerce, or crypto. When not involved in the space, you are mostly only exposed to the grifters. Only, the grift is surface-level... These people rush to market and make speculative promo videos aimed at investors, before even engineering a product.
They actively lie to their users and see them as unsophisticated investors, fools yet to be parted with their money. I've worked with people like this, and it's disgusting.
Yet so many amazing ideas and ecosystem have sprung forth, and people are still working tirelessly to achieve their vision, despite people like you lumping them in with grifters, whom they also despise. You're selling short all of these people in a moment of ignorance and perceived superiority.
I can say the same for the latest boom of generative technologies which many are calling AI. I've been doing ML since 2015 and again have witnessed this entire boom shape up from within. There is soooooo much to be excited about.
Look past the grifters. Focus on the technologies. Discard the ones built on false promises. We can have a discussion about what kind of action should be taken against grifters and people who take advantage of the clueless; please be discerning and do not lump myself nor anyone else working day and night to build cool and new things, and in some cases things whose importance is yet to be understood.
A lot of people thought the internet was a fad during the dotcom boom as well, and we see how that's turned out. Plenty companies went out of business or were dethroned due to making bets against the technology, or failing to learn and adapt around them. Try not to make the same mistake!
No. But with hype comes lots of grift, and this is that.
This doesn't address my points about the danger and unfairness of lumping an entire mass technological movement into grifting category.
The AI hypester demographic on Twitter/X that this product is targeting loves cringe unironically.
i can't even tell if this is _also_ a joke
It's got the same vibe as those online pill mill ("Hims", "Hers") ads, which is actually extremely on-point.
This is an interesting comparison, because the medicines being sold work, where the pendant is vaporware.
I'm talking purely about the vibe of the advertisement, and of targeting insecure urban millennial adults.
I wonder if Spike Jonze realised how accurate his near-future prediction would be with Her.
Except AI wearable compananies don't realise the AI wearable was a flip phone propped up by a safety pin in a shirt pocket.
(the video on that page making an obvious reference to this of course, with the 'besides her' line)
See also https://www.enemy.lol/
From the FAQ:
> When will I receive my enemy?
> your enemy is already on its way. do not be alarmed.
Oh fantastic, glad others had the same idea :D
This is a much better parody than the OP, was disappointed that NotFriend did not attempt to copy the website design.
Quite amusing!
> Crafted from the finest plastic, the NotFriend will never go out of style.
This is obviously correct since it was never in style. :-)
Hey, I spent multiple minutes designing that! ;)
I dig the “scalping a Thomas the Tank Engine” look. Good product.
Glad it wasn’t just me!
I would actually like a penchant that records everything around me and transcribes it plus gives me statistics and feedback on my communication. How much I interrupt people, how much space I take in convos, how to be a better conversationalist, etc.
All local compute of course.
Yes, but the problem is that I don't want to be recorded without my consent by you at all times. And I don't want to have to negotiate you removing this device that is recording me every time we are near each other.
Do you mind if somebody takes notes of the conversation you're having with them?
At what point do the notes become too detailed? An audio recording? A transcript? A summary of the transcript?
Do you mind the fact that all modern smartphones technically record all calls? Digital audio always ends up in a RAM buffer somewhere, and due to how memory allocation works, there's no guarantee that all the buffers will be fully destroyed after the call is complete.
How's an AI "recording" your conversation in memory, transcribing it and writing a summary of that transcript, different from a phone doing the recording to RAM, and a human brain doing the transcribing and writing?
> Do you mind if somebody takes notes of the conversation you're having with them?
It would certainly change the way most people will interact with them.
> At what point do the notes become too detailed?
It doesn't have to be a binary and can vary for different people and situations.
> Do you mind the fact that all modern smartphones technically record all calls?
You cannot retrieve the "recording" of a call, so this is not really meaningful in any relevant way.
> How's an AI "recording" your conversation in memory, transcribing it and writing a summary of that transcript, different from a phone doing the recording to RAM, and a human brain doing the transcribing and writing?
Because it is doing it all the time. "Quantity has a quality of its own"
What? Or course taking notes on a casual conversation is weird, let alone recording it. Of course "writing audio in the sound chip buffer" is not the same thing as "storing audio and data mining it", let along the same as "a brain listening to it".
>A-ha but technically...
No please don't, this is not engaging in good faith.
Actually:
I helped a guy think through just this on reddit a while back and he came back and it worked --
I had stated it as a DEFCON badge idea that he came up with - but his valid reason was it was his job to report on a conference, and had agreed parties to recording.
What he came up with was a hybrid of my recommendation which was an AI listener to audio to text transcribe to rag to search...
Basically using whisper:
>>"I recorded the talks on my phone, uploaded them to my PC and transcribed them with the Whisper plug-in for Audacity. Then fed the transcripts to Gemini and had it generate summaries" --
[the reddit thread was abou the ability for AI to specifically hone in on a specific voice - meaning that you could wander through a conference and ether listen for a specific voice and record on ly that - or all voices that are talking about a particular subject out of the crowd so you could follow actual comments and interest on a person or topic in real-ish time and log it all - hence the DEFCON badge level]
--
So do all this on a RpiBadge with a pc-link of whatever sort...
(You could have a Magic Loop upload an hours worth of audio compressed to a thing and have it capture that log of audio, transcribe it and build the personalization DB based on having it indexed by txtai python lib... and then be able to query all the audio youve recorded...
You could pull in the 1FPS idea from another HNer and have your body-cam capture 1fps uploads and have a img-to-txt summary of the insitu and be able to say "show me all the frames where "red balloon" was in focus? ((This is actually what I want to do with a webcam - is have it txt summarize via txtAI a web stream and then be able to "Zoom Enhance" on anything throughout the day: "Show me garage cam an list all the times a human is decribed in frame - tell me what color shirt is described to all humans - show me the frames with a red shirt"
I wonder if my bolo tie qualifies as a similarly non-smart AI device. I just watched the first half of the "friend" commercial and couldn't help feel the tone was kinda dark and about to veer into horror territory soon. Like you couldn't even parody it because it would be too on the nose.
>I wonder if my bolo tie qualifies as a similarly non-smart AI device.
you'll never know unless you go out and buy some googly eyes
This is hilarious, very nice parody and timing is nice too.
Thank you :D
If I were you I should be worried about legal claims from facebook.
Sounds like a pretty straight forward parody. But, I'm no lawyer.
Reminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-esG_fYPMA
I have a pet rock I picked up during lockdown.
got any pictures?
I'm still saving up to get googly eyes first.
This is the pet rock of our generation.