“Can it look like I’m attending a trade show at all times?” - wondered a population eager to emulate an orthodontist from Plattsburgh wandering Las Vegas
The original shuffle was a success in part because not only was it a pocketable music player, but it also served as a flash drive in an era where those were still on the more expensive side.
From what I've read, no one fucking knows, it's all just "AI-powered devices that enhance your interactions with technology. These devices will seamlessly integrate AI into hardware and software, creating tools that adapt to your preferences and anticipate your needs." bullshit that means nothing.
In the grand scheme of things, this looks like a great multifunctional design: It allows instant identification of undesirable elements in the human gene pool, and it also instantly provides a practical strap to eliminate these genes from the pool. 😏
"Wearing it around your neck" is literally the stupidest use case I have ever seen. And I have seen a lot of use cases written by people who don't know what a use case is.
I'm legitimately confused why you would want this thing over a smartwatch with voice control, tech that has been around for years and you can get for like $40.
My Apple watch asked if it should call 911 as : " it appears you have fallen." No I did not fall, I was swatting at a a freakin fly. I don't think you gotta call the paramedics or cops to kill it.
Here’s a use case for this thing. An actual case made out of popular deodorant bar soap so you can wear it the shower. Let’s call it “Soap on a Rope”. Oh wait…….
If you were concerned whether everyone you meet would be aware if you were a complete asshole, this is an incredibly efficient way of communicating the fact clearly and instantly.
Someone needs to invent a KN95 face mask that simultaneously thwarts facial recognition on these cameras. Ideally something that just makes my entire face glitch out, while also functioning as a KN95 mask since no more covid (and probably also flu) vaccines.
There has been such devices previously, aimed at elderly with bad memory as an accessibility device - where everybody around them knows what it is and consents.
Somehow I bet these devices will do worse, because they'll try to make the machine guess context instead of humans refreshing their memory
I am instinctively freaked out by the idea of talking to someone wearing a little camera around their neck. I would not stick around long enough to hear them explain what "environmental detection" entails
So I came here to ask this vitally important thing. I teach ethics, and I'm working through the various theoretical positions and, despite my longstanding antibullying stance, I'm still coming up "yeah you can bully them."
Removing and destroying these on sight is naturally a good thing, but it also has the side benefit of seeing slopmerchants crying on the internet afterwards
And it's an improvement over, say, the Glassholes, because while there's a societal stigma against bullying someone with "glasses", there is no such stigma about lanyards
"Y'know ChatGPT isn't actually inside that LifeAlert-ass piece of plastic on your neck, right? It's in a server farm fifty miles outside of... Iunno Wichita or something."
"Oh you need a login token or whatever? Then why isn't it just an app on your phone?"
Totally not because a phone camera is usually pointing at the inside of a pocket or bag and even android these days is fairly strict about allowing continual microphone access
Honestly, considering Google is trying to build their own Always-On AI, I'm a little surprised they wouldn't relax that rule just to let other AI companies test the waters for them.
The ideal form factor for this is a rotating LED camera cone like they have on Waymo cars. Put it on the propeller of a common propeller hat and make a trillion dollars.
“Let’s take an AirPods Pro case, put a camera in it, hang it from a string we stole from an Apple retail store purchase bag, and see if we can find some dipshit to buy it for $6.5B”
There's not a lot of practical form factors for this, everything has some tradeoff. Weight / CPU power & battery, UX & available information, comfort of wearing, etc. Lightweight glasses / neckband with offloaded compute to something in your pocket seems most practical, but then you have TWO gadgets
Also, Altman himself, and his Emperor, Thiel, was exposed years ago as a prepper with a go bag and jet. He knew even back then that he'd need a quick getaway to escape the consequences of the chaos he creates for the rest of us.
I actually think it's pretty funny that Ive has managed to grift the ur-grifter. 6 and half billion smackers for a yoke that looks like it came out of a lucky bag.
Ive has the air of a man who's spent the last two decades having his synapses melted and his bank account emptied by various shamans in very fucking fancy spas.
It came about because they already had the iPad and Jobs was going to fire the iPad guy but then decided that it would make a good phone instead because that’s what he wanted, and Ive was all ‘let’s make it sleek like a toilet, but with metal’ and somehow Jobs bought into it
Oh I do too, switched a trackpad a while back due to repetitive motion but I have to switch up mouse/keyboard every year or two regardless. But that port location, man…
There are some pretty cool kits for making modern day ones. Apparently the only hard part was getting the wheel to feel as perfect as we all remember it feeling.
It's just like when Google made the Google Duo app. Ostensibly, you could call people on it. In practice, it was training AIs on (a) all your voices and (b) understanding voice and mouth communications to improve their model.
Google needed a way to transcribe text better so that they could run their algorithms on the YouTube corpus. They spun up Google Duo to be able to gather high-quality information by having two people talk to each other over the phone with a camera.
They then ran Miki Rubinstein's Looking to Listen algorithm on the speech streams, to be able to better train their LLMs to understand and transcribe speech.
They probably used the transcripts of those conversations to train Gemini, so the LLM can do a much better job of following conversations now, even if they are written in pseudo-spoken language.
24 hour connected to the communications network; able to work out what's happening to the wearer and their location in the environment; doesn't have a screen; worn round the neck. I think they gave my gran something like this after her first fall.
They missed the most important bit: does it make an appropriately satisfying crunching noise when it's ripped off the wearer's neck, thrown on the ground, and stomped on?
So, of course the immediate question - the one for which they never seem to have a clear answer - is "what do we do with this thing? what can it do that is useful to me"?
No sensible organisation is going to allow anyone into a secure area with that on. It'll get the attention of every black hat on the planet, because it's only purpose is to be a spybot.
There is some precedent for such an AI tchotchke.
In the film Her (2013), buddy puts a safety pin through his shirt pocket so's his pretend girlfriend's electric eye can peep out his shirt pocket — as did Freddy Flute from Jimmy's pocket in the vividly hallucinatory H.R. Puffnstuff.
So if someone wears this into the changing area at the Miss Teen USA pageant it's gonna upload all that video to the web? If they're underage, wouldn't the wearer be guilty of distributing illegal porn, no matter if it was accidental or not?
Can someone hang one of these around CheeseBrain's neck?
Early adopters of Google Glass (RIP) earned the nickname "glassholes". We need something on those lines for wearers of industrial strength spying devices that have no useful purpose (for the wearer).
Shock collar is next ... (bad joke, sorry). I gave up fastening a 'watch' / device to my body many years ago. Why would I be so stupid as to fasten the next incarnation of a watch (to my body)? And I have to pay for it too? (I'd rather go naked ... just saying).
My guess is that it will provide a link to a cheap LLM on request, probably GPT-4.1 Mini. They will tout it's "amazing image recognition" abilities to justify the little camera.
It will record your voice constantly, and probably those around you, and they will possibly offer "conversation recall", where you can ask it about conversations that you had and it can recall details for you.
They could certainly play back the whole conversation for you, but that would freak out the users, so they will make a big deal about how "we don't record conversations, we help you make sense of them."
There were 2-3 similar-sounding devices that came out a year or two ago, and rapidly flopped.
Adding Johnny Ive design isn't going to fix the problem that they weren't very useful for anything specific, though it'll probably be qualitatively somewhat better, and better integrated. Doubt it'll help.
Relatedly, honestly I assume these will be used for employee surveillance by managers and bought by their employers, rather than something voluntarily purchased by end users.
I think this is intended to be the "touch grass" device. You no longer have to be aware of your physical surroundings and environment because this will do that for you. AI can summarise the important bits of the real world for you to experience in a more efficient manner on a computer screen.
Person: What is that?
Guy wearing this: Uh *looks down at phone, reads* It's the greatest digital assistant for face-to-face communication!
Person: Wait, did AI tell you to say that?
Guy: *grimaces, looks down at phone* Why, of course! And for only $29.99 a month, you too can elevate conversations!
It has come to my attention that this is a fake image. We will have to wait for the real thing to make more jokes. Personally I hope they go with the "AI powered dickey" form factor
Maybe they can add a temperature sensor so when I accidentally dunk my $800 AI spy necklace into the huge pot of marinara I'm cooking it will return any useful information at all
I would be unironically be more excited about this shoehorned 'new AI device' if it was a pen. I'd still be worried about my doodles being used to train military killing drones but at least it would offer some sort of perceived value over the Apple Brooch
I can't imagine another use case? The Humane pin was a horrendous failure, the Rabbit R1 was just ... nothing (barely reviewable acc'rd to Marques Brownlee). It doesn't work without your phone, etc...
Worked in probation. Geo tracking ankle monitors are big. I can envision everyone being required to wear monitors in the near future. Certainly, if the TechFeudalists continue to consolidate ownership and control.
There was a similar device about a decade ago (can’t remember the name) that was essentially the same thing, just no AI. It made a splash for a couple of months and then fizzled.
But somehow this thing is worth $6 billion in the vaporware state?
I like how Altman was complaining how you currently needed to use a laptop to interact with ChatGPT… and their device requires a laptop to interact with ChatGPT.
We do know. It's for AI surveillance. OpenAI needs training data so its models don't suck because they have no plan other than MORE DATA FOR THE TRAINING MACHINE so they need to constantly surveil from 2 to 5% of humans to build models of reality, human behaviour, socialization, etc.
A lot of generous description to say it’s as compact and elegant as an iPod Shuffle, and item you could stow in the small pocket of your jeans and still be useful
Omg, yes! There was a man on the tube wearing sunglasses (lol, couldn't be anywhere much darker) with headphones coming out of them and this would have been the ideal way to say 'no thank you' to that.
i don't have any free hands with my rollator :/ also like, i really prefer not having to adapt my whole life around not being filmed when people could just. not wear surveillance necklaces
Comments
If you’re too lazy to wear a GoPro but still want to ensure that tech bros get absolutely *all* your personal data?
Also, environmental detection??? Bitch I have my own environmental detection
Surveillance made easy.
#digitalDictatorship
No.
No.
So it’s still a device that could be an app that will battery life even more?
But just imagine an AI trained on countless hours of video of people pointing and laughing at it.
“Well, it fits in the palm of your hand and connects to…”
Yeah, but what does it do?
“What it doesn’t do is display things on a screen, integrate with…”
YES, but what THE FUCK is it actually supposed to DO?
And it's the KGB and Stasi's revenge from beyond the grave.
Somehow I bet these devices will do worse, because they'll try to make the machine guess context instead of humans refreshing their memory
https://youtu.be/uH5tROXMQ6g
They don't even have to change the tag line!
was right there.
Wait no
Electrical tape, it's gummier!
"Oh you need a login token or whatever? Then why isn't it just an app on your phone?"
Which is really unnecessary given the built-in choking function of the basic model.
The billionaires considered ... making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival."
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prepper-bunkers-apocalypse-survival-richest-rushkoff
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-manifest-destiny
(And all the iPods, actually.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel)
It's just like when Google made the Google Duo app. Ostensibly, you could call people on it. In practice, it was training AIs on (a) all your voices and (b) understanding voice and mouth communications to improve their model.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVQVAPiJWKU&t=1s
OpenAI doesn't have access to the YouTube corpus or the Duo corpus, so they need to generate their own real-world conversation data sets to train on.
@virginiaopossum.bsky.social
· 49s
I mean, I would buy an AirPod case with a lanyard loop. Oh, wait, that's not what this is?
https://www.wheresyoured.at/measures/
And if it can send/receive via Bluetooth or something, someone could almost certainly make the battery go all Galaxy Note 7.
So there’s that option, at least?
(for avoidance of doubt, Bluesky Earnestness Police: this is what we call An Joke)
In the film Her (2013), buddy puts a safety pin through his shirt pocket so's his pretend girlfriend's electric eye can peep out his shirt pocket — as did Freddy Flute from Jimmy's pocket in the vividly hallucinatory H.R. Puffnstuff.
Can someone hang one of these around CheeseBrain's neck?
https://images.techhive.com/images/idge/imported/article/ctw/2010/04/12/kin_one_508-100395761-orig.jpg?auto=webp&quality=85,70
My guess is that it will provide a link to a cheap LLM on request, probably GPT-4.1 Mini. They will tout it's "amazing image recognition" abilities to justify the little camera.
Where I come from, wearing the device is not a "use case." A real use case would be something it does, or a problem it solves.
Adding Johnny Ive design isn't going to fix the problem that they weren't very useful for anything specific, though it'll probably be qualitatively somewhat better, and better integrated. Doubt it'll help.
Guy wearing this: Uh *looks down at phone, reads* It's the greatest digital assistant for face-to-face communication!
Person: Wait, did AI tell you to say that?
Guy: *grimaces, looks down at phone* Why, of course! And for only $29.99 a month, you too can elevate conversations!
Bro, that’s one of those “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” things.
And yet, they'll manage to come up with a worse name.
Innovation shall never cease.
But somehow this thing is worth $6 billion in the vaporware state?
Marge: Nothing.
Homer: No, really, what does it do?
Marge: Whatever it does, it's doing it now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZag1zlecGI
https://www.alert-1.com/products/emergency-call-button/640?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=180575294&gbraid=0AAAAAD_aoSIFMdDxMvAw_tZGH30M7ltCe&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI1cfCsp3EjQMVDzfUAR3evCE5EAQYASABEgKx1vD_BwE