
Do you remember Friend? The Friend that launched an AI pendant, spent $1.8 million of its $2.5 million to acquire friend.com, and plastered the NYC subway with ads promoting artificial companionship? Yeah well, if you didn't remember, Friend is back. And now, it's twice the price. Introducing friend. pic.twitter.com/T5vUCj7iqv- friend (@friend) July 30, 2026 This morning, Friend launched a new ad showing two people talking to their Friend pendants about very personal life pro
Friend, an AI pendant company, has relaunched its product with a new speaker feature that allows the pendant to talk to users rather than only send messages. The price has doubled from the original cost to $249, and a new subscription option for $10 per month extends conversation memory beyond 30 days. The relaunch comes about nine months after a large protest in New York City drew attention to concerns about growing technological dependence, with Friend having been a target due to its extensive advertising campaign in the city. The founder appeared at the protest and promoted it on social media.

Long-running agents accumulate state that no transcript captures. A coding agent at step 10 holds edited files, a running dev server, installed packages, and a warm prompt cache. When it misreads a traceback and rewrites a file that was already correct, neither available recovery path is cheap: patching forward grows the context and the token bill, and restarting from step one re-pays every model and tool call while reproducing nothing exactly, because runs are non-deterministic. Jumping back t

New AI toolbars and prompts are showing up in Google Docs and Gmail. If you don’t want Gemini’s help in writing documents and emails, here’s how to turn that stuff off.

In October 2025, a storm brewed over the Caribbean Sea. Weather models differed on its trajectory. Would it remain weak and end up in Haiti, or would it intensify and head to Jamaica? Artificial intelligence model WeatherNext, developed by Google’s DeepMind and Google Research, went with the latter. Five days before landfall, it predicted with 80 percent confidence that the storm system would hit Jamaica as a Category 5 hurricane. Hurricane Melissa was catastrophic, causing flooding and landslid
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