Leaving aside the deeply boring part about Zuckerberg’s AI bots, what I don’t understand is the need for 15 friends. Does the average American have no family? No job? No household tasks?
How can one squeeze regular outings with 15 friends into a normal life?
Even if you take them in batches of five, it’s three outings a week to maintain weekly contact. Who is with the kids while you are out with these batches thrice weekly? Who makes the dinner and folds laundry? Who packs the lunches and changes the bedding?
Or is the idea that these friends would agree to meet once every two weeks? Good luck finding 15 such accommodating bastards.
And then there are the text messages. Each friend needs to be buoyed up with strings of 6-7 messages at least every three days. You need to see, read, and watch each friend’s links and memes and react to them at least minimally. There are doctor’s appointments, kids’ milestones, profligate cousins, husbands with back pain, drama at the knitting circle, etc. And then the diagnoses begin. And the surgeries. And the cancer scares. And the actual cancers. Nobody who is regularly undergoing this with three friends would agree to 15. I’d enthusiastically consent to immediate euthanasia if forced to do this for 15 people, batches or no batches.
Of course, Zuckerberg is an individual who says things like “having demand for 15 friends”, which makes it clear that only months of serious torture would induce anybody to be his friend. But this comment still struck a nerve. I constantly feel guilty for not being able to give enough to my friends, and the idea that I’d want to populate my life with fifteen and then perish with guilt altogether is not pleasant.
Clarissa's Blog 
Zuckerberg gives off “uncanny valley” vibes. Everything he says is fake. He’s trying so hard to fit in with the MAGA crowd after Trump on, but it never works.
Also, one more instance of tech creating a problem and then proposing a solution for it.
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“what I don’t understand is the need for 15 friends”
Different cultural norms…. in most of Europe people prefer ‘deep’ relationships with a very few people (mostly from school years). This can be a real problem for outsiders who move to Europe as it’s hard to make anything more than the most superficial kinds of relationships…
Most Americans prefer ‘shallow’ relationships with lots of people. The 15 aren’t people that you hang out with on a regular basis but more like ‘acquaintances’ in Euro-talk. Generally friendly relations and you might go for coffee or lunch at times but there’s no need to keep close tabs.
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Yes, this is the answer. When I read “Or is the idea that these friends would agree to meet once every two weeks? Good luck finding 15 such accommodating bastards,” I was confused. Honestly, even my closest friends would consider every two weeks to be decently frequent (though I really should be better about spending time with people.)
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This makes me realize that there are people here in town who think we are friends but I see them as distant acquaintances.
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Yeah, the trouble is over how one defines “friends”.
Apparently, it’s normal to use the word for people with whom you converse casually at work, any mom you’ve made specific playdate plans with, anybody with whom you have ever gone out to lunch or invited over to your house…
Whereas we probably use the word only for people who are so simpatico they are honorary family.
For me, at least, these are people I often haven’t talked to for several *months* at a time (i.e. fellow hermits, and other low-maintenance people who have healthy social relationships besides me), but when we do get in touch, it never feels as though we have neglected each other: delighted to catch up is all. I, uh, mostly can’t be friends with people who are socially high maintenance 😉
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“think we are friends but I see them as distant acquaintances”
How do russian and Ukrainian lexicalize the idea of friends? Polish has different levels that overlap a little. The main words are:
znajomy/znajoma – acquaintance, you’re friendly and maybe your social circles overlap a bit but not buddies and you don’t seek out each other’s company.
kolega/koleżanka – colleague/friend, more than znajomy, less than other types of friend, have some kind of shared context (work or club or something…)
kumpel/kumpelka – implies years of knowing each other, often implies growing up together or entering a professional or academic field together. has certain privileges that other types of friend don’t.
przyjaciel/przyjaciółka – gold standard, intense affection and loyalty bordering on love, kind of person you’d do anything for.
Unfortunately translation pressure from English has weakened this a bit as ‘friend’ is usually translated as ‘przyjaciel’ even when a different word would clearly be better.
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Oh, that’s so interesting because there is some overlap but some words mean the exact opposite.
Знакомый means the same as in Polish, an acquaintance.
Коллега is a work colleague and nothing else.
Instead of kumpel, which has no relative, we say друг. That’s a close, time-tested, true friend. That’s somebody who sat in the waiting room while I had surgery. Somebody whose hand I held for six hours when we waited for her cancer diagnosis.
Приятель is between знакомый and друг. It’s a sort of an intermediate stage. We also sometimes say it for boyfriend / girlfriend for an adult because there’s no other word.
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This is the same Mark Zuckerberg who poured billions and billions of dollars into the idea that people would put on virtual reality headsets and attend work meetings as cheesy virtual avatars. No one wants that, the idea was thoroughly mocked on every platform, and still additional billions were spent.
The fifteen friends is a made up number that he’s using to argue for demand for something that no normal person wants or needs.
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Imagine the poor souls who have AI bots as friends.
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It’s more common than we think. Maybe zuckerberg is on to something.
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https://x.com/Nikita_Arora17/status/1911159487639240817?t=4PyvWMWqWa1IRgVACOOYVg&s=19
Absolute freaks.
Or maybe she’s an AI bot herself.
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I’m organizing an english-speaking group here in Korea to help out students who really want to get better at it and would otherwise need to pay a lot for a tutor. A couple of weeks ago a student in the group mentioned that she uses chatGPT for therapeutic purposes and her friends do the same. I was blown away. This market is going to be big!
“key psychotherapy principles like empathy” lol
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This will produce crowds of narcissist snowflakes. In addition to the ones we already have.
Lord have mercy.
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Apparently OpenAI rolled back some of the features of chatgpt after this screenshot went viral.
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Maybe I’m doing something wrong but my OpenAI is massively boring.
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“my OpenAI is massively boring.”
All AI is massively boring…. some people manage some cheap tricks with it that are sometimes kind of funny but overalll just blah
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I asked it the name of a character in a novel because I forgot it, and it came up with completely non-existent characters and their names. That was the most entertaining it got.
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“it came up with completely non-existent characters and their names”
I’ve had similar experiences and that’s why the idea that people are using AI instead of other methods to find information is kind of terrifying…
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What I notice is that it’s very reluctant to say that it doesn’t know something and doesn’t know how to find information. Instead, it invents long, plausible and completely erroneous stories. This is a major fail because it eliminates the crucial option of saying that information is unavailable.
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