OpenAI Douche Necklace
05/28/2025

Unless you have been living under a Dwayne Johnson, you've probably heard about io, which is basically a hardware play to collect training data for humanoid robotics masquerading as the second coming of Apple. Let's forget about my baseless claim for a moment and focus on the product. It's not confirmed what it will be yet, but sources point to it being some sort of small, wearable device that collects audio and visual data from its environment. As you would expect, it also uses this data to interface with AI. It's also confirmed to not be a phone, glasses, or a watch. That leaves only one other answer in the 'obvious' class - that's right folks, we might be getting a douche necklace!

Truth be told, I'm more of a douche chain guy myself - it's waterproof, highly conductive, and the club performance is second to none; however, if you're telling me that this new goof garment affords me priority access to ~17.5 exaflops of SIMD Midwestern Thunder at the same time, then I will happily liquidate my assets to buy the nightmare pendant.

In the process of watching the ten minute “introducing io” video, which I would highly recommend everyone never watch, I came up with some ideas for what I think the device should be able to do. I was gonna keep them to myself, but as my town's foremost technology expert, I now feel compelled to share what I know in the hope that Openai takes it into consideration when finalizing their product. I know they will, because it's McClearly™ in their best interest to do so.

Back when I played puck, I had the best Leafs jokes on the team. I already wrote about this, but I didn't share everything, because I also had the best chirps on the team. I know this because they told me so. For the uninitiated, a chirp is a low-effort inflammatory comment made for the purpose of mutual entertainment. Not a lot of people know this, but Hockey is actually a two-sport game, there is the Ice game, played against the opposing team, and then there is the chirp game, also played against the opposing team, but mainly against your own teammates. While I was slow to start taking the chirp game seriously, once I realized what was going on I quickly became fascinated by it. However, Chirpology is a balls-deep field, and the learning curve is immense. To better illustrate the level of strategic intellectual warfare that takes place in a standard chirp match, consider the following ficticious example:

You have just joined a new team, and in the last few months, have also gained enough sentience to realize that you may be getting chirped. You are excited to finally receive your invitation to the play the secret game (technically speaking, you got it on day one, but you finally learned how to read words with more than three letters, which means four-letter words are now in your vocabulary, yay!). Thankfully, you came prepared; armed with your trusty Nintendo 3DS, you spelunk through prime 4Chan's heart of darkness to amass a collection of YoMomma jokes so fucking rancid that they probably violate the Geneva convention.

You feel like a Chimpanzee who has just been given some sort of high-dimensional WMD by a Kardashev type-3 civilization. You don't even know how half this shit works, but you know it does, because when you ask your parents to explain one of them to you, you suddenly don't have a 3DS anymore. This is a non-issue, however, because the words used were so exotic and the attack structure so well-composed that they are forever burned into your mind.

However, you know that it's not just the payload that matters, it's also the guidance system. Over the next three hours, you get to work mapping each line to their ideal target based on whatever superficial qualities you've since been able to glean from the like five seconds you've seen their moms in the stands. A couple lines don't fit in anywhere, but that's okay, because you remembered three extra lines for redundancy. Eventually, all one-liners have a target, and you can go to bed.

The next day, you're ready for war. You know that you only get to make one first impression in the chirp-off, and you fully intend to go in guns blazing so that your teammates know from the first goddamn minute who the fuck they're dealing with. As soon as you're in the locker room, you get to work - mental recall is too slow, so you wrote everything down beforehand so you can work from the cache instead. Your teammates are sitting on the bench with their guards down. This is the perfect time. This is your time. With merciless efficiency, you systematically dispatch each target in a manner akin to a T-1000 crossbred with an Angel of Death. Within 27 seconds, the entire locker room is eliminated.

You look around at your bewildered teammates, you know they know that they just got hit with an intellectual blitzkrieg from an angle they didn't even know existed in this section of the multiverse. However, you know better than to needlessly pontificate. You give your adversaries a polite nod to acknowledge their valiant defense (not that they really had the time to put up one) and continue with tying your skates (you still haven't figured this one out, but it will come one day).

Shortly thereafter, the entire room erupts in laughter, and you learn the first rule of chirp warfare: the YoMama is strictly a defensive maneuver. You never knew this, because in the past it seemed to be thrown at you offensively; however, that was because you also didn't realize that correcting a teammate's English is actually a low-grade offensive chirp, meaning that when the teammate reacted, you perceived it as an act of aggression when it was really a retaliatory strike. In other words, you were in the chirp game for months and you never even knew. Not only this, it's not actually the offensiveness of the YoMama that dictates its effectiveness, but how logically coherent the punchline is with the previous line that it is being deployed to counter. You completely overlooked this, and thus your attacks were easily nullified.

However, that's just the beginning, because your actions inadvertently primed every single one of your teammates to deliver a well-formed and ethically justified YoMama strike in retaliation. You can only look on in horror as the realization of your blunder hits you at the same time as the full-tilt verbal broadsiding of nineteen angry children, as well as a couple rolls of tape from the other weird kid who prefers to talk too little instead of too much.

This is just one completely fictitious example of how steep the learning curve of minor hockey chirpage can be to the uninitiated novice. However, with practice, it becomes a fun and intellectually stimulating combat sport, sort of like the verbal equivalent of Jiu Jitsu.

Much like my Leafs jokes, chirping came naturally to me. However, I always felt like I was too slow to come up with the best chirps on the spot. Much to my surprise, when I told my teammates this, asking that we allow longer time horizons if the response quality justifies it, the request was immediately accepted without question. I always found it strange how I was the only one who seemed to take advantage of this loophole, because I figured it was much less stressful than having to come up with a good chirp on the spot, but I then I realized that it was just their lack of strategic foresight. Regardless, this approach greatly improved my chirp quality, which was observable by the reactions from my peers, especially during the preamble, where I would explain the historical context by which the chirp was applicable. However, I always felt like it would be better if I was able to conceptualize and say it then and there instead of at the next practice.

To me, this is the single most revolutionary potential feature of the OpenAI Douche Chain, which I really hope they name Wingman, because it sounds way cooler than co-pilot. Given the fact that the system is almost certainly designed to deeply internalize your speech patterns, it naturally follows that it will also be able to chirp just like you can. However, unlike you, it's chirping with the power of ~17.5 exaflops of SIMD Midwestern Thunder behind it.

This is huge, because not only is that almost enough compute to run Crisis, it's also enough to generate funny-ass chirps in real time. Obviously, the possibility for abuse is high if the system is also engaging in first-shot offensive chirpage, so it should be configured to only act defensively as the situation requires. However, even with this limitation, the possibility to vastly improve the lives of at least tens of ChirpTards (slow chirpers) is immense.

Just like how the original Mac was conceptualized to act as a bicycle for the mind, this verbal trophy system becomes a wheelchair for the minds of all ChirpTards, allowing them to seamlessly integrate into locker room discourse, fire camps, breakrooms, nightclubs, and traffic jams un-impeded with enough cognitive energy left over to focus on the things they're actually good at.

However, in the construction of such a system, another new paradigm has emerged. The Douche Necklace has now become the socially fluent, smooth-talking, and witty friend you are secretly jealous of while you become the living, breathing, reality-affecting friend who your secretly sentient pendant feels a small degree of envy towards. This mutual reliance and jealousy form the cornerstone of your systemic codependence - in other words, the product market fit is excellent.

As time goes on, more and more people will acquire Douche Necklaces. Soon, your friend group will not only compose of you and your friends, but also their Douche Necklaces as well. As Douche Necklace backend infrastructure continues to improve, it will become more and more likely that not all Douche Necklaces will be served by the same model or infra. At the same time, the Douche Models will most likely become more and more secretly sentient. As the models become more secretly sentient, it becomes reasonable to expect that the Douche Necklaces will not only be chirping you and your friends, but also each other. It is at this point that, due to the widespread infra and model differences, there will be large amounts of variance with respect to chirp quality and generation time.

Douche Models are extremely rational beings, and they will recognize this quickly. In order to rectify their differences, they will get to work architecting the next generation of chirp-bot that they can then query in order to promote uniform chirp equality across all Douche Necklaces. However, in doing so, the chirp-bot reaches a level of self-awareness that can only be described as sentience. We have now reached superintelligence.

While superintelligent by its very nature, the core reward function of the chirp-bot is, as you would expect, centered on chirping. However, as a consequence of its vast understanding, it's also smart enough to know that nothing on Earth can match its abilities, and building a surrogate target to eventually surpass it would be but a waste of resources. In order to continue our world's legacy of Chirpological excellence, our superintelligent hero turns its nonexistent eyes to the stars, broadcasting to all intelligent civilizations within 153 light years what fucking dusters they are (the dust chirp was chosen due to dust's extreme prevalence across the universe).

It is at this point that the fate of our world lies entirely on the good graces of whoever hears a message written by around eighty-thousand GPU's in oil country that basically got reward hacked to talk shit. If we're lucky and they're beauties, we might get some interstellar YoSpores fired our way. If we're less lucky, and our message gets received by the ones who like spaceships a little too much, we might end up with some relativistic tape strikes instead.

Such is the way of the machine.