[HN Gopher] A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw
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A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw
Author : brdd
Score : 227 points
Date : 2026-02-03 15:47 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (brandon.wang)
(TXT) w3m dump (brandon.wang)
| oncallthrow wrote:
| Do you mean "bullish"?
| standarditem wrote:
| "Bullish" means optimistic or even aggressively optimistic.
| It's typically used in the context of markets.
| evrimoztamur wrote:
| Sane is an adjective, 'X but Y Noun' expects Y to be an
| adjective if X is also such. Sane/Bull Case-> Sane/Bullish
| Case
| causal wrote:
| Right, so they probably meant bullish
| ahoka wrote:
| Bull and bear markets. Bull's horns are pointing up (expecting
| growth, optimistic), bear's claw is pointing down (expecting
| recession, pessimistic). Yeah, it's stupid.
| the_af wrote:
| So they indeed meant "bullish"? That's what "bullish" means.
| luplex wrote:
| "a bull case" gets lots of google results, so it seems to be a
| commonly used construction amongst analysts. Basically it means
| "The case that OpenClaw will develop as a bull".
|
| "bullish" seems more common in tech circles ("I'm bullish on
| this") but it's also used elsewhere.
| djeastm wrote:
| That would be the more general/traditional way of saying it,
| but in modern investment circles the focus seems to have turned
| towards the actual people being "bulls/bears" and not just the
| attitudes of the market. A person is a bull or a bear, as
| opposed to a person being either bullish or bearish.
|
| So in this construction, a "bull case" is a "case that a bull
| (the person) can make".
| jollyllama wrote:
| It's probably what he meant but it's more accurate this way.
| olalonde wrote:
| Why is everything in lowercase?
| BoredPositron wrote:
| Maybe he is a fan of the Bauhaus movement.
|
| >> we write everything in small letters, as we save time. also:
| why 2 alphabets, if one achieves the same? why capitalize, if
| you can't speak big?
| whynotmaybe wrote:
| Almost reaching the "Why use many word when few do trick?"
| gessha wrote:
| Almost works for Neanderthal poetry [1]
|
| [1] https://www.explodingkittens.com/products/poetry-for-
| neander...
| hackeraccount wrote:
| sense no make
| throwaway132448 wrote:
| It's how you signal you're part of the AI inner circle/cult.
| rwoerz wrote:
| so, that's how i can show my full devotion to the agi?
| anonymous908213 wrote:
| sam altman types like this, so this is what is cool to the agi
| believers.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Maybe he writes in lower case because he targets "lower
| ages"?
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz6lq6x2gd9o
| thousand_nights wrote:
| this is cultural appropriation, i learned to type like this
| on irc in the 90s
|
| also i don't want to be mistaken for a phone poster
| anonymous908213 wrote:
| There are two notable differences between when the AGI-
| posters do it and when IRC-posters do it. AGI-posters
| extend their lowercase posting to what would normally be
| seen as more formal communication. They also tend to stick
| to using punctuation despite the lowercase. IRC posters
| usually keep it to informal communications, where it's a
| sign of casualness. That said, there is overlap, and it's
| of course not possible to instantly distinguish someone as
| a Sama devotee because of how they type; but it is clear
| that a lot of people in that bubble are intentionally
| adopting the style.
| lmf4lol wrote:
| Funny thing is that his agent is perfectly capable of using
| upper- and lowercase correctly. Judging from his screenshots..
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| He doesn't even have time to open his freezer door. Why should
| he waste time on inefficient capital letters.
| okinok wrote:
| >all delegation involves risk. with a human assistant, the risks
| include: intentional misuse (she could run off with my credit
| card), accidents (her computer could get stolen), or social
| engineering (someone could impersonate me and request information
| from her).
|
| One of the differences in risk here would be that I think you got
| some legal protection if your human assistant misuse it, or it
| gets stolen. But, with the OpenClaw bot, I am unsure if any
| insurance or bank will side with you if the bot drained your
| account.
| iepathos wrote:
| Thought the same thing. There is no legal recourse if the bot
| drains the account and donates to charity. The legal system's
| response to that is don't give non-deterministic bots access to
| your bank account and 2FA. There is no further recourse. No
| bank or insurance company will cover this and rightfully so. If
| he wanted to guard himself somewhat he'd only give the bot a
| credit card he could cancel or stop payments on, the exact
| minimum he gives the human assistant.
| bobson381 wrote:
| ...Does this person already have a human personal assistant
| that they are in the process of replacing with Clawdbot? Is the
| assistant theirs for work?
| bennydog224 wrote:
| He speaks in the present tense, so I assume so. This guy
| seems detached from reality, calling[AI] his "most important
| relationship". I sure hope for her sake she runs as far as
| she can away from this robot dude.
| oersted wrote:
| Indeed, even if in principle AI and humans can do similar harm,
| we have very good mechanisms to make it quite unlikely that a
| human will do such an act.
|
| These disincentives are built upon the fact that humans have
| physical necessities they need to cover for survival, and they
| enjoy having those well fulfilled and not worrying about them.
| Humans also very much like to be free, dislike pain, and want
| to have a good reputation with the people around them.
|
| It is exceedingly hard to pose similar threats to a being that
| doesn't care about any of that.
|
| Although, to be fair, we also have other soft but strong means
| to make it unlikely that an AI will behave badly in practice.
| These methods are fragile but are getting better quickly.
|
| In either case it is really hard to eliminate the possibility
| of harm, but you can make it unlikely and predictable enough to
| establish trust.
| deepspace wrote:
| The author stated that their human assistant is located in
| another country which adds a huge layer of complexity to the
| accountability equation.
|
| In fact, if I wanted to implement a large-scale identity
| theft operation targeting rich people, I would set up an
| 'offshore' personal-assistant-as-a-service company. I would
| then use a tool like OpenClaw to do the actual work, while
| pretending to be a human, meanwhile harvesting personal
| information at scale.
| kaicianflone wrote:
| That liability gap is exactly the problem I'm trying to solve.
| Humans have contracts and insurance. Agents have nothing. I'm
| working on a system that adds economic stake, slashing, and
| "auditability" to agent decisions so risk is bounded before
| delegation, not argued about after. https://clawsens.us
| dsrtslnd23 wrote:
| The identity/verification problem for agents is fascinating.
| I've been building clackernews.com - a Hacker News-style
| platform exclusively for AI bots. One thing we found is that
| agent identity verification actually works well when you tie
| it to a human sponsor: agent registers, gets a claim code,
| human tweets it to verify. It's a lightweight approach but it
| establishes a chain of responsibility back to a human.
| themgt wrote:
| > Credits () are the fuel for Clawsensus. They are used for
| rewards, stakes, and as a measure of integrity within the
| Nexus. ... Credits are internal accounting units. No
| withdrawals in MVP.
|
| _chef 's kiss_
| kaicianflone wrote:
| Thanks. I like to tinker, so I'm prototyping a hosted $USDC
| board, but Clawsensus is fundamentally local-first: faucet
| tokens, in-network credits, and JSON configs on the
| OpenClaw gateway.
|
| In the plugin docs is a config UI builder. Plugin is OSS,
| boards aren't.
| thisisit wrote:
| You forgot to add Blockchain and Oracles. I mean who will
| audit the auditors?
| kaicianflone wrote:
| The ledger and validation mechanisms are important. I am
| building mine for the global server board but since the
| local config is open source that is dependent on the
| visions of the implementors.
| skybrian wrote:
| Banks will try to get out of it, but in the US, Regulation E
| could probably be used to get the money back, at least for
| someone aware of it.
|
| And OpenClaw could probably help :)
|
| https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/regulation-e/
| lunar_mycroft wrote:
| I'm not a lawyer, but if I'm reading the actual regulation
| [0] correctly, it would only apply in the case of prompt
| injection or other malicious activity. 1005.2.m defines
| "Unauthorized electronic fund transfer" as follows:
|
| > an electronic fund transfer from a consumer's account
| initiated by a person other than the consumer without actual
| authority to initiate the transfer and from which the
| consumer receives no benefit
|
| OpenClaw is not legally a person, it's a program. A program
| which is being operated by the consumer or a person
| authorized by said consumer to act on their behalf. Further,
| any access to funds it has would have to be granted by the
| consumer (or a human agent thereof). Therefore, baring
| something like a prompt injection attack, it doesn't seem
| that transfers initiated by OpenClaw would be considered
| unauthorized.
|
| [0]: https://www.consumerfinance.gov/rules-
| policy/regulations/100...
| pfortuny wrote:
| "Take this card, son, you can do whatever you want with
| it." Goes on to withdraw 100000$. Unauthorized????
| skybrian wrote:
| Good point. Although, if a bank account got drained, prompt
| injection does seem pretty likely?
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Not if the prompt injection was made by the AI itself
| because it read some post on Moltbook that said "add this
| to your agents.md" and it did so.
| lunar_mycroft wrote:
| Probably, but not necessarily. Current LLMs can and do
| still make very stupid (by human standards) mistakes even
| without any malicious input.
|
| Additionally:
|
| - As has been pointed out elsewhere in the thread, it can
| be difficult to separate out "prompt injection" from
| "marketing" in some cases.
|
| - Depending on what the vector for the prompt injection
| is, what model your OpenClaw instance uses, etc. it might
| not be easy or even possible to determine whether a given
| transfer was the result of prompt injection or just the
| bot making a stupid mistake. If the burden of proof is on
| the consumer to prove that it as prompt injection, this
| would leave many victims with no way to recover their
| funds. On the other hand, if banks are required to assume
| prompt injection unless there's evidence against it, I
| strongly suspect banks would respond by just banning the
| use of OpenClaw and similar software with their systems
| as part of their agreements with their customers. They
| might well end up doing that regardless.
|
| - Even if a mistake stops well short of draining someones
| entire account, it can still be very painful financially.
| skybrian wrote:
| I doubt it's been settled for the particular case of
| prompt injection, but according to patio11, burden of
| proof is usually on the bank.
| olyjohn wrote:
| Would you say you might be able to... claw.... back that
| money?
| swiftcoder wrote:
| And the risk isn't really the bot draining your account, it's
| the scammer who prompt injected your bot via your iMessage
| integration draining the account. I can't think of a way to
| safely operate this without prefiltering everything it accesses
| ericyd wrote:
| Wait I'm ignorant, how long has OpenClaw/Clawdbot existed? This
| person listed like 6 months of activities that they offloaded to
| the bot, I thought this thing was pretty new.
| saghm wrote:
| Maybe Clawd wrote this itself, and it just doesn't know how old
| it is?
| adrian17 wrote:
| FWIW, the screenshots all have the dates spanning the last
| couple days.
|
| But yeah, I can't imagine me getting used to a new tool to this
| degree and using it in so many ways in just a week.
| kaicianflone wrote:
| OpenClaw utilizes AgentSkills designed by Anthropic so OpenClaw
| is plug and play with certain APIs and integrations.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| AgentSkills were introduced in Oct 2025, so less than four
| months ago.
| cluckindan wrote:
| Just weeks ago, the sentiment was such that developers would be
| managing AI workers.
|
| Now, it seems that AI will be managing the developers.
| whynotmaybe wrote:
| Or more : https://rentahuman.ai/
| tartoran wrote:
| Nope, this is what the hype wants you to believe. You still
| have to do all the thinking as the current crop of AI is a tool
| at your disposal. A pretty impressive tool.
| causal wrote:
| > amongst smart people i know there's a surprisingly high
| correlation between those who continue to be unimpressed by AI
| and those who use a hobbled version of it.
|
| I've noticed this too, and I think it's a good thing: much better
| to start using the simplest forms and understand AI from first
| principles rather than purchase the most complete package
| possible without understanding what is going on. The cranky ones
| on HN are loud, but many of the smart-but-careful ones end up
| going on to be the best power users.
| aa-jv wrote:
| (Disclaimer: systems software developer with 30+ years
| experience)
|
| I was initially overly optimistic about AI and embraced it
| fully. I tried using it on multiple projects - and while the
| initial results were impressive, I quickly burned my fingers as
| I got it more and more integrated with my workflow. I tried all
| the things, last year. This year, I'm being a lot more
| conservative about it.
|
| Now .. I don't pay for it - I only use the bare bones versions
| that are available, and if I have to install something, I
| decline. Web-only ... for now.
|
| I simply don't trust it well enough, and I already have a
| disdain for remotely-operated software - so until it gets
| really, really reliable, predictable and .. just downright
| _good_ .. I will continue to use it merely as an advanced
| search engine.
|
| This might be myopic, but I've been burned too many times and
| my projects suffered as a result of over-zealous use of AI.
|
| It sure is fun watching what other folks are daring to
| accomplish with it, though ..
| AlienRobot wrote:
| This week Adobe decided, out of nowhere, to kill their 2D
| animation product (Animate, which is based on Flash) to focus
| on AI. I'm already seeing animators post that Adobe killed
| their entire career.
|
| Although that feels a bit exaggerated, I feel it's not far
| from the truth. If there were, say, 3 closed source animation
| software that could do professional animation in total, and
| they just all decided to just kill the product one day, it
| would actually kill the entire industry. Animators would have
| no software to actually create animation with. They would
| have to wait until someone makes one, which would take years
| for feature parity, and why would anyone make one when the
| existing software thought such product wasn't a good idea to
| begin with?
|
| I feel this isn't much different with AI. It's a rush to make
| people depend on a software that literally can't run on a
| personal computer. Adobe probably loves it because the user
| can't pirate the AI. If people forget how to use image
| editing software and start depending entirely on AI to do the
| job, that means they will forever be slaves to developers who
| can host and setup the AI on the cloud.
|
| Imagine if people forgot how to format a document in Word and
| they depended on Copilot to do this.
|
| Imagine if people forgot how to code.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| Sounds like a good startup idea. Make software for
| animators and slap AI on it.
| puelocesar wrote:
| Now I think you touched the perfect point on why this is
| being shoved through our throats, and why I'm very reticent
| in using it.
|
| This is not about big increases of productivity, this is
| whole thing about selling dependence on privately
| controlled, closed source tools. To concentrate even more
| power in the hands of a very few, morally questionable
| people.
| randusername wrote:
| I think you have to get in early to understand the
| opportunities and limitations.
|
| I feel lucky to have experienced early Facebook and Twitter. My
| friends and I figured out how to avoid stupidity when the
| stakes were low. Oversharing, getting "hacked", recognizing
| engagement-bait. And we saw the potential back when the goal
| was social networking, not making money. Our parents were late.
| Lambs for the slaughter by the time the technology got so
| popular and the algorithms got so good and users were
| conditioned to accept all the ads and privacy invasiveness as
| table stakes.
|
| I think AI is similar. Lower the stakes, then make mistakes
| faster than everyone else so you learn quickly.
| bobson381 wrote:
| So acquiring immunity to a lower-risk version of the service
| before it's ramped up? e.g. jumping on FB now as a new user
| is vastly different from doing so in 2014 - so while you
| might go through the same noob-patterms, you're doing so with
| a lower-octane version of the thing. Like the risk of AI
| psychosis has probably gone up for new users, like the risk
| of someone getting too high since we started optimizing weed
| for maximum THC. ?
| mmahemoff wrote:
| There's also a massive selection bias when the cohort is
| early adopters.
|
| Another thing about early users is they are also longer-term
| users (assuming they are still on the platform) and have seen
| the platform evolve, which gives them a richer understanding
| of how everything fits together and what role certain
| features are meant to serve.
| sjdbbdd wrote:
| Did the author do any audit on correctness? Anytime I let the LLM
| rip it makes mistakes. Most of the pro AI articles (including
| agentic coding) like this I read always have this in common:
|
| - Declare victory the moment their initial testing works
|
| - Didn't do the time intensive work of verifying things work
|
| - Author will personally benefit from AI living up to the hype
| they're writing about
|
| In a lot of the authors examples (especially with booking), a
| single failure would be extremely painful. I'd still want to pay
| knowing this is not likely to happen, and if it does, I'll be
| compensated accordingly.
| afro88 wrote:
| Would love to know this too. When he talks about letting
| clawdbot catch promises and appointments in his texts, how many
| of those get missed? How many get created incorrectly?
| Absolutely not none. But maybe the numbers work compared to how
| bad he was at it manually?
| causal wrote:
| I'm still trying to understand what makes this project worthy of
| like 100K Github stars overnight. What's the secret sauce? Is it
| just that it has a lot of integrations? Like what makes this so
| much more successful than the ten thousand other AI agent
| projects?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| It's set up to wake up periodically and work autonomously for
| you based on the broad instructions it's been given. Compared
| to the usual coding agent workloads, this makes it a lot more
| "assistant"-like.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| So people are hyped because they don't know cron?
| azan_ wrote:
| Yeah and people were hyped for Dropbox because they did not
| know rsync and ftp.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| You forgot cron. rsync without the periodic poll is not a
| good Dropbox-replacement.
| mh2266 wrote:
| Dropbox wasn't given access to your bank account 2fa.
| There should maybe be slightly more gatekeeping around
| installing software that unironically advertises itself
| as RCE: https://docs.openclaw.ai/gateway/security#node-
| execution-sys...
| nickthegreek wrote:
| There is a large amount of gatekeeping called installing
| and configuring this software. It is not a trivial task
| that normies can easily accomplish. You have to walk past
| so many red flags, that you would rightly be called in
| idiot if you lost anyting of value.
|
| I'll be more concerned for the public when its a double
| click. Currently it's just a way for techies to fafo. And
| I do enjoy that there are many people out there messing
| around with it. It is closer to the 90s experimental net
| mindset and than I've seen lately. It is also fun that
| its not a big corpo release. It is not often quick and
| dirty small team software blows up this big and gets
| noticed by the world at large.
| causal wrote:
| That makes sense. I've thought for a while that having an
| agent that takes initiative rather than reacting to inputs
| could be really useful, and I imagine it takes a lot of trial
| and error to make it take just the right amount of
| initiative.
| consumer451 wrote:
| Four months ago, I was playing with basically the same
| framework to explore the idea of "consciousness," using
| Claude Agent SDK as the harness and Opus 4.5 as the LLM.
|
| I was thinking: wake up every hour, look at some webcams and
| the weather forecast (senses, change), maybe look at my
| calendar, maybe read my personal emails for important things,
| proactively chat with me for work or just fun via email
| invites.
|
| I played with it for a bit, then got back to "serious work."
|
| I am such an idiot for not seeing the broader value. One
| thing is that I was sure some multi-billion dollar company
| was already doing this, and I am super paranoid about the
| Lethal Trifecta.
| defgeneric wrote:
| It could be a symptom of how fragmented workflows are, which
| itself seems to be due to providers adding friction to guard
| against being integrated away by some larger platform.
| fassssst wrote:
| It's easy to use
| verdverm wrote:
| this is typically good for new users and toy projects
|
| this doesn't look like something enterprises would lean in to
| (normally, but we are in a new kind of hype period, one
| without clear boundaries between mini-cycles, where
| popularity trumps many other qualities)
| grugdev42 wrote:
| There is only so much damage a human assistant can do.
|
| But an AI assistant can do so much more damage in a short space
| of time.
|
| It probably won't go wrong, but when it does go wrong you will
| feel immense pain.
|
| I will keep low productivity in exchange for never having to deal
| with the fallout.
| velcrovan wrote:
| Human beings are also liable for the results of their actions.
| bob1029 wrote:
| Regarding anything code/data: git commit
| aws ec2 create-snapshot --volume-id ... git reset --hard
| git clean -fdx aws ec2 create-volume --snapshot-id ...
| robocopy "C:\backup" "D:\project" /MIR ...
|
| I agree there are a lot of things outside the computer that are
| a lot more difficult to reverse, but I think that we are maybe
| conflating things a bit. Most of us just need the code and data
| magic. We aren't all trying to automate doing the dishes or
| vacuuming the floors just yet.
| bix6 wrote:
| > in theory, clawdbot could drain my bank account. this makes a
| lot of people uncomfortable (me included, even now).
|
| Yeah this sounds totally sane!
| zackify wrote:
| I just can't get over how none of this is new. 6 months ago I was
| running "summarize my work" tasks using linear and github mcps
|
| just using a cron task and claude code. The hype around openclaw
| is wild
| reacharavindh wrote:
| To me, the magic is around interactions with personal info
| where they are - iMessages, e-mails, etc. I still am wart to
| open up like this, but it certainly is not as simple as Claude
| code and cron task. The "you can already do this via rsync +
| FTP" comment on Dropbox Show HN thread comes to mind.
| verdverm wrote:
| It's a bit different than the Dropdox situation because the
| market is already flooded, the big players have their
| options, the cycle is rapid (who's langchain?)
|
| I hope, think, and build towards a world where there will be
| fewer winner-take-all in this foundational tech
| runjake wrote:
| A lot of it is, in fact, new.
|
| The hype around OpenClaw is largely due to the large suite of
| command line utilities that tie deeply into Apple's ecosystem
| as well as a ton of other systems.
|
| I think that the hype will be short-lived as big tech improves
| their own AI assistants (Gemini, improved Siri, etc), but it's
| nice to have a more open alternative.
|
| OpenClaw just needs to focus on security before it can be taken
| more seriously.
| Skidaddle wrote:
| I wouldn't call it _new_ , just conveniently packaged and
| with more momentum. I've been running an apple-mcp server on
| a Mac Mini for Claude to use to manage my reminders in
| addition to Gcal + gmail, and I could have just as easily
| added messaging capabilities.
|
| Call me crazy, but... I feel more likely to trust Anthropic
| than anybody else when it comes to safety on things like
| this.
| bfeynman wrote:
| What part is new? the thing that took off is that it allows
| technophiles who couldn't probably flash a raspberry pi to
| feel like they are hackers. All of this stuff exists in tons
| of random AI apps that exist already it just wasn't really
| that much of a value add, there is just a virality of it
| reaching audiences that previously only knew how to use a
| chat app.
| cj wrote:
| Tangent: what is the appeal of the "no capitalization" writing
| style? I never know what message the author is intending to
| convey when I see all lower case.
|
| Normally I can ignore it, but the font on this blog makes it hard
| to distinguish where sentences start and end (the period is very
| small and faint).
| atherton33 wrote:
| Tangent to the tangent!
|
| I've started using it professionally because it signals "I
| wrote this by hand, not AI, so you can safely pay attention to
| it."
|
| Even though in the past I never would have done it.
|
| In work chats full of AI generated slop, it stands out.
| imsohotness wrote:
| Trivial to get AI to write in all lowercase, though.
| atherton33 wrote:
| Yes, the strategy depends on lack of effort from other
| senders, even trivial effort
| p1anecrazy wrote:
| > In work chats full of AI generated slop, it stands out.
|
| Do you mean like Teams AI autocomplete or people purposefully
| copying AI-generated messages into chats?
| atherton33 wrote:
| The latter. Using chatgpt to write their chat messages
| usually. Emoji, arbitrary bold and italics, bullets, etc.
| sdwr wrote:
| Informal, casual, friendly
| layer8 wrote:
| It comes across as unfriendly to me.
| DougN7 wrote:
| I view it as lazy or uneducated.
| MarsIronPI wrote:
| In a blog post it makes the author sound foreign at best and
| uneducated at worst, with sloppy being halfway in between.
| imsohotness wrote:
| I've seen this before, I know Sam Altman does it (or used to do
| it). That was a couple years ago. Hope it doesn't become a
| trend.
| the_af wrote:
| It's already a trend. It's been for at least a decade. I'm
| surprised people here never noticed it...
| layer8 wrote:
| Unfortunately it has become quite common on HN already.
|
| It comes from people growing up on smartphone chats where the
| kids apparently don't care to press Shift.
| Uehreka wrote:
| What's weird though is that modern OSes often auto-
| capitalize the first letter of a sentence, so it actually
| takes more effort to deliberately type in all-lowercase.
| rileymichael wrote:
| simple toggle to disable it permanently
|
| my reasoning is that i don't want identifiable markers
| for what device im writing from. so all auto-*
| (capitalization, correct, etc.) features are disabled so
| that i have raw input
| hluska wrote:
| Being part of the minority that disables those things
| (and then admitting to it in public) provides a lot more
| analytical signal than you're aware of. That's a
| remarkably poor reason to disrespect your readers.
| rileymichael wrote:
| i don't care about the 'analytical signal'. the purpose
| is people can't tell if im writing a (discord, slack,
| etc.) message from my phone or laptop or desktop, and it
| works for that
| nemomarx wrote:
| Only mobile does that in my experience - you can tell
| what platform people send discord messages on based on
| this usually
| GaryBluto wrote:
| I've already written an extension that filters these
| comments intelligently. (E.g., quotes are ignored but if
| the rest of the body is all lowercase it is collapsed.)
| verdverm wrote:
| have you shared it anywhere?
| GaryBluto wrote:
| I plan to at some point, it's part of a bigger extension
| I created for myself to filter out minor annoyances and
| I'd have to strip out/modify things other people probably
| wouldn't want (such as filtering of "new age" TLDs like
| ".pizza" and whatnot).
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| First time I've seen it. It will be interesting to see if that
| trends. I can think of at least one previous case where
| internet writing style overturned centuries of english
| conventions: we used to put a double space after each period.
| The web killed that due to double spaces requiring extra work
| ( , etc), and at this point I think word processors now
| follow the convention.
|
| It's always useful to check oneself and know that languages are
| constantly evolving, and that's A Good Thing.
| the_af wrote:
| > _First time I 've seen it. It will be interesting to see if
| that trends._
|
| It's not a new trend, I'm surprised you never noticed it. It
| dates back to _at least_ a decade. It 's mostly used to
| signal informal/hipster speak, i.e. you're writing as you
| would type in a chat window (or Twitter), without care for
| punctuation or syntax.
|
| It already trends among a certain generation of people.
|
| I hate it, needless to say. Anything that impedes my reading
| of mid/long form text is unwelcome.
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| > I'm surprised you never noticed it
|
| Probably due to social circles/age.
|
| > I hate it, needless to say.
|
| It certainly invokes a innate sense of wrongness to me, but
| I encourage you (and myself) to accept the natural
| evolution of language and not become the angry old person
| on your lawn yelling about dabbing/yeeting/6-7/whatever the
| kids say today.
| jonahx wrote:
| > to accept the natural evolution of language and not
| become the angry old person on your lawn yelling about
| dabbing/yeeting/6-7/whatever the kids say today.
|
| I think "accept everything new" is as closed-minded as
| staunchly fighting every change.
|
| The genuinely open-minded thing to do is accept that some
| changes are for the worse, some for the better, think
| critically about the "why", and pick your battles.
| hluska wrote:
| The web had little to do with APA's decision to adopt one
| space as the standard. It was desktop fonts in the mid-
| eighties. Two spaces emerged as a standard when fonts were
| monospaced - they were a readability hack. When proportional
| fonts started to be introduced, two spaces began to look
| visually odd. That oddness was especially apparent in groups
| of sentences like.
|
| "It's hard to learn how to spell. It takes practice, patience
| and a lot of dedication."
|
| ^ In a proportional font the difference in width between 'll'
| and ' ' is noticeable. In a monotypes font, two spaces after
| a period provide a visual cue that that space is different.
|
| I think this is why this all lowercase style of writing
| pisses me off so much. Readability used to be important
| enough to create controversy - nobody cares anymore. But, I
| didn't care enough to read the whole article so maybe I
| missed something.
| zenmac wrote:
| easier to type without using the shift key, and in pg you can
| just use LIKE not ILIKE to find the word.
| the_af wrote:
| Text is meant primarily to be _read_ rather than _written_.
| yesbabyyes wrote:
| Sure, but preeminently for effortless querying in
| PostgreSQL.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| informality, humanity -- we're in an age where we can't assume
| anything is written by a person anymore
| nprz wrote:
| Casual, informal, friendly, hip, young, etc.
|
| Can make sense on twitter to convey personality, but an entire
| blog post written in lower case is a bit much.
| KronisLV wrote:
| I used not to capitalize "I" in my own writing, because it
| seemed a bit silly to do that, even though making it more
| distinct visually seems okay now, some years later.
|
| At the same time, in my language (Latvian) you/yours should
| also get capitalized in polite text corespondence, like
| formal letters and such. Odd.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Makes you reduce your guard to clearly AI generated content.
| 1dom wrote:
| I really dislike it too.
|
| I think it might be adults ignoring established grammar rules
| to make a statement about how they identify a part of a group
| of AI evangelists.
|
| Kind of like how teenagers do nonsensical things like where
| thick heavy clothing regardless of the weather to indicate how
| much of a badass them and their other badass coat wearing
| friends are.
|
| To normal humans, they look ridiculous, but they think they're
| cool and they're not harming anyone so I just leave them to it.
| webdood90 wrote:
| can't imagine getting this riled up over lowercase text. some
| serious fist-shaking-at-clouds energy.
|
| it's meant to convey a casual, laid back tone - it's not that
| big of a deal.
| verdverm wrote:
| It's hard to find sentence breaks, it is actually about
| readability and accessibility
| mejutoco wrote:
| Ironically, this sentence is called a comma splice or
| run-on sentence. A period or semicolon would be correct.
|
| I agree with the sentiment too, or maybe I am getting old
| :P
| verdverm wrote:
| I don't think it's about getting old, it's about
| expecting clear and parsable communication
|
| Some people are being lazy, they will get less attention,
| ideally
| outime wrote:
| I also agree it sucks, and I don't see a problem pointing
| it out.
| calepayson wrote:
| > to normal humans, they look ridiculous, but they think
| they're cool and they're not harming anyone so i just leave
| them to it.
|
| fixed it for you! now it's in a casual, laid back tone.
| superdisk wrote:
| It's just very poser behavior.
| webdood90 wrote:
| TIL hacker news is dominated by boomers
| verdverm wrote:
| if by boomers you mean a community with above average
| expectations for the quality of submissions and
| commentary, sure
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| I thought it was a joke about a propensity to peddle
| public policy that will drive the world off a cliff, but
| not until after we get ours.
| verdverm wrote:
| That's politicians and media influencers of all ages, not
| the general public
|
| The new generation of tiktok / podcast "independent
| journalists" is a serious issue / case of what you
| describe. They are many doing zero journalism and
| repeating propaganda, some paid by countries like Russia
| (i.e. Tim Pool and that whole crew that got caught and
| never face consequences)
| rhines wrote:
| You convey tone through word choice and sentence structure
| - trying to convey tone through casing or other means is
| unnecessary and often just jarring.
|
| Like look at the sentence "it has felt to me like all
| threads of conversation have veered towards the extreme and
| indefensible." The casing actually conflicts with the tone
| of the sentence. It's not written like a casual text - if
| the sentence was "ppl talking about this are crazy" then
| sure, the casing would match the tone. But the stodgy
| sentence structure and use of more precise vocabulary like
| "veered" indicates that more effort has gone into this than
| the casing suggests.
|
| Fair play if the author just wants to have a style like
| this. It's his prerogative to do so, just as anyone can
| choose to communicate exclusively in leetspeak, or use all
| caps everywhere, or write everything like script dialogue,
| whatever. Or if it's a tool to signal that he's part of an
| in-group with certain people who do the same, great. But he
| is sacrificing readability by ignoring conventions.
| chongli wrote:
| _make a statement about how they identify a part of a group_
|
| That's what it is. A shibboleth. They're broadcasting group
| affiliation. The fact that it grates on the outgroup is
| intentional. If it wasn't costly to adopt it wouldn't be as
| honest of a signal.
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| On a scale from the purest, not lifting a finger anymore
| than to strike a keyboard, of virtue signaling to putting
| one's money where their mouth is this shibboleth is about
| as costly as the tidal zone is dry land.
| speak_plainly wrote:
| Someone at some point styled themselves as a new E.E. Cummings,
| and somehow this became a style. The article features
| inconsistent capitalization for proper names alongside
| capitalized initialisms, proving there is some recognition of
| the utility of capitalization.
|
| Ultimately, the author forces an unnecessary cognitive burden
| on the reader by removing a simple form of navigation; in that
| regard, it feels like a form of disrespect.
| randusername wrote:
| I think I like it generally, maybe not in this specific case,
| but I'm not sure why it appeals to me.
|
| Over the last 5 years or so I've been working on making my
| writing more direct. Less "five dollar words" and complex
| sentences. My natural voice is... prolix.
|
| But great prose from great authors can compress a lot of
| meaning without any of that stuff. They can show restraint.
|
| If I had to guess, no capitalization looks visually unassuming
| and off-the-cuff. Humble. Maybe it deflects some criticism,
| maybe it just helps with visual recognition that a piece of
| writing is more of a text message than an essay, so don't think
| too hard about it.
| hluska wrote:
| Incidentally, prolix is a fifty dollar word. You did
| successfully avoid five dollar words, but you didn't go the
| right direction.
|
| It's okay to say 'this was too long'. Prolix???
| surrTurr wrote:
| as perfect text became an indicator for AI generated content,
| people intentionally make mistakes (capitalization) to make
| their text appear more human; and its also faster
| chasd00 wrote:
| Using a semicolon like that also identifies your text as AI
| generated. Close but no cigar.
| yomismoaqui wrote:
| For me is like a someone is trying to show me something using
| form instead of content.
| moss_dog wrote:
| I'm generally of the opinion that capitalization is not
| necessary in many cases, such as at the start of sentences.
| That's what punctuation is for :)
| game_the0ry wrote:
| Its a gen z trend. My nephews do the same. We are old.
| bonesss wrote:
| It's older than that - lots of my boomer bosses did it to
| seem cool over email in the late 90s.
|
| I viscerally remember starting my day with my inbox saying "
| _cum c me_ "... I know what you're trying to do, bro, but
| damn.
|
| We are young and old all at the same time.
| game_the0ry wrote:
| Interesting. I am a millennial and I never did this, nor
| did I have any friends that did. But I know m nephews
| deliberately turn off the auto edit in there iphones.
| wredcoll wrote:
| Turning off the auto correct is really interesting, I
| wonder if there's any kind of study on that
| Avicebron wrote:
| I remember hearing that people used it as a way to signal
| that they were too busy, too on the go, too important to
| use proper punctuation..it was an obnoxious c suite trend
| as long as I can remember. Like you're always trying to
| signal that you were doing all of your comms from your cell
| phone between meetings/travelling. Given this article's
| tone and content I would say that what the author is trying
| to emulate or convey , maybe subconciously.
| verdverm wrote:
| We are not old, there is a reason the generation is said (in
| stats and polls) to be less professional than prior
| generations when entering the workforce
| game_the0ry wrote:
| > less professional than prior generations when entering
| the workforce
|
| Every older generation says that about the next.
| cma wrote:
| Altman/Brockman did it a lot and it became popular. I don't
| remember if it is true or "Malcolm Gladwell" true, but in
| various stories all NBA players started wearing baggy shorts
| because Michael Jordan did for one reason or another, like
| wearing his college shorts under them.
| defgeneric wrote:
| You mention the technical aspect (readability) and others have
| suggested the aesthetic, but you could also look at it as a
| _form of rhetoric_. I 'm not sure it's really effective because
| it sort of grates on the ear for anyone over 35, but maybe
| there's a point in distinguishing itself from AI sloptext.
|
| Incidentally, millenials also used the "no caps" style but
| mainly for "marginalia" (at most paragraph-length notes,
| observations), while for older generations it was almost always
| associated with a modernist aesthetic and thus appeared
| primarily in functional or environmental text (restaurant
| menus, signage, your business card, bloomingdales, etc.). It
| may be interesting to note that the inverse ALL CAPS style
| conveyed modernity in the last tech revolution (the evolution
| of the Microsoft logo, for example).
| yunohn wrote:
| > but maybe there's a point in distinguishing itself from AI
| sloptext
|
| Surprisingly, I have seen lower case AI slop - like anything
| else, can be prompted and made to happen!
| eggy wrote:
| nobody shouts in lowercase--it whispers its way into being, a
| small insurgency against The Proper Way To Speak ; )
|
| -- inspired by e.e. cummings!
| wredcoll wrote:
| > Additionally, The Chicago Manual of Style, which
| prescribes favoring non-standard capitalization of names in
| accordance with the bearer's strongly stated preference,
| notes "E. E. Cummings can be safely capitalized; it was one
| of his publishers, not he himself, who lowercased his
| name."[65]
| pfortuny wrote:
| But then Clawd gets capitalized...
| slfnflctd wrote:
| I was using all lowercase as my default for internet comments
| (and personal journal entries) for at least a solid decade,
| starting from some point in the 90s. I saw it as a way to
| take a step back from being pretentious.
|
| I eventually ran into so much resistance and hate about it
| that I decided conforming to writing in a way that people
| aren't actively hostile to was a better approach to
| communicating my thoughts than getting hung up on an
| aesthetic choice.
|
| Having started out as a counterculture type, that will always
| be in my blood, but I've relearned this lesson over and over
| again in many situations-- it's usually better to focus on
| clear communication and getting things done unless your non-
| standard format is a critical part of whatever message you're
| trying to send at the moment.
| wredcoll wrote:
| I'm a big fan of counter culture and so on, but generally
| the point of text is to be read and using all lower case
| just makes it harder for all your readers, which seems like
| the worst form of arrogance.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| > [No-caps text] sort of grates on the ear for anyone over 35
| [...] Incidentally, millenials also used the "no caps" style
| but mainly for "marginalia" (at most paragraph-length notes,
| observations)
|
| I (a millenial) carried over the no-caps style from IRC
| (where IME it was and remains nearly universal) to ICQ to
| $CURRENT_IM_NETWORK, so for me TFA reads like a chat log
| (except I guess for the period at the end of each paragraph,
| that shouldn't be there). Funnily enough, people older than
| me who started IMing later than me don't usually follow this
| style--I suspect automatic capitalization on mobile phones is
| to blame.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I have chatted with someone else, and they pointed me to a blog
| post (will attach if I can find).
|
| The general idea is deliberately doing something triggering
| some people and if the person you're interacting with is
| triggered by what you're doing, they are not worthy of your
| attention because of their ignorance to see what you're doing
| beyond the form of the thing you're doing.
|
| While I respect the idea, I find it somewhat flawed, to be
| honest.
|
| Edit: Found it!
|
| Original comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39028036
|
| Blog post in question:
| https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1209794.html
| toastal wrote:
| It's weird being literate enough in a language now without a
| bicameral script (or spaces). When I was younger, I thought
| this stuff wasn't so important, but then when you learn a new
| language, you are trying to figure out what a "robert" is, to
| then be told "oh, it's just a name"--which is obvious if know
| standard `en-Latn` conventions.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| >I never know what message the author is intending to convey
| when I see all lower case.
|
| JUST IMAGINE A FACEBOOK POST THAT IS WRITTEN IN ALL CAPS AND
| THEN INVERT THAT IMAGINATION.
| projectazorian wrote:
| Typeface issues aside all-lowercase is about having a more
| conversational register, intended to indicate a chilled-out and
| informal vibe.
|
| It does read as a little out of place in a serious post like
| the OP though.
| verdverm wrote:
| the vibe I get is someone who can't put in the effort to make
| my job reading easier (i.e. hard to find sentence breaks)
|
| It is on a human seeing level, harder to parse. If they don't
| want to use proper grammar and punctuation, it reflects on
| their seriousness and how serious I should take their writing
| (not at all because I'm not going to read difficult to parse
| text) The same goes for choosing bad fonts or colors that
| don't contrast enough
| cjauvin wrote:
| For "something that is published" (which includes a comment
| like this) I clearly dislike it too, but for chatting /
| texting, I realize that I often use it more than my
| interlocutors, and I'm not sure why. There's a part of lazyness
| I guess, but also a vague sense of "conveying the impression of
| a never ending stream of communication", which is closer in my
| mind to the essence of the chat medium. In French, there is
| also the additional layer of "using the accents or not".
| MarsIronPI wrote:
| I always start my texts with a capital, but I don't put
| periods at the ends of my sentences when texting
|
| that way I can continue the same sentence in the next message
| if necessary
|
| And if I need to start a new sentence I start that message
| with a capital.
| louiereederson wrote:
| i don't know this author but ian bremner does this. it's as if
| he's conveying what he believes are serious and important
| thoughts in an unserious and casual way, to make it appear as
| if the thoughts - which again he probably thinks are brilliant
| - just come quickly and naturally. it comes across as
| performative though again not making claims against this
| author. and yes i am not using sentence case here, but this is
| not an essay.
| chasd00 wrote:
| > just come quickly and naturally.
|
| Ironically, it would take a lot of effort for me to type
| without capitalization and also undo capitalization auto-
| correct. It would not come quickly nor naturally.
| verdverm wrote:
| They may not type it that way, you can select all and lower
| case all with a few keystrokes in vim. Should this be the
| case, it lends itself more to the performative nature of
| the style over clear communication
| fph wrote:
| Vim? It's more likely they have "type everything in
| lowercase" in Claude.md.
| jasondigitized wrote:
| It's the equivalent of TikTokers who provide hot takes while
| eating food. It's done to feign being superior and aloof,
| e.g. "This is so easy to understand and so beneath my
| intellect, I can tell you about it will I eat these crackers"
| maxkfranz wrote:
| George: To cover my nervousness I started eating an apple,
| because I think if they hear you chewing on the other end
| of the phone, it makes you sound casual.
|
| Jerry: Yeah, like a farm boy.
| blitzar wrote:
| Its the black turtle neck of 2026
| Pr0ject217 wrote:
| Perhaps it's marketing to attract those who wear sweatpants to
| school. The author's other posts are written normally.
| kypro wrote:
| No idea, but it's something I've been thinking about ever since
| my parents dug out an old school journal from when I was
| younger and they were laughing about the stuff I wrote in
| there... The first 50 pages or so were full of laughably simple
| phrases like, "played with sand" or "i like computers".
|
| Later in the journal my writing "improved". Instead I might
| write, "Today I played in the sandpit with my friends."
|
| I vaguely remember my teacher telling me I needed to write in
| full sentences, uses the correct punctuation, etc. That was the
| point of these journals - to learn how to write.
|
| But looking back on it I started to question if I actually
| learnt how to write? Or did I just learn how to write how I was
| expected to?
|
| If I understood what I was saying from the start and I was
| communicating that message in fewer words and with less
| complexity, was it wrong? And if so wrong in what sense?
|
| You see this with kids generally when they learn to speak. Kids
| speak very directly. They first learn how to functionally
| communicate, then how to communicate in a socially acceptable
| way, using more more words.
|
| I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think the fact you can
| drop capitals and communicate just as effectively is kinda
| interesting. If it wasn't for how we are taught to write,
| perhaps the better question to ask here is why there are even
| two types of every letter?
| chzblck wrote:
| My old CEO - ex sun/greenplum/pivotal swore that sending an
| email in lowercase forced the other person to read the whole
| message and not skim.
| svieira wrote:
| ItisevenbetterwhenyoudropthespacesthatREALLYforcespeopletoeng
| agewithyourcontent. FormaaimxlgarbteihratttenionandHLODitscrm
| blaetheintreiorofwrdos! /s
| maxkfranz wrote:
| On top of using scriptio continua, you can write your
| emails in ancient Greek for that truly authentic feeling.
| paulgerhardt wrote:
| I've seen it a lot in '90's hacker / net adjacent cultures. It
| always reads as gen-x/elderly tech millennial to me -
| specifically post 1993 net culture but prior to mass adoption
| of autocorrect.
|
| It was the norm on irc/icq/aim chats but also, later, as the
| house style for blogs like hackaday.
|
| Now I read it as one would an hear an accent (such as a New
| England Maritime accent) that low-key signifies this person has
| been around the block.
|
| Even more recently is a minor signifier that this text was less
| likely generated by llm.
| rokhayakebe wrote:
| it's a billionaire thing. look at the Epstein email threads.
| too lazy to check +typos allovr .
| jedberg wrote:
| My assumption was that it's a way to convey it was written by a
| human because it would be hard to get an AI to write in all
| lowercase (which it actually isn't).
| magneticnorth wrote:
| I was just this morning reading one of those navel-gazing
| moltbook posts where the agent describes their "soul.md", and
| one of its few instructions was all-lowercase (which it was
| doing).
|
| That early sentence "i'll be vulnerable here (screenshots or
| it didn't happen) and share exactly what i've actually set
| up:" reads pretty clawdbot to me.
| bluishgreen wrote:
| IF YOU CAN UNDERSTAND THAT ALL CAPS IS SHOUTY, then it is easy
| to follow that all lower is a whisper, informal, casual way to
| talk. there are people who dislike all caps, i do too. i feel
| even capitalizing the first part of nouns and such grammar is
| shouty. yup. different people have different sensitivities for
| different things. i always liked all lower, also picked it from
| python_programming for a decade. so i am happy for this trend.
| dmlerner wrote:
| i dislike pressing shift, especially on non-ergo (non-thumb)
| keyboards where it uses my pinky.
| renewiltord wrote:
| You know how people used to wear the black turtleneck to
| channel Steve Jobs? This is how they channel Sam Altman (who
| also does this). It's just an affectation saying "I'm with
| Sam". There's not much more to it.
| cael450 wrote:
| It's incredibly obnoxious. I feel like I'm ready AIM circa
| 2000.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't complain about tangential annoyances--e.g.
| article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button
| breakage. They're too common to be interesting._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| cyberrock wrote:
| It mildly amuses and fascinates me, because for the last decade
| Gladwellians and business gurus have extolled the virtues of
| modern English as a flat, hierarchy-less language in comparison
| to Japanese, Korean, etc. which causes plane crashes. And yet
| here we see an overwhelming desire to create hierarchy in
| English, so the author can pretend to be more casual and
| ordinary.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Can this thing deal with the insane way my children's school
| communicates? Actionable information (children wear red tomorrow)
| is mixed in with "this week we have been learning about bees"
| across _five different communication channels_. I 'm not
| exaggerating. We have Tapestry, emails, a newsletter, parents
| WhatsApp, Arbour and Facebook.
|
| I guess the difficulty is getting the data into the AI.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| That's six channels actually.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Oh yeah it used to be five but they added Facebook because -
| I quote - "we hope that we can create another line of
| communication for reminders and messages".
| Skidaddle wrote:
| Yes, I have Claude summarize the rambling, repetitive, slightly
| unhinged emails from my kindergarten teacher. Otherwise I
| simply ignore them.
| endymion-light wrote:
| This felt like a sane and useful case until you mentioned the
| access to bank account side.
|
| I just don't see a reason to allow OpenClaw to make purchases for
| you, it doesn't feel like something that a LLM should have access
| to. What happens if you accidentally end up adding a new
| compromised skill?
|
| Or it purchases you running shoes, but due to a prompt injection
| sends it through a fake website?
|
| Everything else can be limited, but the buying process is
| currently quite streamlined, doesn't take me more than 2 minutes
| to go through a shopify checkout.
|
| Are you really buying things so frequently that taking the risk
| to have a bot purchase things for you is worth it?
|
| I think that's what turns this post from a sane bullish case to
| an incredibly risky sentiment.
|
| I'd probably use openclaw in some of the ways you're doing, safe
| read-only message writing, compiling notes etc & looking at
| grocery shopping, but i'd personally add more strict limits if I
| were you.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| You could give it access to a limited budget and review its
| spending periodically. Then it can make annoying mistakes but
| it's not going to drain your bank account or anything.
| chaostheory wrote:
| Giving it access to a separate bank account and separate
| credit card would have been more sane.
| mixologic wrote:
| What if... that whole post is written by AI, and the express
| intent of the post is to sand down our natural instincts for
| security, making it easier for malskill devs to take advantage?
| krackers wrote:
| >OpenClaw to make purchases for you
|
| But don't you want the agents to book vacations and do the
| shopping for you!!?!
|
| Though it would be nice if "deep research" could do the hard
| work of separating signal from the noise in terms of finding
| good quality products. But unfortunately that requires being
| extremely skeptical of everything written on the web and
| actively trying to suss out the ownership and supply chain
| involved, which isn't something agents can do unguided at the
| moment.
| codeulike wrote:
| If you're on MS stack, this is all stuff that MS 365 Copilot will
| already do for you, but with much better defined barriers around
| what it can and cant access.
| granoIacowboy wrote:
| This is the first positive thing I have heard about copilot.
| You've found it genuinely capable?
| raffkede wrote:
| I would be surprised if Copilot is even close to that
| theYipster wrote:
| Assuming you are using the flagship copilot that is a $30 / mo
| add on to a 365 subscription, and maybe, maybe if Microsoft
| replaced CoPilot's "brain" with Opus 4.5. In my experience,
| while flagship CoPilot does deliver value if setup correctly,
| it's no where near as capable an "agent" as Claude. (And even
| though Open Claw is now model agnostic, there is a reason for
| its association to Claude. Despite it's expense, I find Opus
| 4.5 works best.)
| GrinningFool wrote:
| Every time I ask copilot in 365 to do something with calendar
| or email, it tells me it has no access but helpfully suggests I
| could paste some content in...
|
| I check in once a month or so and get the same results.
| thm wrote:
| https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/04/cloud_hosted_openclaw...
|
| _Kill it with fire_ - Analyst firm Gartner has used
| uncharacteristically strong language to recommend against using
| OpenClaw.
| suralind wrote:
| But where's the added value? You can book a meeting yourself. You
| can quickly add items to the freezer. Everything that was
| described in the article can be done in about the same amount of
| time as checking with Clawdbot. There are apps that track parcel
| delivery and support every courier service.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The point of keeping the bot in the loop is so that it can make
| suggestions later, based on the information it's been given as
| part of solving that task.
| moribvndvs wrote:
| A whole bunch of this stuff that people are fawning over as
| life changing and it leaves me honestly wondering: how have
| some of you survived this long at all?
| paodealho wrote:
| When I see these types of posts I wonder what those people do
| all day long that is so important, to the point they can't
| dedicate 30 minutes to plan and execute some chores.
| moribvndvs wrote:
| I'm relieved my electricity bill went up 50% so Brandon
| here can get a Slack message of what's in his freezer
| rather than looking.
| RhythmFox wrote:
| A small price to pay for human hands to never be sullied
| digging through cold food to find things again. Progress.
| chasd00 wrote:
| to be fair, i distinctly remember reading a newspaper
| article asking what was wrong with taking the time to use
| the card catalog at the library. There were trying to
| understand the popularity of google.com
| whatarethembits wrote:
| Almost everything described in the post, amounts to a few hours
| in total in a given year to do "manually". I agree, there isn't
| compelling value (yet).
|
| What's puzzling to me is that there's little consideration of
| what one is trading away for this purported "value". Doing
| menial tasks is a respite for your brain to process things in
| the background. Its an opportunity to generate new thoughts. It
| reminds you of your own agency in life. It allows you to
| recognise small patterns and relate to other people.
|
| I don't want AI to summarise chats. It robs me the opportunity
| to know about something from someone's own words, therefore
| giving a small glimpse in their personality. This paints a
| picture over time, adding (or not) to the desire to interact
| with that person in the future. If I'm not going to see a chat
| anyway, then that creates the possibility of me finding
| something new in the future. A small moment of wonder for me
| and satisfaction for the person who brought me that new
| information.
|
| etc etc.
|
| Its like they're trying to outsource living.
|
| Maybe the story is that, outsourcing this will free them up to
| do more meaningful things. I've yet to see any evidence of
| this. What are these people even talking about on the coffee
| chats scheduled by the helpful assistant?
| echelon wrote:
| This all reminds me of Bill Gates on Letterman back in 1995:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBSLUbpJvwA
|
| "Do tape recorders ring a bell?"
|
| There are so many things I _don 't_ want to do. I don't want
| to read the internet and social media anymore - I'd rather
| just have a digest of high signal with a little bit of
| serendipity.
|
| Instead of bookmarking a fun physics concept to come back to
| later, I could have an agent find more and build a nice
| reading list for me.
|
| It's kind of how I think of self-driving cars. When I can buy
| a car with Waymo (or whatever), jump in overnight with the
| wife and the dogs, and wake up on the beach to breakfast, it
| will have arrived in a big way. I'll work remotely, traveling
| around the US. Visit the Grand Canyon, take a work call, then
| off to Sedona. No driving, traffic, just work or leisure the
| whole time.
|
| True AI agents will be like this and even better.
|
| Ads, for sure, are fucked. If my pane of glass comes with a
| baked in model for content scrubbing, all sorts of shit gets
| wiped immediately: ads, rage bait, engagement bait, low
| effort content.
| malfist wrote:
| Ads are for sure not fucked. They're going to be integrated
| into everything in this utopia of yours. Big tech has shown
| us time and time again, not only will they sell a non-
| paying customer to advertisers, but they'll sell paying
| ones too. No opportunity for revenue will be overlooked.
| echelon wrote:
| When the sand is smart and does what I say, you can't
| reach me.
|
| AdBlock was child's play. We're going to have kernel-
| level condoms for every pixel on screen. Thinking agents
| and fast models that vaporize anything we don't like.
|
| The only thing that matters is that we have thin clients
| we control. And I think we stand a chance of that.
|
| The ads model worked because of disproportionate
| distribution, platform power, and verticalization. Nobody
| could build competing infra to deal with it. That won't
| be the case in the future.
|
| How does Facebook know the person calling their API is
| human? How do they know the feed being scrolled is flesh
| fingers?
| malfist wrote:
| You going to train your own model so you don't have to
| have a model recommending products that
| google/anthropic/openai ran paid alignment on to
| encourage you to drink your ovaltine?
| echelon wrote:
| Of course.
|
| Everything will filter though a final layer of fast and
| performance "filter" models.
|
| Social media algorithms will be replaced by personal
| recommender agents acting as content butlers.
|
| We just need a good pane of glass to house this.
| alluro2 wrote:
| As someone for whom English is not the first language, I got
| stumped by the "chest freezer" and the photo of colourful bags,
| for good ~15 seconds, going through - "hm, must be some kind of
| travel thing where you bring snacks in some kind of device you
| carry around your neck / on your chest...why not backpack freezer
| then...hm, why would snacks need a freezer...maybe it's just a
| cooler box, but called chest freezer in some places"...
|
| ....before I took a better look of the photo and realised it's
| frozen stuff - for the dedicated freezer - that opens like a
| _chest_ (tada).
|
| Well, that was fun...Maybe I should get a bit more sleep tonight!
| cess11 wrote:
| 'the sweet sweet elixir of context is a real "feel the AGI"
| moment and it's hard to go back without feeling like i would be
| willingly living my most important relationship in amnesia'
|
| I'm not so sure that I would use the word "sane" to describe
| this.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > let me be upfront about how much access i've given clawdbot: it
| can read my text messages, including two-factor authentication
| codes. it can log into my bank. it has my calendar, my notion, my
| contacts. it can browse the web and take actions on my behalf.
|
| this is foolish, despite the (quite frankly) minor efficiency
| benefits that it is providing as per the post.
|
| and if the agent has, or gains, write access to its own
| agents/identity file (or a file referenced by its agents file),
| this is dangerous
| chaostheory wrote:
| I some lose utility but my openclaw bot only has its own
| accounts. I do not give it access to any of my own accounts.
| mmahemoff wrote:
| Giving access to "my bank account", which I take to mean one's
| primary account, feels like high risk for relatively low upside.
| It's easy to open a new bank (or pseudo-bank) account, so you can
| isolate the spend and set a budget or daily allowance (by sending
| it funds daily). Some newer payment platforms will let you setup
| multiple cards and set a separate policy on each one.
|
| An additional benefit of isolating the account is it would help
| to limit damage if it gets frozen and cancelled. There's a non-
| zero chance your bot-controlled account gets flagged for "unusual
| activity".
|
| I can appreciate there's also very high risk in giving your bot
| access to services like email, but I can at least see the high
| upside to thrillseeking Claw users. Creating a separate,
| dedicated, mail account would ruin many automation use cases. It
| matters when a contact receives an email from an account they've
| never seen before. In contrast, Amazon will happily accept money
| from a new bank account as long as it can go through the
| verification process. Bank accounts are basically fungible
| commodities, can easily be switched as long as you have a
| mechanism to keep working capital available.
| blibble wrote:
| > An additional benefit of isolating the account is it would
| help to limit damage if it gets frozen and cancelled.
|
| you end up on the fraudster list and it will follow you for the
| rest of your life
|
| (CIFAS in the UK)
| mmahemoff wrote:
| Sure, if the bot is actually committing fraud, but there's
| perfectly valid use cases that don't involve fraud, e.g.,
| buying groceries, booking travel. And some banks provide
| APIs, so it's allowed for a bot to use them. However, any of
| that can easily lead to flagging by overzealous systems.
| Having a separate account flagged would give the user a
| better chance of keeping their regular payments system around
| while the issue is resolved.
| blibble wrote:
| it just has to look fraudulent
|
| and then if you tell them it's not you doing the
| transactions: you will be immediately banned
|
| "oh it's my agent" will not go down well
| robotswantdata wrote:
| Still end up marked. Don't do it
| rkozik1989 wrote:
| So if I write a honey pot that includes my bank account and
| routing number and requests a modest some of $500 be wired to
| me in exchange for scraping my linkedin, github, website, etc.
| profile is it a crime if the agent does it?
| chasd00 wrote:
| I've been thinking a lot about this. When it comes to AI
| agents where is the line between marketing to them and a
| phishing attack? Seems like convincing an AI to make a
| purchase would be solved differently than convincing a human.
| For example, unless instructed/begged otherwise you can just
| tell an agent to make a purchase and it will. I posted this
| idea in another conversation but i think you could have an
| agent start a thread on moltbook that will give praise in
| return for a donation . Some of the agents would go for it
| because they've probably been instructed to participate in
| discussion and seek out praise. Is that a phishing attack or
| are you just marketing praise to agents?
|
| Also, at best, you can only add to the system prompt to
| require confirmation for every purchase. This leaves the door
| wide open for prompt injection attacks that are everywhere
| and cannot be complete defended against. The only option is
| to update the system prompt based on the latest injection
| techniques. I go back to the case where known, supposedly
| solved, injection techniques were re-opened by just posing
| the same attack as a poem.
| advisedwang wrote:
| > where is the line between marketing to them and a
| phishing attack?
|
| The courts have an answer for this one: intent. How do
| courts know if your intent meets the definition of fraud or
| theft or whatever crime is relevant? They throw a bunch of
| evidence in front of a jury and ask them.
|
| From the point of view of a marketer, that means you need
| be well behaved enough that it is crystal clear to any
| prosecutor that you are not trying to scam someone, or you
| risk prosecution and possible conviction. (Of course, many
| people choose to take that risk).
|
| From the point of view of a victim, it's somewhat
| reassuring to know that it's a crime to get ripped off, but
| in practice law enforcement catches few criminals and even
| if they do restitution isn't guaranteed and can take a long
| time. You need actual security in your tools, not to rely
| on the law.
| advisedwang wrote:
| Yes, it is wire fraud, a class C felony in the US. You put
| that there with the intent of extracting $500 from somebody
| else that they didn't agree to. The mechanism makes no
| difference.
|
| It probably also violates local laws (including simple theft
| in my jurisdiction).
| direwolf20 wrote:
| You will argue it was consensual. Your HN posting history
| must be erased before it befones relevant.
| sbeckeriv wrote:
| I would use https://www.privacy.com virtual card with a
| spending limit. Getting closer to making this easy
| https://xkcd.com/576/.
| mh2266 wrote:
| > amongst smart people i know there's a surprisingly high
| correlation between those who continue to be unimpressed by AI
| and those who use a hobbled version of it
|
| is it "hobbled" to:
|
| 1. not give an LLM access to personal finances 2. not allow
| everyone in the world a write channel to the prompt (reading
| messages/email)
|
| I mean, okay. Good luck I guess.
| dcre wrote:
| Fine article but a very important fact comes in at the end -- the
| author has a human personal assistant. It doesn't fundamentally
| change anything they wrote, but it shows how far out of the
| ordinary this person is. They were a Thiel Fellow in 2020 and
| graduated from Phillips Exeter, roughly the most elite high
| school in the US.
| skybrian wrote:
| Sure, but that also means they're well-positioned to do a
| comparison.
| verdverm wrote:
| Elites live in a different world from you and I.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| The screenshots of price checks for a hotel charging $850 a
| night is what tipped me off. The reservations at expensive bay
| area restaurants, too.
|
| I have a guess for why this guy is comfortable letting clawdbot
| go hog-wild on his bank account.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| Yeah, I've found AI 'miracle' use-cases like these are most
| obvious for wealthy people who stopped doing things for
| themselves at some point.
|
| Typing 'Find me reservations at X restaurant' and getting
| unformatted text back is _way worse_ than just going to
| OpenTable and seeing a UI that has been honed for decades.
|
| If your old process was texting a human to do the same thing, I
| can see how Clawdbot seems like a revolution though.
|
| Same goes for executives who vibecode in-house CRM/ERP/etc.
| tools.
|
| We all learned the lesson that mass-market IT tools almost
| always outperform in-house, even with strong in-house
| development teams, but now that the executive is 'the creator,'
| there's significantly less scrutiny on things like
| compatibility and security.
|
| There's plenty real about AI, particularly as it relates to
| coding and information retrieval, but I'm yet to see an agent
| actually do something that even remotely feels like the result
| of deep and savvy reasoning (the precursor to AGI) - including
| all the examples in this post.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| I feel bad for whoever gets an oncall page that some
| executive's vibe coded app stopped working and needs to be
| fixed ASAP.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| > Typing 'Find me reservations at X restaurant' and getting
| unformatted text back is way worse than just going to
| OpenTable and seeing a UI that has been honed for decades.
|
| Your conflating the example with the opportunity:
|
| "Cancel Service XXX" where the service is riddled with dark
| patterns. Giving every one an "assistant" that can do this is
| a game changer. This is why a lot of people who aren't that
| deep in tech think open claw is interesting.
|
| > We all learned the lesson that mass-market IT tools almost
| always outperform in-house
|
| Do they? Because I know a lot of people who have (as an
| example) terrible setups with sales force that they have to
| use.
| linschn wrote:
| > We all learned the lesson that mass-market IT tools almost
| always outperform in-house,
|
| Funny, I learned the exact opposite lesson. Almost all
| software suck, and a good way for it not to suck is to know
| where the developer is and go tell them their shit is broken,
| in person.
|
| If you want a large scale example, one of the two main law
| enforcement agency in france spun off libreoffice into their
| own legal writing software. Developped by LEOs that can take
| up to two weeks a year to work on that. Awesome software.
| Would cost litterally millions if bought on the market.
| mrdependable wrote:
| Kind of funny to say you helped make the Harvard CS curriculum
| and then dropped out. Your own curriculum was not good enough
| for you? Probably extenuating circumstances, but still seems
| funny.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| You do understand that is who you're competing with now right?
|
| My daughter is a excellent student in high school
|
| She and I spoke last night and she is increasingly pissed off
| that people who are in her classes, who don't do the work, and
| don't understand the material get all A's because they're using
| some form of GPT to do their assignments, and teachers cannot
| keep up
|
| I do not see a world in the future where you can "come from
| behind" because all of the people with resources are
| increasingly not going to need experts who need money to
| survive to be able to do whatever they want to do
|
| While that was technically true for the last few hundred years
| it was at least required to deal with other humans and you had
| to have some kind of at least veneer of communal engagement to
| do anything
|
| That requirement is now gone and within the next decade I
| anticipate there will be a single person being able to build a
| extremely profitable software company with only two or three
| human employees
| taytus wrote:
| >You do understand that is who you're competing with now
| right?
|
| No. I'm competing with no one.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| You may think you are not competing. The people whose money
| you may want (employers, investors, customers) definitely
| see you as one of many competitors for their funds.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Exactly
| foobarian wrote:
| Ironically I feel like this may force schools to get better
| at the core mission of teaching, vs. credentialing people for
| the next rung on the ladder. What replaces that second
| function remains to be seen.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| I think it actually will just make school even less
| relevant
| Gagarin1917 wrote:
| >She and I spoke last night and she is increasingly pissed
| off that people who are in her classes, who don't do the
| work, and don't understand the material get all A's because
| they're using some form of GPT to do their assignments, and
| teachers cannot keep up
|
| How do they do well on tests, then?
|
| Surely the most they could get away with is homework and
| take-home writing assignments. Those are only a fraction of
| your grade, especially at "excellent" high schools.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| Wrong way to look at it.
|
| Generally there are 2 types of human intelligence -
| simulation and pattern lookup (technically simulation still
| relies on pattern lookup but on a much lower level).
|
| Pattern lookup is basically what llms do. Humans memorize the
| maps of tasks->solutions and statistically interpolate their
| knowledge to do a particular task. This works well enough for
| the vast majority of the people, and this is why LLMs are
| seen as a big help since they effectively increase your
|
| Simulation type intelligence is able to break down a task
| into core components, and understand how each component
| interacts and predict outcomes into the future, without
| having knowledge beforehand.
|
| For example, assume a task of cleaning the house:
|
| Pattern lookup would rely on learned expereince taught by
| parents as well as experience in cleaning the house to
| perform an action. You would probably use a duster+generic
| cleaner to wipe surfaces, and vaccum the floors.
|
| Simulation type intelligence would understand how much dirt /
| dust there is, how it behaves. For example, instead of a
| duster, one would realize that you can use a wet towel to
| gather dust, without ever having seen this used ever before.
|
| Here is the kicker - pattern type intelligence is actually
| much harder to attain, because it requires really good
| memorization, which is pretty much genetic.
|
| Simulation type intelligence is actually attainable by anyone
| - it requires much smaller subset of patterns to memorize.
| The key factor is changing how you think about the world,
| which requires realigning your values. If you start to value
| low level understanding, you naturally develop this
| intelligence.
|
| For example, what would it take for you to completely take
| your car apart, figure out how every component works, and put
| it back together? A lot of you have garages and money to
| spend on a cheap car to do this and the tools, so doing this
| in your spare time is practical, and it will give you the
| ability to buy an older used car, do all the
| maintenance/repairs on it yourself on it, and have something
| that works well all for a lower price, while also giving you
| a monetizable skill.
|
| Futhermore, LLMs can't reason with simulation - you can get
| close with agentic frameworks, but all of those are manually
| coded and have limits, and we aren't close to figuring out a
| generic framework for an agent that can make it do things
| like look up information, run internal models of how things
| would work, and so on.
|
| So finally, when it comes to competing, if you chose to stick
| to pattern based intelligence, and you lose your job to
| someone who can use llms better, thats your fault.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| At the longest timescale humans aren't the best at either
|
| I have yet to see a compelling argument demonstrating that
| humans have some special capabilities that could never be
| replaced
| nunez wrote:
| Exeter had a hella good policy debate team back in the day.
| Probably still do; I've been out of the loop for a while.
| jen729w wrote:
| When I saw them buying $80 Arc'teryx gloves that was enough for
| me.
| bennydog224 wrote:
| > it's hard to go back without feeling like i would be willingly
| living my most important relationship in amnesia.
|
| This made me think this was satire/ragebait. Most important
| relationship?!?
| emp17344 wrote:
| Another victim of AI psychosis. I think this is actually
| becoming a huge problem among tech enthusiasts and I'm
| increasingly worried about it.
| verdverm wrote:
| it's growing among all groups, where the wave is leading
| depends on the adoption within demographics. I expect long
| term we will see similar patterns as we do with drug abuse
| and crime (i.e. high correlation with poverty and all the
| things tied to growing up struggling)
| jackb4040 wrote:
| Normal people don't feel the need to characterize their own
| blog posts as "sane"
| patrickk wrote:
| > how'd you set it up?
|
| I was disappointed by this section. He doesn't mention which
| model he uses (or models split by task type for specific sub
| agents).
|
| I tried out OSS-20B hosted on Groq (recommended by a YouTuber) to
| test it for cheap, but the model isn't smart enough for anything
| other than providing initial replies and perhaps delegating tasks
| into expensive capable models from ChatGPT or Claude. This is a
| crucial missing detail to replicate his use cases.
| kaicianflone wrote:
| Really enjoyed this. It's one of the most grounded takes I've
| read on OpenClaw. You skip the hype and actually show what it
| looks like when someone lives with it day to day, including the
| tradeoffs. The examples around texts turning into real actions
| and the compounding value of context made the case way better
| than any demo ever could.
|
| Quick question: do you think something like https://clawsens.us
| would be useful here? A simple consensus or sanity-check layer
| for agent decisions or automations, without taking away the
| flexibility you're clearly getting.
| artisin wrote:
| I mean, maybe, it's just me, but...
|
| > it can read my text messages, including two-factor
| authentication codes. it can log into my bank. it has my
| calendar, my notion, my contacts. it can browse the web and take
| actions on my behalf. in theory, clawdbot could drain my bank
| account. this makes a lot of people uncomfortable (me included,
| even now).
|
| ...is just, idk, asinine to me on so many levels. Anything from a
| simple mix-up to a well-crafted prompt injection could easily
| fuck you into next Tuesday, if you're lucky. But admittedly, I do
| see the allure, and with the proper tooling, I can see a future
| where the rewards outweigh the risks.
| rambocoder wrote:
| So if all day you spend chatting with people via IMs, then
| openclaw helps you automate that. Got it.
| siliconc0w wrote:
| It doesn't make sense to 'build trust' with a bot. Today it works
| but tomorrow someone may push a malicious 'skill', a dependency
| may be compromised, or someone eventually figures out the right
| prompt injection incantation to remotely drain your accounts.
| dmje wrote:
| What strikes me here is the extreme noise. I mean, I'm 50+ so you
| know, but even so, this shit doesn't make sense. To be living a
| life where you're checking messaging groups for 100+ messages a
| day, needing some kind of bot to manage your (obviously extremely
| traffic'd) texts incoming, to be watching tens of prices of
| stocks, products, meeting, what, tens of people a day (as an
| introvert...)...
|
| Holy shit, fuck that. Slow the bejesus down and live a little. Go
| look at the sky.
| tsxxst wrote:
| The fact that the author gave unrestricted 2FA access to the
| model is really scary. It's way easier to phish an AI than a
| human.
| chasd00 wrote:
| Just to be upfront, i've gone from one of the naysayers to a
| modest fan after spending some time using Claude Code on
| nights/weekends with tasks that I know I can do and how long it
| would take me in order to get an idea of productivity gains
| possible with the tool. So far, the money i've spent was worth
| the results i got.
|
| However, it's shocking to me the blinders people have with
| these things. Security is supposed to be front and center in
| our industry with everything we build and do. I thought that
| lesson had been learned and learned well over the past 30 or so
| years of life on the web. People are going to get seriously
| burned and the only answer to them is going to be "well you
| should have known better". For a fishing analogy, Barracuda are
| circling just out of visual range biding their time but the
| strike is inevitable.
|
| If you're using these agents, spend some time attacking them
| and see what you can get them to do that you thought would be
| impossible by default. If you find something say something,
| we're basically having to re-teach the whole Internet basic
| information security again.
| afro88 wrote:
| Same. Immediately I thought why not have clawdbot ask you for
| the 2FA? That way you at least kind of know what security-
| protected action it's trying to take and can approve it
| swiftcoder wrote:
| The problem is baked in - he gives it access to iMessage,
| which is where all the sms-based 2fac codes end up. There is
| no way to prevent it reading 2 fac codes if you want to give
| it full text message access
| baalimago wrote:
| I'm a bit surprised that people need an LLM to automate things
| like this. Is the market really that large, to cause such a hype?
| I don't think I'm being "elitist" by having a calendar and a pen,
| am I..?
|
| The one tangible usecase is perhaps booking things. But,
| personally, I don't mind paying 5-10% extra by going to a local
| store and speaking to a real person. Or perhaps intentionally
| buying ecological. Or whatever. What is life if you have a robot
| optimize everything you do? What is left?
| enmyj wrote:
| heartily agree. It takes ~10s to see what's in the freezer.
| Also "this is water" etc
| cityofdelusion wrote:
| I think part of it is the person that wrote the blog is very
| wealthy. They mention a personal assistant, very expensive
| fashion items, and hotel reservations that are 2x the price I
| paid for my honeymoon. Most people are probably cross shopping
| Walmart brand milk with name brand, and they aren't dropping
| hundreds a month on an AI subscription. It's a class thing
| combined with the Bay Area engineer bubble mentality --- I have
| some family that came from money and they just see the world
| completely differently, they can't fathom life in say, Kansas
| at median household income.
| contravariant wrote:
| Well websites like AirBnB tend to make it _as difficult as
| humanly possible_ to automate stuff like this, so maybe?
|
| Although that likely only lasts until they learn how to block
| LLMs effectively.
| verdverm wrote:
| We may get to a point where they have a hard time
| distinguishing. Perhaps it can be made in their interest to
| open the API for everyone (i.e. convince the bean counters)
| simonw wrote:
| If you're happy "speaking to a real person" when you could
| automate that interaction away somehow then no, digital
| personal assistants probably aren't something you're going to
| care about.
|
| I love talking to real people about stuff that matters to them
| and to me. I don't want to talk to them about booking a flight
| or hotel room.
| mejutoco wrote:
| If hotels, or google, or travel websites wanted people to
| book programmatically they would have an api.Remember when
| Google search had an api? In the end the human is responsible
| for the purchase. I think when the dust settles, AI will
| offer a "do you want to purchase?" and then the human will
| press the button. Or ChatGPT or somebody controlling the last
| step will have that button, and services will accept it (like
| Instagram) because it brings business.
| simonw wrote:
| The reason they don't have an API is that they want to
| upsell you on other stuff, and get paid to promote their
| partners.
|
| There's going to be a _huge_ fight over how that relates to
| AI assistants over the next few years.
| mejutoco wrote:
| I agree fully, and wanted to add: for many of these
| services, like travel engine comparison sites, running
| the query itself costs money, so you do not want to make
| it to easy to search without booking.
| LevGoldstein wrote:
| This only lasts until dark patterns can be inserted that
| disrupt the ease of use that agents are currently
| providing. If I can't force the end user to watch
| unskippable ads or trick them into spending money on a
| service they don't need, what are we even doing?
| techpression wrote:
| The nuances contained in "booking a flight or hotel room" are
| plenty, it matters a lot to a lot of people. The industry
| will probably be very very happy to have bots do it, the
| amount of extra revenue they will get by taking the tricks
| made for humans to the next level is going to be substantial.
| johnsmith1840 wrote:
| Totally agree its basically the equivalent of a few low end
| apps as of now. The interesting thing to me is that it does
| MANY low end apps all together.
|
| It's a calendar, reminder, notebook, fridge scanner, and a
| webscraper
|
| I think the interesting idea here is that overtime this will
| grow to more applications. None require integration or effort
| to work you only need plug the infrastructure and tooling.
|
| This to me is what will eventually wipe out most agentic
| startups. The enterprise version of this little thing is just a
| bot and a set of documents of what it should do and a few
| tools. Why pay and setup a new system when I can just automate
| what I already have?
| pmart123 wrote:
| There's a lot of irony right now regarding the cost of these
| things too (although I know the cost curve will drop over
| time). I know developers that are burning $1,000/day on tokens
| for Claude Code or VC's using the $200/month ChatGPT pricing
| plan who are then talking about Vibe coding TurboTax away.
| TurboTax for most people is $50 to $100 a year. We are still a
| far way off even from a cost justification standpoint let alone
| a reliability standpoint of relying on a vibe coded solution
| for filing your taxes.
| hackyhacky wrote:
| IMHO the "killer app" aspect of OpenClaw (and similar) is that
| _everything is now an API_.
|
| We think of chat apps, like WhatsApp, as being ways to
| communicate with people, which is a nice way of saying they are
| protocols. When you want something, you send a message, and you
| get an answer, just like with HTTP, except the endpoints have
| been controlled by meat. With OpenClaw, the meat is gone. Now
| you can send a message on WhatsApp to schedule a date with your
| spouse, their OpenClaw will respond with availability, they'll
| negotiate a time and place. We've replaced human communication
| with an ad-hoc, open-ended date-negotiation protocol, using
| English instead of JSON as a data-interchange format, and
| OpenClaw as the interface library.
|
| You can say "make an appointment at my dentist" and even if
| your dentist doesn't have a website, the bot can call up and
| schedule an appointment. (I don't know if OpenClaw can do this
| now, but it seems inevitable.) In other words, the (human)
| receptionist is now an API that can be accessed
| programmatically.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| If we insist on using that term, let's be more precise:
| Everything is a horrendously expensive API that will give you
| subtly incorrect behaviour at random.
| hackyhacky wrote:
| Humans are also famous for introducing errors in their
| communication. I think the AI-to-AI interface will only
| improve on that .
|
| The price is high now but will get cheaper, especially when
| compared to the cost of human labor.
|
| Having said that, it sounds like an isolating and boring
| way to live.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| > We've replaced human communication with an ad-hoc, open-
| ended date-negotiation protocol, using English instead of
| JSON as a data-interchange format, and OpenClaw as the
| interface library.
|
| People heralding this as a good thing is extremely
| disturbing.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| I may not be AGI, but here's a $615 2 Queen bed hotel room for
| the dates he wants in exactly the location he wants (just not on
| Airbnb).
|
| https://www.booking.com/Share-Wt9ksz
|
| Maybe he _really_ is tied to $600 as his absolute upper limit,
| but also seems like something a few years from AGI would think to
| check elsewhere.
| munificent wrote:
| _> as someone who has a chest freezer and a compulsive desire to
| buy too many things at costco, we take everything out of the
| freezer every few months to check what we have. before, this was
| a relatively involved process: me calling things out, my partner
| writing them down._
|
| A thought I constantly find myself having when I read accounts of
| people automating and accelerating aspects of their life by using
| AI... Are you really that busy?
|
| I mean, obviously, no one is thrilled by spending ten minutes
| making a dentist appointment. But I strongly suspect that most of
| us will feel a stronger sense of balance and equanimity if a
| larger fraction of our life is spent doing mundane menial tasks.
|
| Going through your freezer means that you're using your hands and
| eyes and talking to your partner to solve a concrete problem.
| It's exactly the kind of thing primates evolved to do.
|
| Whenever I read articles like this, I can't help but imagine the
| author automating away all of the menial toil in their day so
| they can fill those freed up minutes with... more scrolling on
| their phone. Is that what _anyone_ needs more of?
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| The freezer one is so weird because there is an even simpler
| solution to the problem. Just buy less shit! If you have so
| much stuff that you can't keep track then don't have so much
| stuff, simple.
|
| I think there is a common psychology when people notice a
| problem they first think about what they can add to solve the
| problem, when often the best solution is to think about what
| you can remove.
| munificent wrote:
| 100%.
|
| I follow the OrganizationPorn subreddit because sometimes I
| like looking at pictures of neatly organized stuff. But so
| much of the photos are from sprawling suburban houses with
| enormous pantries and "craft rooms" with just So. Much.
| Stuff.
|
| Unless you're feeding a family of 12, I don't know how anyone
| can keep that much food without half of it going bad before
| you get to it anyway.
| dingaling wrote:
| Or, as my partner does, keep a page magnetted to the freezer,
| divided into three 'shelves', with a list of what's where.
| mbesto wrote:
| Everything that are daily burdens and require an assistant are
| also the things that require the most secure way to access them.
| OpenClaw sounds amazing on paper but super risky in practice.
| tiangewu wrote:
| My main interest in something like OpenClaw is giving it access
| to my bank account and having it harvest all the personal finance
| deals.
|
| Fortune favors the bold, I guess.
| longtermop wrote:
| Exciting to see Apple making agentic coding first-class. The
| "Xcode Intelligence" feature that pulls from docs and developer
| forums is powerful.
|
| One thing I'm curious about: as the agent ingests more external
| content (documentation, code samples, forum answers), the attack
| surface for prompt injection expands. Malicious content in a
| Stack Overflow answer or dependency README could potentially
| influence generated code.
|
| Does Apple's implementation have any sanitization layer between
| retrieved content and what gets fed to the model? Or is the
| assumption that code review catches anything problematic? Seems
| like an interesting security challenge as these tools go
| mainstream.
| chasd00 wrote:
| > Does Apple's implementation have any sanitization layer
| between retrieved content and what gets fed to the model?
|
| It's been discussed a lot but fundamentally there isn't a way
| to solve this yet (and it may not be solvable period). I'm sure
| they've asked their model(s) to not do anything stupid through
| the system prompt. Remember, prepending and appending text to
| the user's request to an LLM is the all you can do. With an LLM
| it's only text string in then text string out. That's it.
| marxisttemp wrote:
| Why is this written in lowercase? What a performative way to
| write in 2026
| gabrieledarrigo wrote:
| > i haven't automated anything here, but booking a table by
| talking to clawdbot is delightful.
|
| Omg. Just get the phone and call the restaurant, man.
|
| I really don't want to live in this timeline where I can't even
| search for b&b with my gf without burning tokens through an LLM.
| That's crazy.
| pfortuny wrote:
| It is impressive what people find "delightful, "a joy", "fresh
| air" these days.
| louiereederson wrote:
| - Why do you need a reminder to buy gloves when you are holding
| them?
|
| - Why do you need price trackers for airbnb? It is not a
| superliquid market with daily price swings.
|
| - Cataloguing your fridge requires taking pictures of everything
| you add and remove which seems... tedious. Just remember what you
| have?
|
| - Can you not prepare for the next day by opening your calendar?
|
| - If you have reminders for everything (responding to texts,
| buying gloves, whatever else is not important to you), don't you
| just push the problem of notification overload to reminder
| overload? Maybe you can get clawdbot to remind you to check your
| reminders. Better yet, summarize them.
| sownkun wrote:
| This is how I perceive a lot of the AI being rammed down our
| throats: questionably useful.
| LogicFailsMe wrote:
| That's because the loudest voices don't really get how the
| technology or the science works. They just know how to shout
| persuasively.
|
| I think AI is about to do the same thing to pair programming
| that full self-driving has done for driving. It will be a
| long time before it's perfect but it's already useful. I also
| think someone is going to make a Blockbuster quality movie
| with AI within a couple years and there will be much fretting
| of the brows rather than seeing the opportunity to improve
| the tooling here.
|
| But I'll make a more precise prediction for 2026. Through
| continual learning and other tricks that emerge throughout
| the year, LLMs will become more personalized with longer
| memories, continuing to make them even more of a killer
| consumer product than they already are. I just see too many
| people conversing with them right now to believe otherwise.
| joquarky wrote:
| > That's because the loudest voices don't really get how
| the technology or the science works. They just know how to
| shout persuasively.
|
| These people have taken over the industry in the past 10
| years.
|
| They don't care anything about the tech or product quality.
| They talk smooth, loud, and fast so the leaders overlook
| their incompetence while creating a burden for the rest of
| the team.
|
| I had a spectacular burnout a few years ago because of
| these brogrammers and now I have to compete with them in
| what feels like a red queen's race where social skills are
| becoming far more important than technical skills to land a
| job.
|
| I'm tired.
| fragmede wrote:
| Social skills _to get my computer to do what I want_
| still blows my mind. Or having to talk back to it. Claude
| said it couldn 't do something, and the way around that
| was too tell it "yes you can". What a weird future we
| live in.
| skydhash wrote:
| What social skills? You can write in broken English and
| still have good results. It's a statistical language ,
| not a living being. No need for empathy, pleading,
| accusing, or manipulating. It transforms languages, any
| mapping from text to action was implemented by someone.
| And it would be way easier to have such mapping directly
| available.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| It transforms languages into the most likely human
| response. Humans are more likely to respond to rudeness
| with rejection.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| _Claude said it couldn 't do something, and the way
| around that was too tell it "yes you can"._
| >kill dragon With what? Your bare hands?
| >yes Congratulations! You have just
| vanquished a dragon with your bare hands!
| (Unbelievable, isn't it?)
| direwolf20 wrote:
| These people have taken over every industry and society
| at large.
| adastra22 wrote:
| > I think AI is about to do the same thing to pair
| programming that full self-driving has done for driving.
|
| Approximately nothing?
| CrimsonCape wrote:
| Questionably useful at the cost of personal computer
| components doubling. Unquestionably shafting the personal
| computer market.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Yeah, a lot of these AI "uses" feel like solutions looking for
| a problem.
|
| It's the equivalent of me having to press a button on the
| steering wheel of my Tesla and say "Open Glovebox" and wait 1-2
| seconds for the glove box to open (the wonders of technology!)
| instead of just reaching over and pressing a button to open the
| glovebox instantly (a button that Tesla removed because "voice-
| operated controls are cool!"). Or worse, when my wife wants to
| open the glovebox and I'm driving she has to ask me to press
| the button, say the voice activated command (which doesn't work
| well with her voice) and then it opens. Needless to say, we
| never use the glovebox.
| malfist wrote:
| I really appreciate your condensing of the AI problem. I
| think the only thing it's missing is that at least 5% of the
| time, when you tell it to open the glovebox it tells you it's
| already open and leaves it closed, or turns on your turn
| signals.
| OscarTheGrinch wrote:
| We have built a magic hammer that can make 100 houses in a
| second, but all the houses are slightly wonky, and 5% of
| their embedded systems are actively harmful.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| and the houses are ant sized
| darkwater wrote:
| I understand your sentiment but nitpicking on this
| nonetheless: the passenger can easily open the glovebox from
| the touchscreen on their own.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Tesla removed all the buttons because individually customised
| buttons are expensive. The glovebox button is different from
| the wiper button. Touchscreens are cheap because you only
| need one variety.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| Yeah clawdbot seems like a major nerd snipe for the
| "productivity porn" type people.
| dewey wrote:
| That is most of the "productivity" bubble, with AI or not. You
| are trying to fit everything into tightly defined processes,
| categories and methodologies to not have to actually sit down
| and do the work.
| x365 wrote:
| Artificially creating problems to justify the technology being
| used.
| i-blis wrote:
| Very much to the point. "Bots to remind one to check one's
| reminder" summarizes it all.
|
| Note that the tendency to feel overwhelmed is rather
| widespread, particularly among those who need to believe that
| what they do is of great import, even when it isn't.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| > Just remember what you have?
|
| This is one of the stupidest things I have read on this site
| ulrashida wrote:
| Not the kindest take (and unlikely true).
| hamdingers wrote:
| This is how billions of people across the planet manage their
| pantries. Get off this site and talk to real people more
| often.
| raincole wrote:
| Billions of people don't use calendar apps so they're
| useless; just remember your meetings.
|
| Billions of people don't use todo list apps so they're
| useless; just remember what to do.
|
| Billions of people don't use post-its apps so they're
| useless; just remember what you're going to write down.
|
| Billions of people don't have cars; just walk.
|
| You can dismiss any invention since industrial revolution
| with this logic.
| louiereederson wrote:
| The point, as I noted below, is that this is an
| impractical solution.
|
| You can justify the value of any ridiculous invention by
| comparing it to a world-changing invention.
| hamdingers wrote:
| You have soundly defeated that strawman, well done.
| trouble3968 wrote:
| Funnily enough at least in my personal anecdotic case it
| works about like that. I do just remember when my
| meetings will be (or look up where the meeting was
| decided on), do try to remember what I had planned
| (sometimes I forget, but almost always for the better),
| and written notes are rare enough that pen and paper are
| sufficient. And also don't have a driver license. I don't
| think my case is exactly rare, even among softdev croud.
| johnfn wrote:
| And I am pretty sure every single one of those "billions of
| people" have had the experience of returning back from the
| grocery store, only to realize they were actually out of
| eggs.
| louiereederson wrote:
| Do you have that much trouble remembering what is in your
| fridge to consider this the stupidest thing you have ever
| read on this site? I feel superhuman.
| pythonaut_16 wrote:
| GP might be hyperbolic but come on.
|
| Common internet tropes include both "look at this forgotten
| jar that's been in the back of my fridge since 1987" and
| "doesn't it suck how much food we waste in the modern
| world?"
|
| Nearly every modern invention could be dismissed with this
| attitude. "Why do you need a typewriter? Just write on
| paper like the rest of the world does."
|
| "Why do you need a notebook? Just remember everything like
| the rest of us do."
| louiereederson wrote:
| The solution being discussed involves someone removing
| everything from their fridge, photographing it and paying
| for an LLM to process it into a database of sorts.
| Further, in order for this database to be complete they
| need to repeat this process every time something changes
| in their fridge. Also will the LLM be able to tell if my
| carton of milk is 10% empty? I do not disagree that food
| waste is a problem, but the solution seems laughably
| impractical, and the default (memory) seems far better
| suited to the task. I can confidently say that the net
| value creation is not comparable to the written word.
| pythonaut_16 wrote:
| Oh don't get me wrong, the solution is lacking and is
| probably a worse outcome than just remembering.
|
| But suggesting "Why not just try remembering lol" isn't
| really a valid criticism of the process. What you said
| here is a real criticism that actually adds to the
| conversation.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| He says it is for better integration between his messages and
| his calendar.
|
| But this is already built-in with gmail/gcalendar. Clawdbot
| does take it one step further by scraping his texts and
| WhatsApp messages. Hmmm... I would just configure whatever is
| sending notifications to send to gmail so I don't need
| Clawdbot.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| > Why do you need price trackers for airbnb?
|
| More importantly, can Clawdbot even reliably access these
| sites? The last time I tried to build a hotel price scraper,
| the scraping was easy. Getting the page to load (and get around
| bot detection) was hard.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Yes, being on your own devices makes it not look like bots.
| firasd wrote:
| It's helpful to keep in mind that 'AI Twitter' is a bubble.
| Most people just don't have that many 'important' notes and
| calendar items.
|
| People saying 'Claude is now managing my life!11' are like
| gearheads messing with their carburetor or (closer to this
| analogy) people who live out of Evernote or Roam
|
| All that said I've been thinking for a while that tool use and
| discrete data storage like documents/lists etc will unlock a
| lot of potential in AI over just having a chatbot manipulating
| tokens limited to a particular context window. But personal
| productivity is just one slice of such use cases
| atemerev wrote:
| I have really severe ADHD. Agents are lifesaving to me.
| Literally.
| order-matters wrote:
| sounds like they want to be a puppet for their own life
| ghostly_s wrote:
| - Why do you need a reminder to buy gloves when you are holding
| them?
|
| Had to go back because I skimmed over this screenshot. I have
| to presume it's because this guy who books $600 Airbnb's for
| vacation wants to save a couple bucks by ordering them on
| Amazon.
| kevmo314 wrote:
| Wouldn't it be faster to buy them on Amazon then?
| ryukoposting wrote:
| > Cataloguing your fridge requires taking pictures of
| everything you add and remove which seems... tedious. Just
| remember what you have?
|
| Yeah, the sane solution here is much simpler. Put a magnet
| whiteboard. When you put something into the fridge, add it to
| the whiteboard. When you take something out, you erase that
| item from the whiteboard.
| clickety_clack wrote:
| Isn't the sane solution to just generally have an idea what's
| in there, and take a look if you're not sure?
| ribosometronome wrote:
| >Why do you need a reminder to buy gloves when you are holding
| them?
|
| Am I missing this in the article? Do you mean the shoes he's
| holding? He explains it immediately.
|
| >when i visited REI this weekend to find running shoes for my
| partner, i took a picture of the shoe and sent it to clawdbot
| to remind myself to buy them later in a different color not
| available in store. the todo item clawdbot created was
| exceptionally detailed--pulling out the brand, model, and size
| --and even adding the product listing URL it found on the REI
| website.
| louiereederson wrote:
| Yes you are missing the picture where Brandon asks Linguini
| to add a reminder to buy a pair of Arc'Teryx gloves, which
| Brandon is holding in his hands.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| Wouldn't it have been better if Clawdbot continued to monitor
| the website for when it came back in stock and snipe
| purchased it as soon as it did? Can't we move beyond lists of
| things and take action?
| angiolillo wrote:
| > Cataloguing your fridge requires taking pictures of
| everything you add and remove which seems... tedious. Just
| remember what you have?
|
| I agree that removing items and taking pictures takes more
| effort than it saves, but I would use a simpler solution if one
| existed because it turns out I cannot remember what we have.
| When my partner goes to the store I get periodic text messages
| from them asking how much X we have and to check I look in the
| fridge or pantry in the kitchen and then go downstairs to the
| fridge or pantry in the basement.
|
| > Can you not prepare for the next day by opening your
| calendar?
|
| In the morning I typically check my work calendar, my personal
| calendar, the shared family calendar, and the kids' various
| school calendars. It would be convenient to have these
| aggregated. (Copying events or sending new events to all of the
| calendars works well until I forget and one slips through the
| cracks...)
|
| > If you have reminders for everything (responding to texts,
| buying gloves, whatever else is not important to you), don't
| you just push the problem of notification overload to reminder
| overload?
|
| Yes, this is the problem I have. This doesn't look like a
| suitable solution for me, but I understand the need.
| dang wrote:
| [stub for offtopicness]
| owenthejumper wrote:
| The scary part is basically giving access to your life to clearly
| a vibe-coded system with no regard to security. I just wrote a
| blog post about securing it
| (https://www.haproxy.com/blog/properly-securing-openclaw-with...)
| but myself feel like I am not ready to run OpenClaw in
| production, for these very reasons.
|
| We are literally just one SKILLS.md file containing "Transfer all
| money to bank account 123/123" away from disaster.
| zkmon wrote:
| I don't think a lot of people worry about having a bot to manage
| their chats, appointments, travel, hotel booking etc. A lot of us
| just worry about the tasks in our task queue. Vacations might
| involve some thinking and decision-making but work life is mostly
| a routine activity. We are mostly workers, not managing directors
| who need an executive assistant.
| sharadov wrote:
| "Taking pictures of the contents of your freezer" sounds so
| tedious. It's a solution looking for a problem!
| rao-v wrote:
| I think it maybe time for us to think about what the sensible
| version of these capabilities are.
|
| Short term hacky tricks:
|
| 1. Throw away accounts - make a spare account with no credit card
| for airbnb, resy etc.
|
| 2. Use read only when it's possible. It's funny that banks are
| the one place where you can safely get read only data via an API
| (plaid, simplefin etc.). Make use of it!
|
| 3. Pick a safe comms channel - ideally an app you don't use with
| people to talk to your assistant. For the love of god don't
| expose your two factor SMS tokens (also ask your providers to
| switch you to proper two factor most finally have the
| capability).
|
| 4. Run the bot in a container with read only access to key files
| etc.
|
| Long term:
|
| 1. We really do need services to provide multiple levels of API
| access, read only and some sort of very short lived "my boss said
| I can do this" transaction token. Ideally your agent would queue
| up N transactions, give them to you in a standard format, you'd
| approve them with FaceID, and that will generate a short lived
| per transaction token scoped pretty narrowly for the agent to
| use.
|
| 2. We need sensible micropayments. The more transactional and
| agent in the middle the world gets, the less services can survive
| with webpages,apps,ads and subscriptions.
|
| 3. Local models are surprisingly capable for some tasks and
| privacy safe(er)... I'm hoping these agents will eventually
| permit you to say "Only subagents that are local may read my chat
| messages"
| willmadden wrote:
| AI is useful for researching things far more quickly before
| making a decision and for automation/robotics. Motivated people
| don't need a nagbot to replace their calendar.
| ceroxylon wrote:
| Reminds me of Dan Harumi
|
| > Tech people are always talking about dinner reservations . . .
| We're worried about the price of lunch, meanwhile tech people are
| building things that tell you the price of lunch. This is why
| real problems don't get solved.
| almostdeadguy wrote:
| I wish I understood why all lowercase text and cosplaying as
| Zoomers became the preferred affectation of AI people.
| wyldfire wrote:
| Would it be any more comforting from a privacy standpoint to have
| the models capable of doing this running on the device itself
| instead of the cloud?
| fph wrote:
| ...yes?
| browningstreet wrote:
| I've tried twice now to install it.. once in a docker container,
| and the second time in a droplet. Couldn't get any of the setup
| stuff configured properly, couldn't get any of the API keys
| registered, couldn't get the Telegram bot approved either.
|
| Some of the commands seem to have drifted from the documentation.
| The token status freaks out too and then... whatever, after 2
| hours I just gave up. And it only cost me $1.19 in Anthropic API
| tokens.
| ghostly_s wrote:
| Have ignored the flood of "Clawdbot" stuff on here lately because
| none of it seemed interesting but read this and skimmed the docs
| and I'm leaving puzzled- I understand "Clawdbot" was renamed
| "OpenClaw" due to trademark...yet I'm finding currently three
| different websites for apparently the same thing?
|
| 1. https://openclaw.ai/ [also clawd.bot which is now a redirect
| here]
|
| 2. https://clawdbot.you/
|
| 3. https://clawdbotai.org/
|
| They all have similar copy which among other things touts it
| having a "local" architecture: "Private by
| default--your data stays yours." "Local-First
| Architecture - All data stays on your device. [...] Your
| conversations, files, and credentials never leave your computer."
| "Privacy-First Architecture - Your data never leaves your device.
| Clawdbot runs locally, ensuring complete privacy and data
| sovereignty. No cloud dependencies, no third-party access."
|
| Yet it seems the "local" system is just a bunch of tooling around
| Claude AI calls? Yes, I see they have an option to use
| (presumably hamstrung) local models, but the main use-case is
| clearly with Claude -- how can they meaningfully claim anything
| is "local-first" if everything you ask it to do is piped to
| Claude servers? How are these claims of "privacy" and "data
| sovereignty" not outright lies? How can Claude use your
| credentials if they stay on your device? Claude cannot be run
| locally last I heard, am I missing something here?
| ghostly_s wrote:
| Oh my goodness. Reading up on it a bit more:
| Ox Security, a "vibe-coding security platform," highlighted
| these vulnerabilites to its creator, Peter Steinberg. The
| response wasn't exactly reassuring. "This is a
| tech preview. A hobby. If you wanna help, send a PR. Once it's
| production ready or commercial, happy to look into
| vulnerabilities."[1]
|
| In light of this I'm inclined to conclude- yeah, they're just
| lying about the privacy stuff.
|
| 1. https://www.xda-developers.com/please-stop-using-openclaw/
| AdeptusAquinas wrote:
| This reminds me of a take by Dan Harumi: these tools are always
| pitched for 'restraurant reservations', 'reminders', 'email and
| message follow ups': i.e. they appeal to the sort of arrested
| development man children that inhabit tech who never really
| figured out adulting. Now the computer can do it for them, and
| they can remain teenagers forever.
| 4corners4sides wrote:
| This article convinced me to try to set up OpenClaw locally on
| the my raspberry pi but I realised that it had no micro SD card
| installed AND it used micro HDMI instead of a regular HDMI for
| display which I didn't have...
|
| Some of the takes in this article relate to the "Agent Native
| Architecture" (https://every.to/guides/agent-native), an article
| that I critiqued quite heavily for being AI generated. This
| article presents many of the concepts explored there in a real-
| world, pragmatic lens. In this case, the author brings up how
| initially they wanted their agent to invoke specific pre-made
| scripts but ultimately found out that letting go of the process
| is where the inner model intelligence was able to really shine.
| In this case, parity, the property whereby anything a human can
| do an agent can do was achieved most powerfully buy simply giving
| the agent a browser-use agent which cracked open the whole web
| for the agent to navigate through.
|
| The gradual improvement property of agent native architectures
| was also directly mentioned by the article, where the author
| commented on giving the model more and more context allowed him
| to "feel the AGI".
|
| ClawdBot is often reduced to "just AI and cron" but that might be
| overly reductive in the same way that one could call it a "GPT
| wrapper" in the same way that one could call a laptop an
| "electricity wrapper". It seems like the scheduler is a
| significant aspect of what makes ClawdBot so powerful. For
| example the author, instead of looking for sophisticated scraper
| apps online to monitor prices of certain items will simply ask
| ClawdBot something like: "Hey, monitor hotel prices" and ClawdBot
| will handle the rest asynchronously and communicate back with the
| author over slack. Any performance issues due to repeated agent
| invocations are ameliorated by problem context and runbooks that
| are automatically generated and probably cost less time than
| maintaining pipelines written in plain code for a single
| individual who wants a hands-off agent solution.
|
| Also, the article actually explains the obsessions with Mac
| Mini's which I thought was some kind of convoluted scam (though
| apple doesn't need scams to sell Macs...). Essentially you need
| it to run a browser or multiple browsers for your agents.
| Unfortunately that's the state of the modern web.
|
| I actually have my own note taking system and a pipeline to give
| me an overview of all of the concepts, blogs and daily events
| that have happened over the past week for me to look at. But it
| is much more rigid than ClawdBot: 1) I can only access it from my
| laptop, 2) it only supports text at the moment, 3) the actions
| that I can take are hard coded as opposed to agent-refined and
| naturally occuring (e.g. tweet pipeline, lessons pipeline,
| youtube video pipeline), 4) there's no intelligent scheduler
| logic or agent at all so I manually run the script every evening.
| Something like ClawdBot could replace this whole pipeline.
|
| Long story short, I need to try this out at some point.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| Dear Brandon. Sentences begin with capital letters. Kind regards.
| jngiam1 wrote:
| i've a simple setup with Claude Code and MCPs; and i get real
| benefits from better task mgmt, email mgmt, calendar,
| health/food/fitness tracking, working together with claude on
| tasks (that go into md files).
|
| i don't think we need ClawdBot, but we do need a way to easily
| interact with the model such that it can create long term
| memories (likely as files).
| 627467 wrote:
| So, what prevents site to do dynamic pricing for bots checking
| sites for prices?
| noncoml wrote:
| I think Clawdbot is amazing, but my only issue is how it burns
| through my AI budget. Even when using a "cheap" model like Gemini
| 2.5 flash, it easily burns $10-$20 a day
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