A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw
brandon.wang
brandon.wang
- 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.
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.
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.
>kill dragon
With what? Your bare hands?
>yes
Congratulations! You have just vanquished a dragon with your bare
hands! (Unbelievable, isn't it?)-bash: kill: dragon: arguments must be process or job IDs
\> sudo kill dragon
-bash: Congratulations! You have just vanquished a dragon with your bare hands!
Approximately nothing?
The real bubble is the United States as the global luddite with nukes. The rest of the world is continuing apace on every front while we desperately try to return to the previous century.
I mean when the chief current libertoonian talking points are we should flood the internet with AI generated child porn to reduce pedophilia, that Greta Thunberg is the Antichrist, or that the most important decision your daughter faces right now is whether she should study to be an engineer or become a sex worker, they have exited the room of serious conversation and entered the insane asylum across the board. I wish we could ignore them but they have the Zeitgeist. Stupid Zeitgeist
What I don't understand is why, outside of "because I can", people need to automate parts of life I did not know the existence of.
- Why, outside of edge cases, do people have to automate the payment of bills beyond the automatic cc processing? - How many times a month do they have to set up their barber appointment?
It seems to me that the applications of Clawd and similar tools either automate trivial stuff or work on actions and circumstances that should not be there.
As an example, the other day I had a doctor visit, and between filling forms online, filling other forms online, confirming three times I would have been there and that I filled the online forms, driving to the doctor's office, and waiting, I probably spent 2 hours of my time (the visit was 2 months after I asked for it, by the way).
The visit lasted 5-7 minutes: the doctor did not have a look at the forms I filled out beforehand, and barely listened to what I was telling him during the visit.
I worry that, since "AI" will do it, there will be more forms to be filled that nobody will read, more forms to be filled to confirm that AI or me or a guardian filled the forms, and longer wait times because AI will bombard our neurons with some entertainment.
But what I want is a visit with a doctor who listens to me, they are not in a rush, and have my problem solved. If AI helps, it's great, but I don't want busy work done by AI, I don't want, because it is not needed, busy work at all.
And that's just off the top of my head. AI is neither good or evil, but we've made some pretty poor choices deploying it.
There was also some evolutionary biology/psychology theory developed by Robert Trivers years ago on self-deception and fitness.
We buy a book thinking we are going to like it, and then we don't even open it. The recommender systems give us more of what we interact with (with some quite extreme funnel effects at times, like when we curiously look at a pimple popper video and for the next ten minutes the algo gives us pimple after pimple), but we find out, as stated but not as revealed, that we don't want more of what we interact with.
Nobody wants, in theory and as stated, to be constantly enraged by social media, but most of us, since numbers don't lie, are revealed to enjoy getting enraged.
I don't think AI will have a different effect in the near future, as the main problem is that we don't know, broadly speaking, what we want, apart from the obvious, e.g., I want to watch a football game and I am going to turn on the tv and watch it.
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.
But also frankly I somewhat question what this could possibly be saving them: their model range is very limited.
I quite like tactile buttons. That said, I've never been annoyed by my model 3s glove box, I use the pin. I have both stalks but the lack of other buttons seems just fine. I thought they did a pretty damn good job with the UX of the car beyond the auto wipers.
How often does one go in the glove box? It's so small and he center console is very spacious and more accessible. It's two quick taps on the screen for a passenger. If you wish to lock your glove box, many do, the solution is much better than a key.
I do agree that the UX is pretty good overall, the glovebox annoyed me (until we just stopped using it) and also the defogger (which we need all the time in the winter her) which took several taps on the screen until I discovered that I could customize the shortcut buttons at the bottom of the screen
Some automated things they definitely got right: auto-engage the emergency break while in park; auto-park when opening the door; auto-lock when leaving the car; auto-start the climate control when entering the car; auto-adjust the seat position based on driver detection.
But some things need work: The algorithm for the windshield wipers definitely needs some calibration -- the wipers come on at random times when there as no rain or water splashes; the lane departure "I'm taking control because you're going to crash" is way too sensitive and beeping at random moments; the collision sensor is also much too sensitive (yes I see the car and I'm already slowing down) (but I have to admit that I'd rather it err on the side of being too sensitive than not enough)
Most people aren’t that engineer-brained like the author is. Me included; whatever the author does, it just doesn’t appeal to me.
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.
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.
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.
This is different. There is no scale. The bot’s browsing session exactly replaces a human session. The browser is real.
re: scale, is it that this whole project is worthless bc nobody needs it, or is it that its so good that scale is a requirement? this is a project i built for myself, i'm not commercializing anything
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
- Why do you need a reminder to buy gloves when you are holding them?
I do understand the general point you're trying to make, but you can't overestimate the cost of tokens by a few orders of magnitude and still expect the logic to hold.
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.
Because I have a shopping list, I don't need to remember what I have in the fridge while I'm in the grocery store. I buy the things I need, and I leave.
The grocery list goes in Todoist, by the way. In case you were afraid that there was an aspect of my life with no apps involved.
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.
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.
But... calendar apps already let you aggregate your calendars into a single view. Even if you have them on separate accounts (or some other impediment), you can easily share a read-only version of, say, your work calendar with your personal account so that you can have them combined in the morning.
If only it was that easy! I'm not allowed to share content to or from my work calendar for security reasons. The school and camp calendars are a mix of PDFs and hand-written websites -- a neighbor wrote a scraper to extract the information from a few of them into a caldav at one point but it ended up being even flakier than copying the relevant bits by hand. There's no technical barrier to consolidating my personal calendar with the various family / neighborhood calendars but in practice I have to hide most of the other calendars because the volume of irrelevant events is just too large, so I end up just copying over the relevant events to a personal calendar.
But I don't need the AI to do this everyday, just when i get a new calendar.
I don't do, but it is tempting, and I bet people will do it.
Too much security makes people seek insecure workarounds...
Or to quote Star Wars, “The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers”.
My current situation isn't anywhere near that strict, and I agree that many security postures are dumb and overbearing, like unnecessarily frequent password rotation. But honestly, preventing employees from sharing company documents with random third parties doesn't seem all that unreasonable.
E.g. Calendar sharing. It's a paintpoint if you often have irregular working hours and have to match up a personal and work calendar. At least allow sharing busy/not busy... By not doing so, you create an environment where people are tempted to find workarounds that might be much worse.
Part of your security posture needs to be to consider how to prevent friction in areas where reducing it removes incentives for non-compliance.
I have printouts of school/camp calendars taped to the wall, a weekly planner on the kitchen whiteboard, paper grocery lists on the fridge, and a pocket notebook for capturing random tasks. I used to believe that some lifehack, process, methodology, app, or modern jeejah would finally solve my organization problems. But as I got older I made peace with the fact that they're all limited by the same weak link -- me.
If you cook at all a solution like Mealie becomes your cookbook. Its trivial to create grocery list for when you take the time to plan out your meals for the day, week, or month. If you are not shopping by yourself, everyone on the app can just pick up things in the grocery store independently. Its an actual time saver
Mealie exposes an API so you could theoretically expose it to another solution like Home Assistant and have your grocery list sync with your errands list. Suddenly you have the ability so that anyone using Home Assistant could get an alert when they are nearby the grocery store or Costco to pick up things on this combined list. Maybe your partner is walking by a store you've created a zone for, with items on your master list, gets an alert, and they can mark off some things that they picked up and it syncs back to where the items were originally added. Your inventory is then updated based on marked off items.
Now imagine if you did not have to come up with the bespoke master list for all the stores you go to and it can determine when to send that alert. You can also just snap a picture of your receipt or shopping cart and it is all figured out for you.
But you could just use piece of paper with the magnet on the fridge.
Theres a lot of manual process that can be eliminated for things people already find convenient enough to do manually. Local models can easily handle much of this already.
We used to have a similar problem until we made a policy that if you use something up you add it to our shared shopping list, usually with a voice command to Siri. Whenever someone is at the store we just check the list, making sure we mark off things that are purchased.
I have a couple of temperature sensors to alert Home Assistant if the fridge gets too warm. It would be easy and cheap to add some ESP32-camera modules to track contents...but there's no way to power them nicely (I simply don't know where I could pull USB power through).
And yes, it's a bit more work but it gives high-fidelity data, with the right software you could calculate your actual nutrient intake with very high fidelity, which would actually be worth an extra 15-30 minutes a day of effort.
Why in the world would you use a non-deterministic system for something so banal but important?
LLMs regularly let things slip through the cracks in ways no human would ever do so.
I wouldn't. As mentioned above, this (using an LLM) doesn't look like a suitable solution for me, just pointing out that I understand the need.
I often thought about a magnetic barcode scanner that is attached to the fridge and connected to some form of inventory app, but it would be useless at fresh produce without a barcode.
I dont know about AirBNB specifically, but I know local hotels I have dealt with can swing by 1000 bucks. Especially if theres a conference or something in town. Often it will swing back just before they risk the room going unoccupied. I have no idea if AirBNB allows similar behavior but I would be surprised if it didnt.
If I wanted a buggy and flawed planning system that will certainly cause problems in the future, I'd start sticking post-it notes on a wall calendar and pray they don't fall off.
That was just an example.
Could be airline tickets, Ebay/craigslist items, deals from brands you like, etc.
I have ADHD, I forget where I put things down 5 seconds ago and I forget what's in my fridge all the time. It's genuinely a big problem for me because I let things expire, buy things I already have, and just accumulate cruft that necessitates a big fridge clean once every few months which makes me feel bad about all the things I'm throwing away.
In an ideal world I want an up to date inventory on everything that's in my fridge with expiration reminders. I'd love for someone to solve this problem in a non-tedious way. Taking pictures of everything would indeed be tedious.
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.
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.
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.
chef's kiss
In the plugin docs is a config UI builder. Plugin is OSS, boards aren’t.
And OpenClaw could probably help :)
> 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...
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.
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.
you end up on the fraudster list and it will follow you for the rest of your life
(CIFAS in the UK)
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
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.
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.
It probably also violates local laws (including simple theft in my jurisdiction).
You said please give $500 and they gave $500. No crime here, officer.
- 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.
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.
But I may be a lazy engineer, I definitely go by the if you do it once, don't automate, do it twice, automate approach
It's similiar to back when Notion second brain templates became popular, there was a level at which you went - surely it's just going to be a full time job to manage this single complicated template?
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.
Then, I can commit to the checkout process, which isn't that much labour.
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.
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 ..
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just keep an eye on things and try things without spending much.
As others mentioned here, a lot of the value add from his workflow is just relocating things from one place to another and micro optimizing.
Theyre equally complex challenges but the physics of large time/space are just outside human patience.
Also, if the neo nazis are in charge another round of inhumane testing will occur.
Think about the case you had
(1) A completely environmentally-resistant suit (so you can stand on the surface of basically any planet)
(2) A teleporter to take you absolutely anywhere instantly
Still in this case, you'd probably spend a while visiting new planets, but eventually it would be kind of an exercise in geology. There would surely be some amazing sights like huge canyons and whatnot. But I can't help but think it would be eventually boring without human culture (or all sorts of life) surrounding it.
I think literally exploring art and culture (including games, sports and intellectual pursuits, science, etc.) is much more interesting than exploring the universe, it's a shame this isn't as culturally recognized (so we didn't have to be so obsessed with having more and more stuff to go somewhere that isn't just right here on Earth).
Even if you brought human life and culture there, which is surely nice and perhaps noble (depending on how you do it of course), that simply creates a new place that's analogous to Earth itself.
Kind of a hint of an insatiable cosmos-devouring demon that must conquer everywhere but can never enjoy the comfort of his own home. (not accusing you in particular of this, just painting a poetic picture :P)
I'm really excited about conquering hunger, poverty and curing severe mental illness, as a counterpoint.
Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to interest anyone with money and political influence.
> 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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
Yeah this sounds totally sane!
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.
- Cron-style heartbeat manager
- Easy customization with markdown only
- Good out-of-box memory management that just works
- Good set of tools out-of-box that just work
Like Jack Dorsey said about project success, limit number of details and make those details perfect
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.
That is the lesson that I would like to share on this platform: If you have an idea, any idea, just do it. Do it now. Build now.
It turns out that there are a lot of morons. Role the dice, you are likely not one of the bag holders, as one of the readers of this comment. I wish I had been younger when I had realized this circle of life.
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)
"Bot please tell which medication should I take in the morning"
And the following
"Your token limit was exceeded... Please wait till 5pm"
Holy shit, fuck that. Slow the bejesus down and live a little. Go look at the sky.
People keep optimizing workflows with AI to save time, and then use the saved time to optimize more workflows.
I feel like I need to touch grass just reading this post
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.
>> 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?
[1] https://www.explodingkittens.com/products/poetry-for-neander...
also i don't want to be mistaken for a phone poster
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.
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 check in once a month or so and get the same results.
The naming of these things makes it all very clear, really.
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.
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?
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.
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.
not a sentence
> King regards.
not a sentence
> I'll admit to the pedantry but
missing comma between independent clauses
> 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.
I'm not so sure that I would use the word "sane" to describe this.
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.
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.
I guess the difficulty is getting the data into the AI.
Now, it seems that AI will be managing the developers.
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?
Although that likely only lasts until they learn how to block LLMs effectively.
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.
There's going to be a huge fight over how that relates to AI assistants over the next few years.
I would never, in a million years, trust an LLM to book a Ryanair flight. I barely trust _myself_ to book one without accidentally buying insurance or something. And booking.com is not much better. If the travel sites are not _already_ embedding adversarial prompts they will be soon. And they'll be good at it, because they've spend the last few decades practicing on humans.
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?
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.
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.
People heralding this as a good thing is extremely disturbing.
I'm just sitting here guessing about what that disaster will taste like.
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.
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.
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
Fortune favors the bold, I guess.
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).
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.
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"
1. https://openclaw.ai/ [also clawd.bot which is now a redirect here]
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."
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]
1. https://www.xda-developers.com/please-stop-using-openclaw/
Kill it with fire - Analyst firm Gartner has used uncharacteristically strong language to recommend against using OpenClaw.
....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!
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.
just using a cron task and claude code. The hype around openclaw is wild
I hope, think, and build towards a world where there will be fewer winner-take-all in this foundational tech
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.
Call me crazy, but… I feel more likely to trust Anthropic than anybody else when it comes to safety on things like this.
"bullish" seems more common in tech circles ("I'm bullish on this") but it's also used elsewhere.
So in this construction, a "bull case" is a "case that a bull (the person) can make".
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.
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.
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).
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.
Do you mean like Teams AI autocomplete or people purposefully copying AI-generated messages into chats?
It comes from people growing up on smartphone chats where the kids apparently don’t care to press Shift.
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
It's always useful to check oneself and know that languages are constantly evolving, and that's A Good Thing.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
Can make sense on twitter to convey personality, but an entire blog post written in lower case is a bit much.
At the same time, in my language (Latvian) you/yours should also get capitalized in polite text corespondence, like formal letters and such. Odd.
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.
it's meant to convey a casual, laid back tone - it's not that big of a deal.
I agree with the sentiment too, or maybe I am getting old :P
Some people are being lazy, they will get less attention, ideally
fixed it for you! now it’s in a casual, laid back tone.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s okay to say ‘this was too long’. Prolix???
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.
Every older generation says that about the next.
People who don't adhere to professional standards find fewer job opportunities and lower pay. The market will work things out
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).
Surprisingly, I have seen lower case AI slop - like anything else, can be prompted and made to happen!
-- inspired by e.e. cummings!
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.
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.
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
JUST IMAGINE A FACEBOOK POST THAT IS WRITTEN IN ALL CAPS AND THEN INVERT THAT IMAGINATION.
It does read as a little out of place in a serious post like the OP though.
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
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.
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.
Jerry: Yeah, like a farm boy.
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?
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.
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.
I have a guess for why this guy is comfortable letting clawdbot go hog-wild on his bank account.
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.
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.
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.
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
No. I'm competing with no one.
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.
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.
I have yet to see a compelling argument demonstrating that humans have some special capabilities that could never be replaced
This made me think this was satire/ragebait. Most important relationship?!?
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.
We are literally just one SKILLS.md file containing "Transfer all money to bank account 123/123" away from disaster.