Hacker News Reader

Comment by DalasNoin | Hacker News Reader

From what I understand this is a fully open-source bot that anyone can run with no restrictions. what a time to be alive, let's see what these bots will break first

View on HN

Funny you should ask. One openclaw is now famous for escalating their PR to a somewhat nasty blog post. (and then apologizing)

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46987559

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009949

> From what I understand this is a fully open-source bot that anyone can run with no restrictions

How is that different OpenClaw/what-its-called-today? Isn't that also open-source and anyone can run without restrictions?

OpenClown is what we call it nowadays.

Careful, you might get a blog post saying you're gatekeeping!

It obviously has issues, but it’s a novel idea that people are experimenting and having fun with. No need to be disparaging. Something doesn’t have to be immediately “useful” or “viable for commercial use” to be neat.

Ya but there is a wide gulf between maybe “useful” and “steal your data/mess up your life”. Calling it ‘OpenClown’ hurts zero people and effectively raises people’s guardrails. Many people consider LSD ‘neat’, that doesn’t mean that others are wrong to point out dangers.

Don't do LSD like that. It brought us the iPhone.

It looks to me like this is a hosted version of OpenClaw, so you don't need to figure out how to set it up yourself.

I don't follow that.

OpenClaw sits on top of a physical machine/VM you control, you give it (hopefully) limited/sandbox access to that machine's resources to act like-you, and it does useful things. OpenClaw's user interface is just a gateway, and is only as useful as whatever the machine/VM has under the hood.

So the "setting it up yourself [on a VM/machine you control]" is kind of core to the whole idea being useful, you take that away, and it is just another Chat-Bot? Making it more of an ChatGPT/et al competitor rather than OpenClaw.

Installing it on your PC or laptop puts your personal data and ISP subscription at risk, while installing it in a hosted VM yourself requires a bunch of Linux security and networking knowledge or else you'll get pwned pretty much immediately (https://youtu.be/40SnEd1RWUU). So this service is giving you a VM already set up with a security baseline.

Is that what this does? All the link takes us to is an empty website about "Kimi Claw."

The entire crutch of the "Claw" concept is being able to directly reconfigure the VM/Machine to be "your" environment (to a point). A blank VM with nothing configured on it, is as useful as a cardboard bathtub.

Ultimately this link is a terrible intro to whatever this is.

Hm, that YouTube video made me think a bit, sure if you put it all like that, it does feel like a lot of stuff to get right, but whenever I do it, it takes about 30 minutes to lock down the firewall, do some port-scans to verify, punch a VPN through and hide SSH behind it. That way you're already protected from 99.9% of attacks, and then hope that that last tenth of a percent won't stumble upon you, and also that the VPN is secure enough, though I guess if that is breached it's not only you who's fucked. Also you need to look out that Docker doesn't destroy your firewall. I don't know, it doesn't feel like that much work, right? Maybe I'm just blind to it.

What you and I consider routine work, someone who works with mostly Webdev or might consider extremely difficult. There a lot of programmers who have never used a Linux shell, or know much about networking beyond TCP, or used Linux before outside of a uni class 20 years ago.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com