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Comment by xnx | Hacker News Reader

The main function of OpenClaw was for people to signal how advanced and cutting edge and thought-leader-y they were. All those Mac minis are sitting idle now.

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I bought a Mac mini m4 before openclaw to use as a music production machine, when it turned out not to work out I tried setting up openclaw on it after hearing all the noise, but that turned out not to work out either.

I’ve found a much better use for it now. I use it as a Tailscale + ssh + tmux + Claude code machine, which gives me an always on Claude code environment with persistent sessions. I ssh from my phone using termius and from my laptop through ssh, and I can even access my projects through Tailscale with hot reloading for the most part, no deploy needed. It’s really good and my mini isn’t idle at all.

That sounds like a complete waste tbh lol. Your mac mini m4 is now doing something any computer with 16GB of RAM can do

You're not wrong, but at least it's not idle. And I can use it for something else if the need arises.

Claude has Dispatch now, which should replace the tmux + CLI for you

That's really not remotely the same thing

Yea I have to try it and see. When Claude released Remote Control I hoped on right away and it was crap, it kept disconnecting. Tailscale + SSH was much better.

I just run claude code on my phone, in termux

That's a fair assessment if you look at LinkedIn posts.

Personally though, I am finding it incredibly useful and I use it daily to assist with operations, strategy, sales.

I’d be curious to hear more about how you use it for those 3 categories. Care to share?

Operations: mostly tasks and reminders, I often think of something while on the road and send a voice message (like I would to a real PA). I use Kokoro-based TTS for local text-to-speech. Anything from "remind me to discuss X with so-and-so tomorrow" to "I have a multiple PoC projects w/ large entities starting next week - think about how I can best handle that" to "brainstorm how can I maximize upfront revenue with them", etc

Sales: using Google/gemini web search API and it's best run off-peak due to rate limits 503 Service Unavailable (everyone is overbooked when it comes to AI) to see what's happening in the space, any new developments involving companies I care about - and send me a daily digest with an overview and conversation topics.

#1 is just Siri/Google Assistant with extra steps (and expense).

#2 could be a scheduled task (cron job or something higher level) that calls a plain old AI provider API. IIRC most providers can even do those natively now.

Your comment reminds me of the FTP/Dropbox one.

I mentioned the same thing and it's getting downvoted lol

That would be valid if setting up a scheduled AI task actually took any technical knowledge, but it doesn’t. ChatGPT lets you schedule tasks natively in the UI, and I assume others do as well.

(And OpenClaw is hardly nontechnical!)

#2 also provides an opinion on why a certain development is significant and how it relates so something else I am working on for that client.

The process is definitely more pleasant to me than setting up cron jobs and scripting things. I have a business to run.

#2: Gemini also has scheduled actions. You can just ask it to give you daily digests about developments in some area, or you could even be in the middle of chatting about some current events, and tell it to notify you when there is new data, etc.

No recurring expense, just the hardware upfront cost. My next step is run the models locally as well. I used to work at FAANG (incl. compliance) and I would never use a cloud-based assistant of any kind.

> No recurring expense, just the hardware upfront cost. My next step is run the models locally as well.

So, at the moment, yes recurring expense?

Helpful info, thank you for sharing this.

On strategy do you ever worry that we trend towards the same patterns? This being relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDL3Ch7Nz8c&t=4m7s

Some truth to that. I hear it thrown around the office and everyone feels obligated to out agent each other (without actually proving a great use case)

For myself I don't need autonomous agents. I need a smaller version of Claude Code instead (the mcp client not the coding agent) that can run on local models that are under 24B params. I still need to try pi dev.

To be fair, my mac mini was sitting idle well before Openclaw arrived on the scene.

This is a good point, I should scout second hand markets for Mac Minis now.

Running neofetch equiv

Yeah, people really took it to the extreme and made a cult out of it for no reason. Mass delusion at its finest.

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