10,071 karma · joined August 28, 2014
Like, no one bats an eye at all the people paying $100/mo for Hulu + Live TV, or paying $350/mo for virtual pixels in candy crush / pokemon go / whatever, and I'm having at least that much fun in playing with openclaw.
Over 5 years, that works out to ~$45k vs ~$10k, and during that duration, it's possible better open models will come available making the GPU better, but it's far more likely that the VC-fueled companies advance quicker (since that's been the trend so far).
In other words, the local economics do not work out well at a personal scale at all unless you're _really_ maxing out the GPU at close to 50% literally 24/7, and you're okay accepting worse results.
As long as proprietary models advance as quickly as they are, I think it makes no sense to try and run em locally. You could buy an H100, and suddenly a new model that's too large to run on it could be the state of the art, and suddenly the resale value plummets and it's useless compared to using this new model via APIs or via buying a new $90k GPU with twice the memory or whatever.
I have it hooked up to my smart home stuff, like my speaker and smart lights and TV, and I've given it various skills to talk to those things.
I can message it "Play my X playlist" or "Give me the gorillaz song I was listening to yesterday"
I can also message it "Download Titanic to my jellyfin server and queue it up", and it'll go straight to the pirate bay.
It having a browser and the ability to run cli tools, and also understand English well enough to know that "Give me some Beatles" means to use its audio skill, means it's a vastly better alexa
It only costs me like $180 a month in API credits (now that they banned using the max plan), so seems okay still.
It shows me way fewer ads than all the popular fitness apps and loads way quicker since it doesn't have to load like 10MB of ads for me to enter one number, so it seems like a good improvement.
I do not think it's an improvement over an excel sheet, but as the average openclaw user, I would rather pay anthropic $10/day in API credits than create a google sheets document.
A free press is important to democracy, so the government should move some tax money to journalists, and then this link could instead be to a taxpayer funded site (like NPR) instead of to a for-profit ad-powered spam-site run by billionaires who pay journalists as little as possible while pocketing as much as they can.
Unfortunately, PBS and NPR are so severely under-funded that they need to run donation drives and can't do journalism of this level.
Like, that feels like it's also a huge amount of token churn ("sure, I can search every xls file on your machine to find the 2023 invoice from that company"), and very early in its adaption curve.
Most people are still using AI as a webpage chatbot to ask questions to and copy+paste between, but running an "openclaw" like assistant, which can access your files, email, and opens you up to wild security attacks, that seems like a really big killer app.
Cowork to me also seems like it'll take longer to reach the broader market since the models are less good at "use the mouse and keyboard to do this repetitive task" than "write code", but I see it as having killer-app potential with lots of token churn.
And every few weeks in the cooking subreddit we get a new person talking about a new soup they made. Just think if we put all 1000 of those cooks in one kitchen with one pot, we'd end up with the best soup in the world.
Anyway, we already have "the one" project everyone can coalesce on, we have CephFS. If all the redditors actually hopped into one project, it would end up as an even more complex difficult to manage mess I believe.
The reality is right now we have a poorly implemented advertisement service that shows malware, and if you ignore the ads and look at the search results based on relevance, they're clearly better.
The claim "A good ad service would be good" is a truism, but that's not the reality we live in.
So my grandmother searching "Powerpoint" and getting malware instead of the microsoft app is good actually?
Let me compare some search terms and see if ads are giving me "better" results:
* ublock - surfshark vpn
* wordle - spammy adware word game
* slack - spammy adware game
* microsoft word - spammy spyware office app (not the one made by MS)
* every bank I could think of - different financial app
Like, this isn't a good user experience. The ads aren't relevant, even when you type in a hyper-popular app's name exactly, something like 80% of the time a competitor has sniped the top spot.
For the "microsoft word" search, the spam app had an identical logo to word, and I have no doubt many people have been fooled. If you look at the reviews, some of the 1 star reviews are detailed complaints, and all the 5 star reviews are inhuman sounding "This helped me do my job" and "great app" reviews.
> I don’t think different solutions exist in the App Store
Sorting roughly by popularity and reviews, and also doing a little more to combat fake reviews, seems like it would be better. It at least would mean that if I searched "bank name" my bank's app would come up, since for every bank I tried the first non-ad result was in fact the bank in question.
It would save grandmothers around the world who just click on the first result.
If I search for my bank, I get another bank. If I search for "Wordle", I get a bunch of ad-supported spamware (both the ad and non-ad results) before the real NYT Games app.
The app store has ads in search results. This is the primary way that my technologically inept relatives end up with the wrong app installed btw, is by searching and clicking the first result, and getting complete trash adware.
Apple should be ashamed of selling out their users.
However, I have even less patience for companies forcing paid-for third-party ads down my throat on a paid product. Slack at least doesn't sell my eyeballs. Facebook, Twitter, Google's ads are worse to me than new feature dialogues.
Which brings me to Apple. I pay for a $1k+ device, and yet the app store's first result is always a sponsored bit of spam, adware, or sometimes even malware (like the fake ledger wallet on iOS, that was a sponsored result for a crypto stealer). On my other devices, I can at least choose to not use ad-ridden BS (like on android you can use F-Droid and AuroraStore, on Linux my package manager has no ads), but on iOS it's harder to avoid.
Apple hasn't sunk to Google levels in terms of ads, but they've crossed a line.
What they changed is that if you have OpenClaw run 'claude -p' for you, that gets your account banned or charged API rates, and if they think your usage of 'claude -p' is maybe OpenClaw, even if it's not, you get charged API rates or banned.
It seems so silly to me. They built a feature with one billing rate, and the feature is a bash command. If you have a bad program run the bash command, you get billed at a different rate, if you have a good script you wrote yourself run it, you're fine, but they have literally no legitimate way to tell the difference since either way it's just a command being run.
The justification going around is that OpenClaw usage is so heavy that it impacts the service for other people, but like OpenClaw was just using the "claude code max" plan, so if they can't handle the usage the plan promises, they should be changing the plan.
If they had instead said "Your claude code max plan, which has XX quota, will get charged API rates if you consistently use 50% of your quota. The quota is actually a lie, it's just the amount you can burst up to once or twice a week, but definitely not every day" and just banned everyone that used claude code a lot, I wouldn't be complaining as much, that'd be much more consistent.
If nix fails to pull things from its binary cache, it will download the "sources" of the derivations, which are hosted in various places and so it's even more likely an overly broad block impacts one of them.
This football block very well could also cover GitHub, cdn.kernel.org, and so on, so nix building things could fail just as easily.
The solution isn't to use something else which can download source code from 100s of sites across the internet to compile as a fallback, it's to not use internet which sporadically blocks sites hosting developer assets.
The solution is not technical, it's political.
Bread and water is prisoner food, but avocado toast and cream-cheese bagels at the corner bodega are considered mid-to-upper-class fare. Pasta (also wheat) can range from kraft mac-and-cheese (poor-coded) to hand-made pasta with pesto sauce.
Rice and tea (ochazuke) is historically the "bread and water" equivalent in Japan, but people of every socioeconomic class still eat rice and miso soup for breakfast, eat rice balls (onigiri) regularly, and generally eat a diet with a lot of rice.
Even though rice is the staple food of Japan, I'd actually argue that instant ramen is much more poor-coded these days than even ochazuke.
I wouldn't be surprised if the middle class and lower class eat more-or-less identical quantities of rice.
Whether that's a big deal or not depends on the person, their finances, how much rice the family eats, etc etc.
And then they have iMessage, aka blue bubbles, which are kinda like Signal or Whatsapp or Telegram. Everyone in Europe uses whatsapp, and a lot of people in the US use iMessage. If you don't use whatsapp in europe, you'll have a rough time communicating with some social groups, and the same thing for iMessage in the US.
However, unlike every other messenger app I can think of, iMessage isn't cross platform.
Also unlike every other messenger I can think of, it comes installed by default and for some reason uses the same app as the SMS app, and also claims encryption but randomly switches to SMS and breaks encryption making it obviously the least secure of all the apps (and also backs up your keys to iCloud in a way apple can access them by default, neither here nor there).
Blue bubbles are when iMessage is acting as the iMessage app, and has encryption and can use features like sending high resolution photos, location, invites, and a bunch of other apple-specific features.
Green bubbles are when the iMessage app has converted itself into the SMS and RCS app, and has a reduced feature set, like being unable to remove people from group chats.
It's frankly a quite confusing decision to have two quite different apps built into the same app and indicate which feature-set is active based on the color of a UI element. I think everyone would prefer if apple split it into the 'Messages' app (SMS + RCS) and an optional 'iMessage' app which doesn't come installed by default, but you can download on the app store from Apple. I'm frankly surprised the EU hasn't forced apple to show a prompt for "default messenger app" on startup with the options being "Whatsapp", "iMessage", etc etc, like they do for default browser.
Microsoft was found guilty, so clearly the bar is not what you're trying to claim.
Like, for phones, I want a phone which runs Linux, has NFC support, and also has iMessage so my friend who only communicates with blue-bubbles and will never message a green-bubble will still talk to me. I also want it to have regulatory approval in the country I live in so I can legally use it to make calls.
Because apple has closed the iMessage ecosystem such that a linux phone can't use it, such a device is impossible. I cannot vote for it.
As such, I will complain about every phone I own for the foreseeable future.
Because of that, you need an apple device around to be able to deal with iMessage users.
Apple has a monopoly over the "M-chip" personal computer market. They have a monopoly over the iOS market with the app store. They have a monopoly over the driver market on macOS.
Like, Microsoft was found guilty of exploiting its monopoly for installing IE by default while still allowing other browser engines. On iOS, apple bundles safari by default and doesn't allow other browser engines.
If we apply the same standard that found MS a monopoly in the past, then Apple is obviously a monopoly, so at the very least I think it's fair to say that reasonable people can disagree about whether Apple is a monopoly or not.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
I do not think there is any money for something that trivial.
Even the irrationally exuberant VCs wouldn't put money in that.
The GPU also takes around $500-$1000 in electricity, and even then you won't be able to run a model of as good quality as anthropic.
It's also hard to justify since who knows how quickly it will be outdated, like maybe soon you'll need a blackwell chip (like a $100k PC, check out the NVIDIA DGX Station) to run a decent model.
... It'll take a lot more than a year to pay back a model capable of running openclaw with any sort of reasonable performance.
Or can you report that you've had good luck with a Strix Halo or local GPU for less than $40k up-front costs?
I can do that now with claude code and a "while true" bash loop.
Or with the built-in "/schedule" in claude code to set an agent to run say once every few minutes.
Read the section titled 'The Gamble' if you want that opinion, but the tl;dr is that our 2025 strike against Iran ceded our ability to claim dis-involvement in Israeli strikes, and so Israel was able to draw us into this war whether we wanted to or not.
Windows isn't the alternative if you're on hacker news, OpenBSD and linux are the alternatives.
The following comment in the blog post
//go:generate stringer -type=Pill
I would find it very reasonable to commit that with 'Co-Authored-By: stringer v0.1.0' or such.
Or 'sed s/a/b/g' and 'Co-Authored-By: sed'
If you type 'cargo init', you will get 'edition = "2024"', but no 'rust-version'.
The situation is different because rust does not require a 'rust-version' in Cargo.toml, and in practice most crates do not have one, while in go it is required you specify a minimum version, there's no automation to set it to the true minimum, and most projects update it incorrectly in practice (because the go cli updates it incorrectly for you).
If you want to frame it as a life-saving feature, it should be on by default and impossible to turn off, or at the very least should be a required prompt during initial phone setup.
I'm asking for something that will make more people more secure, since I personally know plenty of people who want iMessage security, but for the web to still be functional (i.e. JIT to work).
> If they have the option to turn off the life saving measure they will
Then they'll just turn off all of lockdown mode, like they do now, to see a good friend's photo album. Great.
... I feel like we're talking past each other, and frankly with your tone of voice you're clearly not going to listen to anything anyone says on this, so there's not really any point in having this discussion at all.
Apple restricts their iDevice computers to only run iOS, with no option to install linux.
Microsoft _could_ require that lenovo or dell lock down secureboot such that linux cannot be installed, but they don't (not to mention microsoft surface pros can run linux), so apple is clearly doing more to restrict my freedom with their devices than microsoft is with theirs.