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A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

brandon.wang

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Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

#141

Post by mmahemoff »

blibble wrote: post #112
mmahemoff wrote: post #106

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 ac…

> 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)

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.

Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

#142

Post by ryukoposting »

dcre wrote: post #108

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.

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.

Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

#143

Post by slfnflctd »

defgeneric wrote: post #97
cj wrote: post #26

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).

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, o…

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.

Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

#144

Post by hluska »

randusername wrote: post #63
cj wrote: post #26

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).

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…

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???

Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

#146

Post by MarsIronPI »

cjauvin wrote: post #132
cj wrote: post #26

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).

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 a…

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.

Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

#147

Post by louiereederson »

cj wrote: post #26

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).

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.

Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

#148

Post by RC_ITR »

dcre wrote: post #108

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.

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.

Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

#149

Post by verdverm »

webdood90 wrote: post #140
1dom wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

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.

It's hard to find sentence breaks, it is actually about readability and accessibility

Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

#150

Post by MarsIronPI »

sdwr wrote: post #34
cj wrote: post #26

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).

Informal, casual, friendly

In a blog post it makes the author sound foreign at best and uneducated at worst, with sloppy being halfway in between.
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