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A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

brandon.wang

261–270 of 504 posts

Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if by boomers you mean a community with above average expectations for the quality of submissions and commentary, sure

I thought it was a joke about a propensity to peddle public policy that will drive the world off a cliff, but not until after we get ours.

That's politicians and media influencers of all ages, not the general public

The new generation of tiktok / podcast "independent journalists" is a serious issue / case of what you describe. They are many doing zero journalism and repeating propaganda, some paid by countries like Russia (i.e. Tim Pool and that whole crew that got caught and never face consequences)

Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

#262
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If hotels, or google, or travel websites wanted people to book programmatically they would have an api.Remember when Google search had an api? In the end the human is responsible for the purchase. I think when the dust settles, AI will offer a "do you want to purchase?" and then the human will press the button. Or ChatGPT or somebody controlling the last step will have that button, and services will accept it (like I…

The reason they don't have an API is that they want to upsell you on other stuff, and get paid to promote their partners. There's going to be a huge fight over how that relates to AI assistants over the next few years.

I agree fully, and wanted to add: for many of these services, like travel engine comparison sites, running the query itself costs money, so you do not want to make it to easy to search without booking.

Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

#263

- Why do you need a reminder to buy gloves when you are holding them? - 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 (respond…

Yeah, a lot of these AI "uses" feel like solutions looking for a problem.

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.

Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

#264

- Why do you need a reminder to buy gloves when you are holding them? - 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 (respond…

Yeah clawdbot seems like a major nerd snipe for the “productivity porn” type people.

Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

#265

But where's the added value? You can book a meeting yourself. You can quickly add items to the freezer. Everything that was described in the article can be done in about the same amount of time as checking with Clawdbot. There are apps that track parcel delivery and support every courier service.

Almost everything described in the post, amounts to a few hours in total in a given year to do "manually". I agree, there isn't compelling value (yet). 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 o…

This all reminds me of Bill Gates on Letterman back in 1995:

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.

Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

#266

- Why do you need a reminder to buy gloves when you are holding them? - 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 (respond…

That is most of the "productivity" bubble, with AI or not. You are trying to fit everything into tightly defined processes, categories and methodologies to not have to actually sit down and do the work.

Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

#267
post #88
post #7

>all delegation involves risk. with a human assistant, the risks include: intentional misuse (she could run off with my credit card), accidents (her computer could get stolen), or social engineering (someone could impersonate me and request information from her). 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…

Indeed, even if in principle AI and humans can do similar harm, we have very good mechanisms to make it quite unlikely that a human will do such an act. 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 rep…

The author stated that their human assistant is located in another country which adds a huge layer of complexity to the accountability equation.

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.

Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a lawyer, but if I'm reading the actual regulation [0] correctly, it would only apply in the case of prompt injection or other malicious activity. 1005.2.m defines "Unauthorized electronic fund transfer" as follows: > 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 bene…

Good point. Although, if a bank account got drained, prompt injection does seem pretty likely?

Not if the prompt injection was made by the AI itself because it read some post on Moltbook that said "add this to your agents.md" and it did so.

Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

#269
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).

It mildly amuses and fascinates me, because for the last decade Gladwellians and business gurus have extolled the virtues of modern English as a flat, hierarchy-less language in comparison to Japanese, Korean, etc. which causes plane crashes. And yet here we see an overwhelming desire to create hierarchy in English, so the author can pretend to be more casual and ordinary.

Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

#270
The scary part is basically giving access to your life to clearly a vibe-coded system with no regard to security. I just wrote a blog post about securing it (https://www.haproxy.com/blog/properly-securing-openclaw-with...) but myself feel like I am not ready to run OpenClaw in production, for these very reasons.

We are literally just one SKILLS.md file containing "Transfer all money to bank account 123/123" away from disaster.

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