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A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

brandon.wang

361–370 of 504 posts

Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

#361
post #148
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 revolutio…

> We all learned the lesson that mass-market IT tools almost always outperform in-house,

Funny, I learned the exact opposite lesson. Almost all software suck, and a good way for it not to suck is to know where the developer is and go tell them their shit is broken, in person.

If you want a large scale example, one of the two main law enforcement agency in france spun off libreoffice into their own legal writing software. Developped by LEOs that can take up to two weeks a year to work on that. Awesome software. Would cost litterally millions if bought on the market.

Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

#362

> as someone who has a chest freezer and a compulsive desire to buy too many things at costco, we take everything out of the freezer every few months to check what we have. before, this was a relatively involved process: me calling things out, my partner writing them down. A thought I constantly find myself having when I read accounts of people automating and accelerating aspects of their life by using AI... Are you…

The freezer one is so weird because there is an even simpler solution to the problem. Just buy less shit! If you have so much stuff that you can’t keep track then don’t have so much stuff, simple. I think there is a common psychology when people notice a problem they first think about what they can add to solve the problem, when often the best solution is to think about what you can remove.

Or, as my partner does, keep a page magnetted to the freezer, divided into three 'shelves', with a list of what's where.

Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

#363

- 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…

>Why do you need a reminder to buy gloves when you are holding them?

Am I missing this in the article? Do you mean the shoes he's holding? He explains it immediately.

>when i visited REI this weekend to find running shoes for my partner, i took a picture of the shoe and sent it to clawdbot to remind myself to buy them later in a different color not available in store. the todo item clawdbot created was exceptionally detailed—pulling out the brand, model, and size—and even adding the product listing URL it found on the REI website.

Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

#364
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…

And the risk isn’t really the bot draining your account, it’s the scammer who prompt injected your bot via your iMessage integration draining the account. I can’t think of a way to safely operate this without prefiltering everything it accesses

Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

#365

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…

I would use https://www.privacy.com virtual card with a spending limit. Getting closer to making this easy https://xkcd.com/576/.

Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

#367
post #254
post #145

The fact that the author gave unrestricted 2FA access to the model is really scary. It’s way easier to phish an AI than a human.

Same. Immediately I thought why not have clawdbot ask you for the 2FA? That way you at least kind of know what security-protected action it's trying to take and can approve it

The problem is baked in - he gives it access to iMessage, which is where all the sms-based 2fac codes end up. There is no way to prevent it reading 2 fac codes if you want to give it full text message access

Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

#368
i've a simple setup with Claude Code and MCPs; and i get real benefits from better task mgmt, email mgmt, calendar, health/food/fitness tracking, working together with claude on tasks (that go into md files).

i don't think we need ClawdBot, but we do need a way to easily interact with the model such that it can create long term memories (likely as files).

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