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OpenClaw is what Apple intelligence should have been

jakequist.com

401–410 of 440 posts

Re: OpenClaw is what Apple intelligence should have been

#401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Imagine if Siri could genuinely file your taxes Imagine if the government would just tell everyone how much they owed and obviated the need for effing literal artificial intelligence to get taxes done! >> respond to emails If we have an AI that can respond properly to emails, then the email doesn't need to be sent in the first place. (Indeed, many do not need to be sent nowadays either!)

How can government know how much you owe them when they don't know all your tax deductibles?

You being personally ignorant of this specific argument which gets litigated every single time this comes up but only by Americans because most other countries have zero difficulty doing exactly that is not a valid argument.

91 percent of American filers take the standard deduction. The IRS already has all their information, already knows how much they withheld, already knows what they owe back. For all these people, TurboTax is just filling in 10 fields in the standard form.

"All your tax deductibles" is irrelevant for the vast majority of the country, and always has been.

The 35 million remaining americans who do itemize are free to continue using this old system while the rest of us can have a better world.

Re: OpenClaw is what Apple intelligence should have been

#402
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re heavily invested in Apple apps (iMessage/Calendar/Reminders/Notes), you need a Mac to give the agent tools to interact with these apps. I think that combined with the form factor, price, and power consumption, makes it an ideal candidate. If you’re heavily invested in Windows, then you’d probably go for a small x86 PC.

Can you imagine giving an AI access to your messages, notes and calendar though? I use agentic coding, this is next level madness.

I used Claude Code (CC) to make my own MCPs for these apps. I gave it read/write access only, no ability to delete. Of course it could probably code it's way into doing that since it can access the MCP code. I don't run it in --yolo mode though.

I interact only with CC on the machine and watch what its doing, I haven't tried OpenClaw yet.

Here's some workflows I've personally found valuable:

- I have it read the "Grocery" Reminders list and find things I commonly buy every week and pre-populate the grocery list as a starting point. It only adds items that I haven't already added via Siri as the week goes on. For example, I might notice I've run out of cheese and I'll say "Hey Siri, add cheese to grocery list". The list is shared via iCloud Reminders app between my spouse and I.

- Pre-CC, I wrote an OR-Tools python tool for "solving" the parenting time calendar. My ex and I work inconsistent schedules each month. Each month I was manually creating a calendar honoring requests, hard constraints, and attempting to balance custody 50/50. CC uses the MCPs to fetch the calendar events and review emails related to planning. It then structures everything as JSON as inputs to the optimizer. The optimizer runs with these inputs and spits out a few "solutions". I review the candidate solutions and select one. CC uses the MCP to add the solution to the calendar. This one saves me probably an hour every month.

- CC uses an email MCP to fetch emails from my child's school and suggest events its found in the emails to add to the calendar.

None of these are huge time savings on their own but the accumulation of reducing the time to complete these repetitive tasks has been awesome in my opinion. These are all things that most definitely would not have been worth automating with traditional dev work but since I can just dictate to CC for a few seconds and it has something that works a few minutes later it's become worthwhile.

Re: OpenClaw is what Apple intelligence should have been

#403
post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes. “Non-existent security” is only a pesky detail that will surely be ironed out. It’s not a critical flaw in the entirety of the LLM ecosystem that now the computers themselves can be tricked into doing things by asking in just the right way. Anything in the context might be a prompt injection attack, and there isn’t really any reliable solution to that but let’s hook everything up to it, and also give it the t…

Yes, there are some flaws. The first airplanes also had some flaws, and crashed more often than they didn't. That doesn't change how incredible it is, while it's improving. Maybe, just maybe, this thing that was, until recently, just research papers, is not actually a finished product right now? Incredibly hot take, I know.

I think the airplane analogy is apt because commercial air travel basically capped out at "good enough" in terms of performance (just below Mach 1) a long time ago and focused on cost. Everyone assumes AI is going to keep getting better, but what if we're nearing the performance ceiling of LLMs and the rest is just cost optimization?

Re: OpenClaw is what Apple intelligence should have been

#404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they not? Many phone functions are already available through voice assistants, and have been for a very long time, and yet the vast majority of people still prefer to use them with the UI. Clicking on the weather icon is much easier than asking a chatbot "what's the weather like?"

Some people seem to think that Deckard’s speech-controlled CSI software in Blade Runner is actually something to strive for, UX-wise. As if it makes any sense to use strictly nonvisual, non-two-dimensional affordances to work with visual data.

The sad part is that while everyone is chasing new interface modalities, the traditional 2D UI is slowly getting worse thanks to questionable design trends and a lack of interest.

Re: OpenClaw is what Apple intelligence should have been

#405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless of how Apple will solve this, please just solve it. Siri is borderline useless these days. > Will it rain today? Please unlock your iphone for that > Any new messages from Chris? You will need to unlock your iphone for that > Please play youtube music Playing youtube music... please open youtube music app to do that All settings and permission granted. Utterly painful.

I think half your examples are made up, or not Apple's fault, but it sounds like what you really want is to disable your passcode.

I LOVE the "complaining about apple ux? no way, YOU'RE the problem / you're doing it wrong / you must not be a mac person".

Thanks for keeping this evergreen trope going strong!

Re: OpenClaw is what Apple intelligence should have been

#406
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

get off your devices when driving, it's as dangerous as being drunk behind the wheel

You don’t look at it, you just talk to it and it can talk back to you. It’s more just having a conversation with a personal assistant while driving. Which is a pretty common thing to do.

Having an important phone call while driving is also pretty dangerous.

Speeding and drunk driving are also pretty common things to do despite being dangerous.

Pay attention behind the wheel.

Re: OpenClaw is what Apple intelligence should have been

#407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think half your examples are made up, or not Apple's fault, but it sounds like what you really want is to disable your passcode.

I LOVE the "complaining about apple ux? no way, YOU'RE the problem / you're doing it wrong / you must not be a mac person". Thanks for keeping this evergreen trope going strong!

well if you're making complaints that aren't true, or asking for functionality that exists already, your complaints don't seem very credible to me.

Re: OpenClaw is what Apple intelligence should have been

#409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right I'm going to assume you're naive rather than just instantly being contrarian. Yes of course someone could be socially engineered into downloading a malicious package, but that takes more effort, so whilst bad, is not an argument for removing all best security practices that have been rolled out to users in the last 5 years. what you are arguing for is a fundamentally unsafe OS that means no sensitive data can e…

Truly sensitive files do not need to be shared with your AI agent. If you have an executive assistant you don't have to give them all of your personal information for them to be able to be useful.

Ok contrarian it is.

Re: OpenClaw is what Apple intelligence should have been

#410
You just put words in Apple's mouth. This is exactly what they should do but safer . This is entirely possible because only apple has control on their ecosystem.

If they optimize their entire hardware line (iPhone, Watch, Mac Mini, Macbook) AI enhanced with local/remote LLM model, they will win big. Imagine someone running a business can manage their entire business with iPhone/Mac/iCloud without buying any other saas services (inventory, payments, customer service).

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