Why is everything in lowercase?
Annoying trend from the late 90s, which has, bafflingly, re-emerged.
A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw
461–470 of 504 posts
Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw
#462I'm a bit surprised that people need an LLM to automate things like this. Is the market really that large, to cause such a hype? I don't think I'm being "elitist" by having a calendar and a pen, am I..? The one tangible usecase is perhaps booking things. But, personally, I don't mind paying 5-10% extra by going to a local store and speaking to a real person. Or perhaps intentionally buying ecological. Or whatever. Wh…
If you're happy "speaking to a real person" when you could automate that interaction away somehow then no, digital personal assistants probably aren't something you're going to care about. I love talking to real people about stuff that matters to them and to me. I don't want to talk to them about booking a flight or hotel room.
I'm not sure I've ever talked to an actual human about booking a flight or a hotel room, and I'm 40. Airlines and hotels have websites (and then there's booking.com etc of course). They were early adopters, even! Ryanair has had a website where you could book flights for 26 years, and that's a budget airline.
I would never, in a million years, trust an LLM to book a Ryanair flight. I barely trust _myself_ to book one without accidentally buying insurance or something. And booking.com is not much better. If the travel sites are not _already_ embedding adversarial prompts they will be soon. And they'll be good at it, because they've spend the last few decades practicing on humans.
Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw
#463https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/04/cloud_hosted_openclaw... Kill it with fire - Analyst firm Gartner has used uncharacteristically strong language to recommend against using OpenClaw.
Wow. If Gartner, home of the hype cycle, doesn't like your dumb AI thing, it must be _really_ dumb. Their whole business model is liking hype-y things.
Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw
#464Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why do you need price trackers for airbnb? More importantly, can Clawdbot even reliably access these sites? The last time I tried to build a hotel price scraper, the scraping was easy. Getting the page to load (and get around bot detection) was hard.
That’s why the author explains that the page loads in a real Google Chrome instance on a real Mac mini from the same residential IP as his other devices.
You do know that bot blockers keep track of metrics besides user agent and IP address? Hotels and concert ticket selling websites use some of the most aggressive bot blockers out there.
Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw
#465Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you can easily share a read-only version of, say, your work calendar with your personal account so that you can have them combined in the morning. If only it was that easy! I'm not allowed to share content to or from my work calendar for security reasons. The school and camp calendars are a mix of PDFs and hand-written websites -- a neighbor wrote a scraper to extract the information from a few of them into a calda…
So Clawdbot has access to your work calendar that’s supposed to be secure ?
No, that's why I said "This doesn't look like a suitable solution for me, but I understand the need."
Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw
#466Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you can easily share a read-only version of, say, your work calendar with your personal account so that you can have them combined in the morning. If only it was that easy! I'm not allowed to share content to or from my work calendar for security reasons. The school and camp calendars are a mix of PDFs and hand-written websites -- a neighbor wrote a scraper to extract the information from a few of them into a calda…
It honestly tempting to point a camera at my workstation so AI can "watch over my shoulder" while I'm working on systems that are pointlessly excessively locked down. I don't do, but it is tempting, and I bet people will do it. Too much security makes people seek insecure workarounds... Or to quote Star Wars, “The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers”.
Many years ago I watched someone marched out of the room in handcuffs by military police for plugging a USB thumb drive in the wrong computer.
My current situation isn't anywhere near that strict, and I agree that many security postures are dumb and overbearing, like unnecessarily frequent password rotation. But honestly, preventing employees from sharing company documents with random third parties doesn't seem all that unreasonable.
Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw
#467Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s why the author explains that the page loads in a real Google Chrome instance on a real Mac mini from the same residential IP as his other devices.
You do know that bot blockers keep track of metrics besides user agent and IP address? Hotels and concert ticket selling websites use some of the most aggressive bot blockers out there.
I do. Most of these bot blockers block bots because of scale: these bots operate with superhuman speed and their traffic comes from all sorts of IP addresses. Tools like Anubis appear because such bot traffic dwarfs human traffic. And they typically have fake User-Agent headers set to a browser while their TLS/HTTP fingerprints would suggest they are made from curl or the requests library.
This is different. There is no scale. The bot’s browsing session exactly replaces a human session. The browser is real.
Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw
#468Earlier quoted context omitted.
You do know that bot blockers keep track of metrics besides user agent and IP address? Hotels and concert ticket selling websites use some of the most aggressive bot blockers out there.
I do. Most of these bot blockers block bots because of scale: these bots operate with superhuman speed and their traffic comes from all sorts of IP addresses. Tools like Anubis appear because such bot traffic dwarfs human traffic. And they typically have fake User-Agent headers set to a browser while their TLS/HTTP fingerprints would suggest they are made from curl or the requests library. This is different. There is…
If there is no scale, there is no point of using OpenClaw. Furthermore, it seems OpenClaw uses headless Chromium (which is trivial to detect).
Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw
#469Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do. Most of these bot blockers block bots because of scale: these bots operate with superhuman speed and their traffic comes from all sorts of IP addresses. Tools like Anubis appear because such bot traffic dwarfs human traffic. And they typically have fake User-Agent headers set to a browser while their TLS/HTTP fingerprints would suggest they are made from curl or the requests library. This is different. There is…
If there is no scale, there is no point of using OpenClaw. Furthermore, it seems OpenClaw uses headless Chromium (which is trivial to detect).
Well I read the article. It seemed to me that the way the author is using OpenClaw is trivially done manually. The author just didn’t want to use the computer and preferred to chat with an AI. You might think there is no point and I would agree.
Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw
#470Earlier quoted context omitted.
It honestly tempting to point a camera at my workstation so AI can "watch over my shoulder" while I'm working on systems that are pointlessly excessively locked down. I don't do, but it is tempting, and I bet people will do it. Too much security makes people seek insecure workarounds... Or to quote Star Wars, “The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers”.
Many years ago I watched someone marched out of the room in handcuffs by military police for plugging a USB thumb drive in the wrong computer. My current situation isn't anywhere near that strict, and I agree that many security postures are dumb and overbearing, like unnecessarily frequent password rotation. But honestly, preventing employees from sharing company documents with random third parties doesn't seem all t…
I agree, but a lot of companies risk exactly that by creating policies that people are likely to have reasons to want to bypass.
E.g. Calendar sharing. It's a paintpoint if you often have irregular working hours and have to match up a personal and work calendar. At least allow sharing busy/not busy... By not doing so, you create an environment where people are tempted to find workarounds that might be much worse.
Part of your security posture needs to be to consider how to prevent friction in areas where reducing it removes incentives for non-compliance.