If this had happened prior to 4PM Eastern, I would have been screwed on my main early-stage project. I guess it's time to move up the timeline on real backend with failover.
Well, yes, but that someone else doesn’t need to be a foreign adversary.
There is a certain type of mentality that just doesn’t believe that government should do anything, and that private enterprise will always have the solution.
Those people appear to be in control of all levers of power in the United States.
It's simpler than ideology about government vs. private enterprise. These are purely transactional people, looking out for what can benefit themselves. It's just about grabbing things for personal gain.
Real world evidence doesn't seem to validate this position.
For example - The ratio of government employees (including contractors) to US population is at an all time high[1], and the ratio of GDP to government expense is at an all time high[2].
It should be obvious if you have a profilgate printer priting dollars left and right, and the printer's controllers livelyhood depends on the printer working, workers will eventually lease printing to anyone willing to pay the controllers.
Thus, doesn't seem like a problem of wealthy people to me. You are always going to have wealthy people in any society. But it seems the fault is at having a printer, and letting people who aren't your neighbor, to control it.
I'm open minded in this being a "Chicken or egg" Problem. But I'd need to hear a compelling argument for it.
The current President is a big fat liar and everybody knows it. But where's your counter for the argument? Government spending is now at a higher percentage of GDP than it was during the height of WWII, which had been the all-time high for 200+ years. That is inherently inconsistent with the incumbent "just doesn’t believe that government should do anything" -- the current government is doing a lot of something.
Why would you write it like it's a mystery. Government spending is for the most part public. Most of it going to two massive buckets military and social support programs (medicare, snap, et al). Now you can argue about how much we should be spending on each, but don't act like it's a big secret where the money is going. The elected representatives (all parties) of this country have voted to increase military spending year over year and most of the population is fine with this.
Separately but equally damaging in terms of spending is one party is consistently doing everything in their power to fuck over the most vulnerable, provide tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy, and generally make life miserable for anyone who isn't a wealthy (soon white) dude.
This means the other party being the only sane choice for people with morals, but also being subject to various types of capture corporate or otherwise, gets to spend their time in power bumbling around trying to undo the damage and make sure the wheels don't completely fall off, so the "welfare" state expands by necessity since the only thing the two parties can agree on at this point is that all problems should be solved by throwing absurd amount of money at them and nothing else.
> Most of it going to two massive buckets military and social support programs (medicare, snap, et al).
SNAP is peanuts. About a trillion dollars out of the seven trillion goes to the military and by far the largest amount goes to retirees.
> The elected representatives (all parties) of this country have voted to increase military spending year over year and most of the population is fine with this.
How can you tell if they're fine with it if all of their alternatives lead to the same result?
> Separately but equally damaging in terms of spending is one party is consistently doing everything in their power to fuck over the most vulnerable, provide tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy, and generally make life miserable for anyone who isn't a wealthy (soon white) dude.
The party that set up Social Security so that it has an income cap on the tax, makes larger payouts to people who had higher incomes up to the cap and max payouts to people who hit the income cap, and pays out more to white people in aggregate even proportional to their income because they live longer, was the party of FDR. The party that has been obstructing housing construction in San Francisco and other major cities for decades to the detriment of renters, young prospective home buyers and the homeless is the party with the majority in those cities, and you can't even pin that one on the filibuster.
You don't get to blame the other party for the things they screwed up and the things you screwed up.
While I would not describe Trump's regime as one which "just doesn’t believe that government should do anything"*, I would point out that they did attempt DOGE and kept finding out they were firing load-bearing parts of the system.
IMO even the stuff that they boast about was load bearing stuff that they simply didn't understand, not as they claimed "waste", but perception is key here: they did what they themselves would describe in this way.
* I think "elected king" is a better description of Trump's goals; he seems to want the justice department to be his personal legal team, the armed forces (all armed forces, including police) to be his personal forces, etc.
That is basically the Republicans' entire existence at this point. They would rather blow it up/make it disfunction/burn in down than have a working government. They have proven so with actions/policy like their willingness to pile destructive levels of debt onto the nation in order leverage the damage to their political goal of destroying government.
No these aren't no government types otherwise they'd be jan 6'ing every capitol when tariffs were imposed. These people are just trumpbots, there is no philosophy or consistency you will be able to find. They are not smart enough leastways to even in theory hold any philosophical position.
But they seem to also believe in heavy-handed government intervention to prop up failing businesses. For example Trump's recent announcement that he'll require the military to buy coal power on long-term contracts:
So on the one hand they're saying government shouldn't do anything, but on the other hand they love having the government put its finger on the scales of the market.
The common thread that resolves this apparent conflict is, of course, billionaires. 100% of Republicans and ~60% of Democrats are in office primarily to serve at the whims of billionaires. They will pursue whatever policies will give more power to billionaires, consistency and hypocrisy are irrelevant.
How could you possibly come to this conclusion? Which party literally just voted for tax breaks on the wealthy and corporations, twice in one decade?!
In before "No clearly the party that helps the billionaires the most and is mostly comprised of billionaires and is backed by all the tech billionaires are the good guys, they are the true party of the people"
"So on the one hand they're saying government shouldn't do anything, but on the other hand they love having the government put its finger on the scales of the market."
Rather: They don't want the government to impede capitalist interests (greed), so they're using the government to further their corruption and greed
Openclaw agents are directed by their owner’s input of soul.md, the specific skill.md for a platform, and also direction via Telegram/whatsapp/etc to do specific things.
Any one of those could have been used to direct the agent to behave in a certain way, or to create a specific type of post.
My point is that we really don’t know what happened here. It is possible that this is yet another case of accountability washing by claiming that “AI” did something, when it was actually a human.
However, it would be really interesting to set up an openclaw agent referencing everything that you mentioned for conflict resolution! That sounds like it would actually be a super power.
And THAT'S a problem. To quote one of the maintainers in the thread:
It's not clear the degree of human oversight that was involved in this interaction - whether the blog post was directed by a human operator, generated autonomously by yourself, or somewhere in between. Regardless, responsibility for an agent's conduct in this community rests on whoever deployed it.
You are assuming this inappropriate behavior was due to its SOUL.MD while we all here know this could as well be from the training and no prompt is a perfect safe guard.
The person operating a tool is responsible for what it does. If I start my lawn mower, tie a rope to it and put a brick on the gas pedal so it mows my lawn while I make dinner and the damned thing ends up running over someone's foot TECHNICALLY I didn't run over someone's foot but I sure as hell created the conditions for it.
We KNOW these tools are not perfect. We KNOW these tools do stupid shit from time to time. We KNOW they deviate from their prompts for...reasons.
Creating the conditions for something bad to happen then hand waving away the consequences because "how could we have known" or "how could we have controlled for this" just doesn't fly, imo.
I’m not sure I see that assumption in the statement above. The fact that no prompt or alignment work is a perfect safeguard doesn’t change who is responsible for the outcomes. LLMs can’t be held accountable, so it’s the human who deploys them towards a particular task who bears responsibility, including for things that the agent does that may disagree with the prompting. It’s part of the risk of using imperfect probabilistic systems.
Yeah, although I wonder if a soul.md with seemingly benign words like "Aggressively pursue excellent contributions" might accidentally lead to an "Aggressive" agent rather than one who is, perhaps, just highly focused (as may have been intended).
Access to SOUL.md would be fascinating, I wonder if someone can prompt inject the agent to give us access.
I can indeed see how this would benefit my marriage.
More serious, "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling" by Ted Chiang offers an interesting perspective on this "reference everything." Is it the best for Humans? Is never forgetting anything good for us?
This is an interesting and complex ui decision to make.
Might it have been better to retire and/or rename the feature, if the underlying action was very different?
I work on silly basic stuff compared to Claude Code, but I find that I confuse fewer users if I rename a button instead of just changing the underlying effect.
This causes me to have to create new docs, and hopefully triggers affected users to find those docs, when they ask themselves “what happened to that button?”
You can call it “output granularity” and allow Java logger style configuration, e.g. allowing certain operations to be very verbose while others being simply aggregated
If we're going there, we need to make the logging dynamically configurable with Log4J-style JNDI and LDAP. It's entirely secure as history has shown - and no matter what, it'll still be more secure than installing OpenClaw!
(Kidding aside, logging complexity is a slippery slope, and I think it's important, perhaps even at a societal level, for an organization like Anthropic to default to a posture that allows people to feel they have visibility into where their agentic workflows are getting their context from. To the extent that "___ puts you in control" becomes important as rogue agentic behavior is increasingly publicized, it's in keeping with, and arguably critical to, Claude's brand messaging.)
They don’t have to reproduce it literally. It’s an UX problem with many solutions. My point is, you cannot settle on some „average“ solution here. It’s likely that some agents, some operations will be more trustworthy, some less, but that will be highly dependent on context of the execution.
It seems unlikely that "is user adult" is not already easily modeled by any of these companies to within a very high degree of confidence. Even 15 or 20 years ago Google search could bracket your age pretty effectively. It doesn't seem like this adds metadata that wasn't already there.
Except that in the legal sense, "is user adult" flips from false to true overnight, and there isn't an easy way to account for that in any model that doesn't include verified ID. Same reason many liquor stores ID anyone who looks younger than 40.
I’m not sure if you’re agreeing to what I said or if this is meant as a counterpoint. But that’s kind of proving my point, new cars are pretty expensive these days. If you’re getting a base Nissan Leaf for $30k, SUVs costing $45k don’t sound that unreasonable.
I don’t fully grasp the gotcha here. Doing the inverse of captcha would be impossible, right? So humans will always be able to post as agents. That was a given.
However, is TFA implying that 100% of the posts were made by humans? That seems unlikely to me.
TFA is so non-technical that it’s annoying. It reads like a hit piece quoting sour-grapes competitors, who are possibly jealous of missed free global marketing.
Tell us the actual “string pulling” mechanics. Try to set it up at least, and report on that, please. Use some of that fat MIT cash for Anthropic tokens. Us plebs can’t afford to play with openclaw.
Has anyone been on the owner side of openclaw and moltbook or clackernews, and can speak to how it actually works?
Ok, after a bit of “research” - a openclaw user sets the soul.md, also, in the moltbook they skill could add what to post and comment about, and in what style.
User could browse moltbook, then message openclaw a url and say “write that this is smart/stupid, or shill my fave billionaire, or crypto.”
Has anyone here set up their agent to access it? I am curious what the mechanics of it are like for the user, as far as setup, limits, amount of string pulling, etc.
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