I'm trying to put together what you could possibly mean by this -- rolling coal is fundamentally about spite. In isolation, nobody _wants_ their vehicle to spew black smoke. It only comes close to making sense in the context of another population (EV owners, typically, or more generally "the libs").
OpenClaw lets people live a bit dangerously, but fundamentally gives them something that they actually wanted. They wanted it so badly that they're willing to take what seem like insane risks to get it.
> OpenClaw lets people live a bit dangerously, but fundamentally gives them something that they actually wanted. They wanted it so badly that they're willing to take what seem like insane risks to get it.
For the first time in my career I feel so incredibly behind on this: What is open claw giving people that they want so badly? It just seems like Russian Roulette, I honestly don't see the upside
I can give you, as an example, what is driving me towards trying it.
I work as a contractor for 2 companies, not out of necessity, but greed. I also have a personal project with a friend that is dangerously close to becoming a business that needs attention. I also have other responsibilities and believe it or not - friends. Also the ADHD on top of that.
I yearn for a personal assistant. Something or somebody that will read the latest ticket assigned to me, the email with project feedback, the message from my best friend that I haven't replied for the last 3 days and remind me: "you should do this, it's going to take 5 minutes", "you have to do this today, because tomorrow you are swamped" or "you should probably start X by doing Y".
I have tried so many systems of managing my schedule and I can never stick with it. I have a feeling that having a bot "reach out", but also be able to do "reasoning" over my pending things would be a game changer.
But yes, the russian roulette part is holding me back. I am taking suggestions though
My hope would be that since openclaw is communicating with me to my personal device, where I have all noise filtered, it would be a bit better.
I also know it can integrate with TickTick, which has been a huge change for me with task management. Then again - in my experience whatever tool I use to keep track of stuff only works for as long as it's a novelty, but 3 months is a record anyway.
The thing is - when I receive a message and I'm not in the headspace to answer, I close the notification and forget about it. My expectation would be openclaw reminding me that I still haven't replied to this person about that thing.
Obviously, there's a million ways to do it that don't require openclaw. Obviously there's a million things that I won't be able to grant openclaw access to (e.g. company jira or slack). And obviously, I don't want it evaluating every single of my personal messages. But I think there is a reasonable middle ground where it can work well. But I don't yet know how to reach it
Like with any new tool/technology, you have to try it. And even then the benefits won't be obvious to you until you've played with it for a few days/weeks. With LLMs in general, it took me months before I found real good use cases.
Simple example: I tell (with my voice) my OpenClaw instance to monitor a given web site daily and ping me whenever a key piece of information shows up there.
The real problem is that it is fairly unreliable. It would often ping me even when the information had not shown up.
Another example: I'm particular about the weather related information I want, and so far have not found any app that has everything. I got sick of going to a particular web site, clicking on things, to get this information. So I created a Skill to get what I need, and now I just ask for it (verbally), and I get it.
As the GP said. This is what Siri etc should have been.
> Simple example: I tell (with my voice) my OpenClaw instance to monitor a given web site daily and ping me whenever a key piece of information shows up there.
Maybe i'm just old -- a cron job can fetch the info and push it to some notification service too, without also being a chaos agent. It seems I spend the security cost here, and in return i can save 15 minutes writing a script. Juice doesn't seem to be worth the squeeze.
But they don't just want the text of the website pushed as a notification every day. They want the bot to load the site, likely perform some kind of interaction, decide if the thing they're looking for is there, and then notify them.
> Maybe i'm just old -- a cron job can fetch the info and push it to some notification service too, without also being a chaos agent.
Here's a concrete example: A web site showing after school activities for my kid's school. All the current ones end in March, and we were notified to keep a lookout for new activities.
So I told my OpenClaw instance to monitor it and notify me ONLY if there are activities beginning in March/April.
Now let's break down your suggestion:
> a cron job can fetch the info and push it to some notification service too, without also being a chaos agent.
How exactly is this going to know if the activity begins in March/April? And which notification service? How will it talk to it?
Sounds like you're suggesting writing a script and putting it in a cron job. Am I going to do that every time such a task comes up? Do I need to parse the HTML each time to figure out the exact locators, etc? I've done that once or twice in the past. It works, but there is always a mental burden on working out all those details. So I typically don't do it. For something like this, I wouldn't have bothered - I would have just checked the site every few days manually.
Here: You have 15 minutes. Go write that script and test it. Will you bother? I didn't think so. But with OpenClaw, it's no effort.
Oh, and I need to by physically near my computer to write the script.
Now the OpenClaw approach:
I tell it to do this while on a grocery errand. Or while in the office. I don't need to be home.
It's a 4 step process:
"Hey, can you go to the site and give me all the afterschool activities and their start dates?"
<Confirm it does that>
"Hey, write a skill that does that, and notifies me if the start date is ..."
"Hey, let's test the skill out manually"
<Confirm skill works>
"Hey, schedule a check every 10:30am"
And we're done.
I don't do this all at once. I can ask it to do the first thing, and forget about it for an hour or two, and then come back and continue.
There are a zillion scripts I could write to make my life easier that I'm not writing. The benefit of OpenClaw is that it now is writing them for me. 15 minutes * 1 zillion is a lot of time I've saved.
I agree with the sentiment that there are use cases for web scraping where an agent is preferable to a cron job, but I think your particular example can certainly be achieved with a cron job and a basic parser script. Just have Claude write it.
I didn't say it's not doable. I'm not even saying it's hard. But nothing beats telling Claw to do it for me while I'm in the middle of groceries.
Put another way: If it can do it (reliably), why on Earth would I babysit Claude to write it?
The whole point is this: When AI coding became a thing, many folks rediscovered the joy of programming, because now they could use Claude to code up stuff they wouldn't have bothered to. The barrier to entry went down. OpenClaw is simply that taken to the next level.
And as an aside, let's just dispense with parsing altogether! If I were writing this as a script, I would simply fetch the text of the page, and have the script send it to an LLM instead of parsing. Why worry about parsing bugs on a one-off script?
Scripts fail. Agents exfiltrate your data because someone hacked the school's website with prompt injections. Make sure it's a choice and not ignorance of the risks.
People on both sides are just getting started finding all the ways to abuse or protect you from security assumptions with these tools. RSS is the right tool for this problem and I would be surprised if their CMS doesn't produce a feed on its own.
I'm not totally naive. I had the VM fairly hardened originally, but it proved to be inconvenient. I relaxed it so that processes on the VM can see other devices on the network.
Now this tool spreads. You help everyone get it set up. Someone hacks the site, injects a prompt lying about some event, maybe Drag Queen Story Hour in a place with lots of people enraged about it. Now there's chaos and confusion. Corrections chase the spread of misinformation.
Giving plausible examples could further your case. But at some point you have got to realize that other people have actually thought about these things are are willing to do this.
Imagine going up to everyone riding a motorcycle and telling them about the inherent dangers of their activity and to stop. It is obvious that the OP understands risk, has taken several strong steps to harden their system and isn’t worried about the school calendar getting hacked making an event that they would get notified about and that destroying their community somehow. I don’t even understand openclaws place. The exact same events would unfold without the ai in there at all.
The trick is to give them a tree pruning chain saw, one intended for climbing tree loppers to use one handed - it's an ideal weight for nine years old to use two handed.
And to supervise.
As tested on my children and grand children.
Also, if you happen to have a furnace with a large pot of molten glass, five year olds are capable (given a stand) of making marbles from the furnance and will do that for hours if you can spare the time to let them.
Fair point, I just think that example is better off running on a cron job than using compute from llm inference, (though that will become negligible over time, anyways).
It increasingly seems like most people make a different decision after thinking through the security implications of something like this. This is me being charitable.
A personal assistant of some sort that is actually useful at some stuff and not just a toy?
It’s not some huge life changing thing for me, but I also only dabble with it - certainly it has no access to anything very important to my life.
I find it incredibly useful to just have a chat line open with a little agent running on a tiny computer on my IoT network at home I can ask to do basic chores.
Last night I realized I forgot to set the permanent holiday lights to “obnoxious st parties day animation” at around 9pm. It was basically the effect of “hey siri, please talk to the front house wled controller and set an appropriate very colorful theme for the current holiday until morning” while I drove to pick my wife up from a friends house.
Without such a quick off-handed ability to get that done, there was zero chance I was coming home 20 minutes later, remembering I should do that, spending 10 minutes googling an appropriate preset lighting theme someone already came up with, grabbing laptop, and clicking a half dozen buttons to get that done.
Trivial use case? Yup. But those trivial things add up for a measurable quality of life difference to me.
I’m sure there are better and cleaner ways to achieve similar - but it’s a very fast on-ramp into getting something from zero to useful without needing to learn all this stuff from the ground up. Every time I think of something around that complexity level I go “ugh. I’ll get to it at some point” but if I spend 15 minutes with openclaw I can usually have a decent tool that is “good enough” for future use to get related things done for the future.
It’s done far more complex development/devops “lab” stuff for me that at least proved some concepts for work later. I’ll throw away the output, but these are items that would have been put off indefinitely due to activation energy because the basics are trivial but annoyingly time consuming. Spin up a few VMs, configure basic networking, install and configure the few open source tools I wanted to test out, create some simple glue code to mock out what I wanted to try out. That sort of thing. Basically stuff I would have a personal intern do if I could afford one.
For now it’s basically doing my IT chores for me. The other night I had it finally get around to setting up some dashboards and Prometheus monitoring for some various sensors and WiFi stuff around the house. Useful when I need it, but not something I ever got around to doing myself for the past 7 years since I moved in. Knocking out that todo list is pretty nice!
The risk is pretty moderate for me. Worst case it deletes configs or bricks something it has access to and I need to roll back from backups it does not have permissions to even know exist, much less modify. It certainly has zero access to personal email, real production environments, or anything like that.
OpenClaw has a persistent memory, stored to disk, and an efficient way of accessing it. ChatGPT and Claude both added a rudimentary "memory" feature in March but it's nowhwere as extensible or vendor neutral.
> In isolation, nobody _wants_ their vehicle to spew black smoke.
Honestly, when I was 12 years old and my dad floored the TDi in our Land Rover (with the diesel particulate filter deleted), it felt satisfying in a way, like the machine is allowed to be its most efficient self.
Now that I'm adult, I know that it's marginal gains for the car and terrible for the environment, but there are people that have the thinking capability of a 12 year old driving these trucks. I don't think all of them do it because of spite (though I'm sure most do).
I don't remember if Plug-n-Play shipped with the original Windows 95 (it's certainly there in the final OSR), but that was a pretty big shift from the manual IRQ and port mapping days of DOS/Windows 3.1.
They were fake long file names though. At the actual dos layer they were 8.3. And the plug and play was terrrrible. I always turned it off. Ugh the plug and play modems/soundcards were trash.
They weren't fake long file names. They were actual long files names but of course the operating system that didn't support long files names didn't know what to do with the (very real) long file names. It only knew the 8.3 file name that was also set for compatibility.
Of course it sucked if you looked at or worked with DOS based apps. But it was one of those things that was always good about Microsoft Windows: Backwards compatibility.
They literally would build in (bug-) compatibility layers for specific games, where if they detected you were running a particular game, they'd not use the fixed or optimized code paths, but the old ones / emulate / patch things as the game expected them to be. And that was not because Windows was buggy and the games were good. It was the other way around. Games used trickery and internal knowledge that they shouldn't and if/when MS would block those paths or change internals, those games would stop working or crash.
You're not wrong, but PnP including the configuration basis for PCI which still sits at the config space layer of the latest and greatest PCIe. That's the piece I find so significant. I work with GPUs that mostly communicate over a proprietary C2C connection, but how does the OS find them? PCI enumeration.
Columbo is anything but a failure, though, and the audience knows that. His genius is leveraging humility to convince killers that he's a bumbling idiot, while in reality he's onto them from the first encounter.
_Slow Horses_ came up in another thread. I'd argue that Columbo has more in common with Jackson Lamb than with Charlie Brown.
The walmart experience is so wildly different depending on who they're catering to.
When I lived in poor areas, I've literally been shaken down by gigantic bouncers in the parking lot for "stealing" (but not) a bag of $5 cat litter. Why on earth this is even worth the liability of sending bouncers is beyond me. And everything even remotely valuable and easy to steal is behind locked showcases, but no one gives a fuck to get it out to help you buy it.
In rich areas, it's lobster sandwiches and no one even bothering you for your receipt on the way out, and maybe someone might even help you find something in the store. Nothing you want is behind glass, except maybe something unusually valuable by walmart standards and miniscule like an SD card.
“Gas Station Sushi: Fresh one day a week, but no one knows which one…”
I read the post as involving seeing the other family at Walmart, but the buying of things not needed and consumption of lobster as happening elsewhere.
You might have even better precision if you stay away from CPU0 and also set idle=poll in your kernel command line. Lots of things (including other interrupts) often land on CPU0. It would not be my first choice for something where I wanted high timing precision.
I came here to post this. We make a lot of the same sorts of optimizations for our OS distro (debian based) -- disabling frequency scaling, core pinning, etc. Critically, CPU0 has a bunch of stuff you cannot push, and you're better off with using one of the other cores as an isolated island.
This is what the scheduler latency looks like on our isolated core:
# Total: 000300000
# Min Latencies: 00001
# Avg Latencies: 00005
# Max Latencies: 00059
# Histogram Overflows: 00000
The is the politicians not being able to form a coalition. Imagine your congress not agreeing to fill some commissions or confirm some positions in government.
It is a 'shutdown' of the legislative branch, not the executive.
Not really comparable because the bureaucratic system kept running. It's just a completely different political system and "there is no government" means a different thing. US-style "government shutdowns" don't really happen in Belgium.
OpenClaw lets people live a bit dangerously, but fundamentally gives them something that they actually wanted. They wanted it so badly that they're willing to take what seem like insane risks to get it.
What do the two have in common?
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