- Why do you need a reminder to buy gloves when you are holding them?
I do understand the general point you're trying to make, but you can't overestimate the cost of tokens by a few orders of magnitude and still expect the logic to hold.
Most people aren’t that engineer-brained like the author is. Me included; whatever the author does, it just doesn’t appeal to me.
Yeah, the sane solution here is much simpler. Put a magnet whiteboard. When you put something into the fridge, add it to the whiteboard. When you take something out, you erase that item from the whiteboard.
Because I have a shopping list, I don't need to remember what I have in the fridge while I'm in the grocery store. I buy the things I need, and I leave.
The grocery list goes in Todoist, by the way. In case you were afraid that there was an aspect of my life with no apps involved.
I think AI is about to do the same thing to pair programming that full self-driving has done for driving. It will be a long time before it's perfect but it's already useful. I also think someone is going to make a Blockbuster quality movie with AI within a couple years and there will be much fretting of the brows rather than seeing the opportunity to improve the tooling here.
But I'll make a more precise prediction for 2026. Through continual learning and other tricks that emerge throughout the year, LLMs will become more personalized with longer memories, continuing to make them even more of a killer consumer product than they already are. I just see too many people conversing with them right now to believe otherwise.
These people have taken over the industry in the past 10 years.
They don't care anything about the tech or product quality. They talk smooth, loud, and fast so the leaders overlook their incompetence while creating a burden for the rest of the team.
I had a spectacular burnout a few years ago because of these brogrammers and now I have to compete with them in what feels like a red queen's race where social skills are becoming far more important than technical skills to land a job.
I'm tired.
>kill dragon
With what? Your bare hands?
>yes
Congratulations! You have just vanquished a dragon with your bare
hands! (Unbelievable, isn't it?)-bash: kill: dragon: arguments must be process or job IDs
\> sudo kill dragon
-bash: Congratulations! You have just vanquished a dragon with your bare hands!
Approximately nothing?
The real bubble is the United States as the global luddite with nukes. The rest of the world is continuing apace on every front while we desperately try to return to the previous century.
I mean when the chief current libertoonian talking points are we should flood the internet with AI generated child porn to reduce pedophilia, that Greta Thunberg is the Antichrist, or that the most important decision your daughter faces right now is whether she should study to be an engineer or become a sex worker, they have exited the room of serious conversation and entered the insane asylum across the board. I wish we could ignore them but they have the Zeitgeist. Stupid Zeitgeist
What I don't understand is why, outside of "because I can", people need to automate parts of life I did not know the existence of.
- Why, outside of edge cases, do people have to automate the payment of bills beyond the automatic cc processing? - How many times a month do they have to set up their barber appointment?
It seems to me that the applications of Clawd and similar tools either automate trivial stuff or work on actions and circumstances that should not be there.
As an example, the other day I had a doctor visit, and between filling forms online, filling other forms online, confirming three times I would have been there and that I filled the online forms, driving to the doctor's office, and waiting, I probably spent 2 hours of my time (the visit was 2 months after I asked for it, by the way).
The visit lasted 5-7 minutes: the doctor did not have a look at the forms I filled out beforehand, and barely listened to what I was telling him during the visit.
I worry that, since "AI" will do it, there will be more forms to be filled that nobody will read, more forms to be filled to confirm that AI or me or a guardian filled the forms, and longer wait times because AI will bombard our neurons with some entertainment.
But what I want is a visit with a doctor who listens to me, they are not in a rush, and have my problem solved. If AI helps, it's great, but I don't want busy work done by AI, I don't want, because it is not needed, busy work at all.
And that's just off the top of my head. AI is neither good or evil, but we've made some pretty poor choices deploying it.
There was also some evolutionary biology/psychology theory developed by Robert Trivers years ago on self-deception and fitness.
We buy a book thinking we are going to like it, and then we don't even open it. The recommender systems give us more of what we interact with (with some quite extreme funnel effects at times, like when we curiously look at a pimple popper video and for the next ten minutes the algo gives us pimple after pimple), but we find out, as stated but not as revealed, that we don't want more of what we interact with.
Nobody wants, in theory and as stated, to be constantly enraged by social media, but most of us, since numbers don't lie, are revealed to enjoy getting enraged.
I don't think AI will have a different effect in the near future, as the main problem is that we don't know, broadly speaking, what we want, apart from the obvious, e.g., I want to watch a football game and I am going to turn on the tv and watch it.
Note that the tendency to feel overwhelmed is rather widespread, particularly among those who need to believe that what they do is of great import, even when it isn't.
It's the equivalent of me having to press a button on the steering wheel of my Tesla and say "Open Glovebox" and wait 1-2 seconds for the glove box to open (the wonders of technology!) instead of just reaching over and pressing a button to open the glovebox instantly (a button that Tesla removed because "voice-operated controls are cool!"). Or worse, when my wife wants to open the glovebox and I'm driving she has to ask me to press the button, say the voice activated command (which doesn't work well with her voice) and then it opens. Needless to say, we never use the glovebox.
But also frankly I somewhat question what this could possibly be saving them: their model range is very limited.
I quite like tactile buttons. That said, I've never been annoyed by my model 3s glove box, I use the pin. I have both stalks but the lack of other buttons seems just fine. I thought they did a pretty damn good job with the UX of the car beyond the auto wipers.
How often does one go in the glove box? It's so small and he center console is very spacious and more accessible. It's two quick taps on the screen for a passenger. If you wish to lock your glove box, many do, the solution is much better than a key.
I do agree that the UX is pretty good overall, the glovebox annoyed me (until we just stopped using it) and also the defogger (which we need all the time in the winter her) which took several taps on the screen until I discovered that I could customize the shortcut buttons at the bottom of the screen
Some automated things they definitely got right: auto-engage the emergency break while in park; auto-park when opening the door; auto-lock when leaving the car; auto-start the climate control when entering the car; auto-adjust the seat position based on driver detection.
But some things need work: The algorithm for the windshield wipers definitely needs some calibration -- the wipers come on at random times when there as no rain or water splashes; the lane departure "I'm taking control because you're going to crash" is way too sensitive and beeping at random moments; the collision sensor is also much too sensitive (yes I see the car and I'm already slowing down) (but I have to admit that I'd rather it err on the side of being too sensitive than not enough)
People saying 'Claude is now managing my life!11' are like gearheads messing with their carburetor or (closer to this analogy) people who live out of Evernote or Roam
All that said I've been thinking for a while that tool use and discrete data storage like documents/lists etc will unlock a lot of potential in AI over just having a chatbot manipulating tokens limited to a particular context window. But personal productivity is just one slice of such use cases
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.
This is different. There is no scale. The bot’s browsing session exactly replaces a human session. The browser is real.
re: scale, is it that this whole project is worthless bc nobody needs it, or is it that its so good that scale is a requirement? this is a project i built for myself, i'm not commercializing anything
This is one of the stupidest things I have read on this site
Billions of people don't use todo list apps so they're useless; just remember what to do.
Billions of people don't use post-its apps so they're useless; just remember what you're going to write down.
Billions of people don't have cars; just walk.
You can dismiss any invention since industrial revolution with this logic.
You can justify the value of any ridiculous invention by comparing it to a world-changing invention.
Common internet tropes include both "look at this forgotten jar that's been in the back of my fridge since 1987" and "doesn't it suck how much food we waste in the modern world?"
Nearly every modern invention could be dismissed with this attitude. "Why do you need a typewriter? Just write on paper like the rest of the world does."
"Why do you need a notebook? Just remember everything like the rest of us do."
But suggesting "Why not just try remembering lol" isn't really a valid criticism of the process. What you said here is a real criticism that actually adds to the conversation.
But this is already built-in with gmail/gcalendar. Clawdbot does take it one step further by scraping his texts and WhatsApp messages. Hmmm... I would just configure whatever is sending notifications to send to gmail so I don't need Clawdbot.
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.
I agree that removing items and taking pictures takes more effort than it saves, but I would use a simpler solution if one existed because it turns out I cannot remember what we have. When my partner goes to the store I get periodic text messages from them asking how much X we have and to check I look in the fridge or pantry in the kitchen and then go downstairs to the fridge or pantry in the basement.
> Can you not prepare for the next day by opening your calendar?
In the morning I typically check my work calendar, my personal calendar, the shared family calendar, and the kids' various school calendars. It would be convenient to have these aggregated. (Copying events or sending new events to all of the calendars works well until I forget and one slips through the cracks...)
> If you have reminders for everything (responding to texts, buying gloves, whatever else is not important to you), don't you just push the problem of notification overload to reminder overload?
Yes, this is the problem I have. This doesn't look like a suitable solution for me, but I understand the need.
We used to have a similar problem until we made a policy that if you use something up you add it to our shared shopping list, usually with a voice command to Siri. Whenever someone is at the store we just check the list, making sure we mark off things that are purchased.
But... calendar apps already let you aggregate your calendars into a single view. Even if you have them on separate accounts (or some other impediment), 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 caldav at one point but it ended up being even flakier than copying the relevant bits by hand. There's no technical barrier to consolidating my personal calendar with the various family / neighborhood calendars but in practice I have to hide most of the other calendars because the volume of irrelevant events is just too large, so I end up just copying over the relevant events to a personal calendar.
But I don't need the AI to do this everyday, just when i get a new calendar.
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”.
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.
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.
I have printouts of school/camp calendars taped to the wall, a weekly planner on the kitchen whiteboard, paper grocery lists on the fridge, and a pocket notebook for capturing random tasks. I used to believe that some lifehack, process, methodology, app, or modern jeejah would finally solve my organization problems. But as I got older I made peace with the fact that they're all limited by the same weak link -- me.
If you cook at all a solution like Mealie becomes your cookbook. Its trivial to create grocery list for when you take the time to plan out your meals for the day, week, or month. If you are not shopping by yourself, everyone on the app can just pick up things in the grocery store independently. Its an actual time saver
Mealie exposes an API so you could theoretically expose it to another solution like Home Assistant and have your grocery list sync with your errands list. Suddenly you have the ability so that anyone using Home Assistant could get an alert when they are nearby the grocery store or Costco to pick up things on this combined list. Maybe your partner is walking by a store you've created a zone for, with items on your master list, gets an alert, and they can mark off some things that they picked up and it syncs back to where the items were originally added. Your inventory is then updated based on marked off items.
Now imagine if you did not have to come up with the bespoke master list for all the stores you go to and it can determine when to send that alert. You can also just snap a picture of your receipt or shopping cart and it is all figured out for you.
But you could just use piece of paper with the magnet on the fridge.
Theres a lot of manual process that can be eliminated for things people already find convenient enough to do manually. Local models can easily handle much of this already.
I have a couple of temperature sensors to alert Home Assistant if the fridge gets too warm. It would be easy and cheap to add some ESP32-camera modules to track contents...but there's no way to power them nicely (I simply don't know where I could pull USB power through).
And yes, it's a bit more work but it gives high-fidelity data, with the right software you could calculate your actual nutrient intake with very high fidelity, which would actually be worth an extra 15-30 minutes a day of effort.
Why in the world would you use a non-deterministic system for something so banal but important?
LLMs regularly let things slip through the cracks in ways no human would ever do so.
I wouldn't. As mentioned above, this (using an LLM) doesn't look like a suitable solution for me, just pointing out that I understand the need.
I often thought about a magnetic barcode scanner that is attached to the fridge and connected to some form of inventory app, but it would be useless at fresh produce without a barcode.
I dont know about AirBNB specifically, but I know local hotels I have dealt with can swing by 1000 bucks. Especially if theres a conference or something in town. Often it will swing back just before they risk the room going unoccupied. I have no idea if AirBNB allows similar behavior but I would be surprised if it didnt.
If I wanted a buggy and flawed planning system that will certainly cause problems in the future, I'd start sticking post-it notes on a wall calendar and pray they don't fall off.
That was just an example.
Could be airline tickets, Ebay/craigslist items, deals from brands you like, etc.
I have ADHD and I forget what's in my fridge all the time. It's genuinely a big problem for me because I let things expire, buy things I already have, and just accumulate cruft that necessitates a big fridge clean once every few months which makes me feel bad about all the things I'm throwing away.
In an ideal world I want an up to date inventory on everything that's in my fridge with expiration reminders. I'd love for someone to solve this problem in a non-tedious way.
- 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 (responding to texts, buying gloves, whatever else is not important to you), don't you just push the problem of notification overload to reminder overload? Maybe you can get clawdbot to remind you to check your reminders. Better yet, summarize them.