Dunno, my calendar reminds me "out of the blue", without me having to initiate a conversation, that it's time to leave for the gym, no "claw" or "ai" involved.
I always have my backpack with me, so if I need milk I can pick it up on the way back. And I am pretty sure that I have to notice if I need milk myself.
The tech sounds cool, but whenever I hear about actual applications, I don't see the point.
That's because you just lack of imagination. Imagine if you have a human personal assistant, what would you ask them to do? Examples:
"Find me the cheapest ticket to Las Vegas for the first week of June. Buy one at anytime that you think is reasonable. Wait until no later than two months from now before buying. Get two tickets if my brother can also go".
"Email me if anyone posts a Sega multi mega for sale. But only if it's in black color".
I have no idea if OpenClaws can already do such a task or not, I don't have one, but it opens up new possibilities. If it isn't there yet, it will be.
> Imagine if you have a human personal assistant, what would you ask them to do?
That’s kind of the confusing thing for me, I wouldn’t have a human personal assistant do anything for me as long as any money is on the line. I couldn’t teach them my preferences well enough to trust them to do it the way I want, instead of just doing it myself.
Personal assistants only make sense to me if you’re so rich that money doesn’t really matter to you anyways.
Your trip booking thing for example is something I would never give to a human assistant.
The alert for stuff on sale can already be done on the usual price tracking websites.
Air ticket booking agency used to be popular before the Internet made that business obsolete.
> The alert for stuff on sale can already be done on the usual price tracking websites
Sega multi mega is a rare collectible item. No price tracking websites have it. You need to frequent online groups or forums of enthusiasts. eBay may have ones, but information (e.g color) may be missing, and follow-up is required. OpenClaw can do that for you.
Yes, there are probably people for whom this sort of thing can work.
For example, when I was at M$, management came to us extolling the virtues of Cortana and the then new "smart inbox". The manager was ecstatic. And for him, it maybe really was the neatest thing since sliced bread. And I know plenty of people with 10000+ unread in their INBOX. For them, it might be lifesaver.
But all the engineers in the room were "eek, get it away from me and make sure it never gets near my inbox". I personally maintain an INBOX-0 policy, not always perfectly, but it works for me. Unreads never last for more than a few minutes. So I have "situational awareness" of my e-mail, and when Apple also introduced smart inboxes, they broke that situational awareness while adding nothing whatsoever to my benefit. And people I communicate with also started losing e-mails, because they got sorted somewhere they weren't expecting.
Thank you for illustrating my point perfectly: none of these scenarios you give as examples are things that resonate with me at all, and I wouldn't delegate them to a human personal assistant either.
I mean, yes, some people have real issues with delegating tasks to others. Those people probably wouldn't get much benefit from an... AI assistant. That doesn't "illustrate your point", it just states the obvious.
You are confusing "issues" with "lack of need" and "lack of benefit of proposed solution".
Again, I think the tech is cool, and I would actually really like to both better understand and try out the tech. But to try something out in earnest, I need some concrete use-case, and so far the use-cases I have seen range from "meh" to "get it away from me".
For agentic coding, I also needed some concrete use cases, and I found where it worked really well, where it struggles, and where it's just horrible.
Okay but like, some people don't live the types of lives where they could benefit from an assistant, either a real one or an AI one. I'm one such person. My life is pretty simple. I don't juggle a thousand different things, and am comfortable with taking care of everything myself. But I also recognize that not everyone is like that. I have a lot of friends who can barely stay on top of things. They have families, demanding jobs (sometimes more than one), lots of responsibilities, and they constantly forget to do stuff or postpone due to lack of time. I think tech like this, once (if) it becomes more reliable and user-friendly, could really gain a lot from them.
Bottom line is that there's a big difference between "not useful to me" and "not useful". If it was the latter, nobody would have human personal assistants either... but that's not the case.
> Imagine if you have a human personal assistant, what would you ask them to do?
Those are not good examples for why people have a human assistant, you have human assistants to do in-person or person-to-person things that you don't have the time or desire to do yourself. They are simply not the same as releasing a 24/7 ai roulette process on the internet with all your payment and account info.
The online monitoring examples can be done with current automation tools and scripts
If I had a human personal assistant, I'd tell him to clean my gutters, sweep the driveway, clean the kitchen table...
I understand, if we imagine a world where everyone is constantly plugged into the computer all the time, and every bit of human activity is coordinated and surveilled by the computer at all times, this shit appears to be quite useful. Otherwise and even if, it's total schlock.
Like, "hey openclaw can you order me groceries" is great, but the only reason is that there's a wageslave on the other side of that transaction who has to drive to the grocery storef and pick the groceries out. Pretty soon that slave is going to be all of us and my god it makes me feel like an insane person that the boosters of this tech don't see that.
My wife constantly asks me about adding books to her Kindle. I use Anna’s archive for this, but the process can be very annoying. I have to go to the site, search for the content. Filter by epub and English. Then download the content. Then send it to her Kindle email.
My openclaw now searches for the relevant content upon her request, sends the URL to a Stacks docker instance, monitors the Stacks instance for when the download completes, grabs the resulting epub from a local file share, then sends it to her kindle email. She doesn’t even send me the request anymore; she sends them straight to the Discord bot.
It also corrects our calendar every night. She often just through something on the calendar like “[son’s name] speech”, but we have speech appointments in either of two locations, and I have a strong preference for calendar items in the format “[person] - activity”. If she puts the city name with the speech appointments (“[son’s name] speech [town]”), openclaw reformats the title accordingly and adds the physical address of the speech therapy office we go to in that town. This means Apple Calendar sends us notifications when it’s time to leave, instead of just 30 mins prior.
I have a few others as well, but those are real world examples. Maybe they don’t matter for your use case, but they’re good for mine.
Like sure, it is. But when I'm out doing something and she texts me a book title and author, I'd have to make a mental note to take care of it next time I'm free. It also means having a stack of epub files in my phone/tablet/laptop downloads that I've got no use for.
"...while average scores have declined for everyone, boys are doing much worse."
And it definitely doesn't get the resources.
"But in contrast with efforts to encourage girls in math and science, which have helped shrink their achievement gap with boys, little attention or effort has been focused on improving boys’ reading skills."
We've been framing things the same way for decades now, ignoring boys. Maybe it is time to frame things differently.
Unless you also think that boys just don't matter.
Sadly, it sounds like you're all-in on making it a zero sum, us-vs.-them game. If not declaring a war over resources in the Education-Industrial Complex, then condemning anyone who's reluctant to take up arms for your cause.
Vs. over 100 years ago, my grandmother taught 1st through 8th grades. In a one-room schoolhouse. Rural community - maybe 1% of parents had been to college. Annual per-student funding was $50-ish. Grandma's teaching credentials were, at best, a 2-year "Normal School" degree. The School District's Superintendent was probably 1/4 time or less, with zero administrative staff.
And yet the vast majority of grandma's students left her 8th grade able to read at that level. Old family stories from the era have neither "boys vs. girls" subtexts, nor zero-sum worldviews.
Yeah, Swift looks like someone started trying to port a C# syntax onto an esoteric object-orientated C-dialect (similar to Vala and GObject) then at the last moment noticed Rust 1.0 had been released, tried to patch on some Rust features, and hit release before they were done.
It's quite deceptive. Rust seems initially hard to learn, but it's a small language, so you arrive at competency faster than you might think. Swift seems initially easy to learn, but is a broad language with lots of edge-cases, so you're never quite as competent as you think you are, or need to be
Ehh I have been using Swift from the beginning and I disagree with you and the parent. Swift was "good" before the addition of property wrappers and the result builder syntax. That's when lots of the weird "features" started being bolted on.
Before that it just felt like what a modern OO language with reference and value types, type safety, some very light "not truly functional but nice to have" functional programming features, and readable, "normal", dot syntax would be like. The language was basically complete at that point for the purposes of writing UI apps with the existing Apple frameworks.
> ... some of the more recent complex language features
This isn't recent. The approach that Swift took had this path locked in from the start, the (d)evolution towards ever more spiraling complexity was inevitable from the initial choices.
And this is not 20/20 hindsight, a lot of people, including yours truly, were saying that fron the very start. As an example, take initialization:
The swift book has 16 rules and 14 pages just on object initialization. Chris replied in the comments: "the complexity is necessary for <feature we want> and thus simplicity must give way". My reply: "the <feature you want> is incompatible with simplicity and thus must give way".
→ Swift included all of Smalltalk's keyword message syntax as a special case of a special case of the method call syntax.
---
Rob Rix:
“Swift is a crescendo of special cases stopping just short of the general; the result is complexity in the semantics, complexity in the behaviour (i.e. bugs), and complexity in use (i.e. workarounds).”
> I was excited and optimistic about transitioning to Swift in the Swift 3 days. By Swift 5 I was pining for Objective-C.
Swift 5 isn't that bad (even if result builders felt like a weird hack to make SwiftUI possible and I dislike SwiftUI massively) but around that point the language has increasingly made me think "why did this happen when Java already existed?"
If
really, really, really isn't to your liking, you can write or even: That's pretty much all there is to it. But I have to admit I like the syntax better:reply