I find myself resenting him and his ilk on a daily basis for what they did to the computing space which was once sacred to me with their profiteering. But nothing justifies violence, not even close. Simple as that.

I'm not sure what these people who have strong opinions like this think Openclaw is, but to me, it's a product with 1) a somewhat easy to setup prompt passing wrapper that can span many channels like Telegram, Whatsapp etc. 2) A (at least optimistically) plug-n-play, configurable architecture to wake up to events (cron entries, webhooks etc.) and fire up agents in order to get 'proactive' behavior, with the flexibility to integrate models from a gazillion providers. Pretty much everything else it's bundled with is general purpose tooling that does or could easily exist in any other agentic tool.

It's a rather simple framework around an LLM, which actually was a brilliant idea for the world that didn't have it. It also came with its own wow effect, ("My agent messaged me!") so I consider some of the hype as justified.

But that's pretty much it. If you can imagine use cases that might involve emailing an LLM agent and get responses that share context with other channels and resources of yours, or having the ability to configure scheduled/event-based agent runs, you could get some use out of having an Openclaw setup somewhere.

I find the people who push insanity like "It came alive and started making money for me" and the people who label it utterly, completely useless (because it has the same shortcomings as every other LLM-based product) like Mr. "I've Seen Things. Here's the Clickbait" here, rather similar. It's actually hard to believe they know what they're talking about or that they believe what they're writing.

As much as I dislike what AI slop is doing to visual design, I wouldn’t mind seeing Adobe get hurt for being the comically terrible company it is.

Well, whatever Oracle is doing, which brings us back to a question very similar to your original one.

Totally agree. Speech is powerful and it will always have its place. It will continue to evolve and become far more useful than it is today. But at its core, it remains a highly lossy medium compared with text, especially when it comes to expressing (and consuming expressions thereof) ideas. Even the best voice memo cannot rival a clear, well-structured email when it comes to explaining something even moderately complicated.

Voice assistants, AI pins, and whatever other speech-based interfaces they come up with next will always be "nice to have", but I don't think anybody should be throwing away their keyboards anytime soon. We may have transformed how we make computers work for us, yet the ways we interact with them are much harder to revolutionize, because they are grounded in the physical, neurological, and habitual constraints of human existence. All of which is to say, when I look at the future, I still see a lot of typing.

I always scaffold for AI. I write the stub classes and interfaces and mock the relations between them by hand, and then ask the agent to fill in the logic. I know that in many cases, AI might come up with a demonstrably “better” architecture than me, but the best architecture is the one that I’m comfortable with, so it’s worse even if it’s better. I need to be able to find the piece of code I’m looking for intuitively and with relative ease. The agent can go as crazy as it likes inside a single, isolated function, but I’m always paranoid about “going too far” and losing control of any flows that span multiple points in the codebase. I often discard code that is perfectly working just because it feels unwieldy and redo it.

I’m not sure if this counts as “vibe coding” per se, but I like that this mentality keeps my workday somewhat similar to how it was for decades. Finding/creating holes that the agent can fill with minimal adult supervision is a completely new routine throughout my day, but I think obsessing over maintainability will pay off, like it always has.

As much as I want to buy into the premise, the article’s tone is so aggressively optimistic it feels like it was written on cocaine.

Although Flash really sucked as a technology, it did inspire a lot of visual artistry on the web. Half of the cool stuff you saw on StumbleUpon was made with Flash by people who weren't proficient with JS/CSS, which weren’t capable enough to achieve the same results anyway.

> This website has been temporarily rate limited

Although being stuck at loading something was reminiscent of my early internet experience in a way, the site’s backend seems to be rate-limited and unable to serve. Will check back later!

got hit by the HN death hug - it's back now!