Many breakthrough technologies appear initially like toys. And this certainly qualifies. I've never been able to code anything more complicated than a memory game in javascript but I have worked with engineering teams for my entire professional career. But prompting my agent to write python scripts to pull down data from various tools via API without having to read docs, do trial and error for hours / days / indefinitely, and actually produce something coherent in seconds? Incredible.
Is my OpenClaw agent currently changing my life? No. It sends me a morning briefing based on my calendar, the weather, my Readwise highlights, and notes on who I'm talking to today based on call transcripts. I use it as a food diary (which I could have done on platform LLMs but this feels like a more personalized UX as we can write the logs to text files on my personal computer). I can absolutely see how transformative this agent can become in the next few years. Certainly my usage of LLMs has changed my life since ChatGPT first launched.
You are seeing the loudest / most hyped users. There's a reason it has so many stars and most of the people getting something out of it are not posting on X. They're just using it to do the thing.
> There's a reason it has so many stars and most of the people getting something out of it are not posting on X.
That reason is buying stars, agent swarms, and astroturing.
No project gathers 200K stars genuinely in 3 months. There are far more useful and popular projects that need 10 years to get 200K stars. When you see a project like this get 200K stars in just 3 months, you know something is very fishy.
There just aren't enough hobbyists in the world running local AI models, never mind technically savvy enough to hack something like OpenClaw and be really excited about it.
For a comparison, the local image gen interfaces ComfyUI and A1111 WebUI have a huge amount of stars (~100k and 160k respectively, accrued since 2022 or so), but they allow you to create porn customized to whatever kinks you have, not just automate things for the sake of automation. One of those is a rather bigger value prop than the other, dopamine-wise.
Why would they be running local AI models? The creator of OpenClaw explicitly recommends against running OpenClaw using local LLM models at this time, because they're not as powerful as frontier models as well as much more gullible to prompt injection and the like.
> There just aren't enough hobbyists in the world running local AI models, never mind technically savvy enough to hack something like OpenClaw and be really excited about it.
No you dont understand, just because there are X people capable of doing this and my project got (X + YX) stars in 3 months, that only means that my project is very popular and there are no shenanigans occurring _at all_
If you suggest otherwise you are a luddite who doesnt understand and probably hates progress.
A cursory glance at Wikipedia tells me the technology to make drones (I assume by drones you mean quadcopters) was well known all the way back in the 50s. You could say the technology ultimately ended as nothing but a toy, rather than started as one.
Really appreciate the deep dive here. M&A is the final boss of startups and so rarely do we get any credible, detailed information about how things go down from the founder's perspective, especially at the 9+ figure deal size. Having written a book about pivots, I know how hard it can be to then distill a grueling experience into something digestible. Thank you Derek!
You may be saving money but wood smoke is very much harmful to your lungs and heart according to the American Lung and American Heart Associations + the EPA. There's a good reason why we've adopted modern heating technologies. They may have other problems but particulate pollution is not one of them.
> For people with underlying heart disease, a 2017 study in the journal Environmental Research linked increased particulate air pollution from wood smoke and other sources to inflammation and clotting, which can predict heart attacks and other heart problems.
> A 2013 study in the journal Particle and Fibre Toxicology found exposure to wood smoke causes the arteries to become stiffer, which raises the risk of dangerous cardiac events. For pregnant women, a 2019 study in Environmental Research connected wood smoke exposure to a higher risk of hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, which include preeclampsia and gestational high blood pressure.
I acknowledge that risk. But I think it is outweighed by the savings, exercise and reduced fire danger. And I shouldn't discount the value to me of living in light clothing in winter when I burn wood, but heavily dressed to save money when burning propane. To stop me you'd have to compel me.
This is not a small thing for me. By burning wood instead of gas I gain a full week of groceries per month all year!
I acknowledge the risk of AI too, including human extinction. Weighing that, I still use it heavily. To stop me you'd have to compel me.
Cow A: "That building smells like blood and steel. I don't think we come back out of there"
Cow B: "Maybe. But the corn is right there and I’m hungry. To stop me, you'd have to compel me"
Past safety is not a perfect predictor of future safety.
I'm burning dead wood in a very high wildfire area. It is going to burn. The county takes a small percentage away ... to burn in huge pits. It really isn't possible that much if any of this wood will just slowly decay. All I'm doing is diverting a couple of cords a year to heat my home. There is additional risk to me, but I'm probably deferring the risk to others by epsilon by clearing a scintilla.
Probably the risk involved in cutting down trees is more than for breathing in wood smoke. I'm no better at predicting which way a tree will fall than which horse will win.
At the highest level, this becomes a question of whether we live in a predetermined universe or not. Historians do debate the Great Man vs Great Forces narrative of human development, but even if many historical events were "close calls" or "almost didn't happens" it doesn't mean that the counterfactual would be better. Discrete things like the Juicero might not have happened, but ridiculous "smart internet-connected products" that raised lots of VC money during the ZIRP era feels inevitable to me.
Do we really think LLMs and the generative AI craze would have not occurred if Sam Altman chose to stay at Y Combinator or otherwise got hit by a bus? People clearly like to interact with a seemingly smart digital agent, demonstrated as early as ELIZA in 1966 and SmarterChild in 2001.
My POV is that human beings have innate biases and preferences that tend to manifest what we invent and adopt. I don't personally believe in a supernatural God but many people around the world do. Alcoholic beverages have been independently discovered in numerous cultures across the world over centuries.
I think the best we can do is usually try to act according to our own values and nudge it in a direction we believe is best (both things OP is doing so this is not a dunk on them, just my take on their thoughts here).
First off congrats on launching a novel idea and hitting HN front page.
Question / feedback — why is there no way to see what one of these looks like on the website? You have a header that says "see it in action" that literally doesn't allow you to see the video you're saying it produces.
I have an idea in my mind of what it looks like but I think you'd do well to have multiple examples illustrating different situations where this product could be useful.
I checked the video out and am still unsure - does it simply save a video with an audio visualization? I thought it would be embedding audio into images somehow, based on the title here.
Exactly that. So, I wanted to send voice messages that I pre-record, and then can send later. The easiest way for my workflow was to be able to access and then send them from my cameral roll, which is pretty much where I store everything that I want to send. So, this records audio, makes a simple wave visualisation, and because its a video file and not purely audio, it can be saved to the photos app ie camera roll vs to files.
I think you have a point, I should make this app's intent clearer.
Same here. I managed to see a video on the App Store. It creates a video with a waveform and the audio you recorded. I like it!
It would be great if I could also add some pictures and have it create transitions while the audio plays. If I only pick one photo, it could just display the image with the waveform on top.
I like sending a picture of myself, or a few of my dogs, cats and gf, because it adds that human touch that IMO is needed when talking to family and friends.
If you could make my mouth move with the audio, I'd definitely be willing to pay more for it.
With ChatGPT explicitly storing "memory" about the user and access to the history of all chats, that can also change. Not hard to imagine an AI-powered IDE like Cursor understanding that when you reran a prompt or gave it an error message it came to understand that its original result was wrong in some way and that it needs to "learn" to improve its outputs.
Maybe. I'd wager the next couple of generations of inference architecture will still have issues with context on that strategy. Trying to work with the state of the art models at their context boundaries quickly descends into gray goop like behavior for now and I don't see anything on the horizon that changes that rn.
I am also not a therapist but I am a former tech founder turned executive coach so I do talk to people who are facing what feels like overwhelming challenges, risk, and uncertainty.
Even in the language you used "severe learned helplessness" and "extremely stupid", you are revealing a state of mind (cynicism, self-flagellation) that is not oriented to improving your condition.
You know you have a strong bias against therapists—given your seeming lack of knowledge about them, where do you think that bias came from? Fundamentally, we are a social species and evolved to live with strong connections to small groups.
Our society is no longer set up like that. So professionals like therapists and coaches provide the essential value of a caring, supportive, and helpful relationship that we lack. Like getting an essential nutrient that your diet lacks.
Do you have health insurance? Many of them cover mental health—the site Headway can help you find one that takes insurance. Try a few and gather some first-party data before writing them off fully. The downside is a few hundred dollars. The upside is a much brighter and materially better future.
You have too much faith in the social system. Clue: I am in Eastern Europe. We have exactly zero protection. Not small. Zero.
TL;DR if my reserves dwindle, I get thrown on the street. No conditions. No if-s. No but-s. No social safety net. I become the next fresh bum on the street.
To more directly respond to your question: medical insurance in my case means I get to schedule a meeting 2 months from now, with an old-school psychologist who is going to look at me annoyed and badly hide the fact how impatient he is for me to leave. I heard stories from acquaintances.
Musk has (for now) pulled of heist that sounds like a summer blockbuster scheme: take direct control of the payment system that all US Gov't payments run through.
I guess the world's richest person still didn't have enough. I really the court orders get enforced soon or the limited trust the public has in the federal government is about to go into freefall.
Most of the people that voted for this (at least the ones I've interacted with) are happy that it's happening. They think Musk is just trimming the fat of the budget and getting rid of all the frivolous taxpayer spending.
But then, even ASSUMING THAT IS SO, why can't they see the problem in HOW it's happening. Can you imagine the outrage if, say, Biden handed the keys to the kingdom to George Soros?
Our big brains actually evolved because of lying - research by scientists like Robin Dunbar shows that figuring out who was lying and how to lie better may have driven the explosion of human intelligence. The same brain power that helped our ancestors outsmart each other is what lets us do amazing things today.
You're right that trust matters - that's why we created rules and systems to encourage honesty. But lying is as old as humanity itself.
I love the intent behind this letter. So often talented people are just below the "cut off" for whatever opportunity they are seeking, and they see themselves as unworthy. Some may give up, especially if they are young and have not had other forms of recognition.
I think this is why YC sends notes to rejected applicants who are in "the top 10%" by whatever standard they are grading folks on, and encourage them to apply again.
Not to mention that the “top 10%” shifts year-to-year as much or more than HYPS admissions.
Talent _development_ requires substantive feedback, or at least substantial visibility into the competition versus a binary outcome. For example, tell Founders if they have the substance or right fidelity but poor sense of timing. (And market timing often in the hands of the VCs anyways).
Without real feedback, it’s much closer to a real estate license than an academic math program.
Is my OpenClaw agent currently changing my life? No. It sends me a morning briefing based on my calendar, the weather, my Readwise highlights, and notes on who I'm talking to today based on call transcripts. I use it as a food diary (which I could have done on platform LLMs but this feels like a more personalized UX as we can write the logs to text files on my personal computer). I can absolutely see how transformative this agent can become in the next few years. Certainly my usage of LLMs has changed my life since ChatGPT first launched.
You are seeing the loudest / most hyped users. There's a reason it has so many stars and most of the people getting something out of it are not posting on X. They're just using it to do the thing.